And he was effectively silenced for years but now has been exonerated and it has fueled him just to teach people more about not only his struggles and what he went through, but it's helped him uncover a lot of the influences behind what we're told or how we're told to eat. And the influences ran deep with industry and religion, and it's really surprising, sometimes it reads like a suspense novel or a fiction movie to really keep you on the edge of your seat and with conspiracy theories.
But as he and his wife Belinda have shown and talked about many times, it's there, it's in writing, it's in documents that they've uncovered. And it's a little scary but at the same time the message is that we have to open our eyes, we have to be aware of outside influence and we have to question the status quo. And that's how we move forward and that's how we learn. As part of his work he's written a book, Inversion, One's Man Answer for World Peace and Global Health.
So as you can see by that title, quite ambitious, but he's well on his way to helping us understand this and giving us the path of how we need to see things a little bit differently and understand the influence put upon us. So hopefully this will be a very eye-opening and enjoyable interview with Dr. Gary Fettke.
Dr. Gary Fettke, thank you so much for joining me today on the DietDoctor podcast.
And the other thing is that my message was, let's reduce sugar for patients, particularly in diabetics. You know, I questioned hospital food, but the most important thing was that I wasn't selling anything. I didn't have a book, I didn't have a business that was depending on it. We did start a dietetic service down the track, but that was because no one else was giving that support that was required.
So because I didn't have anything and I was actually the coal fire and literally looking at the end complications of diabetes and obesity and lifestyle disease whether or not it's arthritis, as it was evolving in my practice, a significant amount of diabetic foot surgery. So it's pretty hard to argue against me if I am actually the surgeon doing the amputations, you know, I'm actually seeing the end product and making a noise about it.
So as it turns out, the cereal industry, the Dietitians Association in Australia I think found me as a threat because I actually had an answer for the problem, but it was actually counteracting completely the opposite of what they were promoting.
So why were you the one to say, "Wait a second... there's a better way to do this to prevent all this, to prevent people from getting here"? What did you see differently?
I come from a background of actually being proactive on patients taking care of themselves first of all, so if you go back 25 years, I wouldn't operate on smokers. And I used to give a paper called, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." For and so the if you looked at the early signs of that it was smoking has deleterious effects on cardiovascular tree, our healing potential, and it's now completely mainstream that we should be avoiding major surgery in people who are smoking.
So the next thing from that was that I started avoiding doing surgery. In fact refusing to do major joint replacements on patients that were too fat. That's a politically incorrect term to use now, but that was the scenario. So I drew a line in the sand with patients with a BMI more than 35 and the literature is there that really supports that stand.
We have good options, and when I hear bariatric surgeons saying, well, they tried dieting, I say, "Have they actually tried LCHF?" And they go, "Oh, no, that doesn't work." And I say, "Actually it does."
He said, "I've come to you because I know you won't operate on me straight away and you're going to tell me to diet; I just need help." So he went and saw a dietitian that was completely on board with it and then rang up 10 days later and said, "I have lost all my arthritis pain." He'd lost it all.
And those seem like fairly reasonable conclusions that you can draw but when the literature doesn't exist, when the 10,000 person study about half getting LCHF, half getting joint replacement, when that doesn't exist yet, but the clinical N of one's exist, you find it hard to convince other surgeons about what you're seeing? I mean like once you see it, you can't un-see it, so why doesn't everybody see it?
So there's an interest there in surgeons; we had a chat beforehand- some years ago I gave a talk on don't operate on obese patients. And I gave 200 papers, you know, a summary of those and against my argument there were three papers. And so I actually think that if we're actually operating on obese patients unnecessarily by doing joint placement- Bear in mind that in Australia 90% of knee replacements are done on patients who are overweight and obese.
Bret: 90%! So at least people stop doing that because there goes their income, there goes their livelihood there goes a big percentage of their practice.
And they are going to fail at a higher rate... we've already got that data. So they are going to fail at a higher rate on younger people.. It's just another layer of the tsunami of lifestyle related diseases it's going to be upon the next generation of medical professionals.
And you have turned- not only as a physician but you've turned into an investigative reporter, you along with your wife Belinda, to uncover a lot of sort of the beginnings of an anti-meat campaign of people with vested interest in not promoting LCHF. And it's sort of fascinating and almost unbelievable what you found. So I know it's a big topic but summarize some of the basics of what you found that shocked you and has certainly shocked a lot of people who you've been talking to about it.
So the definition of real food is LCHF whereas the definition of the standard diet comes out of a paper bag or a plastic bag. And that's unhealthy. So all I've been arguing and all- discussing with yourself and others in the scientific world, is we're just talking about biochemistry and real food can't buy definition be unhealthy. And Belinda made this observation when myself and Tim Noakes in particular were under investigation for recommending real food.
She said, "You guys are going blue in the face, but it's going to be something else." So it wasn't until she started to investigate my case because I was clearly under investigation for a few years. She come across that the expert witness that somehow mysteriously appeared into my case was actually someone pretty high up in the nutrition world who was working for a cereal company at the time.
So how come that the breakfast cereal industry got involved in my case? And it took another three years but towards the end of 2018 Belinda came across 600 pages of internal emails from the Australian breakfast cereal industry and in them it had that the concepts of paleo and low-carb were affecting cereal sales, profits were down and these seven people were to be targeted. Now I ended up being the only Australian doctor on that list who was meant for targeting.
And then actually in the documents it had details as to which media people are going to be working with newspapers and magazines across all forums to actually target those people who are promoting low-carb and paleo. So that's scary stuff. And this is actually not some load document. This was actually the briefing document to the CEOs of the heads of the cereal industry in Australia.
So Kellogg's, Nestle, Sanitarium, Freedom Foods and the head of the Food and Grocery Council. Now I am happy to say that because I have actually presented those individual names to send an inquiry, calling them out. And that's Australia, but those five CEOs, or four of those, report directly to the CEOs here in the US. So this is the cereal industry, you know, the biggest corporates at the bottom of that food pyramid that promote the cereals and grains.
They are actually in a working relationship with the Dietitians Association, they've been paid to actually promote the benefits of sugar and cereal. And the Dietitians Association in Australia just like you in the US are the ones that effectively write the dietary guidelines. So here we got the Cereal Industry directly paying the Dietitians Association not only to be involved in targeting of those voices against it, you know, talking about preventive health but they are also the ones writing the dietary guidelines.
So if you think that that started opening Pandora's box... Now it took some years to work out, but along the way Belinda's investigation has completely uncovered and effectively unraveling what's happening with my education, your education and the future of health education along nutrition lines.
So the long and the short of it is we're going back in history and if you look at the history of the dietary guidelines, they have changed over time... they used to be meat and dairy based and over the last 100 years the dietary guidelines in Western society became cereal biased, anti-meat, anti-dairy and rapidly approaching vegetarian and vegan.
The American Dietetic Association in 1917. The founder of that Association was a woman by the name of Linda Cooper. Linda Cooper was a protégé of John Harvey Kellogg. So she was working for John Harvey Kellogg, she effectively started the American Dietetics Association, she then wrote the textbooks for the next 30 years for dietetics, which formed the basis of dietetics and nutrition for the world.
First of all the model of the Dietetics Association as well as the textbooks became that not only for the US, but for Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand. So the Western organizations all followed suit and effectively the cereal industry was right there at the beginning.
Cereal based, anti-meat, anti-dairy... Vegan. And effectively they have been influencing the dietary guidelines for 100 years. So the people involved in writing the vegetarian mandate for the American Association and for the Australian dietetics guidelines were effectively all vegan/vegetarian. And the American one eight out of the nine were actually Seventh-day Adventists.
And the ideology- they were well-intentioned, I've got no problem. This is not antireligious. This is you got the belief, then I'm very happy if you have that belief. However make it grounded. But if you want to start promoting that and influencing that for the whole population make certain is grounded on science and not on an ideology for salvation.
So the terms, "Meat causes violence, causes masturbation, causes cancer", those terms are coming around in the early- no, the late 19th century, the 1860s, 1870s, the meat causes heart disease came up in the 1900s. Essentially we worked out that meat doesn't cause masturbation and the meat doesn't really cause violence so those messages are the 19th century ones.
So then we got the next message, the meat causes cancer, which continued to come along. And if you look at the data, that's very poor Association data for a couple of cancers with low relative risk ratio but nonetheless get over marketed. And so that narrative of fat causes heart disease is actually part of the meat causes heart disease. It's whatever they can use to try and travel that path.
So we've now moved back to meat causes cancer. Now the latest one is meat causes environmental harm. It's all a complete nonsense. But you got to realize that the backing of this is coming from a religious ideology for salvation, not for health.
Which is their big promotional one called The Chip program and it's been introduced in countries like Fiji it's just adopting it, the entire country. I mean the Polynesians, the last thing they need is more cereal and grains for their obesity and diabetes epidemic. But it's also being introduced in the US via insurance companies.
Chip program is being adopted and it's effectively a vegan program with a background of religious ideology they use as an entering wedge into the church. And so it's right there, front and central. And the important thing is they are not hiding any of this. If you actually look at this stuff, and last year, in 2018, they published a 20 page article in a Journal called Religion acknowledging everything I've just said.
They are very proud of it, they've got a health agenda for the world. That's the religious ideology, they are promoting that because they need to get the message to every corner of the world, "every tongue", I think is actually in their-
You know, started as the Christian Association of lifestyle medicine and ultimately this moved through a series of name changes pages but it's widespread around the world... and that has a good message however. It's about medical education and pushing that pathway. Side by side with that is the term 'exercise is medicine' which is actually trademarked and one of the initial founding members of that trademark of exercise is medicine is Coca-Cola.
So in this strange relationship we've got these two arms coming together in medical education... look up LifeMed, which is education... The co-concept of education now being controlled by lifestyle medicine, pushing a vegan plant-based agenda and Coca-Cola coming in and they started becoming involved with lifestyle medicine in 2010, started coming in significant relationships in 2012 and the funding pedal was pressed in 2014, 2015.
So we're now seeing this whole rise of the vegan agenda and they don't realize that the propaganda is being fed by the lifestyle medicine, Adventist church message, Garden of Eden diet with the backbone of the processed food industry led by Coca-Cola.
And so again it's all about being open in the discussion. I am very happy for you to present... Here is my educational package to teach to my medical students, but I come from religious ideological background promoting this for salvation and I have the backing of the processed food industry which is going to help their profit line. I mean, you wouldn't buy into that, would you?
Let's look at both sides of it rather than just taking for granted what you are in cowspiracy of folks overnight. Because that's clearly an agenda driven one. And you've got to realize that that agenda is coming from the garden of Eden diet, Adventists and the food industry Coca-Cola. We are not conspiratorial, we looked at this for a couple of years before... we sought counsel from other people and said we lost the plot on this.
And all we're doing is having it ratified. And then last year as I said the Seventh-day Adventist church came out very proudly saying, "We are behind this." Because they have an agenda, they believe in it.
So if anything I would hope that would hurt their mission more once people realize that it was basically a well-funded media campaign that wasn't based in science, but yet I don't think their message is getting out there, but that the message has been propagated more as look at this evidence-based approach now to being vegan. And that seems pretty problematic when you start to distort what the evidence says.
And so when you actually look into them and they're quoted over and over... But the Adventist studies were done by people affiliated with the Adventist Church that re-quote their own articles. So those three Adventist studies last time we looked at them had been re-quoted each time by themselves over 400 times. I mean 1200 re-citations by themselves.
So let's say I write an article and then I cite myself from that article and I cite myself from the article twice. All of a sudden they've compounded. But if you keep telling everyone that your Adventist health studies are fabulous... But the first two Adventist health studies, the definition of vegetarian was that as long as you didn't have meat more than once a week.
Very, very completely on the mark in that we are as a society right now are fat, we are overhanging in our chairs, we are lethargic, we are sick, we are medicated to the hill. And I honestly think this is completely and utterly unsustainable. And we are about to come over a precipice, you know, it won't be a social decline, it will be a social cliff; we will go over this, it will be really ugly in the next 10 years. But in that movie, the Greenleaf, that's my grandson. You know, I'm hoping that he will be armed with health. He will understand he needs to eat real food.
And so therefore I- Every economic marker, every health marker I look at is we're going to have a massive change in population health. It's scary. However I'm not depressed. I've suffered from this thing called hyper pragmatism. So I'm just being pragmatic about it; this is happening before us. You can see it when you walk down street, see it in your family or community. See it in the hospitals... We need to do something about it. It's going to be messy but let's prepare the next generation for making the difference.
And that's the education I want to see. And my problem... me and Belinda, we see that the education model that's been introduced in the US being pushed in Australia. You know, going back some years, I think it was being pushed into my own university and as it turns out my medical students, we're going to be having this new curriculum thrust upon them. And that's when I came out and started talking to them about...
Actually that's sort of nonsense. I'm talking about real food, LCHF, blah, blah, blah. I didn't realize that I had actually trodden on a hornets nest in my own hospital to my own students. But they were the group that were having this new experimental teaching upon them. That's all been gone by the wayside, but I think that's part of why went into trouble...
And that was the introduction of the low-fat high carbohydrate diet. We have had that social experiment for the last 40 years, 50 years. The next thing which is being pushed literally down our throats is the plant-based vegan, anti-meat, pro-cereal... as Belinda says, with a side of Coke.
And they said, those are the guidelines, we can't change them, we have to do as we are told. And I said, okay I'm going to try and change the guidelines. So what do we do? Well, we stand up, we start questioning. One of the problems in medicine is we are educated on this read, repeat, reward concept. It does not suit us as trainees and as doctors to read something and then question it.
Because then you get into trouble and then you are reported to the medical board because you are saying I can't recommend ice cream to my patients. And that's literally what happened. I've got reported because I said this is ridiculous... stop serving my patients ice cream.
But Flexner came in with this agenda to actually change medical education. It's a fascinating story. And ultimately the Flexner report went through, big-money won out and the model of medical education became one of that let's lab test and medicate. We stopped the bedside caring, we've stopped the holistic interactions. We didn't stop them completely.
And along with that, which was a burgeoning time for the pharmaceutical industry, development of drugs was the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry. So therefore all around 1910 to 1917 we had the birth of the pharmaceutical industry, of the nutrition science which is not science at all... It's about palatability, marketability, shelf-life profit. We had the two that came together and so I call that generational education.
So since 1910, 1917 we have had the pharmaceutical industry educating us on how to treat our patients. We've had the food industry telling us or educating us, I'll use a softer term, on what to eat. And we've lost the ability to think because they then developed the guidelines, the guidelines say, stick within these parameters...
But the guidelines at the best, only are useful for the median group. Let's say two thirds of the population. That leaves a third of the population out to the side, which the guidelines don't fit. But you, as a medical, have to prescribe according to the guidelines for the median group. That means potentially we are doing harm to at least one third of the population.
The most important lesson is question what you're told, question the norm, question the guidelines. Because the people who've put those out haven't questioned the influences, we need to do that and whether you agree or not you have to at least ask the questions. And if you then ask the questions and still agree with them, that's fine, you've done your own due diligence.
But we can't just accept things on face value, we can't do that anymore, because the role of industry, the role of money, the role of religion is too deeply rooted, that's what you and Belinda have taught me that those roots go so deep that we just have to start asking the questions and never stop asking the question; that's the most important lesson.
And when you adopt an LCHF, low-carb healthy fat lifestyle, the very first question I get from doctors all the time is, "I'm worried about the patient's cholesterol." And the patients get that, they are intimidated by that. And I have one really, really simple reply for the health professionals, doctors and so, "What is cholesterol?"
And the scary thing is 99% of doctors cannot answer the question. Just say, what's cholesterol... And unless your doctor can come up with at least five things which cholesterol is there for, then don't take his advice or her advice. Or at least question, because unless we're questioning the doctors, then the doctors aren't going to go and learn. Because they are just following the guidelines. And I did question.
And when you start looking at nutrition science, or "non-science" or "non-sense", it's a house of cards. And that's what all my journey has been in the last 10 years. I press the pack of cards and it just keeps falling down. It doesn't matter if it's cholesterol, sugar or carbohydrate, it's fat, or healthy fats or polyunsaturated oils.
Unfortunately everything I press is falling down. And so in my textbooks I've come to question. You know, Harrison's principles of medicine. I remember my father giving it to me on my 18th birthday. Actually it was 18 plus one day because he said he could give it to me on my birthday because I was completely drunk.
And he gave it to me the following morning. I can still remember him out in the back porch. He said, "Here's your birthday cards next to the definition of alcohol." I can still remember that... Very funny. I mean that's our go-to book. And the editors of Harrison's last year were paid over US $11 million and declared by the pharmaceutical industry.
So it's remarkable what you are doing to try and help educate people on the right way and help them educate themselves. So if people want to hear more about you and read more about what you've written and what you've done, where can we direct them to go?
That's Belinda Fettke no fructose that was changed from Gary Fettke no fructose in the midst of all the medical board investigations. And they said, "You can't talk about this." So we literally just drew a line through Gary and wrote Belinda. Because they cannot silence her. And I've now have been cleared to start talking about this stuff again. I don't think anybody wants me talking about it apart from the patients in the community.
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