Optimal Health Works

Optimal Health Mindset – Make It Passionate

richard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:50:57 +0000

This it the third and final Action Set of the Optimal Health Mindset video mini-series. You need to be logged in to see this content. If you are not yet a subscriber, just enter your first name and email to the right.

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Optimal Health Mindset – Make it Fresh

richard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:33:13 +0000

This is the second Action Set of the Optimal Health Mindset video mini-series. You need to be logged in to see this content. If you are not yet a subscriber, just enter your first name and email to the right.

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Optimal Health Mindset – Make it Simple

richard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:28:24 +0000

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Optimal Health Mindset – Introduction

richard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:20:59 +0000

The Optimal Health Mindset is a 4-part video mini-series designed to get the mindset you need to make Optimal Health real. You need to be a subscriber to access this content. It is free to subscribe. Just enter your first name and email address to the right.

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Supplement Shoppers Guide

richard — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:47:30 +0000

There are so many different supplements on the market. How can you know which ones to buy for you and your family?

Some are good and some are really very poor – and you can’t tell which are which from the price or from the pictures on the label. You can only know from a detailed study of the ingredients compared to the price. I have studied over 200 products on the market in Australia and hand-picked the best quality and best value ones for your family.

This short guide is to help you choose from this hand-picked group exactly what you need.

The Essentials

First you need a good multivitamin. This is the single most important supplement you can take. We have two you can choose from for adults and two you can choose from for children. Really, the needs of women and men differ very little so there’s no need to make any distinction. That’s just marketing hype. In fact, the needs of kids are only that they need less quantity because they are smaller than adults and they need something that is chewable because they often can’t (or won’t) swallow a tablet.

All the options are excellent products, the more expensive choice is just a little better. I recommend taking one with breakfast and one with dinner.

Adults

Premium multivitamin: Pure Nutriceuticals Stress B Forte

Value multivitamin: Blackmores Sustained Release Multi

In addition to that I also recommend Co-Enzyme Q-10 for adults. Take one per day or two per day if you have heart or blood pressure problems or chronic fatigue:

Co-Enzyme Q-10 150 mg 30 capsules, or

Co-Enzyme Q-10 150 mg 60 capsules

Kids

Premium multivitamin: Usana Usanimals for Kids

Value multivitamin: Hi Vita Child Vita

Fish Oil

Everyone needs fish oil. It’s good for adults for heart health, brain function and inflammation control. It is good for kids for these reasons and because it helps them to learn and concentrate.

Your best value for fish oil is always in the liquid form. A good quality liquid fish oil has very little fishy taste and most kids love it straight off the spoon. Maybe you or your child are fussy though and won’t take it that way, so I have sourced the best value pure fish oil capsules for you too.

I recommend one teaspoon before breakfast for adults and half a teaspoon before breakfast for kids. Take the same again in the evening if you feel you need it. You can’t take too much fish oil.

Adults

Liquid Fish Oil: Melrose Norwegian Pure Fish Oil

Capsules: Restore Clinical Natural Fish Oil

Kids

Liquid Fish Oil: Melrose Kids Fish Oil – same oil as adults but with natural flavour added for kids. Adults may use this too.

Capsules: Currently none I can recommend. While it’s hard to believe, manufacturers are adding artificial sweetener and artificial colouring. It’s not marked on the box though so you have to call the manufacturer to know! I’ll update this page as soon as I have a product I can truly recommend.

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Exercise DVDs

richard — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:36:14 +0000

Exercise is one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your health. Here I have researched some DVDs that you can just pop into your DVD player and follow along. They are a great way to do good quality and interesting exercise with no wasted time.

For Women

Amy Dixon – Give Me 10!

Give Me 10! is a super charged, super efficient program that includes SIX 10-minute workouts so you can fit fitness into your lifestyle and do it your way, every day! Amy Dixon has designed this program to help you burn fat and calories, lose weight and inches and get toned and lifted. It works the entire body, so it is everything you need in one energy-packed program. And it’s customizable, so you can do one or two segments, mix and match them, or do all of them together on days that you have more time. Give Me 10! includes the following body defining programs: * Fat Blasting Cardio * Upper Body Sculpt * Lower Body Firmer * Core Makeover * Yoga Stretch & Flex * Bonus KettleBell ToneUp

Petra Kolber – Cardio for Beginners

If you’re new to exercise or looking for a basic, straightforward way to fitness, this is the perfect program for you. Fun yet highly effective, it will get you toned and fit with easy-to-follow, mix and match workouts. Separated into sections of athletic-based cardio and simple dance moves, this program allows you to completely customize your workouts. With two 10-minute and two 20-minute segments to choose from, you can do one or more at a time or work up to the full hour — letting you ease your way into exercise and fit workouts into your busy schedule.

Petra Kolber – Bootcamp Boogie

Now those are two words you never thought you would see together! Bootcamp gets its groove on with Bootcamp Boogie. This program is an interval workout that alternates athletic moves with cardio grooves. Nine easy-to-learn cardio segments are created utilizing a basic combination that moves into a Boot Camp/athletic version followed by a Boogie/dance version. Every segment is wrapped up with a 45 second Blast/interval. Join Petra as Bootcamp gets its boogie on and blasts the calories off!

Kristin McGee – Pilates for Beginners

4 mix-and-match body-sculpting workouts. Get a sleek physique with this simple Pilates program! This beautiful program is the perfect place to start if you’re new to Pilates. In four easy-to-follow segments, you’ll learn–and do–all the basic Pilates mat techniques designed to tighten and tone your entire body. Pilates focuses on core strength, flexibility, and alignment as it lengthens and sculpts your muscles. With step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn the proper form, technique, and breathing methods that make Pilates so effective. Anyone can do it, regardless of age or fitness level.

Amy Bento – 10 Minute Solution: 5 Day Get Fit Mix

No time to exercise? We have the solution for you—the 10 Minute Solution! Everyone can find at least ten minutes in their day, and we’ve developed a well-rounded plan that is made up of 5, highly effective 10-minute workouts that will train your ENTIRE body—without spending hours in the gym! You can do one workout per day and get 5 days worth of amazing cross training. You can also use the mix and match feature to create your own favorite combination of the workouts. Or you can choose to do the routines all together and really kick your workout into high gear!

Jackie Warner – Power Circuit Training

Work out with Jackie Warner, celebrity trainer & star of the hit TV show “Work Out.”
Television star, Jackie Warner, owner of Beverly Hills gym, Sky Sport & Spa, is known for sculpting some of Hollywood’s best bodies. Her renowned circuit training workouts command up to $400 per hour.
Now you can experience Jackie’s personal training at home with the next generation of her signature circuit workouts. She’s added the Power Burn, an amped up addition to her famous formula for ultimate weight loss and accelerated results! These are maximum efficiency workouts that will give you the body-changing results in whatever training time YOU have available. Learn her secrets to shed unwanted pounds, decrease body fat, sculpt amazing abs, and tone to reshape your entire body. Jackie will be there to guide you every step of the way.
5 Powerful Workout Options for Real Body-Changing Results You choose your workout.

For Men

AeroSpace NYC: Savage and Serene

AeroSpace NYC and Michael Olajide Jr’s SAVAGE & SERENE workout is the perfect 1-2 combinition. AEROBOX SAVAGE is taught by world-ranked professional boxer Michael Olajide Jr and is a hard-hitting professional-grade boxing workout to sculpt the entire body (57 minutes). YoAero-Serene is taught by former Dance Theater of Harlem athlete Leila Fazel and is a fluid workout to specficially stretch muscles used during SAVAGE (30 minutes).

P90X

Tired of ineffective workouts that sound great but produce less-than-optimal results? Turn to the P90X Extreme Home Fitness system, a bundle of 12 sweat-inducing, muscle-pumping workouts designed to transform your body from regular to ripped in just 90 days. Hosted by personal trainer Tony Horton, the series of DVDs will help you get lean, bulk up, or grow stronger, with an endless variety of mix-and-match routines to keep you motivated. The secret behind the P90X system is an advanced training technique called “muscle confusion,” which accelerates the fitness process by constantly introducing new moves and routines so that your body never plateaus and you never get bored. The more you confuse the muscle, the harder your body has to work to keep up. And the more variety you put into your workout, the better and faster your results will be. By breaking old routines and opening new doors, secondary and tertiary muscles are constantly being activated and developed.

Chuck Liddell – The Pit Workout

A grueling workout by John Hackleman, who is the primary coach for Chuck Liddell, UFC legend.

Rodney Yee – Strength Building Yoga

Ever wonder how yogis look so strong and muscular without lifting weights? This program will show you how yoga enables anyone to build strength in every part of the body by using balance and the weight of the body itself. In Strength Building Yoga, internationally renowned yoga instructor Rodney Yee guides two complete practice sessions: an aerobic workout to develop greater physical strength, clarity of mind and self- confidence; and stretching and balance practice to improve stamina of body, mind and spirit. Strength Building Yoga is a unique yoga workout to create a lean, powerful physique.

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Optimal Water

richard — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:40:20 +0000

As you know, your body is made up of about 60% water. Your level of hydration is highest at birth and progressively decreases with age but most of that loss is in the first ten years. Being overweight also decreases the percentage of water in your body. Everyone will agree that hydration is critical to having a healthy body. Keeping hydrated is one of the biomarkers of youth. But does it matter what water you drink in order to hydrate? Should you buy bottled water? Or is the water from the tap just as good? Does it really matter that bottled water is stored in plastic? Should you have a filter? If so, which is the best and which offers the best value for money? What about alkaline water and water ionizers – are they are scam or is there real science behind them? This BluePrint will answer all of these questions so you and your family can enjoy the best hydration for the best health possible today.
Is Tap Water Safe?
In most third-world and many second-world countries clean water is a rare and precious commodity. Many people drink water that is contaminated with bacteria that make them sick or with metals such as arsenic or fluoride that cause long-term disease. In Australia we are blessed with very safe water straight out of the tap. But does this mean that we can’t do any better? There are residues in the tap water in our country that are known to cause cancer. Residues that are known to cause loss of brain function (don’t want that!). And there are ‘emerging pollutants’ that simply don’t exist in third-world countries that are becoming a concern for us. Many of these are not currently tested for at all. There is no doubt we can do better than tap water for our family. Before discussing what the best water is, let’s examine more closely the problems with tap water. I won’t give an exhaustive report on tap water contaminants because just the major ones will be quite convincing that it can be improved upon.
Tri-halogenated methane (THMs)
Chlorine of course is added in the processing of water to kill off any bugs that might be present in it. However, it is not the chlorine residue that is harmful to humans at the levels that remain, but the organic compounds that form from it. Tri-halogenated methanes are the most toxic of these disinfection by-products. THMs are formed by the action of chlorine on organic matter. The primary one of concern is our tap water is chloroform. Research has shown that the amounts present in our water supply are sufficient to cause an increase in the rate of death due to bladder cancer. The rate is increased by up to two times which is a large difference¹. According to the Center for Disease Control in Canada, “there is an urgent need to resolve this”². The levels of THMs considered acceptable in Australia is 0.25 ppm (parts per million)³. In the US and Canada, the maximum acceptable amount is 0.08 ppm⁴. Apparently Australians are tougher than Americans and Canadians – we can take 4 times more THMs... and yet the Canadian government still sees “an urgent need to resolve” the problems caused by their levels of THMs. THMs are easily removed from water by a simple carbon filter. For this reason alone, I believe a water filter to be a valuable investment for your family.
Aluminium
Aluminium is used in the processing of water as a flocculant. When water has suspended sediment, mixing in aluminium salts (especially alum) clumps the sediment together making it fall to the bottom for easy removal. It is a standard technique for clarifying water the world around. Unfortunately, not all of the aluminium gets removed before it reaches your tap and aluminium is known to cause loss of brain function at the levels that we commonly drink. Some people maintain that this connection remains unproven but it is not so. I remember my father replacing our aluminium pans with stainless steel when I was a kid. He said they caused Alzheimer’s Disease. He was right. In 2009 in New South Wales, researchers at the Australian Institute for Biomedical Research studied the effects of aluminium in the water of rats. There were three groups of rats given 0, 2 and 20 ppm aluminium in their drinking water for their entire life from birth to death. The rats were put in a maze to test their spatial memory. This is a standard test of memory function in rats. The rats were tested in the maze weekly from middle-age until old-age. Of the rats with no aluminium in the water, 100% of them continued to solve the maze just as well in old age as in middle age. Of the rats given 2 ppm aluminium, 20% showed significantly reduced ability to find their way as they aged. Of the rats given 20 ppm aluminium, fully 70% lost their ability to find their way as they aged⁵. This is a marked and real decline in cognitive function. Other studies on people have shown that it is not only rats but people also have cognitive decline with aluminium in the drinking water⁶. What is the limit of aluminium permitted in Australian tap water? There isn’t one³. There is an ‘Aesthetic Guideline Value’ of 0.2 ppm and the water suppliers generally aim to keep the levels below 0.1 ppm but there is no actual limit. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to remove aluminium. It is only removed by an expensive to buy and maintain reverse osmosis filter. My recommendation is to call your local council and speak to the lab that does the water testing for your area. Ask for the last 6 months of aluminium testing results for the reservoir that serves your home. If it is consistently less than 0.1 ppm the effect of the aluminium is small enough to ignore. If it regularly goes over 0.1, you had better invest in a reverse osmosis filter or use rainwater. Rainwater is free of aluminium so this is not a concern if you get your water from your roof.
Lead
Lead is a heavy metal that damages nerve connections and causes blood, heart and brain disorders. Children are especially susceptible to its effects. It has been shown repeatedly to cause permanent reduction of cognitive capacity resulting in learning disabilities even in extremely small doses. It also causes infertility in men and miscarriage in women. When you think lead, you probably think of old paint and toys and pottery from China. These are all very real problems. But so is lead in our drinking water. Lead pipes were used in old houses so if yours was built in the 1930’s or before, you’d best check. But the bigger problem is that lead is still used in solder used by plumbers and DIYers. In fact the very word ‘plumber’ comes from the Latin word for lead, ‘plumbum’. The Australian Standard directing plumbers to use lead-free solder was only established in 1989 and manufacturers of lead solder are still not obligated to label their product as unsuitable for use on drinking water pipes. On top of this, in Australia, brass used in taps is allowed to contain up to 4.5% lead as an alloying element. This is only a standard, not a law so imported products are never tested for their lead content. Compliance with this standard is entirely voluntary. Studies in Perth in 1993 of cold water from the kitchen tap showed 5% of homes had lead levels above acceptable limits. (http://www.lead.org.au/lanv8n1/l8v1-11.html) Given this, I guess it should be no surprise that a 1996 blood lead survey of Sydney children found that 25% of 1-5 year olds are lead poisoned. (http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst13.html ) So the water that your supplier delivers to your street is maintained to stringent standards for lead content, but a lot of lead is often added along the path from the street to your glass. If you drink water from a rain water tank, you should also be concerned about lead. One quarter of tank-water samples tested in Victoria contained more than the acceptable level of lead. (http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst13.html ) The only real solution is a point-of-use filter that specifically removes lead. I cannot emphasise enough how important this is. Again, they are inexpensive and very worthwhile if you care about your brain, your heart and the children.
Other Contaminants
I think that the big three above are more than enough reason to be certain that a water filter is a good idea. Still, there are a few other contaminants that deserve mention. Pharmaceutical drugs are now appearing in the water supply. Apparently, people who use them excrete them and some even flush excess drugs down the toilet. They find their way through the groundwater back into our drinking supply. Tests have shown up to 40 different pharmaceutical drugs detected in some city water supplies. But it gets worse. There is currently no requirement for even testing for the presence of these drugs in the water supply by the suppliers in Australia. Canada, New Zealand, the US and the UK are the same^7, ⁸^, ⁹^, ³. Arsenic and cadmium are other heavy metals known to be toxic that are found in our water¹⁰. Nitrate is a known carcinogen present at levels that cause rectal cancer. Bisphenol A used in plastics manufacture is an endocrine disrupter (more on that later) and is not even tested for. Fluoride is a serious problem in many water supplies especially in India where there is a lot of current research on how to get it out of the water. In Australia, some water suppliers are actually adding it to the water to try to compensate for substandard dental services in poorer communities. The levels supposed to be added to Brisbane water is 0.8 ppm with an upper limit of 1.5 ppm. Over 1.5 ppm causes damage to teeth and bones (dental fluorosis) so if you are athletic or have athletic children or just know how important hydration is and drink just double the average, you are at risk¹¹. Dental and medical authorities worldwide state that babies should have no fluoridated water but the fluoride is even present in breast milk as well of course when you make up bottled milk. I would have a water filter just to remove this one contaminant.
Bottled Water
Bottled water is a great marketing success of the last 20 years. It is a product that didn’t even exist 25 years ago. But for daily use, bottled water is very expensive. It is expensive for the water itself – Australian bottled water costs about $3.00 a litre. Italian about $9 a litre. Tap water costs just $1.20 per tonne! Bottled water is more expensive that petrol and more expensive than softdrinks (even though they are made from the same water). But it is not only the cost of the water that is a concern. 200 ml of oil is needed to make the plastic of one 600 ml water bottle. Then there is the cost of packaging, shipping, storing, refrigerating and recycling (35%) or burying in landfill (55%); all of which consume precious resources. (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/08/18/1186857841959.html) But is it better for you? I can find no evidence that bottled water is better than tap water. In fact some 40% of all bottled water brands are sourced from the municipal supply! But there is evidence that the PET plastic that the bottles are made from is a serious endocrine disruptor. Researchers Martin Wagner and Jorg Oehlmann of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany in 2007 found evidence of estrogenic compounds leaching out of the plastic packaging into the water. They took 20 brands of mineral water sold in Germany – nine bottled in glass, nine bottled in plastic and two bottled in paperboard boxes coated with an inner plastic film. The then tested for the presence of estrogen-like compounds and found levels of up to the equivalent of 72.6 ng/L of natural estradiol. In an adult woman the levels of estradiol are less than 50 ng/L for most of her cycle so this is not a small amount. To confirm the effect of these estrogen-like compounds, the researchers then grew the New Zealand Mud Snail, Potamopyrgus Antipodarum, in each of the different bottled waters. This snail is a common model used to test the activity of estrogen-like compounds. When they are present, the snails breed at a faster rate. The snails bred faster in all the water from plastic bottles and plastic-lined cardboard. They bred normally in the water from the glass bottles¹². Excess estrogen in men causes infertility and loss of masculinity. Excess estrogen in women causes a higher risk of breast cancer and other diseases of the female organs. So is bottled water a healthy alternative? I’d say not. Drink it on rare occasions – not as your primary water source.
Your best option – filter your water at Point-Of-Use
All of the problems of tap water can be solved by a point-of-use water filter. Whole-of-house filters will not protect you against lead. Then, to carry your water, use glass or stainless steel containers. The question of course is: what water filter is best? There are so many different water filters on the market ranging in price from $50 to $4000 dollars just for a domestic device. Is it really that the more expensive filters are best? To a degree that is true but you can get most of the benefits from a low- to mid-range filter.
Important things you need to know about water
Let me give a little background on water and filters first. Following are the 8 most desirable traits that you want from your water. I have arranged in order of priority, but really, you want them all:

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Optimal Body Weight

richard — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:48:02 +0000

Some people struggle to lose weight and the moment they have a lapse in their discipline, they just stack the weight back on to be where they were when they started or even heavier. Others are the exact opposite – they struggle to gain weight and the moment they are undisciplined with regular large feedings, they lose weight again. Why is this?
Fat Rats
The two rats in the photo were born at the same time and kept the same conditions. They were given as much food to eat as they wanted. One of them (can you guess which one?) ate a normal amount of food, was satisfied and stopped; growing to a normal size. The other was voracious and just kept eating and eating until it weighed three times as much as the normal rat next to it. What was the difference? In this BluePrint, you will learn about the powerful ancient programs in your body that make you fat and make you skinny. You will know how to turn on your fat-loss program and turn off your fat-gain program effortlessly while all the time getting healthier. My focus here will be on normalising body fat rather than gaining athletic muscle mass although the two are not at all opposite.
Health Gain is more important than Weight Loss
If you have been taking action steps from the Optimal Health Foundation Program I know your health and that of your family will have already improved enormously. If you were overweight when you started, you have most probably lost a lot of weight already. Maybe you have already realised your target weight. Unfortunately, the vast majority of efforts people make to achieve weight loss are based on very wrong methods. This means that you can lose weight and actually be sicker and weaker than before. It is well established that overweight and obese people get more degenerative diseases as they age and die earlier than people with normal weight¹. Perhaps surprisingly, it has not been shown that losing weight results in life extension². Studies show that you still live the same shortened life even if you lose weight as an adult. In fact, if you lose weight after 60 years of age, you are likely to shorten your life further³. This comes as no great surprise to me as the most common strategies for losing weight are to eat low-fat and to emphasise ‘complex carbohydrates’. This kind of diet is very nutrient-sparse and while it may make you lose weight, it will also make you lose health. In order to make low-fat diets taste acceptable, they also often contain trans-fats, sugar, artificial sweetener and msg all of which are extremely toxic. This is an area of intense current research but to me, the scientists are all looking in the wrong places which is why they have come up with a blank so far. So again, I cannot stress enough that your priority must be on gaining health and not on losing weight. Having said that, I strongly believe that a healthy body is not overly fat and that by understanding – and actioning – the principles of good health, your body will naturally assume a good balanced weight for your natural build.
Your Fat-O-Stat
The fat cells of your body produce a hormone called leptin. A hormone is a signalling molecule used by your body for communication. In this case, to communicate to your brain how much fat you are carrying. The more fat cells you have, the more of this leptin is in your bloodstream. There are receptors for leptin in your brain that measure how much leptin is in your body. In this way, your brain knows just how much fat is in your body⁴. Pretty clever. Your brain maintains a leptin set-point to regulate how much fat you have in your body. As you accumulate more fat, the leptin level in your blood goes up. When it goes above your set-point, your brain will take steps to bring it down. When you lose fat, the leptin level in your blood goes down. When it goes below your set-point, your brain will take steps to bring it up. It’s just like the thermostat in your reverse-cycle air conditioner at home. If you set the thermostat to 25 degrees and the air temperature goes to 28, the air conditioner turns on and brings it down. If the air temperature goes down to 20, the heater turns on to bring it up. It is the thermostat in your air conditioner that controls the behaviour of the whole machine such that the temperature in your room stays at a nice comfy 25. It’s exactly the same with your body weight but instead of a thermostat to maintain temperature, you have a fat-o-stat to regulate how fat you are (of course you do have a thermostat too, it’s just not the topic of this BluePrint). If you get more fat than your fat-o-stat is set to, your brain turns on your fat-loss programs. If you get less fat than your fat-o-stat is set to, your brain turns on your fat-gain programs. This is why forcing your body to change weight without changing the set point of your fat-o-stat is so hard. You can starve yourself into shrinking but as soon as you relax and let your body do what it wants to do, it will bounce right back to where your fat-o-stat is set. Does this sound familiar? In fact, as you will see, one of the things that will push your set-point up to ‘Even Fatter’, is starvation, so often you don’t just bounce back to where you were but to even fatter. Clearly the solution here is to adjust the set point of your fat-o-stat. Then your brain will engage your fat-loss programs and fat will fall off effortlessly. Yes, you do still have to eat healthy food and do exercise, but you will want to instead of kicking and screaming all the way. The rat in the photo on the left has a genetic defect that makes it unable to produce leptin. It has faulty fat cells that work fine in every way except they don’t produce any leptin⁵. As a result, the rat’s brain always believes it’s too skinny. The rat’s fat-gain programs are turned on; it eats voraciously and gets aggressive if you deny it food. It keeps eating and eating until it is over three times the weight of the normal rat on the right which just stops when it has had enough. But here is an even more amazing part. Scientists have calculated how much extra fat the rat should gain from the extra food it eats compared to the normal rat. The rat gains even more fat than the normal rat would from the same amount of food. The fat-gain programs actually alter the rat’s physiology so that it more efficiently gains fat from the food supply available.
The Myth of ‘A Calorie is a Calorie’
This is profound. You see, you will commonly read or hear on TV that a calorie is a calorie. It doesn’t matter where the calorie comes from – fat, sugar, starch or protein – it will make you fat just the same depending on how many calories you eat. But this is not true. The fat-making power of a calorie is determined by whether your fat-gain or fat-loss program is turned on (and also on how easily your body can convert the different kinds of calorie into fat). And it turns out that one of the things that changes the set point of your fat-o-stat is the kind of foods you eat. If you eat foods that turn your fat-o-stat down, the calories in the food are less important. If you eat foods that turn your fat-o-stat up, every single calorie goes to your hips, or worse, to your tummy or worst of all, around your abdominal organs. So which foods are they? Alright... we’ll get to that...
Ah hah! I know, I’ll just inject leptin!
So do people have this genetic abnormality too? Yes, but it is extremely rare – like about 3 cases in the world. You see, your brain knows that you need body fat to be ready to have babies. When your body fat levels are too low, a woman stops ovulating. In fact, if the body fat levels are too low in children, they won’t go through puberty until there is enough body fat. The intelligence of your body clearly knows that if you are too skinny, you are not strong enough to have babies – man or woman. In the case of these poor people, taking leptin saves their lives. One girl was 86 kg at 8 years of age (normal is 28 kg) and her 2 year old cousin 28 kg (normal is 14 kg). And your body knows how fat you are from your leptin levels. Because their leptin levels stay at zero, their brains think they are skinny no matter how much they eat. If they cannot get to puberty, they can never have babies so this genetic defect is extremely rare since (until now) it couldn’t get passed on. Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Hey, if leptin signals how much fat I’ve got, maybe I can just trick my brain into thinking I’m fat enough already by taking leptin. If I take enough, my brain will conclude I have too much fat and turn on the fat-loss programs.” Um. No. That is what scientists had hoped when they discovered leptin in 1994. But your brain is just not that easily tricked. In the obese mouse or person that has a genetic inability to make leptin, it works just like that. They stops eating and shrink down back to normal. But in experiments with obese people with no genetic defect it does not work very well at all. This is because obese people already have very high levels of leptin. It’s not a leptin deficiency that is the problem. It is the high setting of the fat-o-stat.
Fat-loss and Fat-gain Programs
So what exactly are these fat-loss and fat-gain programs? They are set of actions – behaviours or physiological changes – directed by your brain to increase or decrease the amount of fat in your body. When your brain needs to gain fat (or thinks it needs to), it turns on the fat-gain program. The fat-gain program drives you to increase your energy intake and reduce your energy expenditure. To increase energy intake, you get hungry, you get aggressive if denied food, you find food that makes you fat especially attractive (sugar and starch), your stomach needs to stretch a lot before you feel full. To reduce energy expenditure, your thyroid hormones drop, you get lethargic (even lazy), your body temperature drops and you feel the cold, exercise seems like way to much effort. Your cells also change their metabolic pathways to focus on converting as much of the available nutrients as possible into fat instead of heat or other expendable energy⁴. As a consequence of these actions of your fat-gain program, there are other changes or side effects that occur. Depression, loss of concentration and impaired memory due to reduced energy available for your brain, sensitivity to feeling the cold due to lower body temperature and efforts to conserve heat loss, water retention and constipation due to lower thyroid hormones and decreased libido simply because energy is being conserved to make fat. It’s miserable. Remember, anytime your body fat levels drop below the set point, these fat-gain programs will kick in. If you attempt to lose weight by reducing your calorie intake – i.e. by eating less – your fat-gain programs will kick in causing you to have all the miserable changes it entails. If your fat-gain program is turned on, how can a calorie-restricted diet ever possibly work in the long term? The answer is: it can’t. This is the reason for yo-yo dieting. The entire premise of losing weight by starving or partly starving yourself is doomed to fail as soon as you stop dieting. It doesn’t make you live longer, and you don’t have more fun on the way. On the other hand, if your fat-loss program is engaged, you get all the opposite effects. You actually don’t want to eat and when you do you get full really easily. You have lots of energy and a high body temperature making you resistant feeling the cold. Your concentration is good and your mindset is positive. Anytime your body fat levels are above your set-point, this is how you feel. And it feels good so we like to be there. And yet ‘there’ for most of us is fat.
What happens if you change the set-point?
I think you can now easily see that if you want to lose body fat, the key is to lower your set point, turn off your fat-gain program and turn on your fat-loss program. So long as you eat healthy food following the three Food Principles I have already taught you, fat will just fall off. Muscle will remain as leptin is not made by muscle, only by fat. These are the things that will cause your set-point to move to ‘Super Fat’

Eating sugar and carbohydrates – these turn up your fat-o-stat. That’s why it’s so hard to lose weight by eating low-fat. Our physiology is wired up for the hunter and gatherer lifestyle not the agrarian. When the hunt is bad, people eat grains. It’s time to store up fat for the hard times. When the hunt is good, people eat meat. It’s time to lose fat so you can run faster to catch more meat.

Starvation – again, food shortage is read by your brain as hard times. You fat-gain programs turn on strongly.

Stress – some stress turns on fat-gain, some turns on fat-loss. If stress is perceived by your brain as like the threat of starvation or cold weather, your fat-gain programs kick in.

Pregnancy and pre-pregnancy – it is natural for your body to gain extra fat in readiness for pregnancy and to keep that throughout pregnancy. In fact without enough fat, you won’t even ovulate let alone get pregnant.

Cold – if you can’t get warm, your fat-gain programs turn on.

Toxins – your brain is made of about 2/3 fat. Fat-soluble toxins tend to accumulate in your body in your fat stores which includes your brain. The biggest problem is with POPs – Persistent Organic Pollutants – which include DDT, dioxins, PCBs, Chlordane and the infamous Agent Orange. Studies have shown that elevated levels of POPs are associated with up to 38 times increased chance obesity and diabetes⁶. 38 times! This is huge. In order to keep these toxins out of your brain, your body turns on your fat-gain program. The more body fat you have the more the toxins are kept out of your brain by simple dilution. It is very important that you eat organic meat to minimise your accumulation of these POPs. Eat nutrient-dense to enable your body to remove these toxins.

Nutrient-sparse diet – if you eat nutrient-sparse food like bread and pasta your body gets depleted of essential micronutrients. While you might be eating a lot of food, your brain interprets the micronutrient deficiency as hard times. Fat-gain programs turn on.

Fat peer group – if you hang out with overweight people, your brain moves your set point to match those around you.

These are the things that will move your set-point to ‘Lean’

Abundance – when the hunt is good, we eat lots of meat. This turns on your fat-loss program. It’s better to be lean when hunting as you can run faster and catch animals better.

Eat Nutrient Dense (Food Principle #2) – times are good. Fat loss programs turn on.

Eat Organic (Food Principle #3) – less fat soluble toxins means less need for body fat.

Fight-or-flight stress – you can run away better if you are lean. Chronic fear of something you need to run away from turns on your Fat-loss program.

Running – any bodyweight exercise turns on your fat loss program as you can do it better with less body fat.

Breast feeding – if you can’t breast feed, your brain reasons either you haven’t got enough nutrients to make milk or you didn’t have enough nutrients to keep your baby. Either way, it says times are hard. Breast feeding means times are good. Breast feeding has been repeatedly shown to result in long-term reduced weight in mothers and to decrease the chance of obesity in babies when they become adults⁷.

Associate with lean people – reset your perception of normal body size⁸^,⁹.

Action steps to change your set point
So writing all this into simple action steps:

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Good Bugs, Bad Bugs and Leaky Gut

richard — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 03:56:13 +0000

For thousands of years there have been certain fermented foods eaten by traditional peoples who have regarded them as the secret to their long lives. The Russians and Georgians are renowned for their longevity and many say regular yoghurt eating is the key. The Japanese are also renowned for their long lives and many ascribe them to their fermented plums and radishes, miso and natto. The Koreans eat kimchi. The south-east Asians tempeh, fish sauce and soy sauce. The middle east and India drink variations of kefir fermented from milk. The central Europeans salami, sauerkraut and gherkins. The northern Europeans, surströmming. Poi in Hawaii. Many of these foods are so highly valued, they play a sacred role in the culture used as an offering to the gods or considered essential at the family dinner table.
The Ferment of Probiotics
Is it just coincidence that so many different peoples from around the world value fermented foods so highly? Or was it just because they didn’t have refrigerators and had no choice but to eat food that had gone off? Sure enough, it turns out that fermented foods are very health-promoting. In fact, eating them will make you slimmer, improve your absorption of minerals, make you think more clearly, make you more resistant to getting sick and even protect you from nuclear radiation! It’s such a remarkable list, it almost sounds too good to be true. And yet true it is. As we all know, bacteria can make food go ‘off’ and eating that food will make you very sick in no time at all. But then food can also ‘ferment’ resulting in all the health benefits above. Your nose will tell you straight away if something is fermented and safe to eat or off. The organisms growing in the fermented foods are called ‘probiotics’ – literally, ‘promoting life’. My objective in this BluePrint is for you to understand what probiotics are, how they affect your body, and how you ensure you and your family get as much benefit as possible from these amazing foods.
Leaky Gut
It turns out that those same organisms that we used to ferment our food actually live inside of us in our digestive tract fermenting away. If these organisms inside us are probiotic, they make us healthy but if they are the kind that make food go off, they make our health go off too. One of the main ways they do this is by affecting the integrity of the lining of the digestive system. Our digestive system, or gut, forms one continuous tube extending from your mouth to your anus. It does not open to the precious interior of your body at all. In fact, when your body formed inside your mother’s womb, you started as a flat plate that rolled up like a rolled pancake leaving a hollow tube going from top to bottom. That tube is the embryonic precursor to your gut. You can see that the gut is really connected to the outside world and not to the inner organs of your body. This is really important to understand because your gut has to keep a very tricky balance. On the one hand, it needs to maximise absorption of nutrients from your food. On the other hand, it needs to rigorously protect the organs of your body from absorbing toxins that make your body weak and sick. The part of your body tasked with this monumental feat is a one-cell-thick layer lining your gut made up of cells called enterocytes. These amazing cells are linked together to form a single continuous sheet that covers the entire interior of your intestines. The absorption of nutrients then takes place solely through the bodies of these cells. In this way, the enterocytes can regulate what gets absorbed and what does not. If your body needs more calcium, they absorb more calcium. If not, they don’t. If there is something in your digestive tract that the cells don’t recognise or which they see as harmful, they are left behind to go out with the stool. For this network to function properly, each enterocyte must be very close to the ones next to it so nothing can slip through the gaps. This is accomplished by ‘Tight Junctions’ made of special proteins produced by the enterocytes for the purpose. These Tight Junctions require a substantial amount of energy to maintain. If the cell gets tired, weak, sick or inflamed for any reason, these tight junctions then start to breakdown and the toxins that should stay inside your intestines can slip right past and into your bloodstream where they can wreak havoc with your health.¹ This is called a leaky gut. It’s a very common problem today.
70% of Your Immune System Lines Your Gut
Of course your body is very keenly aware of the fact that your gut is full of potential toxins, bacteria and viruses. To watch out for that, some 70% of your immune system is found clustered along your enterocyte lining constantly on the lookout for nasties that need it to step in. But while this is critical, when you have a leaky gut, this immune response causes even more of the problem. When toxic stuff (food fragments, bacteria, bits of protein etc) slip past the weakened enterocyte layer, the immune cells react by making antibodies to that stuff which makes more inflammation. This inflammation further weakens the integrity of the barrier making it leak more leading to more immune response and more inflammation.² Let’s consider an example. Say you eat wheat when your gut lining is in full health. Wheat contains a very large protein called gluten – you’ve probably heard of it. Proteins are made up of series of amino acids (AAs) arranged in a very specific order and in the case of gluten, this chain is over 100,000 AAs long. The gluten gets broken down inside your gut into 1, 2 or 3 AA long segments and then gets absorbed into the enterocyte. Inside, the enterocyte finalises the breakdown of the protein into individual free AAs for the body to use. These are then released into the bloodstream to go to the liver to get packaged up for use by your body. This process is so thorough that in health there is no passage of the whole wheat protein into the bloodstream, only the single amino acids.
Once the Lining is Damaged...
Let’s say now, for the very first time, you have some damage to the lining of your gut. There are many causes, but one is antibiotics which can cause a breach in the barrier so let’s say you have just finished a course of antibiotics. Now when you eat the wheat, it gets partly broken down and fragments of the gluten protein slip right past the enterocytes bypassing the proper processing. You get bits of gluten in your bloodstream. The immune cells are right there and recognize something that doesn’t belong. They make antibodies that track back toward the source of the protein, the gut wall. Attaching there, they release chemicals that cause inflammation because that is what antibodies do. Now the lining of your gut is inflamed not because of the initiating damage, but because of the leaked gluten. If it doesn’t repair in time and you regularly eat bread, this cycle keeps feeding itself and becomes a permanent breach. This is called an allergy and is the cause of food intolerances. You can see how once you get one, it’s easy to get another... and another.³ Remember though, not only gluten and other protein fragments slip past, so do many bacteria. Often when this happens, there are lots of bad bacteria in your digestive tract and these are the ones that come through. The good bacteria are more interested in what’s inside your gut anyway. So your immune system responds to these bacteria too and before long you have your immune system busy trying to mop up the mess of stuff coming from your gut. It’s so busy with this that it doesn’t have time or energy (your immune function uses a lot of energy) to defend against other attacks so now your whole body becomes more susceptible to attack – colds, flu, tummy – catching what’s going around⁴. Sound bad? It gets much, much worse. With your immune system working overtime trying to clean up the mess, it generates lots of inflammation – not just at the gut wall but throughout your whole body and chronic inflammation is the root cause of a lot of degenerative disease including arthritis⁵, psoriasis^6, ^7, ^8, ⁹ and eczema¹⁰. Recent research has now definitely linked leaky gut with heart disease¹¹. This is a very serious problem as you know all these are common and serious problems in Australia today.
Leaky Gut Causes Many Modern Diseases
Because your immune system is using up so much of your energy on this impossible task, it leaves you with little energy for other activities. Ever feel low in energy? Left long enough, this low energy state can reach the debilitating level of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Only 20 years ago many doctors doubted the existence of CFS. Now it is recognised by health professionals the world over. Researchers in Belgium have recently (2010) proven that patients with CFS have elevated levels of antibodies against gut bacteria; that healing the leaking gut reduces those antibodies; and that there is a direct correlation between reducing these antibody levels and recovery^12, ¹³. This is very exciting news for the families of anyone with CFS. These bacterial and protein fragments also affect the function of the brain causing depression, and cloudy thinking^14, ^15, ¹⁶. Depression is one of the single most common reasons that Australian’s make a visit to the doctor. And leaky gut has not been linked only to mild depression but also to major depressive disorder. Leaky gut has even been implicated in the severe brain disorders autism¹⁷ and schizophrenia¹⁸. The extra load on the liver causes fatty infiltration. The liver can no longer perform its role of detoxification fully as it is overloaded and clogging up. This in turn leads to skin problems. Twin studies on obese vs lean twins have shown marked differences in the digestive bacterial population between them. Scientists now believe this is a significant contributor to unwanted weight gain^19, ^20, ^21, ²².
Don’t forget the Children
But new research is suggesting that bad gut flora in infancy and childhood can seriously affect health for a lifetime. Current research is investigating whether inflammatory bowel disease, type 1 diabetes, allergies, asthma, and autism may have their origins in Leaky Gut²³. Regardless, children with leaky gut are certainly more susceptible to getting sick in general⁴. Studies now show that mineral absorption is compromised in an unhealthy gut. Proper probiotic health is important to calcium²⁴, magnesium²⁵ and iron²⁶ absorption. In one study in Houston, Texas, teenagers were followed for one year. Half of them were given supplementation to enhance their gut flora and half were not. After just 8 weeks the teens with the good bugs had measurable increases in mineral absorption. After 12 months, those with the good bugs had fully 35 grams more minerals stored in their bones.
Antioxidants Unavailable Without Healthy Flora
You know how important antioxidants are to your health, well it so happens that without the good bacteria in your gut some of the most powerful antioxidants, the polyphenols, are almost entirely unavailable for your body to absorb. Having a healthy gut flora has been shown to increase antioxidant effectiveness by up to 91%⁴.
What causes a Leaky Gut?
Anything that damages the healthy bacteria that live inside you will make your enterocytes weak. When too weak to sustain the Tight Junctions, the process of leaking starts. There are three main things that have been shown to damage the healthy bacteria:

Antibiotics (of course – their whole purpose is to kill bacteria and they kill the good as well as the bad)²⁷

Preservatives in food (again, the whole point of them is to kill or at least block the growth of bacteria), and²⁸

Unhealthy food (Certain foods feed the good bacteria. Not eating them allows the bad to overgrow.)⁴

Leaky gut can also be caused by certain drugs. Anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin damage the gut wall so badly they commonly cause bleeding. Many people use aspirin never dreaming it might lead to a cascade of problems²⁹. Alcohol also damages the lining when consumed to excess. Alcohol also damages the liver directly but this is made worse by the damage to the gut wall³⁰.
The Role of your Nervous System
Chiropractors have often seen resolution of many of the symptoms of leaky gut when they correct subluxation in the spine or cranium. They figure this is a result of removal of interference to the nervous system but recent research has uncovered some amazing details of how powerful this effect is. Remember the enterocyte layer? It is a one-cell-thick sheet of cells bound together with Tight Junctions. Well it turns out that your digestive system has its own nervous system called the enteric nervous system or ENS and there is a nerve fibre going from it to every single enterocyte in your gut. Researchers in France discovered that if you damage the ENS, the Tight Junctions break up, the sheet falls apart and the enterocytes start to grow in clumps instead^31, ^32, ³³. Now of course, your ENS is connected to your regular nervous system via nerves from your spine so it stands to reason that subluxation of your spine irritating those nerves could well lead to breakdown of the gut barrier. But the connection goes even higher up. It has been observed in hospitals that after traumatic brain injury, gut function is impaired. A research team investigating this in Finland discovered that the enterocyte barrier breaks down within 30 minutes of brain injury. 30 minutes!² Again, we can see that subluxation, perhaps at the base of the brain or even in the cranium itself may well cause leaky gut.
How do you know if you (or your child) have leaky gut?
This is an area of intense current research. Perhaps the best test currently is to measure antibodies to noxious bacteria but so far this has only been used in research settings. Some people have gastrointestinal symptoms but studies show that only 27% of people with actual changes in the gut lining seen in a biopsy report symptoms such as IBS, bloating, diahorrea or constipation. In other words if you have digestive symptoms, you know there is a problem with your gut, but if you don’t have digestive symptoms, you can’t rule out a problem with your gut. Classic signs of leaky gut or sick gut flora are:

Constant tiredness

Skin rashes or itchiness

Aches and pains

Recurrent sickness

Asthma

Depression

Recurrent thrush / urinary tract infections

IBS / IBD (irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease)

Allergies – commonly to wheat, cow’s milk

Colon cancer

Asthma

Can’t lose weight

Dark circles under the eyes – you commonly see this in kids.

How do you fix Leaky Gut and get the good bugs back?
There are four steps:

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Fats, Oils and Public Enemy #2

richard — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:03:14 +0000

We’ve all heard the story a thousand times… Saturated fat causes heart disease. Eating fat makes you fat. Eating meat is bad because it contains artery-clogging saturated fat that causes you to have a coronary. We all know that above all, we should eat low-fat… Only… the entire story is almost completely wrong.
Saturated Fat is NOT the Cause of Heart Disease or Obesity
Consider the following:

Mother’s milk contains over 50% of its calories as fat, much of it saturated fat. It also contains a higher proportion of cholesterol than any other food. Did God really design Mother’s Milk to set our children on the path to heart disease? It is shocking that current recommendations include low-fat diets for children.

Cohen studied Jews who lived in Yemen and ate fats entirely of animal origin plus fruits and vegetables. He compared them to Yemenite Jews living in Israel. Their diets contained margarine, vegetable oils and sugar. He found very little heart disease or diabetes in the former group but high levels of both diseases in the latter.¹

People in the north of India eat 17 times more animal fat than those in the south while having an incidence of coronary disease seven times lower.²

A survey of 400 Masai warriors in Tanganyika showed a long continued diet exclusively of meat and milk. The men had low levels of serum cholesterol and no evidence for arteriosclerotic heart disease. If you have seen any photos of these amazing people, they are all tall, lean and strong.³

Several Mediterranean societies have low rates of heart disease even though fat-including highly saturated fat from lamb, sausage and goat cheese-comprises up to 70% of their caloric intake. The inhabitants of Crete, for example, are remarkable for their good health and longevity.

Surely then if eating fat caused us to die early then the countries that eat the most fat would live the shortest lives. That would have to be right, wouldn’t it? But according to United Nations statistics, this is not true at all. Japan is currently (2010) number one in longevity and the people in Japan who live the longest are the Okinawans who eat lots of fatty pork and cook in lard. Second is Hong Kong where the food is not particularly low fat. Third and fourth place are Iceland and Switzerland where they eat some of the highest fat diets in the world. Clearly, eating fat is not the cause of heart disease or obesity. The low-fat myth is tragic because it is a sure path to overweight, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis and depression. But knowing this is also liberating because in fact everyone hates low-fat food. It tastes boring. Actually, it has very little taste at all. Can it really be right that our bodies have been designed to enjoy only taste-less food? By the time you have read this BluePrint you will know that fat is not bad, eating (natural) tasty food is healthy, which fats are the best ones to eat and which to reduce and which to strictly avoid. Eating the right fats has a dramatic effect on our life expectancy and on how we look.
The Tragedy of Low-Fat
Natural fats in general are actively health-promoting foods. Our taste-buds are wired to enjoy the taste of fatty foods. When scientists design products to eat that are low fat, they have to work out a way to make them taste acceptable even though they are missing fat. To achieve this, the products are filled with sugar, artificial sweetener and MSG – three of the most damaging toxins in our environment today. And if that isn’t enough, your body needs fat in your diet to be able to absorb many nutrients critical to your body’s health. Without fat in your diet, you miss out on:

Calcium – needed to build healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles. Even if there is enough in your diet, if you can’t absorb it, over time you can develop osteoporosis and muscle pains.

Vitamin A – critical to good vision and healthy skin.

Vitamin D – protects you from osteoporosis, cancer and heart disease.

Vitamin E – the primary antioxidant protecting your cell membranes and so the precious contents of your cells. It protects your eyes against degeneration, your heart against disease and your lungs against cancer.

Vitamin K – important for healthy blood and healthy bones

Co-Enzyme Q10 – without which people develop high blood pressure, swollen ankles and feet, congestive heart failure (which is often fatal) and general fatigue.

How common are all these problems today? Eating low fat is a major contributing cause to the modern day degenerative conditions. Further, when you eat low fat, your body has to try to compensate for what it is missing. This causes it to use up other nutrients at a much higher rate making you more likely to develop depletion of antioxidants, co-enzyme Q10 (again!), chromium and protein.
What is the difference between Fat and Oil?
The technical term is ‘lipid’ which means a fat or an oil. The only difference is that oils are liquid at room temperature and fats are solid. I will use the terms interchangeably. Let me tell you what you need to know about the chemistry of fats. Fats are made up of three fatty acids on a glycerol backbone. The nature of the fat is determined by which three fatty acids make up that fat. Most fats are a mixture of different fatty acids and the varying proportions of these fatty acids is what makes different fats. Fatty acids are made up of chains of carbon atoms between 4 and 22 carbon atoms long. The length of the chain has a big effect on the properties of that fat. For example, short chains tend to be more liquid (oils – like coconut oil, butter) and long chains more solid (fats – like beef fat). Fatty acids can also be either saturated or unsaturated. Saturated means that between all the carbon atoms in the chain there are only single bonds. This is important because it means that the fatty acids make straight chains. The straight chains tends to lay in close and tight to one another and so make the resulting fat more solid (a fat). Unsaturated fatty acids have one or more double-bonds in the chain (usually 2 or 3). These double-bonds can be in one of two forms: what is called cis and what is called trans. The cis double-bond puts a kink in the fatty acid making it hard for them to pack in close. This results in a more liquid result – an oil. The trans double-bond leaves the carbon atom chain straight making the fatty acid lay in close and become more solid. With two exceptions, trans fats are not naturally occurring which makes them very difficult for your body to use and to get rid of. In fact artificial trans fats are a leading cause of heart disease, cancer and obesity today. The location of the double bond in the fatty acid is counted from one end of the molecule. That end is called the omega carbon atom. So a fatty acid with a double bond that is three carbon atoms from the omega end is called an omega-3 fat. Because the cis double-bond puts a kink in the fatty acid, it would actually be an oil. Examples are fish oil and flax oil.
The Good Fats and the Bad Fats
This is really very simple. The bad fats are the artificial trans fats. Your body simply does not know how to handle them because they have never occurred in the food supply before they were invented by man at the turn of the last century. As a result, they are a major cause of heart disease today as well as Alzheimer’s, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, infertility in women and probably diabetes. You probably know that all of these are major problems in epidemic proportions in Australia today. Without doubt, trans fats are Public Enemy #2. Trans fats have a lot of very convenient properties for food technologists. Firstly nothing will eat them (except humans!) so they give good shelf life to products made with them. They are easy to store for a long time without refrigeration. You can manufacture them to have whatever properties you want for your purpose. But above all, they are very cheap to make as they are made from cheap canola, soy or corn oil. Trans fats are also called hydrogenated oil, or partly hydrogenated oil. You will find a lot of Public Enemy #2 in most fast foods and in almost all packaged foods in the supermarket. Most salad dressings, biscuits, margarine, fruit bars, nut bars and muesli bars – even from the ‘health food’ shop. Just about anything from the bakery. Almost anything that is deep fried or just fried in a take-away shop. If it is commercial food and the manufacturer does not state ‘Trans Fat Free’, then you can be sure it contains trans fat. Since trans fat has now been clearly proven to cause heart disease even when consumed in small amounts, you would think there should be at the very least a health warning required on such foods. Currently in Australia trans-fat labelling is voluntary! In many countries now, trans-fat labelling is mandatory and in some countries, it is simply illegal to have trans fat in the food. This is the case in Denmark which has been working on reducing trans fat in the food supply for 20 years. As they have reduced trans fat consumption in that country from 6 grams per day to 1 gram per day, there has been a corresponding drop of heart disease by 50%.⁴ You can see why I have called it Public Enemy #2. In the UK, the Food Standards Agency has decided that voluntary manufacturer measures will result in trans fats being removed from the food supply. So far, it hasn’t worked. (Surprised?) When a mother eats trans fats, it goes into her milk. If a mother from the UK were to feed her baby in Denmark, she would be breaking the law because of the amounts of trans fat in her milk.
The Good Fats
Short and medium chain fatty acids are digested, absorbed and processed by your body in a completely different manner to long chain fatty acids. They have a number of special properties as a result. The short chain fatty acids have four carbon atoms (found mostly in butter) or six carbon atoms (in goat butter). They are anti-microbial and protect us from viruses, yeasts and bacteria. They are easily absorbed and converted into energy and so cause less weight gain than long chain fats such as found in

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