The McCarrison Society - NL 40/1: Special Generating Healthy Brains Edition

NL 40/1: Special Generating Healthy Brains Edition

Article Index
NL 40/1: Special Generating Healthy Brains Edition
Chairman's comments
GHB Special Report On The McCarrison Society
GHB:Report by Conference Organiser Rev Simon House, MA
GHB: Preconception to late adolescence:
GHB: From past to present: evolution and epigenetics
GHB: CLEAVE LECTURE Nutrition, the brain and mental ill health
GHB: Our changing diet; deficits and disorders
GHB: Genomic imprinting for brain development and behaviour
GHB: 'Brainfoods': Modulating brain structure and function
GHB: The effects of maternal anxiety or stress during pregnancy
GHB: Cornerstones in the Psychobiological Development of Mankind:
GHB: A psycho-soma integration perspective
GHB: 'New Parenting', psychotherapy, prenatal
GHB: Attention deficit disorders
GHB: Priorities in Research Funding
GHB:Into the future; avoiding the cost of folly
GHB: References
News
Mind What You Eat
McCarrison meeting with Sustain
Future Events

Page 2 of 22

Chairman’s comments

The latest new initiative by Government is to spend £62 million on the UK Biobank (www.biobank.ac.uk) project. This is a 30-year epidemiological study, funded by the Department of Health, the MRC, the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Executive. From 2006 the project will collect information on the health and lifestyle of 500,000 UK volunteers aged between 40 and 69. The aim is to build the world’s largest information resource on the genetic and environmental factors that cause or prevent human disease.

Sir Richard Doll in his seminal thesis on cancer in which he identified smoking as a major cause of lung cancer claimed that 30-70% of cancers were related to food, and are therefore preventable. The 7 Country study of 1950s- 1970s, the MRFIT, the Framingham studies in the USA of the 70s, 80s and 90s, the Nurses studies of over 100,000 women followed for 1,077,536 person-years in the USA, together with the reports on trans fatty acids being even more harmful than a high saturated fat diet1, speak with one voice delineating nutritional distortion as a major cause of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and Western cancers. David Barker’s work has identified the importance of maternal and foetal nutrition, which adds to the evidence available in the 1970s that heart disease has a paediatric cause.

These large studies were built on what has been described as the library shelves groaning under the weight of scientific, and experimental evidence implicating bad nutrition in the 20th century Western disease. By the time of the 1978 FAO / WHO Expert International Consultation on the “Role of Dietary Fats and Oils in Human Nutrition”2 there were already 21 national and international committee reports recommending action on food production and nutrition, identifying school children and pregnancy as vulnerable targets for the effects of such distortions and making specific food based recommendations for a revision of food production.

30 years later we are told we need to invest £62 million and wait for another 10 -30 years before we know the answer.

The answer is simply embedded in Sir Robert McCarrison’s prescription of “The unsophisticated foods of Nature”.

In other words Sir Jack Drummond’s proven ethic of linking nutrition and health needs to be restored. The post war rejection of his ethic, which replaced Drummond and McCarrison’s food nutritional quality by food production and weight gain, needs to be stopped. All that did was to produce surpluses of empty calories, which are now being exported at subsidised

prices to developing countries while simultaneously exporting Western Disease. You do not need £62 million of taxpayer’s money and rocket science to understand what is happening and how to deal with it. The priority should be nutrient quality, not weight gain.

1. Mozaffarian D, Katan MB, Ascherio A, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC (2006) Trans fatty acids and cardiovascular disease. New England Journal of Medicine 354(15):1601-13.

2. FAO / WHO Expert International Consultation on the “Role of Dietary Fats and Oils in Human Nutrition” (1978) Nutrition report no 3, FAO, Rome.

<< Prev - Next >>

[ Back ]