| Interview: Dr John Briffa on the True You Diet |
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| Ceri Balston | |||
| Wednesday, 30 July 2008 | |||
  Q: You trained as a conventional medical doctor, but now you specialise in “nutritionally naturally-orientated medicine”. What is it about these fields that fascinated you, and how did you end up going into those fields particularly?After qualifying as a doctor, I quite soon got the distinct impression intuitively that it probably wasn’t the right career choice for me. I actually enjoy medicine, I enjoyed practising it, but there were a few elements of disquiet that I had about it and one of them was surgery, which was my chosen field and is quite effective, but a lot of medicine is not effective, it just doesn't really work very well. Its also more hazardous, than people understand. So you have these statistics, and they are real you know, when doctors go on strike, death rates don’t go up they go down. So that caused me to question my decision, I also didn’t like the way people were treated generally in medicine. I don’t think medicine is particularly humane, and I thought maybe this isn’t really me. I met a patient who unwittingly opened my eyes to the idea of improving your health nutritionally, and that came about because he’d done that in his own life. My interest in it was personal because I was at that stage quite a newly-qualified as doctor and not in a very good state of health. So I didn’t have any diagnosable illnesses, but I was overweight, I had eczema for a very long time since childhood, and I also felt tired quite a lot of the time. So it really drew to my attention just how rubbish my general wellbeing was and so I was initially interested in sorting some of my health issues. So that really sparked my interest, so I didn’t really join the dots and think, this could be a career for me, until some months later. I started reading more and applying nutritional principles in my practice and that’s really how I got into the field. Q: But then how do we know who to believe if people like yourself keep taking u-turns? Yes, it’s very difficult. First of all there’s a lot to be gleaned from the science. So for instance when I write about natural medicine or nutrition I do try as much as possible look at the science and critique it and see if it relevant or not relevant. But because I have another kind of aspect to my personality, a little bit, I suppose you call it intuitive, I do encourage people to respond to that as well. Now, most people intuitively accept that eating a diet based on the food that we’ve been eating say for two million years does kind of make sense, rather that the foods we’ve been eating for forty years. That is also supported by the science. So most people then would say that’s a reasonable evidence base to apply the principles that they’re learning about.  Q: You touch a little bit on your latest book The True You Diet which traces our genetic history and diet to tell us what we should be eating. Can you tell us more about this theory and how it came about? I think I’ve broadly been interested in the idea of living primal for a quite a long time. So not just with regards to nutrition but there are interesting points about activity and exercise, sunlight exposure and sleep. I was thinking about that as a general principle but I had also known for a long time that different people respond differently to different diets and that one man’s meat can be another man’s poison. So I thought that if a primal evolution diet is the best for us, which I strongly believe it is, could there be differences in that diet which would then dictate differences in an ideal diet for individuals? There is a lot of evidence which shows for instance that you could measure something called respiratory quotients which basically tell if someone is very good at metabolizing fat or if someone is a very good metabolizer of carbohydrate or somewhere in between. Then you can say that maybe people that were eating a lot of meat during their evolution had to become adaptive to metabolising fat whereas if its mango that’s one of your major foods then you have to metabolise carbs for that to be an efficient fuel for you. So as the result of that I kind of got it into my head that if you look at the primal diet, it could fall into the hunter gatherer diet, where food is either hunted or gathered. At one end of the spectrum you have hunters for example in northern Scandinavia or the arctic circle and on the other hand in the tropics you have gatherers mainly which aren’t doing much hunting, so then I started to look for evidence which supports these ideas. In fact you can look to this day and find people who are good metabolisers of fat and people who are good metabolisers of carbs or in between, so it does appear there are still to this day, hunters, hunter gatherers and gatherers around. Q: Even though we are not hunting or gathering? That’s right and because genes change very slowly and we‘ve only been growing crops and milking animals for the last five to ten thousand years, you could argue that the diet that were best adapted to is the diet that we ate prior to the introduction of nuts and dairy. I’m not saying you can’t eat any of those foods, but the diet that is really the hunter gatherer diet is best. Within that there are shades of grey and the book is really about how to find out which types of those people you really are. Q: How do we tell which type we are? The questionnaire in the book will tell you. It is based on few things; on studies that have looked at different types of people and what their characteristics are. You can do studies on people to look at what characteristics tend to define those individuals, then one thing you can find, for instance, is that the hunters actually eat more fat overall then the gatherers. Innately they are drawn to a fattier diet. So that’s one of the classic characteristics you can look for which is what are people’s food preferences. Whereas if you take a gatherer, they do well on some carb, and their engine runs reasonably well on that. They found for instance that if you look at hunters and gatherers, hunters have higher pulse rates. When you ask why, its something probably to do with the fact that thinking back, hunters probably needed high metabolic rates in order to be able to survive cold, and high metabolic rates generally mean faster pulses. It also means that if you get the diet right those people tend to lose weight quite quickly and easily. They are the people that do well for instance on low carb diets. If you’ve heard someone go on a diet plan and say “I’m not eating much, I’m just not that hungry”, the reason that they’re not very hungry is that they are eating the foods they are designed for. So their body is saying “I know you’ve physically put food in me, but it was entirely the wrong fuel,” and keeps people on a constant quest for food as its not getting quite the right type. So these are the kind of characteristics and things we look for in the questionnaire that determine if someone is a hunter, hunter-gatherer or a gatherer. Q: Can maybe different types in same family? Yes potentially because its all part of a spectrum so it could be hunter-gatherer at the hunter end of the spectrum or you could be a gatherer at the hunter-gatherer end of the spectrum. But if you take individuals and get them on the primal most people do better when they’re eating the standard western diet. The next step is fine tuning, and if get an even broadly right your likely to end up in a much better state of health. So I do fine tune a bit and find out whats right for them by changing their diet by responding to what feels right and getting in touch with that. Yes of course you can have subtypes you know I could have written a book whether is fifteen types or five or twenty-five, but for the purposes of getting the diet right, three is plenty. Q: What impact will following the True You Diet have in our health such as weight loss? Yes weight loss potentially if weight needs to come off. What I think is the most important thing, though, is that this isn’t really about weight, its about health. So think of it this way; the body is composed of many cells, brain cells, liver cells and the rest. Within the cells we have things called mitochondria, the mitochondria is like and engine, the power houses in your cells. They are best adapted to certain fuels so for a hunter, quite a lot of fat, for a gatherer, quite a lot of carb. So what your doing is actually feeding every single one of your cells with the fuel more appropriate potentially than the diet you have been eating. That means all of your cells work better, so don’t be too surprised if in addition to losing weight you feel generally better, are more energised, have better mental energy and your liver, your gut, your digestion and everything else can work a little better. So what people often find when they move their diet to something that is more appropriate to their needs is they get a global improvement in their health, and also a lot of nagging health issues that can be due to eating the wrong diet, like irritable bowel syndrome, can disappear when they get the diet right. I also think if you get the diet right your going to decrease the risk of common disease, for example eating low carb will lower the risk of diabetes. So I think what you can look forward to by eating the right diet is a longer healthier life, so you could add years to your life and life to your years. Q: And apart from questionnaire and the information you provide at the beginning about the hunters or different types what else people can expect from your book? Well I think they can expect a thorough review of the scientific literature that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what we really need to eat to have healthy diet. And it explodes number of myths I think that it are still circulating the nutrition establishment, like the idea that the only way to lose weight is to eat less calories and to exercise more. The book doesn’t look at exercise but neither of those things are correct. Eating less calories doesn’t do anything in the long term and it’s arguing really that if you wanted to lose weight you need to concentrate on the quality of your diet not the quantity. It explodes the myth that also you need milk for healthy bones - there’s hardly any evidence for that at all. Most of the evidence is to the contrary and also explodes the myth that margarine is better than butter. It explodes the myth that for a good diet you need a lot of starchy carbohydrates. It explodes the myth that artificial sweeteners are better than sugar. It really goes back, looks at the signs and finds partly why its called the True You diet, its not what’s true for you, it’s the truth is about healthy eating. Even if people didn’t go to find out their type and what their specific ideal diet is, coming away from this book should allow people to be utterly confident about what they’re eating. In one chapter alone on fat there are around ninety scientific references to show that it is just a myth that you need a low fat diet for heart disease and weight loss. So I wrote this book because I wanted people who read it to come away with a thorough grounding in nutritional science, so they can be really confident and most diet books don’t do that. Q: Some people have indicated there’s a correlation between the percentage of the population that’s obese and the number of diets on the market? I think two things about that. First of all, the more obese people the more it appears to authors and publishers that it’s a good market and they need to get into it with a book about weight loss. The other thing is that I actually think dieting makes people fat, because if you diet then usually what you would be doing is cutting calories which I don’t really advise at all, tends to cause a lessening in the metabolic rate. It’s like putting less fuel on the fire, the fire burns less well. If you keep in doing that, repeatedly going through cycles of dieting, you can really see a permanent shift in your metabolism, and now your fire isn’t burning particularly well, and what food you do put on it when you fall back to your original diet doesn’t burn as well as it did in the past, and then the weight goes back on. The trick is to find out what your body runs best on, and to feed it a fair amount of that food. To get the fire large you have to put fuel on it, the right fuel. People overeat because they’re hormonally driven to do that, partly because they’re eating the wrong diet. So that thought, which was not my own but I think is a good one, helps people to understand how they end up overeating, not due to a lack of self control and weak will or greediness, but because it can be quite chemically induced as a result of not eating the right foods. So if you eat a diet that de-stabilises blood sugar and you get a dip in blood sugar, it will usually make you hungry and usually for rubbish food. Is that you or your unstable chemistry? It’s actually your unstable chemistry. Food can be profound in terms of what it does to your mood, your energy and your behaviour. Q: Apart from the primal diet what other nutritional dietary advice can you suggest? A lot of our diet now is made up of relatively recent additions, and some of these are being touted as healthy. I’m talking about starchy carbohydrates like grains, mainly bread, rice, pasta, breakfast cereals, diary products, refined vegetable oil and refined sugar. These make up approximately seventy five percent of the calories we consume, but they are really quite the wrong food, especially the grains, dairy and refined vegetable oils. I don’t know what to say about this other than we have been seriously misled by certain people to believe things that just aren’t based on science or common sense. Q: So apart from going out and buying your book, where else can people go and get information about the work you do? They can go to my website www.drbriffa.com. Three times a week I write a piece that has something to do with health. This morning I wrote about something in the British medical journal where they basically exposed the fact that people who are called Key Opinion Leaders in Medicine, the people that stand up for doctors at conferences, are basically on the pay of pharmaceutical companies. It’s being exposed now that this is too cosy a relationship. I could also write about a study that once again shows that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease or carbs do cause diabetes or it could be a case study of something I have seen. That site has about five hundred and twenty articles on it now. There’s also potential for leaving comments.
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