What did you do on your first date?

 How would you feel if I were to tell you that nutrition science has come such a long way that in my hand I have some pretty special pills? You're never going to have to eat again. You won't be eating any meals. All you need to do is take one of these pills, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of your life. And it's going to give you the perfect balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It's going to give you the number of calories or kilojoules that you need to stay at exactly the perfect weight for your body. It's going to give you all of the antioxidants.

 And what we call phytochemicals just means plant nutrients. Plant chemicals that are good for us all in these amazing little pills. Isn't science amazing? How do you feel? Boo. Um, that's what I was hoping for. I hope you're feeling good, that would be awful. How disappointing. I hope some memories are coming into your mind right now. They certainly are. In mine. I remember my mom's awesome lasagna that she always used to make When there was we'd always appear home with millions of people and she had 20 mouths to feed and she'd whip up this lasagna.

 I remember my grandmother used to make this extraordinary gingerbread cake that my mother could never replicate despite being the better cook. I remember the pancakes that the grandmother of a friend, of a family friend always made us whenever we kids appeared at their house. I remember being a teenager doing exchanges with a student in France, and we had bowls of hot chocolate with white bread. Yes, white baguette with butter and jam. And we dip it into our hot chocolates. I remember the amazing paellas that we used to have as a family in, uh, Spain, rather on our family holidays. The point is, that food is much, much more than about nutrients. 

You'll be pleased to know science is not nearly at this point, thank goodness, because food is more than the nutrients that it contains. Food is part of who we are. Food is part of our culture. It's part of our upbringing. It's part of how we negotiate and interact with each other. Just think about those of you in the room with a partner. 

What did you do on your first date? 

I'm willing to bet that you went for dinner at some point. What do we do when we're celebrating? Apart from popping open the champagne? We probably have some celebratory cake or we have some food. What do we do at Christmas and New Year? What do we do at funerals? Food is always involved. I've traveled to some pretty remote places in the world, and it's the same everywhere you go. Whether you're in the most modern urbanized city or whether you're in some village in the middle of Africa somewhere, people want to share food with you. The sharing of food is a sense of friendship, a, ah, sense of who we are as human beings. And here's, my concern is that and I'm a nutrition scientist, and I've devoted my career to this space.

 My concern is that nutrition is destroying some of those things. But here's the problem, because we do have quite literally a big problem here in Australia and unfortunately in most of the rest of the world, certainly all of the developed world, and fast catching us up with the developing world, it is now the norm in Australia to be fat. Now, that's not an aesthetic problem. I'm not here to talk about body image. That's a whole other talk. But that problem couches us in a whole number of chronic health diseases. We know that diabetes is on the rise. Type 2 diabetes is now the fastest-growing chronic disease in this country. And 280 of us are diagnosed every single day. Every twelve minutes, an Australian dies of cardiovascular disease.

 Ladies, one in three of us will develop cancer. And guys, I'm sorry, one in two of you will develop cancer before you're 85. Now, while much of that can't be prevented, we do know that diet and lifestyle but diet is intricately involved in all of those chronic diseases. If we were to change the way that we eat, we could dramatically reduce those numbers. We could dramatically reduce the early death that is in this country and dramatically improve the quality of life for so many people. 

So why is it that it is so hard to do? If you've ever tried to follow a diet, isn't that an awful word? 

I hate calling myself a dietitian because the word diet is in there. But diet really just means the way that we eat and what we are eating. It's really hard to change the way that we do. And part of that is because of how ingrained the way that we eat is in the way that we live today. So how you've been brought up to eat will always have a dramatic influence on the way that you're eating today the way that you feed your children and the way the next generation comes through. But I also feel that part of the problem is the amount of confusion. 

I was involved in a recent survey where we asked people about how they felt about healthy eating and whether they were confused by it. 87% of people said that they were completely confused by what on earth is healthy eating? And, um, that's coming from some of the media sensationalism that we have around this area. And don't get me wrong, I'm involved in the media and I love that people are so passionate about this area. But unfortunately, it ends up, in some things, being slightly skewed and bent. And what was a truth kind of gets bent out of all proportion. So let's take butter as an example. Did you see the Times Magazine not so long ago where it had butter on the front cover and it said, here's how the scientists have got it all wrong. And suddenly my Facebook page and other people's Facebook were going crazy with saying, yes, burgers and bacon and everything are all back on the menu. That wasn't what the research showed at all. The research actually showed that hang on a minute.

 If we replace saturated fat with a whole bunch of refined carbohydrates, we're in just as bad a state, possibly even worse. That's actually what the research showed. Did the research say, hey, saturated fats are actually really good for us? No, they didn't. It questioned, yes, the relationship between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease. But that's one aspect of saturated fats in our body. It certainly didn't show us that, hey, eating more saturated fat reduces your risk. No, it didn't say that, but that's the media reporting. So that's just one example out of many that are showing us how we're actually causing more confusion. So let's take a little trip back just through my lifetime because essentially the thing I want to remind you about is that we haven't really got fat until the last 50 or so years.

 I'm not that old, but really, it is just those last few decades that we're starting to have this really major problem. So here's what I've seen happen. When I was a teenager, my mom and I first got interested in trying to diet, became aware of my body, and thought I'd got to be skinnier. Skinny equals beauty, unfortunately, in this country and in the UK. Where I grew up. And here's what happened. Mom and I embarked on a whole bunch of diets. We did the Cambridge diet, which was all shakes and pills and so on. We were both ill by about day three in bed. So we decided, okay, maybe that's not the way to go. So then we tried something else called the Scarsdale diet, and that involved eating a dry piece of whole-meal toast in the morning with an orange.

 I ate that breakfast for I don't know how many weeks. I couldn't do it today. Tuna sandwiches I still struggle with it because we had tuna sandwiches every lunchtime. A piece of fruit a low-fat yogurt, and so on. We tried everything. Finally, we settled on a low-fat diet. And of course, that was the era of the low-fat way of eating. I remember eating an entire French baguette because it was fat-free. So guess what's in here? Licensed to eat. And that's exactly what we see. So the low-fat era took off. And what happened? Food companies responded to our need for low-fat by giving us a whole bunch of low-fat food. Unfortunately, it was full of refined starch, lots of added sugars, additives and preservatives, and whatever else flavors galore to try and make the food taste even remotely good. And, um, psychologically, we all had that license to eat, oh, it's fat-free, therefore calorie-free. I can eat as much as I like.

 That's the way that we interpreted it. And we continued to get fatter. So then suddenly the finger of blame went, hang on a minute, we've got it all wrong. It's not fat, it's carbs. It's carbs that are to blame. Go back to eating lots of fat. Let's focus on the carbs. And that's kind of where we are at the moment. So I went shopping. Now, normally you'd expect a little shopping basket to be full of food. In here, there's not very much food, but this is what people are eating. So now we've got a whole bunch of products here. 

This one says raw protein. So we're fixated on the problem is carbs. This says raw protein. And in the ingredients list it's got brown rice syrup and brown rice protein. How do you reckon they got it? Uh, out of the brown rice yet? This is called a raw bar. We've got think thin cookies and cream. We've got high protein, low carb bars, and chocolate flavor. You know what, we want our cake and eat it. We really do. And things that make it sound like eat this and it'll get you burning fat. All of those bars in here have more than 1000 kilojoules. But you know what we're scared of? God forbid you eat a banana. It's carbs. It's going to go straight to the belly. That's the situation we're in. We've got a cookie. We really want to have the chocolate, the sugary, the cakes, the biscuits. So we've got this kind of thing naturally good. It's free of pretty much everything. But you know what's in it? Basically, rice, butter, and sugar just happen to be gluten-free sugar, gluten gluten-free flour. This is the situation we're in where people are completely confused and the food industry keeps responding by giving us more and more. What that's? A basket apart from my banana, it's a basket of processed food. I went into I live in Bondi, and I went into one of the local Whole Foods cafes. It's honestly called Whole Foods that's on its banner. And they serve these amazing green smoothies.

 And I asked for the green smoothie without the protein powder. And she recognized who I was. And why are you not having the protein powder? Is this not a good protein powder? Should we have a better protein powder? And I said Because I don't eat processed food or try not to eat too much of it. And the dawning on her face was like, oh, um, I could see she had never considered that this green pea protein powder was actually a processed food. So why is it that we are kind of recognizing that processed carbs aren't all that good for us? We've certainly recognized processed fats, trans fats, and so on. They're not good for us. But now we're doing it with protein. 

We're processing the life out of that and thinking that's going to be all our answers. So when we look worldwide at the moment, we've got several different nutritional thinking. We've got a very low-fat approach that's practically vegan from Dr. Dean Ornish over in the States. He's got lots of great research. He's shown some amazing studies and published some amazing results. We've got Dr. Lauren Cordain, who's the kind of father of the Paleo diet. I'm sure some people in the room might have tried, or at least here it's the most Googled diet at the moment is Paleo. 

That same cafe, by the way, that serves the green smoothies now serves paleo banana bread, paleo brownies, and paleo protein powder. Was Paleo man eating any of that? But we can't see how ridiculous this is, can we? We've got the very low carb approaches started, of course, by Dr. Atkins and now, uh, uh, incorporated by a whole bunch of other different people, still really popular in the fitness industry. We've got the South Beach diet and the low GI diet, and then we've got traditional diets around the world, like the Mediterranean diet, which is actually pretty high fat, but it's fats from really good stuff like extra virgin olive oil and avocados and nuts and seeds.

 Really solid evidence behind that kind of diet. We've got a very contrasting diet, but they have some of the longest-living people in the world. In Japan, the Japanese diet, the Okinawans have more people that live to 100 than anywhere else in the world. So that diet has been studied extensively to say, can we learn anything from this? And it's very low fat. So why did our low-fat thing not work? And theirs does? Because when we look at all of those different approaches, they have, uh, some commonalities and that commonality is that they're based on real food, on whole foods. And the state that we're at with nutrition research. And I need to remind you that nutrition research or nutrition as a science is still a very, very young science. We only discovered vitamins and minerals last century. We have so much more to understand and to know. So it's a fascinating science to get into and to study and to read about, but there's so much we need to know. 

But there are despite the apparent confusion, there are some very, very clear messages coming out of the science, and that is that there are some foundations that we can all employ. And the most important one of those is that it's about eating more plants. We absolutely must eat more plant food. That's the first thing. But the other interesting thing about looking at these traditional diets that seem to be so healthy is the attitudes toward food in those places.

 I'm going to give you three words and I just want you to think about which one of these words is the OD one out. Bread, pasta, and butter. Which one is it? Is the OD one out? Butter. Why? Because bread and pasta are carbs. This question comes from a real psychology study that was published a few years ago, more than a decade ago now, actually, I think. And they looked at the different cultures and had the Americans, the Belgians, the French, and the Japanese. Now, the French answered that question by saying, well, pasta is the OD one out because bread and butter go together. The Americans answered that question, just as some people here did, by saying, Well, bread and pasta go together because they are carbs. 

Who has the bigger problem with food?

 That study showed that the Americans, while they were much more concerned and worried about the foods that they bought, were much more likely to buy the foods that were in their shopping basket. They didn't place much priority, and they certainly didn't place much pleasure in food, whereas the French did. 

When I was a student, I spent a summer waitressing in a restaurant in Paris, and it was in a business area. And what would happen would all the local business people would come to the restaurant for a sit-down lunch with a knife and fork, converse and chat over the table, and then go back to work in the afternoon. 

What happens in Sydney? 

You're lucky if you grab a sandwich on the way people are eating in the street. Something my mother always told me it was really rude to do. Everything's grabbing on the run. Everything's on the run. Rush, rush, rush. We don't give any priority and we don't give any respect to food anymore. When I was at school, I was not particularly religious, but at school, we had to say grace before we ate our lunch. The whole school had to sit down at our tables and, um, we all chanted the grace and then everyone could start to eat something nice about that kind of respect. Because at the end of the day, what we have to recognize is that we are really lucky that we have a choice. We can choose to follow low-carb or low fat or paleo. 

We have that choice. But where I want to leave you is by saying, that if we're really going to get some change in changing those awful statistics that are hitting Australia, I need your help. We need to lose the diet wars. We need to give up on the promises of the quick fixes and the pills and the potions and the shakes and everything that's going to do it for us without us putting in any effort ourselves. And, uh, we've got to go back to eating real food. And you can choose your ultimate diet.

 As long as you have those core whole food foundations with lots of plant food, whether or not you choose to add meat or other animal products into it, then you can make it individualized to you. And above all, we absolutely must eat with joy. We have to take pleasure in what we're doing because otherwise, we're not going to do it for the long term. And it's only when you change for the long term, you change the way your thought processes work. That's the only way that we're actually going to get real change. And I hope you'll agree with me that that is an idea worth spreading. THANK YOU.