Dr Zoe Harcombe, PhD, researcher, author, blogger and public speaker joins me to discuss public health. In particular, we explore Zoe’s expertise in dietary guidelines, nutrition and obesity. We are facing an obesity epidemic and Zoe sheds light on why our public health messages are playing a major role in it. 

Selected Links from the Episode

Dr Zoe Harcombe website

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Dr Ron Ehrlich:

Hello and welcome to Unstress. I'm Dr Ron Ehrlich. Now a subject, I've discussed in my own book and I think is relevant to every one of us is public health messages. How do they come about? What's the evidence to support them? What impact do they have on individual community, public and in fact global health? Well, not surprisingly, they play a huge role in our health at every level. My guest today is Dr Zoe Harcombe, PhD, a researcher and author, a blogger, a public speaker in the field of diet and health. Her particular areas of interest and expertise are public health, dietary guidelines, especially dietary fat nutrition and obesity. Zoe got a BA and a master's degree from Cambridge University in economics and math, so she understands numbers, statistics and analysis and the impact of all of those on public health and she understands the nuances of research. Do the numbers stack up?

Dr Ron Ehrlich:

In 2015 she released a bestseller ‘The Obesity Epidemic’. What causes it? How can we stop it and that prompted her to do a PhD, which she got in 2016 in public health nutrition. Her thesis was on the actual evidence for the introduction of dietary fat recommendations during those critical years from 1977 to 1983 which still affect public health messages to this very day. Now if you're looking for the most significant public health message, then the low-fat hypothesis espoused, that is telling us to eat everything low fat and demonizing fat espoused by almost every, every supposedly reputable health organization and all authority and then almost every health practitioner for the last 40 years, then this would have to be it. It's had a tremendous impact and if the evidence is anything to go by, it was a major contributor to set us up for the epidemic of preventable chronic degenerative diseases and arguably the environmental degradation that has occurred to this very day. There is so much we talk about obviously dietary guidelines and the evidence for the propaganda behind the plant based dietary recommendations. We are hearing so much about today, cholesterol and heart disease and much, much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Zoe Harcombe. 

Download the PDF transcription

Welcome to the show Zoe.

Dr Zoe Harcombe:

Hi Ron. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:

Zoe. I first followed your conversations on, on the group that was [inaudible]. The cholesterol sceptics, I think it's called thinks the international, the international network of cholesterol sceptics. And of course, we might talk about that cause I always thought the contributors were amazing and the information was amazing and all of that. And that's where I first, uh, came in contact with your contributions there, which I also thought were quite incredible. Um, but I was wondering if you might share with us your story cause it's a really interesting one. 

Dr Zoe Harcombe:

Yeah, sure. It didn't actually start off in anything to do with cholesterol, but it started off with a fascination with obesity and it was as simple as I'm a mathematician by background and logic is really, really important to me as you probably worked out for my newsletters. Um, but what didn't make sense was that I've never met anyone who wants to be overweight, let alone obese. And yet two thirds of the developed world are, and that's obviously Australia, New Zealand, UK, US, I think even sort of spaces like France and Spain and countries that follow the so-called Mediterranean diets,