I like this. There’s a culture of transparency kinda bubbling about. Have you noticed? People seem to be wanting to acknowledge to the world where they’re going wrong, or veering toward pretentiousness, in a spirit of “we’re all in this together, aren’t we?”.
image via wickedhalo.tumblr.com
I quite love the “Shit xxx say” videos doing the traps. Mostly because they’re not cynical or cruel. They’re acknowledging. They seek, I think, to enroll us all in the same story: “Yeah, I know I’ve got a little caught up, and I’m a little affected…”
And the net result is to connect us further with our humanity.
Which, dammit, is all I really want from this life.
I also like that some companies are getting in on the act, not hiding behind the constructed messaging anymore. It’s a mild breath of fresh air. Canadian Yoga brand Lululemon made this pisstake of the painful stuff people-who-are-just-a-little-bit-too-intimate-with-their-own-hamstrings can say. Clever. Brave. It works.
The cynical among us could say brands and businesses don’t have a choice anymore. Everything is transparent, everything Google-able and exposable, and you might as well get in first and acknowledge your faults before your narky customers dig them up.
But Trendwatching recently flagged the new movement: Flawsome….where companies expose their flaws, in a humane way, creating an overall awesomeness.
They describe this leaning toward transparency thus:
Last week I chatted to David Gillespie about some of the food myths he debunks in his new book Big Fat Lies. Today we have a quick chat about why the “lies” continue. I reckon you’ll like this one.
image via Marina Giller
It’s easy to conclude from what David exposes in his book and in the podcast that there is a conspiracy going on. I prefer – and so does David – to be more moderate and get informed as to why the bodgy science got off the ground in the first place. And how it then formed the basis of most nutritional thinking in the Western world – everything from our food pyramid to taglines in infomercials.
It’s almost comical. But understandable. The world wanted answers when rates of heart disease suddenly soared in the 1950s. A President had a heart attack. All that was available at the time was a silly study on rabbits from 30 years earlier that everyone had dismissed at the time as proving nothing of any worth.
But everyone latched on to the faulty science. The lies kind of domino-ed from there.
David is careful to say “ignorance” and commercial reality is to blame. Perhaps. But a breakfast cereal company selling us sugary flakes with clever marketing is only one part of the problem.
The bigger problem, to my mind, is that some of the peak nutritional bodies here and in other parts of the Western world, and many of the doctors, “experts” and nutritionists who we trust to tell us the truth, are often actively peddling these lies – and in the face of conflicting evidence. What’s more…
Some of the more vocal and influential nutritionists are paid by breakfast cereal companies and the like.
And many of the peak bodies are funded by major soft drink and junk food companies.
I won’t draw conclusions for you. I’m not saying such funding (which is often necessary for some of these organisations to survive) results directly in vested outcomes. But it’s good to know the full picture, right? Sadly, we’re rarely given it.
Anyway. You make up your own mind…
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While you’re listening, you may like to check out these links. They highlight the various multinational sugar-based and low-fat companies that fund the major nutritional bodies in Australia and the US. As I say, make up your own mind…
Also, you might also be interested to read this article on how the sugar industry sugar industry muzzles journalists or those who speak out.
And here’s the original column from the Daily Mail on how much sugar there is in breakfast cereals. A quote from the article that I found pertinent: “It would take a very brave government to pick a fight with the corporations that have built such lucrative businesses on the back of our addiction to sugar.”
As I’ve commented before, there’s not going to be a major campaign any time soon to get us off sugar. It’s just not going to happen. We have to take the responsibility on ourselves.
Someone on twitter also sent me this one – a rundown of how PepsiCo do their spin, including this: “Hiring respected public health experts and medical doctors to represent the company, creating an illusion of having a health-oriented mission, instead of being driven by profit.” Sigh…
This was something I got asked on my I Quit Sugar forums a lot. I promised to get to the bottom of the conflicting information…Et voila!
coconut water green smoothie, via The Alkaline Sisters. Recipe below
In a coconut shell.
1. yes, there is in fact sugar in coconut water
All coconuts contain sugar. The levels depend on the type of coconut, and it’s age. Something to note though, even the coconuts with the higher levels of sugar still only contain around 2.95ml of sugar per 100ml, which is not a lot. As I’ve shared in my I Quit Sugar ebook, best to stay under 4.7ml of sugar per 100ml. Of course, a bottle of coconut water – which is how most of us get our coconut water – is generally about 300ml. So. In one bottle there can be up to 9g of sugar, which is 2.5-ish teaspoons.
2. yeah, but how much of that is fructose?
Well. Not so much. And this is what counts. A Brazilian study found the sugar content of an average baby coconut to be made up of:
glucose 50%, sucrose 35%, and fructose 15%
So fructose makes up a maximum of 32 per cent of the total sugars (remember: sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose), and often a lot less (depending on the age of the coconut).
All of which means when you look at that total sugar value on the label, it’s a little misleading. Unlike coke or fruit juice, where we know half (or more) of the sugar content is fructose, coconut water’s sugar content is mostly glucose (which is fine, metabolically speaking).
In it I chat, amongst other things, * how to navigate Easter * suggestions for morning tea, and snack times * fertility and quitting sugar, and how they work together, and I recommend Nat Kringoudis at The Pagoda Tree. * quitting sugar and the impact on exercise Streaming Live by Ustream I’d love to hear … Read more
You may remember David Gillespie from previous discussions such as Why Sugar is Really Grim For You. He’s the author of Sweet Poison and over the past 13 months since I quit sugar we’ve been in regular dialogue.
image via Bon Appetite
Sometimes we talk about the fact that much of what we know about sugar and fat is a big fat lie. Wonderfully, David has now published a book on this very point. Today we’re chatting about his new book Big Fat Lies: How the Diet Industry is Making You Sick, Fat & Poor. If you’ve been wondering, if sugar is bad and saturated fat is actually good, then why are we not been told as such, then this is your weekend read.
But curl up now with a nice buttery piece of toast and enjoy our “fact or fiction” rundown of some common nutritional advice we all get fed…
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The five myths we cover off are:
1. eating fat causes heart disease
(For a little more background on the bodgy science that tried to convince us of this myth, see my blog on Ancel Keys‘ fat study.)
