One of the most listened to items on the RNZ website this week was titled: "Is omega-6 fat making us sick?" But anyone wanting to know the answer to that question would be best advised to do more than simply listen to the interview with David Gillespie the author of The Good Fat Guide How to Add Healthy Fat to Your Diet.
Photo: Screenshot: The Conversation
The book is an updated version of David Gillespie’s 2013 Toxic Oil. A book described by Peter Clifton, a professor of health nutrition, and Bill Shrapnel of the Sydney University Nutrition Foundation like this: "The message is so over-the-top that it’s hard to believe that anyone would take it seriously. Still, messiahs develop followers…."
The pair quoted Gillespie’s conclusion to illustrate just how radical his claims are: "If you do what I suggest, you will be doing all the wrong things, according to our health authorities. You’ll be eating butter, drinking full-fat milk, chomping through bacon and eggs for breakfast and enjoying a meat pie for lunch."
Clifton and Shrapnel – writing on the Conversation website – said Gillespie quoted scientific research selectively while ignoring studies that contradicted his conclusions altogether.
They pointed out that Gillespie’s work wasn’t peer reviewed and was poorly referenced – making it difficult to check many of the book’s claims.
The Good Fat Guide has barely featured in the Australian media since it was published earlier this year and that could be because the earlier edition was so roundly criticised by experts in the field.
That’s not to say that authors of popular books offering health advice shouldn’t be interviewed in the media – but if their claims completely contradict the advice of health professionals then a responsible approach would be to provide some real balance by including an interview with an acknowledged expert.
When the ABC interviewed Gillespie about Toxic Oil back in 2013 it invited not one but three health academics to comment on his findings.
The week before David Gillespie's RNZ interview, Jesse Mulligan spoke to Hassan Vally, an associate professor in Public Health at Melbourne's La Trobe university, about how to identify reliable medical research.
Vally authored an article for Sci-Blogs identifying five key steps to take. The first was to ask whether it was peer reviewed and the last was to check whether the study was corroborated by other studies.
Taking either of those steps should have raised questions about the claims being made in The Good Fat Guide.
Jesse Mulligan asked Hassan Vally whether the media was partly responsible for the confusion around the claims and counter-claims around what's good for you and what's not.
And Professor Vally responded that he thought in part they were. "The attraction for the media is to present the most emotional and most scary aspects of a story because that is what gets people interested. And at the end of the day the people in the media want to write interesting stories that get people to click on links."
The interview with David Gillespie definitely had people clicking – it was one of most listened to interviews on the RNZ website this week.
And that’s a worry because people listening to it – or reading it - really have no way of knowing how robust or otherwise the science being quoted is.
Links to related articles:
Omega-6 fats to prevent and treat heart and circulatory diseases
