that nutrition science has come such a long way

that in my hand I have some pretty special pills.

You’re never going to have to eat again,

You won't be eating any meals,

all you need to do is take one of these pills

breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of your life

and it's going to give you the perfect balance of protein,

carbohydrates, and fat.

It is going to give you the number of calories or kilojoules

that you need to stay at exactly the perfect weight for your body.

It's going to give you all of the antioxidants

and what we call phytochemicals

which just means plants nutrients, plant chemicals

that are good for us.

All in this amazing little pills.

Isn’t science amazing?

How would you feel?

(Booing)

“Boo!” Yes. That's what I was hoping for.

I hope you are feeling, “God, that would be awful!"

"How disappointing!”

I hope there are some memories coming into your mind right now.

They certainly are in mine.

I remember my mom’s awesome lasagna

that she always used to make

when we’d used to appear as millions of people

and she had twenty mouths to feed

and she would whip up this lasagna.

I remember my grandmother used to make this extraordinary

gingerbread cake

that my mother could never replicate despite being the better cook.

I remember the pancakes that the grandmother of a family friend

always made us whenever us kids appeared at their house.

I remember being a teenager doing exchanges with a student in France

and we had bowls of hot chocolate with white bread

yes, white baguette with butter and jam

and we dipped it into our hot chocolates.

I remember the amazing paellas that we used to have as a family

in Spain on our family holidays.

The point is food is much much more than a bit of nutrients.

You’d be pleased to know that science is not nearly at this point.

Thank goodness,

because food is more than the nutrients that it contains.

Food is part of who we are.

Food is part of our culture.

It is part of our upbringing.

It’s part of how we negotiate and interact with each other.

Just think about, those of you in the room with a partner,

what did you do on your first dates?

I'm willing to bet that you went for dinner at some point.

What do we do when we're celebrating?

Apart from popping open the champagne, we probably have some celebratory cake

or we have some food.

What do we do at Christmas and New Year? What do we do at funerals?

Food is always involved.

I’ve traveled to some pretty remote places in the world

and it’s the same everywhere you go,

whether you're in the most modern urbanized city

or whether you're in some village in the middle of Africa somewhere;

people want to share food with you.

The sharing of food is the sense of friendship,

a sense of who we are as human beings.

And here's my concern,

is that ...

and I'm a Nutrition Scientist, I’ve devoted my career to the space;

my concern is that nutrition is destroying some of those things.

But here's the problem,

because we do have quite literally a big problem.

Here in Australia,

and unfortunately in most of the rest of the world,

certainly all of the developed world,

and, fastly catching us up, the developing world,

it is now the norm in Australia to be fat.

Now that's not an aesthetic problem.

I'm not here to talk about body image, that's a whole other talk.

But that problem coaches us in a whole number of chronic health diseases.

We know that diabetes is on the rise.

Type 2 diabetes is now the fastest-growing chronic disease in this country

and 280 of us are diagnosed every single day.

Every 12 minutes an Australian dies of cardiovascular disease.

Ladies, one in three of us will develop cancer

and guys, I'm sorry, one in two of you will develop cancer before you're 85.

Now, while much of that can't be prevented,

we do know that diet, and lifestyle

but diet is intricately involved in all of those chronic diseases.

If we were to change the way that we eat,

we could dramatically reduce those numbers;

we could dramatically reduce the early death that is in this country

and dramatically improve the quality of life

for so many people.

So, why is it that it’s so hard to do?

If you've ever tried to follow a diet,

isn’t that an awful word?

I hate calling myself a dietitian because that word “diet” is in there.

But diet really just means the way that we eat

and what we are eating.

It’s really hard to change the way that we do

and part of that is because of how ingrained the way that we eat is

in the way that we live today.

So, how you’ve been brought up to eat

will always have a dramatic influence on the way that you’re eating today

and the way that your future children

and the next generation comes through.

But I also feel that part of the problem is the amount of confusion.

I was involved in a recent survey

where we asked people about how they felt about healthy eating

whether they were confused by it.

87% of people said that they were completely confused

by what on earth is healthy eating.

That’s coming from some of the media sensationalism

that we have around this area.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m involved in the media

and I love that people are so passionate about this area,

but unfortunately, it ends up in some things being slightly skewed and bent

and what was the truth kind of gets bent out of all proportion.

So, let’s take butter as an example.

Did you see the Times magazine not so long ago

where it had "butter" in the front cover and said:

"There’s hope. The scientists have got it all wrong".

And suddenly my Facebook page and other people’s

were going crazy saying:

“Yes! Burgers and bacon and everything are all back on the menu!”.

That wasn’t what the research showed at all.

The research actually showed that, hang on a minute,

if we replace saturated fat with a bunch of refined carbohydrates

we are in just as bad a state, possibly even worse.

That’s actually what the research showed.

Did the research say:

“Hey, saturated fats are actually really good for us”?

No, they didn't.

It questions, yes, the relationship between

saturated fat and cardiovascular disease

but that’s one aspect of saturated fats in our body.

It certainly didn’t show us that, "Hey, eating saturated fat reduces your risk".

No, it didn’t say that, but that’s the media reporting.

So that’s just one example out of many that are showing us

how we’re actually causing more confusion.

So, let’s take a little trip back through my lifetime,

because essentially the thing that I want to remind you about

is that we haven’t really got fat until the last 50 or so years.

I’m not that old

but really is just those last few decades

that we are starting to have this really major problem.

So, here’s what I’ve seen happen.

When I was a teenager, mom and I first got interested in trying to diet,

became aware of my body and thinking,

“I've got to be skinnier".

Skinny equals beauty

unfortunately in this country and in the UK where I grew up.

And here’s what happened:

mom and I embarked on a whole bunch of diets.

We did the Cambridge diet,

which was all shakes and pills and so on.

We were both ill by about day 3 in bed,

so we decided: "Ok, maybe that’s not the way to go".

Then we tried something else called the Scarsdale diet,

that involved eating a dry piece of wholemeal toast

in the morning with an orange,

I ate that breakfast for I don’t know how many weeks.

I couldn’t do it today.

Tuna sandwiches I still struggle with

‘cause we had tuna sandwiches every lunchtime,

a piece a fruit, a low-fat yogurt, so on.

We tried everything

and finally we settled on the low-fat diet,

and of course that was the era of the low-fat way of eating.

I remember eating an entire French baguette

because it was fat free, so guess what?

In here, license to eat.

And that’s exactly what we see.

So, the low-fat era took off, and what happened?

Food companies responded to our need for low fat

by giving us a whole bunch of low-fat food.

Unfortunately, it was full of refined starch,

lots of added sugars, additives and preservatives,

and whatever else, flavors galore

to try and make the food taste even remotely good.

Psychologically, we all had that license to eat.

“Oh, it’s fat free, therefore, calorie free,

I can eat as much as I like”.

That’s the way that we interpreted it

and we continued to get fatter.

So then, suddenly the finger of blame went:

“Hang on a minute, we’ve got it all wrong,

it’s not fat, it’s carbs!

It’s carbs that are to blame.

Go back to eating lots of fat. Let’s focus on the carbs".

And that’s kinda where we are at the moment.

So, I went shopping, and normally

you’d expect a little shopping basket to be full of food.

Here there’s not very much food, but this is what people are eating.

So, now we’ve got a whole bunch of products here.

This one says "Raw protein".

So, we are fixated with the problem is carbs.

This is raw protein and in the ingredients

says it’s got brown rice syrup and brown rice protein.

How do you reckon they got it out of brown rice?

Yet this is called the raw bar.

We’ve got "Think thin". Cookies and cream.

We’ve got high-protein, low-carb bars in chocolate flavor.

You know what we want: our cake and eat it,

we really do.

And things that make it sound like:

“Eat this and I’ll get you burning fat”.

All of those bars in here have more than a thousand kilojoules

but you know what we are scared of?

(Laughter)

God forbid you eat a banana.

It's carbs.

It’s going to go straight to the belly.

That’s the situation we are in.

We’ve got cookie.

You know, we really wanna have the chocolate, the sugary,

the cakes, the biscuits, so we’ve got this kind of thing

"naturally good".

It’s free of pretty much everything.

But you know what’s in it?

Basically rice, butter and sugar.

Just happens to be gluten-free flour.

This is the situation we are in

where people are completely confused,

and the food industry keeps responding

by giving us more and more of what?

That's a basket, apart from my banana,

of processed food.

I live in Bondi, and I went into one of the local whole foods cafes,

it’s honestly called Whole Foods, that’s on its banner.

They serve these amazing green smoothies

and I asked for the green smoothie without the protein powder.

She looked and recognized who I was and said:

“Why are you not having the protein powder?"

"Is this not a good protein powder? Should we have a better protein powder?”

And I said, “Because I don’t eat processed food,

or try not to eat too much of it".