Why?

The Science behind the Eat Real 4 Life Programme

by Scott Ward

I am not a qualified nutritionist, I am a chef, restaurateur and father of four. My son and my youngest daughter attend Bishop Gilpin School. With the open and engaging approach the school has, there is an opportunity here to provide some skills for life for when it comes to what to eat, produce some great food and have fun along the way.

The perfect result from this project would be to have our children leave with the knowledge to know why to eat what, with an open mind about trying new things. This will navigate a healthy lifestyle through the complex minefield of the modern-day food industry for the rest of their lives.

This is an essential skill that should be introduced at the first stages of life. It will be challenging to achieve and need the buy-in from parents and all concerned. The Eat Real 4 Life programme is not the LCHF (Low Carb, High Fat) Banting Diet, Paleo Diet or Ketogenic Diet, it isn’t a diet at all, it is a balanced programme with education and engagement based on the latest nutritional research. The idea is a gentle steer away from what shouldn’t be eaten, replacing it with very tasty, colourful dishes that should be. An easy way to consider the plan is to say it’s eating the food nature provides that is correct for our genetic makeup, not food sources manipulated by man.

The approach is that it’s fine to eat the wrong things on occasion and foods shouldn’t be considered as ‘banned’, as long as the majority of your intake is what is right for your body and mind. This is a complex subject, I have highlighted the main thought process behind the programme without going into great detail with a suggested reading list of a few books at the end for if you would like further information on the subject. If you have any questions, you can contact us directly at eatreal4life@bishopgilpin.org.

I have suffered with stomach problems for years, specialists had me on a variety of drugs to try and solve the issue. I had to take pills every time I ate anything. This came to a life changing moment in 2015 when after suffering from pancreatitis, I was rushed into hospital and had my gallbladder removed. After surviving the process, I decided it was time to get more educated about what I was putting in my body.

Since changing what I eat, I have not suffered from any further stomach problems and I no longer take any medication for it. I am dedicated for the next generation to have a more educated approach to what they are eating and are given the power to make their own informed decisions. The basis of the approach is general, any dietary issues and concerns on an individual level should be consulted with a good specialist.

With the regular international headlines of ‘child obesity epidemic’ ‘eating disorders in teenagers’ and the associated chronic illnesses that come in later life including diabetes, heart disease, age-related macular degeneration, infertility and cancer; it is clear that the current approach to what we eat and how we eat is not right for us as a species and needs to be address as early in life as possible.

The amount of misinformation around led by unsubstantiated medical theories, government guidelines and big business marketing strategies including adverts for ‘healthy foods’ that are full of sugar, ‘vitamins enriched’, ‘low-fat’, ‘reduced sugar’ or ‘30% less sugar’ makes deciding what is good to eat hugely challenging.

We have become obsessed with dieting and calorie counting to try and address the issue without realising that these are not solutions to the problem. A lot of what we are told about nutrition is dangerously wrong. The truth is, this is a scandal. To understand the issue fully we need to look into our history as a species.

Our ancestors have been around for around six million years, evolving in to the modern form about two hundred million years ago. Up until 300 years ago their diet didn’t include the ingredient that has caused the majority of the issues, sugar. Up until only very recently, our diets were made up of a massive variety of food sources, all natural. We have reduced this to a very small amount by comparison, replacing them with processed ingredients some of which should never have been legal for human consumption in the first place.

As part of the convenience food revolution, we have refined any nature out of what we eat then supplemented them with a whole range of unnecessary man-made vitamins. We have moved away from the diet our bodies after millions of years evolving is designed to survive on. It is interesting to consider if you look at all other any species on the planet, they all control their weight automatically, all except us; or any animal unfortunate enough to be fed by us. All other animals eat the food they were genetically designed to eat.

There are three macronutrients in our diet; fat, protein and carbohydrates. Only carbohydrates are not essential. Glucose is essential for life, but we don’t need to consume it, the body has the ability to make it from fat and protein in the liver with a process called gluconeogenesis. This is how humans survived for millions of years before sugar came along. There is now over-mounting evidence that the white carbohydrate rich, high-sugar diet we prefer is the root cause to many dietary issues.

Sugar is a highly addictive ingredient and is now in most of the food we eat, it is not required in our diet and should be considered a drug. This is not ‘new’ news, press and latest government initiatives are all addressing the need to reduce sugar. As human beings we do not need to eat sugar, we shouldn’t eat sugar at all but if we do choose to eat it, we should be clear about what we are doing.

To understand the issue, we need to consider; what is sugar and what does it do to our bodies when we eat it? Sugars are soluble carbohydrates, what that means is that the body quickly converts the sugar into blood glucose. They are absorbed directly into the bloodstream as glucose, causing a spike in blood sugar levels. Just like taking a drug, we become addicted to the high that it gives us. We now eat sugar so much we don’t even notice this effect. We just have trained ourselves to want the feeling after eating; we have a dependence, just like any other drug addict.

White or beige carbohydrates are food sources that are quickly converted directly to blood sugars when digested, just like eating sugar. Our normal modern diets are made of white or beige carbs, refined ones being the worse. What is incredible is that up until recently, we were recommended to eat them as our main source of food, they are literally everywhere. The following staple ingredients are white or beige carbs: White bread or any white flour produced items such as biscuits, pastry and pasta also white rice and potatoes (not sweet potatoes).

Any soluble carbohydrates consumed must either be used every 24h as an energy fuel or they will be stored either as fat in the fat tissues or as glycogen in the muscles and liver.

To put this into context, one slice of commercially produced white bread contains 1.4 grams of sugar. If you consider how jam is made, a jam sandwich with 2 spoons of jam on white bread has about 21.1g of sugar, by comparison a can of coke has 10.6g of sugar. Also, a baked potato with a portion of baked beans has a massive 100g of sugar, the same as 9 ½ cans of coke. Just because something isn’t sweet, we should not stop thinking as it as a sugar.

We tend to consider food based on its calorific value and use this to base our dietary intake; this is a ridiculous, antiquated idea. A calorie is the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water through 1 degree. This is the same as saying we are running our bodies like diesel engines that can run on any combustible material. There are 150 calories in a can of coke, 160 calories in an avocado. The model for weight control was promoted by German diabetologist Carl von Noorden in the 1900’s, he suggested that the ingestion of calories regardless of whether they originate from fats, carbs or alcohol is the cause of obesity, therefore to lose weight, consume less calories. This is not a valid method of deciding what we should be eating as we now know much more about nutrition.

The reason I mention avocado is it brings me on to fats. I am not a fan of the word ‘superfood’ it is massively overused to explain anything, most things that are called superfoods just aren’t. The avocado however is the exception, rich in exactly the right fat, monounsaturated fatty acid. It is also rich in vitamins C,D&E, high in fibre, folic acid, potassium, it’s good for your brain, skin, digestion, the list goes on.

It’s important to understand the importance of fats in our diet. It’s true, some fats are to be avoided at all costs, back in the 1950’s we made artificial trans-fats (trans-fatty-acids) by adding hydrogen to heated vegetable oils to make them last longer and taste better, they are also used in a lot of processed snack foods and packaged bakery items for the same reasons. They have huge health implications and were banned by the FDA in the US in June of this year. The UK has decided (against all the medical proof) not to ban them, there is a voluntary agreement with the major supermarkets not to use them (since 2012) but it is still unclear what processed foods contain them.

It is estimated by the NHS that banning artificial trans fats would save 7200 lives by 2020 (published in 2015). High-heated (processed) polyunsaturated oils such as vegetable oils may also contain oxidised omega 6 acids another thing that needs to be avoided completely. This carcinogenic is so bad it can even damage your DNA!

Natural cold pressed oils such as coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil and rapeseed oil (not the heated version) retain the goodness of the plants and are the right kind of oils to use.

A vital component to consider is that our brains are made of fat. The history of fat reduction in our diets is linked to cholesterol with governments recommending that cholesterol rich foods (such as eggs) would raise your LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) cholesterol and promote heart disease. After decades of research failing to prove the assumption, it was finally overturned with Dietary Guidelines for Americans addressing this scientific shortcoming, announcing "cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption."

What is so difficult to comprehend is that the worldwide acceptance that low fat is best and saturated fats are to be avoided came from one mans’ hypothesis (Ancel Keys, PHD) in 1961 and despite countless other studies, not one of them proved his theories to be correct. Despite this, we have accepted it as fact for over 50 years. Potentially this man did more to harm the human race than Thomas Midgley, the man who put lead in petrol and CFC’s in fridges.

Dietary cholesterol is essential for brain health and memory formation, it is also how your skin converts sunlight into vitamin D. This comes from saturated fats, now scientifically proven to raise the safe HDL (High Density Lipoprotein); it’s the opposite of what we were told. When you consider the ‘healthy options’ in the supermarket such as low-fat yogurt that has the saturated fat removed and sugar added, it should be criminal to display it as ‘healthy’, we are being misled by a multi-million pound industry for commercial gain.

The other thing to consider is diversity. It is only recently that we have a better understanding of the importance of good gut bacteria. Our ‘gut flora’ refers to microorganisms, predominantly bacteria that populate the intestines. We are finding more ways these ‘friendly’ bacteria help us all the time, including metabolic effects such as providing us with vitamins, nutrients and weight control, so much more than just supporting our immune system.

Humans develop gut flora within hours of being born. It has been accepted for some time that we gain our first bacteria through the birth canal, but new research show that the placenta has a small variety of bacteria that originate in the mother’s mouth (why prenatal oral health is important). The placenta is mostly a sterile environment, within minutes of being born the babys’ flora is developing. They also gain bacteria through immediate skin to skin and natural breast milk. Latest research also shows the microbes assist babies in developing a normal brain and nervous system.

As personally coming from a caesarean birth and bottle fed, possibly my own stomach issues came from this early start, but that’s unsubstantiated in any way.

As we develop, we gain various strains of bacteria from eating a variety of different things, specially fermented foods. From around 3 years old we start developing our range of gut flora for life. Back before the industrial food revolution, humans were eating a huge range of different ingredients, this has been reduced to only a few. It’s interesting to look at our own personal diets to identify exactly how little variety there is, how many times this week have you eaten bread or chicken? Adding fermented foods and variety at a young age can only be beneficial to developing a diverse microbiome colonisation.

Back to carbs, green carbohydrates are found in fruit and vegetables with dietary fibre. It is usually the part of the plant that has vitamins and minerals. They are also good for your teeth and gums. It should be noted that with green carbohydrate fruit and veg, they both have the same goodness, but fruit has more sugar (soluble carbohydrate) so should be consumed less than vegetables.

Examples of green carbs are:

Avocado, broccoli, cauliflower, courgettes, peppers, onions, sweet potatoes, peas, celeriac, aubergines, cabbage, cress, bok choy, fruit.

Finally, there is resistant starch (a different kind of sugar) - found in high-fibre foods such as lentils, beans and unprocessed whole-grains, as they are difficult to digest they are not absorbed as blood sugar instead, travel down to the colon where they feed your gut flora.

Through adding sugar, refining it to make it worse, processing our foods to make them more convenient and cheaper, adding additives to extend shelf life and basing our diet on modern cereals (bread, pasta, etc) we have consistently been making our diet worse. Incredibly it is only since the 1980’s that processed food has been such a large part of our diet. It is time for us to change.

The Eat Real 4 Life Programme.

All of the above scientific approach only leads to a simple conclusion that can only be good. You don’t have to believe in the academic approach to know that if you get a varied selection of fresh ingredients, cook them from scratch, don’t add anything that isn’t needed and eliminate any processed ingredients you will have a good food plan; just eating the food nature intended for us to eat.

The Eat Real 4 Life Programme goes further than this. Not only basing the dishes on green carbs with a high variety of good ingredients (it’s not good enough just to say you have ‘beef’ on the menu, you need to know how the animal was raised and what it was fed on. To not use grain but then use beef fed on it, we are only one step away. Beef should be raised on grass as they are genetically designed to do, nothing else.) but also using modern batch cooking techniques to ensure that no short cuts are necessary.

With the many challenges this programme will need to overcome, the first is clearly getting the children to try and enjoy the food. If we consider sugar consumption as drug taking, we need to consider a careful approach to withdrawal. If we just start by saying ‘From today no white bread, pasta, pastries or cake, instead you have broccoli and salad’ a lot of food will go in the bin and we will have a lot of hungry, unhappy people. We will take a much subtler approach replacing white and beige carbs with protein, good fats and more green carbs, bright, colourful, tasty dishes with new things on offer all the time. There will still be breads, pasta, etc but all wholemeal to begin with then a slower move to more ‘ancient grains’ made with quinoa, oats, barley, amaranth, Kamut, millet and teff.

The programme does not remove sugar completely, it does remove refined sugar and will avoid hidden sugars. When sugars are served, they will come from honey, unrefined sugar, coconut sugar, fruits, maple and agave syrup. They will be used to make exciting desserts that will be part of a balanced plan.

As detailed on the website there will be engagement programmes involving international style pop ups, cooking demonstrations and interesting assembly presentations. There will be no mention of diets, calories, clean food or anything else that could be taken in a negative way.

We will use fermented foods, organic produce when possible, homemade bone and vegetable stocks to add flavour and reduced salt content in all the recipes. There will always be options for dietary requirements and non-meat options will be as exciting as the meat dishes.

It would be easy to say that eating the right diet will ensure we have the nutrients needed for human development for every system in the body, including brain development so will mean more energy for longer periods, higher concentration, better sleep, less sickness, etc. This is not the approach we are taking, but it will be interesting to monitor. One thing is for sure, by not eating sugar-rich foods you avoid the blood glucose spike and inevitable come down that causes mid-afternoon (or mid-morning) energy crashes.

We will use feedback from the students to ensure direction and invite parents in to share the experience. There will be clear communication with parents as the programme progresses. We will be using a variety of restaurants across the capital with the in-house team to bring different styles and techniques of professional cookery.

This is no way a programme to dictate what people have to eat outside of school. It is a demonstration that great tasty food can be satisfying and delicious without having to revert to the easy white carb and processed food options. As the programme progresses, the students will understand why to avoid what. Also, the approach of diverse, international flavours will install an open-minded mindset to discover new experiences.

This is a hugely exciting programme, without overplaying it; life-changing. There will always be a small minority of students that will not accept what is being done, but with the majority of children enjoying the food and experience we should be able to drive the culture the right way.

Further reading:

The Diet Myth, the real science behind what we eat by Tim Spector, FMedSci, professor of genetic epidemiology and director of the TwinsUK registry at King's College, London. According to Thomson-Reuters, he is in the top 1% most cited scientists.

The Real Meal Revolution, the radical sustainable approach to healthy eating by Tim Noakes, a South African scientist and an emeritus professor in the Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at the University of Cape Town.