Eating Ourselves Sick

Book excerpt: "Louise Stephen's powerful, no-holds-barred demolition of Big Food dissects the profit motive that has filled our food supply with toxic oils and sugar, and shows us how money is destroying our health." DAVID GILLESPIE Our diet has changed radically in the space of 100 years. We have swapped home-cooked food made with whole ingredients for processed food made from sugar, seed oils and refined wheat. Modern-day food is cheap, convenient and accessible, but also hugely destructive to our health. Former business consultant Louise Stephen developed an autoimmune disease in her early thirties, which led to renal failure and a kidney transplant. As a middle-class professional from a wealthy Western country, she was perplexed as to how she had become so ill. She started to investigate, using her business and research skills to find out what she could about diet and how it relates to health. What she uncovered will change the way you think about processed food - frozen dinners, breakfast cereals, packaged snacks, dips, flavoured drinks, bottled sauces - and the industry that is profiting from the commodification and toxication of our food supply. Stephen shows us how Big Food is picking up where Big Tobacco left off, employing skilful marketing to nudge us towards increasingly processed food, while hoping we'll fail to notice the commensurate rise in obesity and decline in health. Stephen reveals how governments and peak health bodies are often powerless to intervene and, even worse, are sometimes complicit in convincing us to ditch our wholefood ingredients for factory-made products. This is not a diet book. Meticulously researched and compellingly argued, Eating Ourselves Sick shines a light on the powerful forces that stand between us and a healthy diet.