Can We Trust Health Institutions?
Flawed science, institutional corruption and incentives rewarding disease management is what is making us sick — not willpower.
Since 1982 when the dietary guidelines advocated low fat, margarine, low salt, breakfast cereals, 11 serving of grains, vegetable oils, calorie counting and ultra-processed foods, the health of Australians is worsening. 90% of Australians now die of a chronic disease, only 6% die from infection and the rest accidents. In the 1970’s the disease rate was just 4% of the entire population.
Critically looking at the dietary guidelines or having some common sense should have been enough to kick the guidelines to the moon, but for some reason they took hold. When the Heart Foundation started their heart healthy tick, giving ultra-processed foods, low salt, low fat and margarine the sign of approval, in 2015 replaced with the star rating system, giving 5 stars to ultra-processed food, you know that we have lost our ability to think critically or have common sense.
The nutrition and health space is noisy. Influencers spruik ultra-processed supplements and proteins, amino acids, greens and peptide powders, opposing ideologies on diet. Biohackers use extreme equipment, methods, diet and supplements for their longevity and health goal.
People fight about ideologies; people slam other people using science to disparage their opponent. Science is not irrefutable: science can be funded by industry, science can be hidden if the result is not what was expected, science can be cherry picked, science can prove or disprove anything — for many, modern science has become a religion. Most people don’t understand methodologies nor read any of the science but rather rely on a summary put out by a company wanting to sell a product. These include pharmaceutical companies, supplement companies, food companies, agricultural companies, examples of these are:
Beta Blockers May 2026 – common heart drug taken by millions found useless and possibly dangerous.
L-Tryptophan – contaminated due to the use of Synthetic Biology, killed 37 people in 1989 and injured 1500 in the US.
Breakfast Cereals – ultra-processed and fortified with iron shavings that can be pulled out with a magnet.
Glyphosate – told it was safe and now is implicated in the class action of 140,000 people with Non-Hodkin’s Lymphoma.
Lately I was the victim of such a disparage using science as the weapon. A professor didn’t like that I said that eating food grown on a regenerative farm had better nutrition, the meat from the diversity of the plants was more nutritious and the nutrition content in the plants due to the soil ecology was abundantly higher. She cited science in her favour, of course. I took the line of common sense but with the knowledge of new science that is coming out about the ecology of the soil and the increase in nutrition in the plants and animals.
So here I used science to my defence while also claiming it to be incorrect.
Dr Steven Myers, who alongside me created The Nutrition Academy’s Functional Nutrition Essentials Course, told me that 80% of science is incorrect but it leads us to the 20% that makes a real difference in our lives.
But how do you know the difference between what is correct or not correct?
For the past 46 years I’ve used the philosophy of vitalism to guide me as well as looking historically in anthropological terms.
When I see “margarine is better than butter” I put my two lenses on: my wholistic lens and my historic lens to decide whether I’m going agree with the research or dismiss it as industry-funded. Butter is in its whole state is just cream churned and maybe some salt added, whereas margarine is ultra-processed with interesterified refined vegetable oils along with colours, flavours, synthetic Vitamin A and D, emulsifiers, diglycerides and anything else that they can add from a chemical laboratory. It may taste and look like a food, but in fact it is trickery of the senses and colours that make it palatable.
Over the past few decades, I’ve watched popular supplements rise and fall. As more people use them, and as curious doctors and scientists investigate their effects, we are learning that long-term use of isolated vitamins may sometimes increase the risk of harm rather than improve health. Dr Barry Tan’s research on vitamin E is a useful example: taking a single component of the vitamin E complex may increase the risk of certain cancers.
Now let’s put the two lenses on Vitamin E. Firstly, historically we have never taken a single vitamin and a single entity of a vitamin to survive the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Vitamin E has 8 derivates; four tocopherols and four tocotrienols, they are found in foods in varying amounts but never isolated. If we consider vitamin E via the vitalistic lens, we see that vitamin E was never without a fat, protein and carbohydrate component in the food, and other synergistic vitamins and minerals. To take a single entity from a single vitamin does not follow the laws of nature.
Glyphosate is another case in point which then also brings into play other herbicides and chemicals used on our food. The companies say its perfectly safe, yet common sense tells us that if it is killing something it must also be affecting the plants and or soil surrounding the weeds being sprayed. It did not come to my attention until I realised that eating food with wheat was inflaming me and giving me sore joints. As soon as I stopped, my joints stopped hurting and my inflammation dramatically dropped, I lost 4Kg of water weight in one week and all the pain left my body. I investigated, I was curious, I didn’t know that they were drying the wheat just before harvest and I was consuming a patented antibiotic along with my wheat foods.
How To Trust Yourself With Health
The Nutrition Academy started as a way to inform and educate, so that the educated and informed don’t fall into traps of false health and food marketing, flawed science, pharmaceutical miracle lies, stunning influencers working for money, friend and family persuasion, false news, extreme ideologies and whatever other way marketers and racketeers sell us products that harm, not heal.
I quote Emily Kaplan CEO and cofounder of The Broken Science Initiative
“The chronic disease epidemic is not a result of bad luck or failed willpower, but of decades of flawed science, institutional corruption, and incentives that reward disease management over health”.
She believes that many of the assumptions underlying modern healthcare — ranging from the sugar industry’s influence on nutrition policy to buried research, publication bias, irreproducible studies, and misleading pharmaceutical marketing — have produced a population that is sicker than ever despite record spending.
Conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, fatty liver disease, and many mental health disorders are different manifestations of the same underlying problem: mitochondrial dysfunction. Excess refined sugar and refined carbohydrates, seed oils, and chronic inactivity damage the body’s energy-producing systems, while a healthcare model built around specialties and billing codes focuses on managing symptoms rather than addressing root causes. The answer, she argues, is not waiting for institutions to reform themselves but empowering individuals through education. By improving metabolic literacy and restoring health through nutrition, exercise, and community support.
The Nutrition Academy empowers the individual and with the Academy’s help we help the individual to empower a family, a community, a country and eventually a world, over riding the narratives that destroy human, animal, plant and planet health.
Together we can make a difference and we will.
Cyndi O’Meara
