The Future Makers

From the dawn of time, people have sought the comfort and security of a community

They willingly surrendered their autonomy, being the absolute right to do as they wished, and pledged allegiance to a group in return for certain basic needs – food, water, shelter, security and health care

Today we have all surrendered our autonomy to government

But are those basic needs still being provided? If so, why is it that some people can't gain access to basic health services? Why do predictions indicate that our children will have shorter lives than ourselves? Why are disabling and life-threatening diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, dementia all on the rise at younger and younger ages? One of the answers seems to be, the food we eat is killing us

Another is that health systems around the world are letting people die

Politicians do nothing and supported by corporate greed and hiding behind a mask of deception

What we should and should not eat is a question that has given rise to countless books, products and opinions

We are not the food we eat

We are the food that our ancestors ate

Well in fact we probably haven't evolved much at all genetically over the past two million years

That's the interesting thing

We evolved during Stone Age times

We were hunters-gatherers, we ran after our food, we dug it out of the ground, we gathered fruit and berries and nuts, all of which used up a lot of energy, but gave you quite a balanced diet

We were eating steak so you had the meat, you had lots of seafood, you had a lot of insects which you probably won't want to eat much these days

It takes the same steadfast thousands upon thousands of years to change the physical and chemical nature of ourselves so the introduction of food that's different or new chemical compounds as food will take thousands of years to become adapted to

About 10,000 years ago agriculture was invented and that made a big difference to us from a nutrition point of view

Agriculture in that time scale is less than 10 minutes old and the modern Western diet probably around 10 seconds old and really where the obesity epidemic has really gathered pace in the last 20 years that's really less than one second old

How could we have adapted to this massively rapid pace of change of our lifestyle over the last 200 years when we still I think have the genetic make up primarily of our ancestors

Over the last 10,000 years humans have adapted to eating grains by developing an enzyme in our gut that assists in grain digestion, however some of us have adapted better than others

Those who have not have difficulty digesting gluten

Gluten is a mixture of proteins found mainly in wheat but also in rye, barley and many processed foods

Grains are a valuable source of fibre and lots of vitamins and minerals

They do contain gluten that's certainly true and some people are allergic to gluten and presumably it has developed because it was introduced late in our evolution

Some people are intolerant to gluten and obviously they've worked out that they have to avoid gluten grains with gluten in them but there are grains that are gluten free

We probably are consuming more gluten because the wheat breeders have bred wheat to have higher gluten levels because it makes dough nice and elastic so you get a better product

As well as the bakers using more bread we're of course using much more gluten in fast takeaways in the pizza bases, in the burger buns and in the coating of chicken, all sorts of things that gluten is used for now that it used not to be

So our gluten intake is huge compared to 100 years ago

Because we can't digest gluten properly there are more and more people getting sick from eating gluten

Anyone can develop a reaction to gluten at some stage in their life

So just because you're not reacting to gluten now doesn't mean to say that in the future that gluten won't cause a problem

They cause the headaches, migraines, irritability, poor concentration

They cause mouth problems, esophageal problems, that's the reflux and heartburn

They cause tummy troubles, pain, not feeling well, the gaseous distention, the diarrhea, constipation and fatigue

The most common way that women present with gluten sensitivity is by fatigue and exhaustion

I call these people sick, tired and grumpy

What happens is that these people have always got an excuse for being tired

They've got an extra child or they've been unwell, they're busy at work so they can always explain their fatigue away by something else so they think they are normal

But if you do the blood test and show a high gluten antibody and they go off gluten, suddenly they feel fantastic again

And so many people don't even recognise that they are under the weather

190 children who I have investigated had an endoscopy looking for celiac disease

Of these children, 31 had definite celiac disease

All of the celiacs who were diagnosed got better, except for one

There were a group who had the endoscopy negative for celiac disease

They all went gluten free and 77% got better

The last group had neither celiac disease blood tests nor any evidence of celiac disease in their biopsy

They went gluten free and 92% of these children got better

My colleagues say they would expect the celiacs to get better but they do not believe that the non-celiacs would get better on a gluten free diet

Why wait for years and years watching these children get sicker until you have the full house of celiac disease? I'm often asked do we need gluten? Is gluten essential for life? Well, it's absolutely unnecessary

You do not need gluten in your diet

People on a gluten free diet have all the nutrients they need in a gluten free way

We don't add any gluten to our bread, no sugar, we don't use any oils at all, any oil or fat

I think it's important to know that when you're gluten free you don't have to be deprived

We have everything from gorgeous gluten free chocolate biscuits, muffins, amazing dips, patties, there's nothing that you need to miss out on

In 1924 soy was not considered a food but rather an industrial product

Only 1

8 million acres were harvested in the USA, today it is 72 million acres

It has been promoted as the perfect food, easy to prepare, nutritious, no saturated fats, it can prevent or even reverse some of the world's worst diseases

Its uses and benefits seem endless, or are they? I'm not entirely convinced that there is a huge health benefit from soy

Certainly the FDA in America allow cholesterol lowering claim for soy but when you look at the evidence it's not entirely consistent and not entirely convincing

And then anything else is in the speculation zone, so whether soy is helpful for bone density and stops osteoporosis or whether soy will prevent breast cancer, whether soy will prevent any cancer, I think there isn't enough evidence

So soy has got a very good image but the evidence supporting it is inadequate

It's suggested that the reason why diseases like breast cancer for example and perhaps prostate cancer are lower in Asian communities relates to the intake of soy but I think it's really very soft evidence at this point in time

Everybody at that time had believed the propaganda, they thought soy was literary but some people thought it was God's gift to mankind, eat more of it and you'll get healthier and better

In the West we've got people on all sorts of health fads and bandwagons and they're eating tons of this stuff and they're in danger, they're in danger of disrupting their endocrine function, women are in danger of disrupting their whole estrogen cycle, people are in danger of upsetting their thyroid function

I started drinking soy milk and eating lots of soy products and I ate them for years and years and years and years

I started to have no energy and I was exhausted all the time, I started to lose a lot of weight and I went to a specialist who told me that I had an underactive thyroid

People often don't recognise it with a thyroid problem, they've got things like fatigue, weight loss, hair loss, lethargy, people think I've been working too hard, I'm not feeling good or I'm getting older and my hair's falling out or I'm putting on weight

The effects of the soybean on thyroid function have been well known for more than 50 years, particularly well established in animals because soybeans were fed to animals along time ago and they noted very early on that that upset the animal's thyroid function

Now the thyroid is critical for governing the whole metabolism of a mammal, so you mess with the thyroid, you mess with the whole range of endocrine function and metabolism

So the question that I had very early on is what effects the soy formula is going to have on a child's thyroid, if any, and so we began to review the scientific literature and we found very quickly, as far back as the 1960s when the soy formulas first became more used than what they had been in the past, that there were all sorts of reports of thyroid function, surprise, surprise

One thing you do not want to do with a newborn baby is start mucking about with its thyroid function because it's very, very sensitive, exactly the same thing can happen in an adult woman

You can mess around with her thyroid, you do it too much and you'll tip her into a hyperthyroid state or a hypothyroid state and that's particularly true of women who are going through menopause

At that particular stage in life, their thyroids are very sensitive to changes in the body

That it was quite easy for an infant who was being fed soy formula according to the maker's instructions on the packets, five times a day, was getting the biological equivalent of about five contraceptive pills a day

Any child that was fed soy formula for five months or more was likely to have been affected in the immune or the hormonal system

It's to say, I've got to do something, I've got to do something, I've got to stop one more mother feeding their babies soy food because if I could change one thing in my life, if I could just have one wish to change one thing, I would change that

I would not have reared my babies on soy

We have had many phone calls and emails from mothers who have said essentially, I fed my little boy soy formula, he's two now and there's nothing wrong with him and we always say, well that's excellent, congratulations, it's only a risk anyway, but the real truth is that with that little boy, if he had been on soy formula for several months, the feminising effects may not show up till the time of normal hormonal change

I had the right to know and I didn't know and mothers now have the right to know and lots of them still don't know

What the paediatric endocrinologists in New York found was that children who had been fed soy formula in fact were two and a half times more likely to develop autoimmune thyroid disease but in that same sample, they were two and a half times more likely to develop type 1 diabetes and the ones with type 1 diabetes also had high levels of thyroid antibodies in their blood

People always say that Asians eat it, so why can't we? But what they don't realise is that Asians eat very, very, very little soy product and the soy product they do eat is actually fermented for somewhere between five and seven years

The myth propagated by the industry that the Asians have had food, soy is a staple in their diet, for 5,000 years they didn't eat soy, not until they learnt how to process it and processing involved boiling it, filtering it, fermenting it

The Asians are very moderate in their diet, they eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that but jump forward to this day and age, food processing, the whole attitude toward nutrition is different and so we've got people eating soy that's processed very, very quickly generally from soy protein isolates and so it finds its way into veggie burgers, it finds its way into sausages, it finds its way into breads, it finds its way into all sorts of processed foods, it finds its way into Christmas ham, it's injected in there as extended protein, it finds its way into up and go and nifty little drinks that you can have on the run and that was never the way that it was eaten traditionally

The thing about modern processing of soy is that you can make it taste like almost anything, you can imitate almost anything so that you don't, now if you buy a meat pie the chances are that it isn't all meat in there, that it's got something called hydrolyzed vegetable protein or textured vegetable protein and it made it look and taste like meat, it isn't meat at all, it's probably chunks of soy, the kind of stuff that the wise old Chinese would have sold as fertiliser

It's the world's cheapest source of protein and food manufacturers love shoving it in because it lifts the protein rating of their food and it's cheap

The reason that it's out there is because it's cheap, it's cheap to make, there are millions of tons of it being farmed all over the world and they've foist it on the public mainly unsuspectingly and it is like almost like a cancer because it is spreading into other foods so nearly everything has got some derivative of soy

Is there anything good about soy one might ask, well it makes a good rotational crop other than that it's not worth putting in your body

We've all been told that sugar is bad for our health yet glucose which is created from sugar is essential to producing our daily energy requirement so why does sugar have such a bad reputation, it's been linked to behavioural problems, obesity, diabetes and other diseases, are we simply consuming too much? Sugar does have a bad reputation but some of it is quite unjust, the worst thing about sugar is that you're adding a lot of energy to your diet without any other nutrients

Sugar is traditionally described as empty calories so especially in the form of white stable sugar so basically it's just carbohydrate and no vitamins, no minerals, nothing else with it

When we talk about high energy dense foods we're really talking about the fact that now you can pack so many kilojoules, so much energy into food, we've never been able to do that before

People love organ meats, they love depot fat, they also love honey and these were the few foods in the food supply at that time that were energy dense and they were survival foods, they were very, very important and what we've done is we have turned that into really the majority of our food supply is now energy dense whereas when we were hunter gatherers these were delicacies

And that comes as a result of processing and getting long shelf lives and adding fat and adding sugar to make the taste that sort of thing

15 to 20 percent of calories might be coming from soft drinks and other sugar containing beverages so a very large amount and the critical thing about those sorts of calories is they don't make you feel full so it's very easy to have a soft drink and then have your normal hamburgers and chips

The glycemic index really replaces that old fashioned classification of carbohydrates as sugars and complex carbohydrates so an easy way to think of the glycemic index is foods that are very quickly digested and they're absorbed rapidly from the intestine give you a big large rise in your blood glucose levels and often an hour and a half to two hours after eating your blood glucose levels actually plummet and may end up less than where you started and that triggers a response to your brain to tell you you're hungry, you need to eat again whereas foods with a low glycemic index are those foods which take much much longer to be digested

I'm part of the University of Sydney glycemic index research group and we've just done a meta-analysis to be published later in the year looking at the link between glycemic index and chronic diseases so heart disease even things like eye disease but cancers, type 2 diabetes and so on

You can change kids from sweet drinks to water through proactive school policies and programs relatively easily and that I think needs to be one of the first areas of action is reducing sweet drinks in kids

What to avoid are foods that have lots of added sugar without anything else so lots of those processed breakfast cereals that are full of added sugars have a few vitamins and minerals thrown in for good measure to advertise themselves as healthy but that doesn't make the food healthy so you want to look for products that have good wholesome natural ingredients and a little bit of sugar added just to make it palatable

I feed my toddler a bowl of traditional oats made into porridge with some dried fruit in there if I put a little honey on top or a little sprinkling of brown sugar he's going to eat that really healthy food whereas if I don't he won't like it and he won't eat it

Unfortunately most of the promotion and the encouragement of eating has been around eating high energy dense foods given that this has actually happened at the time in human existence when our need to actually expend energy has reduced

Manual labour has gone out of our lives, we can be so reliant on cars, try and find the stairs in a building these days you actually walk up to see you can't find them you can only find the lift

If you are going to have sugar why not just walk a bit more, do some exercise, burn it off that's what we used to do

Exercise is good for you we all know that it actually is a brilliant thing to do if you are unhealthy because what it does is it starts the lymph working in the body and then everything else starts to work as well

If modern foods contain too much sugar should we balance this by using artificial sweeteners? Artificial sweeteners are in between 6 and 9,000 different products they are in many many foods, they are in lots and lots of supplements, they are in many many drugs because the drugs taste bitter and people don't like to swallow them

The sweetened drinks don't have the calories of course but a large number of those products are caffeinated which is addictive and is part of the ongoing cycle of kids getting used to and wanting caffeine containing sweet drinks

So if we have got people drinking lots of diet drinks plus they are having diet yogurts plus they are having diet this that and the other they could potentially be having a very large intake of some of these artificial sweeteners and to be honest the research isn't there to back up the safety in the long term

I believe that artificial sweeteners are the most dangerous chemicals in our food supply

Aspartame is a deadly neurotoxin and in my opinion nobody should have it in any product at all and it's in everything because as soon as the patent ran out Monsanto's patent everyone could pick it up and therefore it's in every product which you feed to your children and you don't know that you are giving it to them, it's in even products that don't have diet in it, specifically people buy diet products because they think they are actually going to lose weight but aspartame interferes with the protein synthesis of the food and therefore it's actually addictive and people tend to eat more which is hardly a diet product

What happens with aspartame is that the minute that you put something in your mouth that's got aspartame in it your body temperature in the old language is 98

6 and the minute the aspartame product hits the mucosa of your mouth at over 84 degrees what happens is it starts to convert so it converts to formaldehyde and to formic acid and you finish up with methanol toxicity which basically is a deadly deadly poison

Now you don't want formaldehyde in your body until you are dead and get embalmed

The result of that is that many people are being diagnosed with MS and with lupus and in actual fact what they have is aspartame poisoning

Do you know that 76 to 86 percent of all complaints to the TGA and the FDA are about aspartame? A doctor in America named H

J

Roberts has written a definitive book on artificial sweeteners

He explains exactly how 92 life threatening illnesses are caused by artificial sweeteners

The fact that they are permitted in our food supply is one of the great scandals of the 20th century

According to Dr

Roberts aspartame is incredibly addictive and even when he is treating people who have dreadful diseases because of this neurotoxin they can't kick the habit

Are there any good artificial sweeteners? Absolutely not because they are all tarred with the same brush, the whole lot of them

They often change the names of these artificial sweeteners

Presumably because people catch on that something is very very dangerous and they decide oh well this other one may be okay

They are not okay

There is no safe artificial sweetener

Neotame is the new one that is coming out and they say it is ten times more toxic than aspartame

If you don't want to use sugar and you don't want to use aspartame, you don't want to put a neurotoxin in your body, why not use stevia? Stevia is a fantastic sweetener

It is incredibly inexpensive

It comes from the plant of a tree and you only use a tiny tiny bit of it and it is a great product

Use stevia

And I do know for a fact that one of the soft drink companies in Australia has been experimenting with stevia for quite a few years

They haven't actually got it right yet but keep your eye out

There are hundreds of chemical additives that have found their way into our food supply

Some provide benefits, some enhance texture, others appearance

But many of these additives were never intended by nature to be in the food supply

Could this chemical cocktail be doing us harm? Food additives are substances that are added to foods to enhance flavour, enhance colour, to stop the product deteriorating on the shelf

For example stopping oils going rancid

They are not food in themselves

They do a wide range of things and perhaps we can remember back to our childhood when bread was stale by lunchtime and margarine wouldn't spread

They are good preservatives

It is certainly one of the reasons why we are living long as we have modern preservatives

One of the problems at the moment is that there is a big push to have low fat, low salt, low sugar foods

To do that manufacturers add additives

So if you are going low in sugar they need to add either artificial sweeteners or flavours

If they are going low in fat they need to add things to enhance the colour or the flavour and texture as well

And then also the low in salt they need to add flavour enhancers to counteract the fact that it is lower in salt

So these foods are becoming higher in additives even though they are becoming lower in salt, fat and sugar

If you look at a child's diet or an adult's diet, a pretty average day having say for instance cornflakes for breakfast, a muffin, some margarine spread, some diet jam, let's wash it down with a glass of orange juice, you are consuming 32 chemicals

Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, we are a government regulator

Now generally what we do is we set food standards

A lot of them are labelling standards, so nutrition panels, the ingredients, the allergens, they are all regulated on packaged foods

We all need to be reading labels and more than that we need a labelling system that actually speaks the truth in this country because most of the labelling is not even accurate

They will put the main things in but then they don't put the other things in and they call them by other names which most people don't know

So for me I carry around a little card that's got all of the numbers in it and then I find out exactly what's in the products if it's listed

Now you can ring the manufacturer and you speak to someone in customer service and you don't always get the right answer because you can get someone else to ring and they'll get a different answer

So we always try and ring the manufacturer three or four times to try and get some sort of consistent answer

With the 5% labelling loophole, if an ingredient is less than 5% of a product, the additive that is in that ingredient doesn't need to be listed on the packet

The Food Intolerance Network attempted to get Fizzans to close that loophole

We put in a submission asking that all antioxidants be listed on labels regardless of the amount in the total food

Now it was indicated that this submission would be rejected on the basis that there was no peer-reviewed placebo-controlled double-blind studies showing negative effects from the synthetic antioxidants

But never mind that the synthetic antioxidants were initially approved by Fizzans without any such studies

For some people even small doses of additives can cause problems

The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Allergy Unit in Sydney has conducted research on 20,000 patients over 20 years which basically highlights the problems with over 50 food additives in our food supply

What we're finding is that as children are returning to school and to preschools that the rate of asthma is increasing dramatically

What children are taking in their lunch boxes is raising the amount of sulphites that they're consuming

Children who suffer from asthma really should be looking at things like dried fruit that they're eating, cordials, fruit juice drinks and sausages because sulphites are in all those products

What we're seeing a lot of is mothers who put their children onto a diet that removes these additives from their systems

They're also finding an improvement in their overall well-being themselves, noticing that things like lifelong depression, anxiety are just no longer a problem for them

My own example is I've got a child who was diagnosed with chronic tick disorder and that is one step under Tourette's really

We went to a number of specialists trying to work out what this was and because I was already in the food intolerance area I thought it was food so I eliminated a couple of products from his diet and we worked out that it was either 319 or 320, they can be used interchangeably

These additives were in the oils

All the symptoms stopped when we stopped having the foods with those two antioxidants in them

Manufacturers can use oils that have got natural antioxidants in them, for example vitamin E, but that is a more expensive option

So a lot of the oils do have the artificial antioxidants in them

There was an example of a young mother in Perth who had a child and she was breastfeeding the child

The little boy screamed like for 23 hours a day

They removed additives and some natural chemicals

The baby stopped crying

He was more manageable and when they reintroduced the chemicals they worked out that the sole cause of his distress was 282, that's the calcium propionate found in breads

Calcium propionate, perfectly safe, it's an enzyme to produce it naturally in our stomach

It's something we're always going to digest anyway

Why not use it in bread and make sure your bread doesn't go mouldy in a hot humid climate

We certainly know that if you improve the diets of children their behaviour is better, their learning is better, their concentration is better

Hyperactivity in children, ADHD, ADD, it's like learning difficulties, behavioural problems

All of these kids that have got these problems I'm sure that if we took them off the food that they're eating, which I know that mothers think they're doing a good job, but most people do not understand what these chemicals can do to you and they don't understand that they're in nearly everything

You ask any mother that sent a five year old child to a party where they drink red cordial and orange snakes and find out how much hyperactivity is in that child when they get home, it's appalling

The main additives that cause the behavioural problems are the artificial colours

Products that the additives are added to have increased these days

The Tim Tam biscuits, interesting that in a chocolate biscuit you have to add five colours

If you just use chocolate, isn't it normally brown? Everyone loves Tim Tams

How would you feel if you knew that the chocolate that covers the biscuit is actually made from a combination of several chemicals? Number 102 which is tartrazine, number 110 which is sunset yellow, 129 which is Allura red and 133 which is brilliant blue

Mix that with a chemical concoction of caramel and you have chocolate covering and chocolate colouring

Do you know how they make caramel? They actually take chemicals and dip them in ammonia

Then they do several other lovely processes to them and they call it caramel

Read your biscuit labels and see how many of your biscuits have got A, chocolate and B, caramel in them

Most of those additives that I just spoke about, particularly those four, cause incredible challenges for children

We as consumers shouldn't have to prove that what we're eating is unsafe

They should be proving to us that it is safe before they put it in

You can't ban things in the food supply

We've never done that in Australia

It really is about people's choice and making it as easy as possible

Let's face it, a huge number of chemicals that are allowed in this country to be put in our food are completely banned in countries like Finland and Norway and Sweden and Germany

They will not have them in their produce

Currently reactions to food additives when they're reported are disregarded by physans as being anecdotal

Multiple additives are now common in foods and they're not tested in that way

They're tested singly

There are so many wonderful organisations in this country that are attempting to help parents deal with children who are suffering appallingly because of what the government allows manufacturers to put in their food

Historically, saturated fats eaten in small quantities, combined with fresh fruit and vegetables and exercise, provided beneficial cholesterol

So what has changed? A hundred years ago the fats that we would have had in our kitchen would have been mostly animal based

So we would have had lard and dripping and all the leftovers from meat

And there would have been no liquid oils at all

So there's been this whole variety of new oils, polyunsaturated oils, monunsaturated oils, replacing the saturated fat that we had from animals

The predominant reason for trans being developed was really to produce hard fats that are shelf stable

Trans fats get metabolised into products that can be harmful to cells in the body and they are harmful on several grounds actually, particularly with cardiovascular disease and promotion of high cholesterol

The link between fat and cancer is all part of the link between being fat, not doing a lot of exercise and obesity which all have an impact

Macular degeneration is being linked to a huge intake in trans fats

So if we look at canola oil for instance, much of the canola oil that is used in this country comes from GM crops, genetically modified, which by and of itself is scary

Every takeaway food that uses oils uses cheap oils that are really, really bad for you, like canola, like cotton oil, cottonseed oil

So it's another good reason not to eat junk food

For years and years on TV we've seen these great ads for eating margarine as against eating butter

And margarine is one of the worst foods that you can eat

If you don't believe me, go take your margarine out of the fridge, go take it down to your backyard, put it in the bottom of your garden and then put half a pound of butter right next to it or 250 grams

Leave it there, see what happens

I will guarantee you that the insects will eat the butter but they will not touch the margarine

And how do you make margarine? Well you just keep heating it and if you heat it and you heat it and you heat it enough, you'll finish up with plastic

You want to put that in your body? I don't think so

Coconut oil has been touted for a long time as being not good for you because it's very high in fat

What people don't realise is that it's incredibly high in lauric acid which the body really needs

And what it does is it actually comes along and it eats up all the bad fats that you've got in your system

So it's one of the best foods that you can use

You can heat coconut oil to an incredibly high temperature and it will not change the structure of it at all

So as far as cooking foods, if you're going to use oil to cook, I would use coconut oil above and beyond any oil that you could buy, even olive oil, because it's stable and it is so good for you

Your body just craves it

All over the Western world, the people are becoming increasingly overweight

It is estimated that around 30% of them are clinically obese

If this trend continues, how will future generations be affected? 60% of adults are overweight and obese

In Australia, about one in four kids are overweight and obese

The alarming factor is those rates of overweight and obesity in kids has doubled or even tripled in the last 20 years

This is our biggest health problem in Australia

Kids carry that weight into adulthood and we're now seeing children with signs of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, all with a major cause of overweight and inactivity

You can add 30 more diseases on top of that, osteoarthritis, infertility problems, sleep apnea, polycystic ovary syndromes and so the list goes on

If you look at the predictions about the fact that the generation following us may be the first generation where they have a lower life expectancy

There's no doubt that this is a problem that is spiralling out of control

It is ironic that in this day and age we now have the World Health Authority telling us that obesity is the greatest threat to world health

So again, in an ironic way, we have half the world dying of undernutrition and the other half dying of overnutrition

Well, if we link obesity and diabetes together and we now call it diabetesity, this is the biggest epidemic in human history

There's no question about it and diabetes is the fastest growing epidemic in most countries

For type 2 diabetes the most important thing is your family history

It's very strongly inherited and your body weight

There is certainly no association between how much sugar people eat and type 2 diabetes

You can have zero sugar and still get diabetes because you have to deal with lots of other sources of glucose

So starch, we have pasta, rice, bread, they all contain starch

Starch is just a whole series of glucose molecules put together so as soon as we eat that glucose appears in the blood and the pancreas has to produce insulin to deal with it

We have a form of what we call insulin resistance

In simple terms all of the fat in the obesity gets in the way of insulin working on the cells

The real epidemic is occurring with type 2 diabetes

Our own institute does the global predictions for diabetes and we estimate in 2007 246 million people worldwide with diabetes escalating to 380 million in the year 2025

Type 2 diabetes is reversible

It's quite interesting that if someone actually develops type 2 diabetes, is overweight and hasn't been exercising, if they lose weight and they start to exercise they can actually lose the diabetes but it will come back again if they put on weight and they don't exercise

Children aren't encouraged to ride their bikes to school or walk

People are fearful of walking home and I'm not convinced that society is any more dangerous than it was in the 1950s

I just think that we perceive it as being more dangerous

There is a misconception that people who are obese have a low metabolic rate whereas in fact the evidence is very strong, it has been for some time that they have high metabolic rates and so the dominant driver of gaining weight in fact is over consumption of energy and then what happens is that energy expenditure rises because we have a high metabolic rate with obesity to match it

We do have to understand that when we change the characteristics of our diet in a major way we're going to, there are going to be consequences

Because half to two thirds of the adults are overweight or obese it's unlikely to be an abnormality

What we're dealing with is normal physiology responding to an abnormal environment which leads to obesity

I think one of the great challenges for those in this population that are suffering from obesity is that we are predisposed to enjoy pleasurable foods

Some people say they're, you know, they're addicted to sweet foods so if you always have a biscuit with your cup of tea or you always have something sweet at the end of the meal it's actually that habit that's very difficult to break

The commercial markets are fuelling the obesity epidemic

Look at the amount of money that's spent on promoting vegetables and on promoting fruit compared to the hamburgers, the fast foods and obviously the high energy drinks as well

The more ads that a kid is exposed to on TV for high energy density low nutritional quality food the more likely they are to overeat

The easily availability of high calorie food all contributes to kids expanding waistlines

The other point about access to nutritious food is that it costs more

So in many ways it's cheaper to have high energy dense foods

If you look at it strictly it's cheaper to be obese

Cultural change is absolutely fundamental to this whole obesity prevention

So we have to change what is considered normal

What's considered normal about what a kid eats for lunch, how the kid gets to school, what's the appropriate drink to have with dinner

At the moment the federal government is taking a very individual responsibility approach which is that parents are responsible for their children, adults are responsible for themselves and the government has a very limited role in this other than giving them informed choice

That's a recipe for the status quo which is in other words increasing obesity

Parents clearly have the most important role and it's very significant that on December the 21st in 2006 the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution declaring diabetes an international health threat

There are only two other diseases that have received that status HIV AIDS and malaria

That resolution called on all governments to address the issue of diabetes nationally

One of the reasons why diabetes has now gone on to red alert in Australia has been that our Treasury Department recognised that diabetes was a threat to national productivity

It's not uncommon today for people to take daily doses of vitamins and mineral supplements

We also see the word enriched on food packaging indicating that nutrients have been added

But why aren't these nutrients contained in our foods? We recently did a survey, luckily we had some data back from the early 80s on mineral content of food and we actually tested a wide range of foods and found that it has the same contents it did back in the early 80s

In some cases it was actually better

With our fruit and vegetables we actually know that over the last 50 or so years the nutritional value has been decreasing, not a huge amount but by figures of 10 to 20 per cent for some of the nutrients

Probably the biggest change in the nutrition of the food we eat is we're eating a lot more processed food and that by definition contains less nutrition

Looking at the difference between organic food and conventionally grown food and looking at the nutritional content of these foods and it's really difficult to get valid medical research on organic farming because the organic farmers are too busy looking after their crops

They don't have the money and the research companies behind them to actually validate what we're doing and what they're saying

The agricultural industry has billions of dollars invested in their product and they're not necessarily presenting us the truth

Now of course we're demanding food all the year round and food is transported and stored in cold storage as it is frozen and in modified atmospheres so that the oxygen doesn't make it deteriorate

Now this is just as nutritious, it is fine

But once again learn about seasonality

If you want to buy apples in December and January they're obviously last seasons

We find ourselves having to meet the requirements of a supermarket for instance which are how do we get the product to them as cheaply as possible

And that idea of making our products as cheap as possible means that we end up damaging the integrity of the food

Well nutritious foods tend to be those that we call core foods

Core foods being foods that belong to the five food groups for example

So examples of nutritious food would be fruits and vegetables, the breads and cereals, the dairy products and milks and cheese, yogurts, meats and fish and nuts

What our parents had, what the parents before them had is the way to go

Unprocessed good quality food

You don't need to worry about what the ratio is of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in your food

You don't need to worry about how many grams of fibre you're eating

Am I eating food that's as close to its natural state as possible? And intuitively does this seem like good food? Does this food make me feel better? Strictly speaking the dietary guidelines are advising us to eat less fat, eat less sugar, eat less salt and include a variety of foods in the diet

We're spending billions of dollars investigating depression, asthma, mood disorders such as road rage and we're not investigating diet at all

Food marketers do what food marketers do best, they market food

Nutritionists do what they do best, they promote good health and there is a wide gulf between the two people

A lot of the messages people get about health and nutrition is coming from food marketers

Let's look at some examples

Look at all the low fat food that's advertised, normally promoted as all you can eat

We have no aspect of nutritional quality of that but food manufacturers will push what they consider as healthy

Recent survey of muesli bars, energy bars and sports bars in Australia

Looking at 150 of these which most people consider as nutritious snacks, only 14 of them met the greatest being of sufficient nutritional quality that we would recommend

I believe the prevalent culture that we live in is certainly one of the reasons why for so many kids that they make very bad food choices

The main messages that the advertisers are giving them is snack food, convenience food, junk food etc

often couched in terms that suggest that it's freshly picked or it's home grown or it's country fresh or some other emotive language

And the foods that are the most profitable to manufacturers are those that are value added

It's those foods that have been highly processed, they've had the fats or the salts or the sugars added to them, the colours, the shapes or what have you

There's a pretty strong correlation between that more highly processed of food is the more profit laden it is

The highly processed foods are the ones which keep longest, keep best

They're cheapest

When you look at the poor in affluent societies, doesn't matter where they are, they maximise their calories per dollar

Now that's a sensible thing to do when you're poor but it's not good for your health

I think there is a push towards farmers markets, to community markets, to community grown and sold foods but the dominant commercial way of doing business will be through the large, huge retailers through the supermarkets

The market simply won't correct itself

There's far too much money to be made in junk food at the moment through the media, through advertising, through the actual production of this and until we intervene by virtue of reducing the promotion, reducing the availability particularly in schools, changing the culture around what is healthy eating, promoting for example fruit and vegetables in a much, much greater way, then we won't see nutritional patterns changing

We have to look at what parents are presenting to their children and get children more familiar with healthy foods but neither should we make sugary foods or junk foods or anything banned no-no foods

Those foods shouldn't, otherwise what we risk is generating a generation of children who are scared of food and have increased numbers of eating disorders

If we can show that the reason children make poor food choices is because they've received no food education whatsoever I believe government has a responsibility to make that happen

The program that I'm fully engaged in is currently operating in 24 schools in Victoria

Each one of those schools has been required to grow a productive vegetable garden and each one of those schools has to have an eating space so that all those children can sit together around tables and enjoy the food that they make from the produce they've grown

We also have to face the challenge and I think it's particularly for young people, for children, infants and children, that if you get a bad start in life that's going to put you on a trajectory for the rest of your life that's going to be hard to get off

Really it's about getting the family back to eating family meals, eating together, eating around the table, parents being good role models for what their children eat

Well I certainly believe that cultural change will make a major impact on the incidence of cancer but we think legislation, particularly things like restricting junk food advertising to children will be one powerful way of making a cultural change over time in the community

Really the government's role I think is to promote good practice and to encourage that through the various non-government agencies rather than necessarily have some stick that they've built us around the years with

Modern medicine divorced itself from dentistry several centuries ago and began treating the mouth separately to the body

Today doctors do not consider that something going on in the mouth will have an impact on the rest of the body

Mounting research indicates that they are wrong

What is amalgam? It is a material that dentists place in cavities that is about 50% mercury, 30% copper and it's got a little bit of silver and zinc and tin

On a daily basis dentistry implants mercury which is the most toxic substance known to man after arsenic and lead on a daily basis into people's heads

It takes about one microgram to do damage to the nervous system and if you look at how much comes out of a filling you're looking at about 34 micrograms per day per filling but in the United States they have an average of eight fillings per person

Well if you chew gum or eat food the mercury comes out 15,600% faster

Is this significant? We know from many published studies that if you have half a dozen amalgam fillings in your mouth you'll have a mercury vapor concentration in your mouth between 30 and 150 micrograms of mercury vapor per cubic meter

The dental association say oh that's not a problem you breathe it out

Well that's on the exhalation

On the inhalation you breathe it in

And that can go right up into the brain and create diseases like multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, seizures, depression, a big one that we see that nobody wants to talk about is suicide

You crossed over the line now you're fussing with the soul

You don't have a right to do that and to charge a patient to put them in that position

But just because it is a white filling does not mean it is safe

Many of the white fillings are extremely high in aluminium which affects the brain

So you're really jumping from the frying pan into the fire

Every day dentists are exposing their patients, their staff and themselves to massive levels of mercury vapor by constantly cutting the stuff out and constantly putting the stuff in

Is there a danger? Dramatic

Is there a safer way of doing it? Yes

If you take out the fillings that have negative electrical current first then the parathyroid, estrogen, there are several glands that come into action and your body relaxes and goes into a healing mode

If you take out the positive current fillings first it stimulates four endocrine glands like the thyroid and testosterone anterior pituitary piled on top of each other

They create a condition that can let a person have a disease that they didn't know they were going to have

We are offering patients a range of vitamin and mineral supplements which have been shown to bind mercury in such a way that it can be excreted

It will also allow the body to detoxify from mercury so that within a short period of time the body burden of mercury will be reduced to a level of somebody who has never had amalgam fillings placed

We have seen people in wheelchairs get out within three to six days and take a few steps on their own and the family always says oh it's a miracle, it's a miracle

It's not a miracle because mercury attaches to red blood cells

There is a difference in the response that women are hit harder by mercury than men are and this is why 80% of the patients that we see are female because estrogen dominant tissues are more sensitive to challenge than the testosterone sensitive ones but it can still hit anybody

The less mercury the nicer the person is going to be

So your personality is in the hands of your dentist

Your immune system is in the hands of your dentist

Your condition of your heart relates more to the root canal and root canals are directly related to heart disease

If you have nickel crowns, which most of them are now, nickel crowns produces cancer

Why do we use all these things? One reason, they're cheap

How do root canals affect our health? It's the story of millions of bacteria that inhabit a tooth and then go on to produce the largest number of diseases ever attributed to a single source

So every time you bite down you're escorting some of these toxins into the body

These are very very powerful toxins but as these chemicals come out and migrate to whatever your weak link tissue is then you come down with a disease and nobody ever connects it to the fact that it came from a root canal

You can't remove all of the dead tissue

That tissue breaks down, becomes gangrenous and produces very toxic substances which chemically are similar to mustard gas and have profound psychological and carcinogenic effects on the body

It interferes with the body's regulatory mechanisms

For example, routinely we see upper molars, which are root canal treated, associated with breast lumps and breast tumours

We remove those dead teeth and routinely the breast lumps disappear

But this is not really recent information

Even Dr

Weston Price discovered this back just a little after 1900

He himself had done a root canal on a 16 year old boy

A 16 year old boy died of a heart attack

This is a little young to die of a heart attack

So after death he took that tooth out and he cut off a piece of the root, put it under the skin of a rabbit and the rabbit died of a heart attack in about 10 days

So he went through 100 rabbits

All 100 rabbits died of a heart attack

He spent 35 years trying to convince dentistry as head of research for the Dental Association

What does it take to convince people we should not be giving people these diseases? The American Dental Association has recently taken its goal of having the dentists do 30 million root canals a year

They accomplished that by the year 2000

Now they've moved the bar

Now they want them to do 60 million root canals a year

I have talked to some of the congress people in the United States and they say when this hits it's going to be much bigger than the tobacco industry ever thought of being

Down under may become as good at growing lawyers as the United States has

And then you start suing the dentist

If every dentist got sued a million dollars for every incurable disease he had given the person like leukemia, multiple sclerosis, that's one I keep forgetting, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's

The Dental Associations in this country, in America, in Canada and in Britain all claim safety and effectiveness for dental amalgam as a filling material

The reality is that dental amalgam has never been approved as a filling material by either the TGA in Australia or the FDA in America

Simply that it is classed as a dental device

Therefore it does not come under the control of a material which is implanted into living tissue

You ask me what's bad about fluoride, I'd say what's good about fluoride

Not much

Does it reduce decay? No

In fact there are eight epidemiological studies done worldwide including one in Australia at the Australian National University published in Science which demonstrates that when you take fluoride out of the water the decay rate drops

Does fluoride stop decay? No

Is it helpful in making a tooth stronger? No

Has it got any beneficial effects in the body? No

Does it do any harm? Yes

The type of fluoride that's found in natural water supplies is calcium fluoride

The type of fluoride that's added to our water is not calcium fluoride

It's fluorosilicic acid and a few other versions of it

These are major rat poisons and serious toxins

They are carcinogenic

They cause bone cancer in children, especially in boys

Fluoride in the water reduces IQ levels

Fluoridation medicates you against your consent and the government is prohibited from medicating you against your consent which is in fact a form of civil conscription

It has been well known for a long time to rapidly induce aging in humans

It's a general protoplasmic poison

There is absolutely no benefit from having fluoride put in our water supply except to make us all a little dumber and a little more apathetic and that is a very profound effect that fluoride has

This is mass medication in its worst form

Would I ever have a vaccination? No way

No way

The rate of increase in autism is horrific

It has been linked directly to the mercury in vaccines

The range goes from children who die in utero to sudden infant deaths to autism to learning deficits to children who are affected but we don't notice that effect

One of the kids that came to me is a severe autistic boy aged three

Fortunately it was only about six months after he had crashed, regressed into autism from being a perfectly normal happy boy and we treated him for mercury and some homeopathic remedies and he now runs into my room ahead of his parents, five year old, jumps up into the chair, gives me a great grin and says hello Dr

Godfrey

He's so gorgeous, lovely little boy

That's how kids should be

That's how they should be instead of chronically ill with all sorts of illnesses, not necessarily autism but asthma, eczema, epilepsy

So many illnesses and doing a lot of things with the best intentions but they've been led by money and it's very sad

We did a lot of research on Gulf War disease and found where it comes from and politics is what has kept that from coming forward because these diseases, as far as I know, were the only people who have had a hundred percent reversal on the terminal Gulf War vets

It's a combination of things that are in the vaccines along with what's in their mouth because not everybody went down for the count

I mean these people went out and put their life on the line and what did they get from their government? Twenty to twenty-five percent of the people who got the vaccinations were in the field hospitals within four hours

So what did they do the next day? Vaccinate a few more thousand? I mean all they'd have to do is have the FDA say, oh we looked into this and found that mercury was poisonous so we better stop using amalgam

That would take care of the problem

It would take about a half a minute

With the increase of diet related diseases, more and more people are requiring medical services and support but rising costs place affordable health care beyond the means of many

Are health services around the world structured for health or for profit? Well I think there are a number of areas where there are issues with hospital procedures in Australia at the moment

Firstly we do have significant waiting lists in most of the states for elective surgery

Secondly in terms of emergency surgery we often have inadequate emergency facilities and operating rooms and many patients can wait for a year or more for elective surgery then we are increasingly moving towards a two tiered system

It's not as bad perhaps as the United States but it certainly is moving that way

Victoria and Australia have internationally claimed a high standard of care in public hospitals

It is time that we look past the government propaganda in detail at what's really happening

There are particular concerns now that we have at least some data reluctantly released by the Victorian government last year that there were 500 deaths per year on our waiting lists

The government has blithely said that these are people who would have died anyway

The waiting list in Queensland for instance is around 120,000

In Victoria the official waiting list is 40,000 and we know there's another 20,000 waiting to get onto the official waiting list so we've got 60,000 waiting

And we've got issues of there being of the order in Victoria of 500 beds too few to run the hospital system and these are figures which are widely accepted and these are figures which even the government accepts

It's very difficult to monitor because the government does not collect adequate data about who is on a waiting list and why

Certainly people do die while they're on a waiting list for surgery

It's not just a national issue and it's certainly not just Victoria

I think it's a worldwide issue in most western health systems at the moment

Unfortunately over the last ten years this current government has closed beds in a number of public hospitals and there are now bed areas which have been turned into offices and filled with officials and bureaucrats and pen pushers

There's now so much paperwork expected of the clinicians at the bedside and in the wards that this interferes with their capacity to be at the bedside for their patients

There is some data which should suggest that with proper information technology we could improve the efficiency of the work we do as doctors alone by 15 to 20 percent

I think one of the issues is that hospitals do run very close to full capacity in many situations

That means that you only need a small extra workload and the weakest link will often be demonstrated

In any hospital you cannot afford to have worn out overstressed staff dealing with very critical issues of life and death hour to hour they just cannot cope

On any one day in a hospital there might be anywhere from three to a dozen patients who might require intensive care but if there are only a couple of intensive care beds available then clearly there will be many operations cancelled on that day and some patients might be cancelled two, three or more times before they eventually come to operation and we have a major problem in terms of training and particularly retaining nurses in the hospital system

There are many nurses who are trained who have left the hospital system because they're unhappy, they're dissatisfied or remuneration is inadequate

This is the final outcome of economic irrationalism as I call it, that you divert funds away from areas of critical and essential need, health and education into the coffers of government who then at election time say they've run these wonderful budgets, they've got budget balances which are obscene, they're multi-billion dollar surpluses and these are just disgraceful and obscene and intolerable in any just society

Well I think the role of government is very important but often appears to be deficient

I think that long term planning by government is very important in terms of health facilities because they have a very long lead time planning ahead and very often the focus of government is on the short term, the next election and addressing the key performance indicators in order to keep health issues out of the press

As a profession we must be at the forefront in taking on that battle, we must not sit back and just take a free ride to oblivion unless we stand up for our passions

The Premier and the Prime Minister are guilty of criminal neglect

This is criminal neglect

We have to challenge these people

I don't believe they should have a right to retain office when these things are happening in our country

I think both should resign and hopefully they will in due course

There are many good politicians who would take these issues and genuinely and honestly deal with them

That isn't happening in our so called democracy

This economic irrationalism where governments have themselves re-elected because they've stolen money from the people and funded their own re-election, this has to be brought to a stop

Clearly they're not achieving a mandate that the community expects of them and the payment for that is loss of office

In Western democracies we assume we have a right to choose what foods we eat and what health treatments we take

Are we being offered all the alternatives or are we being steered down a path by people with vested interests? I believe the only way that any of us can be protected is to become rapidly informed about all of these topics and then have the right to choose what treatment we deserve and expect from our supposed health care professionals

And I find today the medical profession is just like its textbooks

It's totally bloody static for 15 years at a time and then it changes when it suits itself instead of changing because science is telling it to change and giving it its cues

I have major major concerns about the way my profession has gone

I think we've been totally prostituted or we've become the pushers of the legalised drug industry shall we say

And it's very sad to see this because patients have trust in their doctors, have trust in their dentists and we've been led down a path by an industry that really has no interest in the healthy human

We pick the brightest people to go into medicine and then somehow we dumb them down until they're just reflex script writers

I had two stents put in my coronary artery about two years ago and afterwards I went to see the cardiologist

There was no mention of exercise, there was no mention of my mind attitude, stress, there was no mention of nutrients

To me these are the mainstay of controlling my blood vessels in good order and not statins

So I haven't taken the statins, I've continued to survive

I've had some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, executives and scientists amazed by what I've presented to them as a new idea in terms of infection measurement, assessing antibiotic need and designing antibiotic therapies for particularly serious deadly infections and the scientists took me away from those meetings and said because we respect your science so much we want to talk to you as brother scientist to brother scientist and you can't repeat this

There's two of us who deny that we've ever said this to you but there's no way this company will support your work

This company estimates that 97% of its antibiotic product is sold to inappropriate prescribing

They will not support an accurate testing mechanism that will do away with that 97% of unnecessary antibiotic use

There is a completely safe cream that can remove skin cancers beautifully with absolutely no side effects but guess what? The government has made it illegal

Why is CanSEMA banned? When you consider that the American Indians have used it as one of their natural medicines for hundreds of years completely safely an organization in America called Omega Labs bottled it and started selling it and when the medical guys and the pharmaceuticals got wind that CanSEMA was cutting into their profits the American government sent their goons in, broke their stock, destroyed their records and put the poor man who was selling it in jail and all he was doing was selling its safe cancer cream

Lateral B17 there have been some brilliant results, some good results and poor results but people don't have the right to use lateral unless they're at the death's door in Australia

They have to have terminal cancer which is metastasized and they have to have already had chemotherapy and radiotherapy

They're not given the right to have this treatment

Is it doing any harm? There's always side effects on everything we do

Are there side effects from chemotherapy? You bet there are

They're dreadful

Some research has shown that you've got a chance of living four times as long without any chemotherapy as with chemotherapy

They see a lump in the breast or they put a needle into it but they put it in a few times because they can't quite get the first time

Could that possibly be disseminating the cancer? Well analysis shows yes

Women who have biopsies have a much higher incidence of metastatic bread spread to the axilla and then subsequently to the rest of the body

Exactly the same with prostate cancer

Not only is it traumatic and painful and man becomes impotent and by God that's important but also the incidence of spread of the cancer metastatically to the bones is much higher after biopsy

For four years now I've been doing thermal imaging for breast thermal imaging which is a brilliant advance on mammography and ultrasound because we can pick up the changes in the blood vessels in the breast long before there's a tumour there

If they go to the oncologist they don't mention what we're doing

They don't say that's an alternative

Most of them will say this is the only thing to do

My God this is right

I'm God basically

You'll do as I say

In fact I've heard oncologists say well I'm not going to see you again

You go away

Never come back to see me unless you do what I say

That is dreadful

I've called the attitude a killer attitude because it ends up often causing death

I think that the doctors virtually should be charged with manslaughter or some degree of murder

Fear is a very big thing in doctors' lives, possibly in bureaucrats' lives

It's a very big thing in patients' lives

So we have to get rid of fear

Fear has to come out of the equation

I take fear out of the equation

I always take money out of the equation

I say to a person this is what I think you need but it is your choice to decide what you want

The New Zealand Health Trust has been involved since 2003 with the plan to set up a trans-tasman regulator which is going to regulate not only pharmaceuticals but also all natural products

It is the Australia and New Zealand governments that have signed up to bring about this agency but we're also aware that it's the same sort of regulatory change and battle that's being fought in a number of countries around the world so it doesn't seem to be a stand-alone New Zealand-Australia issue

The fact that it's being replicated in so many places around the world does lead us to suggest that there is a bigger agenda

It's no surprise that these sorts of heavy regulatory burdens are going to play into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies that are of a size that can absorb this and work to effectively wipe out the competition from the smaller and much more financially unstable natural product industry

What it's going to do is put regulatory and compliance costs hurdles in the way that are going to mean up to 65% of products that currently New Zealanders can enjoy are taken off the shelves and they're not going to be lost through safety concerns to what you've got as a system where the over-regulation has gone past helping the consumers is actually going to work to the detriment of the consumers

In April 2003 the TGA raided PAN Pharmaceuticals and permanently closed it

The TGA in its actions basically claimed that PAN's 1,600 natural medicines could cause death or disability, permanent disability

That's a justification for calling the Class 1 recall which it did

But the TGA never proved fault in any of these natural medicines and the shelves of health food stores were swept clear and we couldn't get any natural medicines for a very long time

They simply confiscated the whole batch and destroyed them in a toxic-based facility along with the evidence

You know, I don't blame doctors for not supporting what we're doing and I don't blame doctors for not giving people a choice because unfortunately we've all been brought up in the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine

It's a square box

You think this way you're taught all the right things to do

You know, it's taken me 70 years

I'm 74 and it's taken me 70 years to realise that I have a choice and they have a choice

Why are we not given the freedom to do what we want to do as long as we're given an intelligent choice? I believe that the reason that we are expected to be dumber is so that a government, any government anywhere in the world will have control over that population

It's very simple

The human carcass is unique on this planet

It's the only one that has a commercial value only when it's diseased, has no value when it's healthy

You might think that's cynical but it's a fact

You have no value when you're healthy except to yourself and your family

A huge industry depends on you being kept alive but not too well

We have a total cocktail for keeping people sick

Why would we want to keep people sick? It's very simple

I believe dead people and healthy people don't buy drugs

Only sick people buy drugs

Democracy tells us that we have freedom of expression, including certain rights to free speech

However, many we spoke to refused to be interviewed for fear of reprisals from regulatory bodies

Fear is now not a part of my life because, you know, I've been raided by the police

I had the police coming in and the Queen's Health coming in and they had their guns in their pockets and people said, how can you manage to continue to do as you're doing? I say, well, the simple thing is we're doing people good and we're helping them

And if fear is in your life, you won't accomplish anything

This is the sort of thing we're working against and it's called money, it is called politics, it is not called health

The first thing we did was talk to a number of Australian businesses to find out how they find operation under the TGA system that Australia has

And what we were concerned to hear was that a number of businesses told us some pretty horrific stories of experiences that they had had

But when we asked them if they were prepared to put out a press release or to appear in front of select committee to describe these experiences, they just about across the board didn't want to speak out publicly out of fear of retribution

This is an agency that has enormous powers and can apply them seemingly at will

There are a lot of women going into dentistry in the United States today and the daughter is going to go in practice with the old man

And then they come in and say, you say one more word about mercury and your daughter's license is gone any place in the United States

That may be unfair, but that's, I don't know of anything they do that is fair

But they take the license, they destroy the reputation, they make attempts on your life

I found one thing about the truth

You speak the truth and it puts you in the crosshairs

Unfortunately, the medical community in Australia has been stifled and gagged by governments around the country

Doctors taking a public hospital appointments mostly have to sign agreements that they won't criticize or make public comment

We all have a right to speak, which is being stifled

But we also have a responsibility to speak

And if we don't take on that responsibility, we're not the noble professions we think we are

Well, our view is that in this, the governments have stopped thinking about what at the end of the day is going to help the people who elect them

What's driving this more is the commercial interest

So when you've got regulation that is not benefiting the consumer, then you have to question what the basis is for those laws

They really just like the Gestapo

So we have an attitude which is a punitive type of attitude against those who speak up

And it's all for the sake of this covering up the real issues, diverting the public attention away from the real issues, which is looking after the sick and saving lives

What has it done about deaths in the public hospital system? Nothing except silence the issue, intimidate the AMA

I spoke up about the deaths on waiting lists and the AMA was told shut that bloke up

I was invited with a number of colleagues to attend the minister's office to talk about this after challenging her in public

And we were threatened

We were threatened by the minister's head honchos

There were I think around 10 of them

And we were intimidated and encouraged to withdraw the statements that had been made about their concerns with regard to loss of potential loss of life and likely loss of life

I couldn't believe it was happening in a modern democracy

It felt more than an inquisition

It was direct pressure from a high level in the health department and in the presence of the minister

Governments have a duty of care to the people that they exercise authority over

This is the basis of all international law

We often hear about human rights abuses in developing nations, but seldom do we look into our own backyards

Do governments meet their obligations? If not, how can we ensure that they do? Governments only exist to protect the people and when the laws go beyond that and actually start to work to the detriment of the consumer, they have to be questioned

I've heard this notion of the supremacy of parliament being put

The parliament's supreme

Parliament can do whatever it wants

Gee, there's nothing we can do

Well, that's not true

Parliament is not supreme

Parliament is bound

And I'll read to you straight from the federal constitution

If the question was asked of some politician who had not considered the subject with sufficient accuracy, where the supreme power resided in our government, he would answer that it was vested in the state constitutions

This opinion approaches near the truth but does not reach it

For the truth is the supreme, absolute and uncontrollable authority remains with the people

The Commonwealth government does have a duty of care in terms of activities that it undertakes not to engage in conduct that creates risks and dangers and therefore injures other people

For there to be a duty of care that's breached, there has to be negligent action which means that the harm has to be physical or psychological

It just can't be people being shocked or people being threatened or people being upset

I was actually reflecting on whether politicians could be held liable in accordance with breach of a fiduciary duty

That is in a sense they have been elected and they're elected in one sense as trustees for the people and if they breach that duty they don't act for the benefit of the people

The community has got a duty of care obligation to itself

If the government does not heed the discovered majority will of the community, then the community is entitled outlaw to bring about a sanction against the government

One example up in Corangue where the farmers there were outraged against what the local government up there was doing

There was a meeting and some 498 out of 500 all agreed they were not going to pay rates anymore until the government fixed up the problem

Within a very short space of time the government fixed up the problem

It's up to the leaders of those communities to have the courage of their convictions to show the community how to bring about a sanction in a way that is lawful and that achieves the desired objective of the community

Common law tools are tools that can be applied internationally

If you have an issue in your local community that you want dealt with we encourage you to use your power and your authority to address that issue by the means available to you

Another concept that I'd like to introduce you to is the concept of legally obligated civil disobedience

There are tests which you can apply

Once you have made those tests individually and there's a group consensus then the community is entitled to not obey that law

In fact the community is legally obligated to disobey and do everything in its power to cause that law to be removed or otherwise repealed or squashed by one means or another

Many of the problems can be easily redressed if the constituents of our community know their rights and unfortunately the constituents of our community do not know their rights

We've got to wake up the community or the community needs to wake itself up because its free will that's in operation here and if the community wants to stay asleep then they'll be always remaining as a victim of those who seek to exert their will upon it

I think it is the duty of every citizen to speak up in relation to what they want and to go through the proper channels but the problem is that when the proper channels are closed then one has to take an alternative and demonstrating is one of those ways

The time is right for change because it's self-evident to the majority that our present path is heading to disaster

It's time for the greed of the few to be controlled by the common sense of the many