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Belinda Fettke is back on the show, and this time she is chatting with my co-host, James Connolly.
Belinda Fettke is the wife of Dr. Gary Fettke, an orthopedic surgeon in Tasmania that was under investigation by the Medical Board of Tasmania for giving nutritional advice to his patients. Belinda started her research journey with a simple goal: clear her husband’s name. Little did she know that her research would lead her to uncover the overwhelming influence of the religious ideology shaping our “plant-based” dietary guidelines, food policy, and medical education.
In this episode, Belinda shares with James the elaborate web that connects the Seventh-Day Adventist Church to the food industry. During this discussion, they cover:
- Gary’s personal health story and the events that led to his investigation
- The ties Belinda uncovered to key witnesses in Gary’s case and the cereal industry
- How John Harvey Kellogg fits into the story and the history of the cereal industry
- The not-so-hidden agenda of the Seventh-Day Adventists
Resources:
Sweet Poison by David Gillespie
Sanitarium Health Food Company
Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection by Sam Apple
Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP)
Connect with Belinda:
Website: Belinda Fettke No Fructose
Facebook: Belinda Fettke Low Carb Healthy Fats
Twitter: Belinda Fettke
Instagram: Belinda Fettke
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
Thanks to our episode sponsor, Annmarie Skin Care, a company committed to creating the best natural skin care possible and doing it sustainably. While I’ve always been picky about what goes on my skin, this product goes beyond that, feeding the skin with high-performance seed oils, antioxidant-rich botanicals, and synergistic plant stem cells that deliver skin-supporting nutrients. My skin feels fantastic, and these products smell so good.
For a limited time, you can receive 30% off your order at sustainabledish.com/skin with code DIANA30.
Quotes:
“I believe the Adventist Health Reform message is literally sweeping across America and embedding itself into the very fabric of your society.” – Belinda Fettke
“I say that vested interests and religious ideology have this symbiotic relationship protecting profits and a prophet.” – Belinda Fettke
“We need to get the church off the table, separate church and plate.” – Belinda Fettke
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
James Connolly
Okay, good evening to me, and good morning to Belinda Fettke. You know, I’m really excited about this. It’s a real joy to have you on, to be able to kind of talk about this and in the way that I tried to think about it and sort of guide the idea of this because I just had a podcast with somebody who was asking me very similar questions. And I said, you know, we have this; we can very much look at the world and the culture of our world and see sort of multinational corporations, sort of governing the point of view of how we see the influence of sugar in our diet and exercise and any number of different sort of downstream health effects that kind of happen. Whenever you try to institute, say, a sugar policy in the UK, we’re seeing this right now. You see Pepsi and Coca-Cola in those meetings, in those rooms. The UN’s Food Systems programs, we’ve seen Nestle in many of these places. And so we’ve become very aware of the fact that these multinational corporations are setting the guidelines by which we can talk about the health effects of certain foods. And so when we look at corporations, we’re always looking at them for a very specific point of view. And we say, All right, well, we need to sort of challenge that. But there is a whole other side of the ideological part of this movement that is centered around sort of a plant-based vegetarian versus meat, omnivore sort of dialogue is sort of polarity that’s been kind of created. And so it’s really hard for us to say, Well, if there is an ideology centered around it, is it a religious to spiritual ideology? Really, Belinda is an expert in many of the aspects of that sort of religio-spiritual, corporatist element that has had a heavy, heavy influence over what we consider to be healthy foods in many ways, and especially in the 20th century. And so I want to invite Belinda on and so thank you so much for coming and spending the time. But I wanted to go just a little bit into the history of how you got involved in this. Like, what were the events that transpired that brought you into your research and studying this subject?
Belinda Fettke
Your listeners won’t believe it, that my husband became the only medical doctor in the world silenced from talking about nutrition. And yeah, he’s an orthopedic surgeon, but he’s still studied basic biochemistry, physiology and anatomy, and all of those things. He’s and when he started to look into diet – so we’ll go back one step further. He had his own cancer issues. In 2000, he was diagnosed with a very aggressive pituitary cancer. And he was recommended in the hospital because it caused what’s known as diabetes insipidus, which is quite different to Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, where you just can’t produce enough insulin. Diabetes insipidus is a condition where you actually can’t concentrate your urine. So following surgery and radiotherapy, Gary ended up with quite severe diabetes insipidus, and the hospital told him – so I’m sure it was dietitians, nurses, doctors, they all encourage this, he had to drink about 12 liters, 13 liters of fluid a day to chase this urine output while it was in its severe stage. And look, this went on for years. He was drinking that much fluid, and they said to him, water is going to be really boring, so we suggest you drink fruit juice. And so go back another step. If you look at PET scan of someone who has got cancer, invariably, it lights up like a Christmas tree when you inject glucose to see how extensive the cancer is. And Gary’s was lit up to the max. And even though he’s a doctor, you know, I think doctors get trained in all of these areas at the beginning. And then for the next three – so first two years, next three years, they like learn how to do this band-aid sickcare. They learn how to prescribe, medicate, and operate. And so, as I would say, a very progressive, smart thinking, questioning orthopedic surgeon, he stood and put those two things together.
Belinda Fettke
And 2004, he had further surgery. By 2009, he was in a bad way again, and they, the doctors, they said, We just don’t know what else we can do. And prior to that Gary had just been, you know, a young doctor setting up, really busy, young family and everything else. In 2009 he just went, like, I’ve just got to make time for this. I’ve got to do my own research. And so he started looking into different things. By 2011, he was given a book by a guy here at – actually, he was a lawyer, David Gillespie, and he wrote a book called Sweet Poison. And Gary thought, “Oh, what can a lawyer know about sugar and health that I wouldn’t know?” So he started reading that book as an orthopedic surgeon going, Oh, wow. Okay, this is interesting. And he also got in touch with Colin Champ and Dominic D’Agostino, who are in America. He got the link to them to have a chat to them about things. So he started to come to the realization that he needed to reduce sugar out of his own diet. And he went hardcore. And he had a reason, and incredibly and not unsurprisingly, in hindsight, he also reversed his Type 2 dia… prediabetes. He lost a lot of weight. He reversed his blood pressure issues, his GERD, that reflux that you often get. So his health improved so dramatically 2011. By 2012 he’d done a lot of research and I’ve got a husband who’s very obsessive-compulsive. So when he gets on to something like he does, he just goes for it. So he was understanding so much about science. In fact, there was a professor up at Sydney University who said, “Oh, my gosh, I wish all my students were as keen as you because you’d be amazing.” So then he thought, well, here I am as an orthopedic surgeon in northern Tasmania. We’ve got a catchment area of about 120,000 people, next stop’s Antarctica. We’re in this little island down the bottom of Australia, and his patients, whereas when he first started medicine, he might see someone with complications of Type 2 diabetes once or twice a year. By 2012-2013 he was seeing someone every single week in his clinic, who was requiring either debridement of toes and feet, someone’s amputation and lower leg amputations. And he just went, this is just terrible. This is snuck up on us, this tsunami of Type 2 diabetes complications. And maybe reducing sugar, when you think about insulin and all of these things, maybe reducing sugar and looking at their diet will actually help them? So he made the mistake of thinking the dietitians would be really excited about his own health. And as his patients start to improve their health, he looked at the hospital food menu and just realized it was sugar and carbohydrate loaded. And specific menus for people with Type 2diabetes included three desserts a day. And he just went, “Wait a minute,” he said. So went to the dietitians. And he said, You know, I’ve had this revelation. I’ve been thinking about this and my patients are really, really improving their blood glucose control, and even coming off some medication by reducing sugar. Why are we giving people so much sugar? And understanding that if people have out-of-control blood glucose in hospital, then someone has to come and check their blood glucose levels, then you need someone to prescribe more insulin or some medication. How are we going to get this down? And so this never-ending roller coaster of band-aiding sickcare. So he thought the dietitians would be really excited. And unfortunately, they weren’t. And I’ve questioned since, did they not want to know about this? Or did they not want Gary to be the first to speak about it? Anyway, so as it turns out, a dietitian at the hospital reported Gary for recommending his patients reduce sugar. Oh my gosh, how terrible! And he actually put it on their medication chart where no one would take any notice. He prescribed a low-sugar diet. And yeah, they got a bit upset about it all. So, but he’d gone to them with open arms. He’d gone to them saying, I’m sorry. I’ve been actually causing people more harm. I haven’t considered how we can prevent this and how we can potentially put it into remission or reverse. So he just got louder. He wasn’t going to take no for an answer. So he talked to a senator here and they got it into Parliament discussions. He got into the paper. He was making more and more noise. And interestingly, they just came at him harder and harder. So by 2016, the determination by the medical board who’d investigated him for two and a half years about this horrific man who was making people better by telling them to reduce sugar and by then, also polyunsaturated oils and carbohydrates. He was… he’d worked out his package – his metabolic, his theory of metabolic disease. So, again, he was told that this was a non-appealable and a lifelong determination on him. And I just went, “This is ridiculous.” I mean, I actually started in 2014, saying it’s ridiculous. He was part of a group called Low Carb Down Under. And so this group of doctors, and then dietitians and other health professionals came into this group. When we are seeing incredible results. So they started their own conferences, and they started things. But Gary in 2016 was told he wasn’t allowed to talk about it, couldn’t do anything. And he would lose his medical license if he did. So, crossed out the Gary Fettke No Fructose on the Facebook page became Belinda Fettke No Fructose wrote on there, “I’m really sorry, I won’t be discussing the science in as much detail. But hey, look, what I’m finding out.” And as you mentioned, I was sitting there looking at my husband and these other doctors talking about the science til they’re going blue in the face. It was incredible the science they had in explaining why it was so important for people’s health to reduce sugar and processed carbohydrates and plant-saturated oils. And I just sit to go. I think we’re looking at the wrong thing. I don’t think what you’re talking about… I don’t think that’s the reason why this message isn’t getting into guidelines and why it’s not being understood by higher ups and, as I say, “the rule makers.” So in 2016, I uncovered documents stating that the Dietitians Association of Australia like our peak body for nutrition was accepting $23,000 a year from the cereal industry, a group of cereal industries here – Kellogg’s, Nestle, and Sanitarium and Freedom Foods, so two of them Australian, the other two multinationals. They were paying the Dietitians Association $23,000 to use their members -this is stated specifically – use their members to influence protect, and actively defend cereal, grains, and even sugar’s messaging. And in the list of 12 people specifically named, Gary was the only medical doctor on that list. And we under FOI later uncovered documents from the hospital, 845 paid documentation with the head of the Dietitians Association writing to that hospital asking for Gary to be silenced. So it was, you know, you think about conspiracy theories, but this was really, really happening. And the reason why they were targeting Gary and other low-carb advocates was the fact that cereal sales were down. Oh dear, cereal sales are down. It’s not about health. This is about our bottom dollar, and we need to protect it. So in 2014, going back again, my story jumps all over the place. Sorry, James. But in 2014, I looked at the expert witness that was brought into Gary’s case by the medical board and I keep putting down there because that’s where Hobart is down there. So he was brought in here was the one of the biggest nutrition guns in the South East Asia Pacific region. Remember, my husband’s an orthopedic surgeon, had about 5000 people on social media following him. Oh dear!
Belinda Fettke
He was able to you know, he was looking after a catchment area of 120,000 with six other orthopedic surgeons, so it wasn’t like he was alone. They determined that he was such a threat that they use the biggest gun in nutrition science to determine if an orthopedic surgeon could talk about reducing sugar. Remember, that was all it was at the beginning. So I looked into this guy, I thought he must work for the sugar industry. And I’m not… I can’t hack into things. I’m not a real… it took a while getting onto this podcast. I’m not very technically minded, but I’m very very good at going down rabbit holes that don’t make any sense. So I went down this rabbit hole and found that no, he wasn’t working for the sugar industry. He was employed by Sanitarium here in Australia, and Sanitarium is WeetBix here is considered this Aussie kids breakfast, you know. They don’t grow up on anything else. Alright, well, that’s really interesting he’s working for Sanitarium. As I started to look and look, I found he went back to 2010 in his current role, so while he was determining Gary’s position, he was working for Sanitarium, the cereal industry that was targeting Gary through the DAA. It all started to make sense, but I hadn’t considered Sanitarium’s position specifically. And when I started to look up more and more about Sanitarium, I realized that it’s wholly owned by the Seventh Day Adventist Church and in my mind, I sort of knew, you know, we grew up and understand it was owned by a church. Sanitarium has… the Seventh Day Adventist Church, have a very small footprint in Australia. It’s not like in America. We only have one major hospital. We have this massive food industry where they make something like 250 cereals, alternative meat, alternative milks, like it’s massive here and in New Zealand, and they actually send food to North America, China into Asia as well. India is a big customer of theirs and the UK. So they reach out, but are based here. This is a very, very powerful commercial entity owned by a church that pays no tax because it comes under their charity umbrella, and of being a religious entity. So that I just started looking at all these things. And I thought, why don’t they pay any tax? And then you think, okay, what is that? Why are they promoting all these alternatives? And I came across the actual article, where Ellen G. White, who was the founder of the church in 1863, where she came to Australia in the late 1890s, so 1890 to 1900. And she set up the food industry here. And she actually wrote: the health food business is to take the place of flesh meat, milk and butter. Hence, Sanitarium was founded. So, I was like, okay, so I just keep diving in to see… do you have any questions? I guess I can just keep talking.
James Connolly
Yeah, no, I, you know, I think it’s really interesting because, you know, Ellen G. White ate meat for most of her adult life. She converted to vegetarianism, primarily because she had to. She had multiple sort of conversions. One was a vision that she had. She was pressured by Kellogg, John Harvey, and we can kind of start to talk a little bit about that. But by the time… so, she had the sort of a conversation when she visited Australia, with a woman who came up to her and told her well, you know, you read… so that you get into the conversion to the animal rights movement that happens actually in Australia alone. Yeah, and so I always find that’s really interesting. Let’s go into just a little bit of the SDA because in Seventh Day Adventism – it’s um, I don’t even know where to begin. It’s so much fun because it’s like you, firstly, you’ll get into the sort of 19th-century movements that were kind of these new religions that were being spawned off of, you know, there’s one region that ended up becoming kind of the Great Awakening in Upstate New York. And that’s where you get the sort of founding of Mormonism. Joseph Smith is in that area. The Millerites, who, you know, Ellen White, who was the founder of Seventh Day Adventists.
Belinda Fettke
Who thought that the world was going to end in 1844. And so yeah, this is where the Millerites were based. And Ellen G. White was very much a part of this belief, this movement, which was very, very big in America, and a little bit into Asia and other areas that have worked at the same sort of – the dates they set as the end of the world or when Jesus would return. The interestingly, the day after, Jesus didn’t come back and Ellen G. White wrote that she cried all night because he didn’t come because she was thinking this was something that’s going to be so amazing for her. I don’t know, if your audience would understand that she’d been quite a sickly girl. She’d been hit by a rock when she was young. And so she finished school when she was 11. She never went back because she was so bullied by everybody from a facial deformity, so she never went back to school. She was a very unwell person. And I think she didn’t have a very good social network from what I can read. So when she joined this Millerite group and these people started to take a bit of notice of her, and she had her for first vision. You know, these groups, were going, “Oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, okay, maybe you are meant to be part of this.” Maybe there’s something divine happening here. And I think, got her a lot of attention from that, from what I can read, there was actually Hiram Edson had the very first vision of why Jesus didn’t come back to earth. He actually went from his most holy place to his holy place to his most holy place, and started determining who was going to be saved and who wasn’t going to be saved. So Ellen then had that same vision. So he had it in October, she had it in December. He determined he didn’t want to be a prophet from the church, but he spoke about it to this young group of people. She was only… she was only 17 at the time. So we’re looking at a group of people who started the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the founders. The eldest was James White at 23. Then Ellen and her best friend was 16, and then it’s 15. And it’s 14, 12, and 10. And the only real adult in the group was Joseph Bates, and he was 52. He encouraged these young people, but he’d already given up smoking and alcohol and he’d become a vegetarian. So, when Ellen starts talking about it 20 years later, as her visions that she’s getting, you’ve got to remember, for 10 years, there’d been non-Adventist Health reformers also going around America talking about the importance of vegetarianism. So she’s come into it, but she was the only one who actually put it into the doctrines of the church.
James Connolly
Right? Yeah. So you have Sylvester Graham, who was, in many ways, a huge celebrity in the US and the Alcotts. We know, Louisa May Alcott as a writer, but the family had sort of heavily influence on health and health reform in the States.
Belinda Fettke
Yeah, but a lot of that health reform, if you remember, was about not masturbating. The health reform was really…
James Connolly
We’re getting to that. [both laugh]
Belinda Fettke
And so Mr. Graham was the same, you know, so we had a group of people who had this idea that being healthy meant not masturbating and not interrupting the spiritual thoughts.
James Connolly
Yeah, and so much of that was, the body was a carrier for the soul. And so you see all of this stuff that kind of centered around this idea of caring for the body, not polluting it with, with tobacco and with alcohol, and with any number of different things, but obviously, like, sex and sexual maturity at the time, also being something that was really centered around shame and control, right? They looked at a lot of insane asylums at the time, and they would look at people who had been holed up in these in these asylums, and they would look at things that they would do, right, when you’re alone by yourself. And so they reverse-engineered a lot of the diagnoses by looking at people and saying, Well, what are they doing? They’re polluting themselves, they’re touching themselves. Well, that is a cause for insanity. Right? Not the incarceration itself. But you know, any number of different things. And so much of the way that we determined who was a good person back then was really based on an idea of character. And so the destruction of character meant that you were polluting the community. Sylvester Graham talked about the women’s and men’s genital organs as the sewers of the body. He had a real disgust with the idea of of sexuality. And so, let’s go into… so Ellen G. White has a convergence. She’s really working on the health aspect of the religious doctrine that then becomes this thing that’s proselytized to the world. And they set up an institution in the US, she eventually moves to Battle Creek, Michigan. They set up an institution there as a way initially to kind of train their own doctors to kind of go out into the world. But Kellogg comes in, tell us a little about the Ellen G. White, the Whites, and sort of Kellogg relationship.
Belinda Fettke
Well, Ellen G. White in 1876, decided that they would start a Western Health Reform Institute, and it was only quite small – 24-30. People could go there to have something similar to what was set up in other places, especially Caleb Jackson had his place in Danville. And it was a health resort where people would go, and they would have a vegetarian diet. They would have lots of sunshine. They would have exercise and all of these things, but they were allowed to play games, and they were allowed to have nightly fun. Whereas Ellen G. White, when she brought her vision into what the Western Health Reform Institute would be like, it was a much more spiritual and quiet place. Games and dancing certainly were not allowed. And by 1878, John Harvey Kellogg became the superintendent of that facility, and the head doctor and he went on, as you said, to teach people. But if you go back to when he was only 12 years old, when he went to work for James and Ellen White, as their typesetter, and doing all the print for them, and Ellen’s book, in that time, she wrote a book called A Solemn Appeal to Mothers, which, as you said, it polluting and all those things. It spoke wholly and solely of preventing your children from masturbating. And one of the main things she felt was that eating meat, which she learned from other people, but she had it in his vision from God that she had to put it out there was that it animalized the human nature and roused baser passions and did all these things. So if you were eating meat, you became more animalistic. And then you would masturbate, but it wasn’t just about meat. She also with John Harvey Kellogg, later on, they made cages, genital cages to stop children from masturbating and all sorts of horrific things, pouring carbolic acid onto girls’ clitorises – really got very, very bizarre in their management of this polluting. But in this book, she’s got a 12-year-old, writing down all these terrible things that were going to happen to you if you masturbated. And she primarily blamed stimulants that came into the body and especially meat. So, you know, he’s reading that you lose vision while that myth still perpetuates today.
Belinda Fettke
And she also said it decayed heads. It caused epilepsy again, going into that insanity. All of those things. This is what masturbation causes. And she wrote in this book, it was if you put a pistol to your own chest, and took your own life. Can you imagine that? I mean, I’ve had 12-year-olds, how impressionable this young man would have been. And being just involved in that psyche of all of these things is the beginning of the church, really. And so here he is coming out, doing everything possible that he can do to stop people masturbating because he believes that’s the root cause of a lot of disease. And so then he blamed the gut, and he thought about gut and how am I going to clear out this gut because you don’t want anything in the gut. His primary belief was, how can I make food for people so they stop eating meat? So in the Western world, he was the one who created the very first commercial alternative meat. He created the nut analogs and then the soy analogs. He was the one who invented Kellogg’s cornflakes and people might not realize it was part of an anti-masturbation crusade at the time. You look at these things that he developed and considered, really, it was under the umbrella of the Seventh Day Adventist Church that he created these things with his wife and with his brother, Ella Eaton Kellogg, his wife, she was one of the very first dietitians in the world, like she was doing this home economics course. And so she became a dietitian, he employed her to not only helped create these foods, but to make them more palatable because when they had people coming to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, they needed to show them that food could be okay getting rid of all the meat. So it grew to that small Western Health Reform Institute to the Battle Creek Sanitarium that housed 1200 people at its peak. People came from all over America, celebrities, you had – America had Henry Ford, Rockefeller, Amelia Earhart, all sorts of people went because of the broader aspects of the health reform that they offered. But they were giving people enemas like you would not believe like, just colonics – anything to clean out the colon. Everything was about making sure that’s clean, and vegetarian food and abstaining from sex. That was a really big point they kept trying to push. So I don’t know if everyone did it when they left. But that was very much part of the teaching at that hospital. So, that’s fascinating history. That’s the cereal industry in a nutshell, as you said, we’d had quick chat before – 104, 102 cereal companies were founded in Battle Creek, and a lot of those cereal companies were founded by Seventh Day Adventists, who saw the commercial gain that John Harvey Kellogg was getting, but he actually offered all of the profits to the church.
Belinda Fettke
But they didn’t take it. But Ellen saw what he was creating there. And she wanted to create something under the church. So she went to Australia and created Sanitarium there and then they opened Loma Linda. They moved to California to set up an Adventist church because it was a bit of a schism between the church and John Harvey Kellogg. So they moved to Loma Linda and set up the first food industry there, which was very similar to Sanitarium here in Australia. I said to Gary a few times, oh my gosh, what I’m studying to learn about is so dark, and disturbing. I actually can’t believe it. And so when I’ve talked about our story, and when I’ve talked about my research, I don’t go very often down that deep path. Because I think, for me, it’s not important as much to the nutrition side of things. But I think it’s a really, really important part to be going into to help people understand. And I’m in the process of starting Belinda Fettke .com website. So taking it away from the “I Support Gary” has actually got his name cleared, and just in case anyone doesn’t realize, four and a half years, but yes, his name is cleared. But I think you’re going into some of this space, and even understanding the whole roots of the Home Economics movement. Again, I’m sort of more focused on the nutrition side, but the roots of the Home Economics movement and how that all ties into it, and prohibition, talk about temperance prohibition or anything more about alcohol and women’s suffrage and abolishing slavery, but the two temperance movements and I think they’re quite distinct. So you’ve got the temperance health reform movement, which is the vegetarian, pure group, and then you’ve got the other group who were alcohol, suffrage, and abolition of slavery, they really merged, and Ellen G. White and Ella Eaton Kellogg were both highly influential in the prohibition temperance movement as well, they moved across between the two. And because I think it helped grow, there’s an Ellen White spoke at some event. And I think there’s something like 20,000 people at one event she spoke at. So they came by train, they couldn’t get enough people in there. So she became a very powerful speaker in this area. And I think she’s the most prolific female author in the world, and certainly the most translated of either gender. The books that she wrote about everything, but certainly, then – I think there’s an amazing research article that was produced in 2018. And I think it was a little bit in defense of the research that Gary and I’ve been putting up, but I’d looked into was the global influence of the Seventh Day Adventist Church on diet, and it’s written by a group of Seventh Day Adventist at Loma Linda University. And they even referenced my work in it. So that’s how I know it’s got a little bit to do with us putting this stuff out. You know, this is a really incredible document that they’ve produced. They’re not ashamed of what they’re doing. And I think this is important for people to understand it. It’s not hidden, it’s in plain sight, the work that they’re doing to try to encourage people to reduce their meat intake, because their belief truly is that until enough people reduce meat, and dairy, and eggs and butter and all these things out of their diet, that Jesus won’t return. They haven’t done what they’ve been commissioned to do. And Ellen taught that they are the remnant church, like the chosen people, His chosen people. This all happened, you know, everyone else hadn’t done what they were supposed to do up until 1844. So he came into his most holy place to create this group of people who would actually do what he’d asked. And that’s to proclaim the Gospel. And how they were to do it was to use medical evangelism. Every single person, it’s called a total health movement, TMI, and every single person in the church is apparently supposed to talk about the health benefits of vegetarianism. And as we know, they don’t like to quote vegan because that ties into the animal rights part, but their version of vegetarianism is virtually vegan at the strictest point. And it’s fruit nuts and seeds as found in the Garden of Eden and the beginning of Genesis in the Bible. So this is her belief that we should just be eating fruit, nuts, and seeds. Vegetables weren’t even allowed till the fall of man. So she has allowed those, she said these, okay, but, you know, meat wasn’t allowed till after the flood, but then you would have the sin of eating that meat and your life would be shortened and diseased. And even a professor at Loma Linda University in nutrition back in the 70s was saying that if you cut out meat, it may not happen. This longevity may not happen immediately. But over a few generations, we’ll be living the lives of Adam and Methuselah, that were seven and eight and 900 years long. So they want to live because if they are alive, when Jesus comes back, they just get the opportunity to go straight up to heaven. They don’t have to have the soul sleep. So it’s a really complex religious belief. And also the belief that they may not have God as the intercessor because they don’t believe that atonement happened at the cross, which most Christians – every Christian believes. That was when Jesus took on the sins, they do not believe that. They believe that Jesus has gone to write the books in 1844. And if he already goes past your name, then you may live eight or 10 or 20 years without an intercessor at the time of when we translate to heaven. So you will be presenting to God without someone who’s taken your sins, and you have to remember every single sin you may have done. So it’s a really difficult religion. If you get into the bones of it, a lot of people might not even realize on the surface, that this is what their belief is. And so her books go into all sorts of things, not just nutrition.
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James Connolly
Go a little bit into the global influence of the Seventh Day Adventists on on diet because I think that it’s divided into all of these different sections, but it’s very specific – the introduction about the intents of the church itself, but then it goes into its ministries. It goes into, you know, any number of different things. And then it gets to that sort of seminal point where they talked about the influence they had on a very specific position paper that then is sort of disseminated throughout the world, and is utilized and used all over the place as a defense for putting children and you know, on vegan or vegetarian diets.
Belinda Fettke
And also, they may have they’ve done all the Adventist Health Studies as well, to prove or disprove divine inspiration. If you look at some of the early dietitians that came out – Lana Francis Cooper was a protege of John Harvey Kellogg’s at Battle Creek Sanitarium. And she was a founding member of the American Dietetic Association in 1917. She had 500 dietitians under her tutelage while she was in that place. She wrote the textbooks for dietitians, going forward throughout the world, like globally, in the Western world. She was so influential. And Kate Lindsay was another person, she was a doctor, but she taught the nurses. So similarly, she wrote the nursing textbooks again, they would demonize animal proteins and fats. They didn’t quite get rid of eggs and milk completely in some of their books, but they definitely tried people to discourage them from eating it because they didn’t have the foods then that could take the place of all of those things right, the beginning. And as it went on and on, and this is what they’re – the dietitians and their food chemists, their food scientists, there’s a lot of Seventh Day Adventist food scientists, because they wanted to create this food that would take the place of fresh meat, milk, eggs, and butter. In the end, this is where they’re moving towards. Because the more people they can get this message to this was how they are going to take the gospel. And I found a couple of articles that are really fascinating how they get into China. And by taking the health message, they can go into China, whereas they couldn’t go in as a church necessarily. So again, this global influence, how they go into places to permeate this. So medical evangelism is considered the right arm of the church. And then to use the health reform message to do that. The Adventist Health Studies, I think it’s really important for people to understand that they talk about vegetarian and veganism and how you have seven or 10 or 11 more years of life, because you followed this way. But I think these people that they have studied, in particular are people that have moved to that area. Mostly, it’s not like the original blue zones that I found longevity, people that have spent their entire lives are born there, they’re generational, come right through their lives in that space. A lot of people move to Loma Linda now, which has been considered an area of longevity, to retire to, or to work or to study. And so it’s a very different mentality. And their religious beliefs also encourage you know sleep, and no alcohol, no smoking, no caffeine, and reduce sugar. They do encourage that even though a lot of their foods make high sugar, they encourage a low sugar diet within that. And so if you consider the social contact, and also thought another thing that’s interesting is they say they’re with a community that doesn’t encourage you to cheat. You have a lot of people who’ve decided to take on a health diet or healthier diet, you’ve got a lot of pressure. You just have dessert, why are you having dessert? Why are you doing this? Why did it… but this community don’t want people to know, you want to look like you’re a pillar of spiritual, you know, a very spiritual person, and you’re just totally committed to the message of the church. So there’s no reason to cheat. Yeah, I think that’s also another input. But when you look at the vegetarian and vegan diet, within that Adventist Health Study, veganism means you eat meat less than once a month. That’s not the message that gets out to the community. A vegan diet means absolutely none. So, their health benefits are because vegetarianism is defined as eating meat less than once a week. But they also group vegetarianism as the ovo-lacto and the pescatarians that eat fish. And so they’re all lumped under this term vegetarian. So I would argue that the people who’ve got a very healthy lifestyle, eat meat less than once a week, they eat fish, most days, they have milk and I have eggs, and they call themselves vegetarians. We don’t get that message when we’re out in the public. Right?
James Connolly
And we see the same thing when we study the diet of Mormons who abstain from alcohol, abstain from caffeine, smoking, have a tight-knit community, and are can be more generally sort of wealthier and better educated, affluent, but they eat meat and eat meat on a regular basis. And we see some, you know, many of the same positive health outcomes that kind of happen. And so yeah, it’s so many different lifestyle factors. And that’s sort of bringing nuance to the idea of like, you know, what is a proper diet, but we don’t seem to want that anymore.
Belinda Fettke
I know. It is and the marketing is hard, but then you think the church owns 21 food industries around the world that are marketing highly processed food. So if you look at this group in Loma Linda, yes, you might have some people who are very strict and well educated and affluent and doing all the right things, have access to medicines if they need them. But I’ve spoken to other people in other church areas that are of poor communities. And they said they’re encouraged to eat – there are food industries and food outlets for them to eat the processed food that the church and Adventist have made. And they’re not necessarily the healthy foods, and then they’re probably supplementing it with junk food. And maybe because they’re not in Loma Linda, and I don’t think they’ve got very high alcohol or smoking rates, but junk food and sugars and things like that. I think it’s unfair to highlight a particular area as the pinnacle when it’s the pinnacle because of all of those other factors we’ve talked about. Not necessary the whole church in Australia, about 10 years ago, they actually did a big study of the pastors in the church, and they were very, very unhealthy. And they just said, look, we’ve been teaching the health reform message and we haven’t been fighting it. So then they start doing it. And as you know, if you go vegetarian or vegan, and you cut out all the junk food and everything else, you’re going to lose weight because you’re cutting out the junk food.
James Connolly
I mean, you can find, I think, within especially Loma Linda University, a lot of sort of confluence between the ethical vegan movement – Neil Barnard has presented there many times. It’s almost a revolving door between a lot of sort of ethical veganism. Plus you also have, when you watch a lot of the vegan documentaries, you have a lot of doctors who are Seventh Day Adventists who will advocate for that. And so there is between the ideas of What the Health and Cowspiracy and especially Neal Barnard’s work, there’s so much of a confluence and emerging of ideas that the two actually support each other.
Belinda Fettke
Now, I’ve found in my research as well, I’ve looked at the what I call a symbiotic relationship between the Seventh Day Adventist churches, public health message, which is the Garden of Eden diet, and the commercial interests from what in my case, particularly Coca Cola, and their determination as a public health message to minimize the harms of sugar. And they both are very happy to demonize animal proteins and fats, because it produces that vegetarian vegan thing. So you eat less, and you move more. And they can prescribe lifestyle medicine, they can prescribe exercises, medicine, these two groups, even though they’re quite different, that have a symbiotic relationship, and I and I just look at the food industry that the church owns and I think it’s not about the individuals within that church. It’s I’m talking the commercial, the corporate church very much so and the influences in well, Joan Sabate was in the US 2020 Dietary Guidelines Committee. So we’re looking at people who have got a huge influence in this space, but are coming in with a religious ideology, and not necessarily a financial conflict of interest. I know in America, you’ve got the Sunshine Act, we don’t have that in Australia. So when I’ve tried to look to see people’s conflict of interest, I mean, we don’t even have a university that will teach medicine here. So at least, I was able to work out who some of the people are who are Seventh Day Adventist with an ideology because of where they’ve studied and where they’ve spent schooling and all sorts of things. Whereas here in Australia, it’s been really, really hard. I’ve only been able to work out financial conflicts of interest, mostly when they’ve done work with someone in America. And in that research, they’ve had to determine who they’ve been funded by. So,
James Connolly
But again, like I do think it’s, I find it generally interesting, because they do believe they’re on the right side of history, and they don’t, they’re not particularly hiding this, right? So you will find in the global Adventist study, which was co-authored by Joan Sabate, as well, you can see them talking about their ministry and talking about growing this and in the very specifically that they will use biblical quotes from the book of Genesis talking about, you know, that thou shalt, they should only eat from the meat of the seed as a rationale for their proselytizing to the rest of the world. And so when even when I’ve sent this to people who are very heavily influenced by the sort of plant-based movement, to say, Well, why don’t you take a look at this and see, especially if they say something about that the American Dietetics Association or any number of these different organizations say that a well-planned vegan or vegetarian diet is safe for all stages of life. I’m like, Well, who wrote that? And you know, what percentage of those people had an ideology that maybe you should just know a little bit about? And let’s talk about their history and why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Belinda Fettke
If you go back, Kathleen Sorba was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, she was the head of the American Dietetics Association when vegetarianism was accepted as a position paper. So, yeah, the global influence of the Seventh-Day Adventist church on diet goes back. So Linda Cooper and co might have started going a little bit wishy-washy for a while because a lot of people were really going, “Well, you need meat and eggs and milk because we don’t have enough of your fake food to help us out.” So it wasn’t until you had Mervyn Harding. And I think this is where I was talking about the symbiotic relationship. You have Mervyn Harding in the 1950s decide from the College of Medical evangelists and a devout Adventist totally believing in medical evangelism and the health reform message being part of that wanting to do a doctoral dissertation under Fred Stare at Harvard University. And at the time, Fred Stare, was being paid by the food industry or his departments being paid masses to minimize the harms of sugar. And then you’ve got Mervyn Harding. So they did I think the first three papers on the Adventist Health Studies, where Mervyn Harding and Fred Stare, and this symbiotic relationship, I believe, between the food industry and the Seventh Day Adventist church, it just set for some reason perfectly. You’ve got to remember Fred Stare’s father owned the – I think it was Columbus Canning, or Continental Canning, so I can’t remember which one was one of them over there. And Harvard owned something like 68 million shares – the department that he was in, and 6-8 million shares in this canning company. Now, if Adventist wanted to produce nut meats, soy meats, fruit, vegetables, all these things. They’ve got to be canned. A lot of those to keep them, they can. So again, where does this relationship go in creating this? But, so for instance, Fred Stare and Mervyn Harding were the first, then you had U.D. Register, he went and spoke at the Senate Select Committee about the importance of vegetarian diets. And his article in one of the Adventist papers says he was there to prove not disprove divine inspiration. So all of this work, this is a higher purpose. And I think people have to understand this isn’t about just some money. This is perhaps salvation for these people to get this message through. It’s not just someone who’s just doing it as a paid job. This is a true deep belief by a lot of people. And then you say you’ve got patterns are when you get to keep going further and further through the American Dietetic Association as to their influence and getting these vegetarian and vegan position papers up and going. And so I was looking at the American one and Rhys southern had done a lot of work into that. I don’t know if you’ve seen his work, his websites come down now, but it was brilliant. And so I went online to look and see what the Australian one is. Our vegetarian position paper was wholly and solely produced by the Seventh Day Adventist Church by Sanitarium and one by Kellogg’s. But, I just went, are you kidding me? So the Dietitians Association in Australia is educated by the Seventh Day Adventist Church and commercial and their commercial arms, Kellogg’s and Sanitarium. Even though Kellogg’s isn’t owned by the church. Do dietitians even realize this? And in Australia, they’re not the only the accrediting body, the educational body and their regulatory body and this body is taking money from the cereal industry and giving it to them as the gospel truth.
James Connolly
You know, when we see like, say, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to limit the consumption of a you know, I don’t really remember it was actually fairly reasonable for like a governmental action. Do you want to limit consumption of the sort of big gulps in New York City and Pepsi came out fullsteam, the you know, they’re trying to limit your freedom and every single choice, your choice, your choice to destroy your own body, any number of different things when we see that we say, Alright, look, there’s a consortium of people who it’s in their interest and financial interests to manipulate the conversation in so many different ways. We see it in advertising all the time. We see it in propaganda, we see PR relationships between the fossil fuel industry and the PR companies. We see it in terms of the cigarette industry, and commercials and you know, how this sort of correlation between even lung cancer and smoking, right we see all of that stuff we say, “Look, this is conspiracy. This is how it’s operated.” And then we get into religion where we say, “Oh no. It couldn’t possibly be.”
Belinda Fettke
And I agree, yeah, I grew up as a Christian I used to teach Sunday school as I was going, this is really confronting to actually talk about a religion as well. I didn’t talk about my research for about two and a half years publicly, and just poor Gary is going, she’s lost the plot. Instead of talking about food industry, she’s just focusing on this church. But the more and more that we learn to understand and how I believe Gary was targeted by the cereal industry, of which Sanitarium was a very powerful one. But that expert witness, I didn’t find information about till about 2019. So it was after the case at all finished, but I found him going all the way back to 2000. And he was involved with the union of what is IU in its International Union of Nutrition Science. He was the president of that for a couple of years. And he was very, very keen to get planetary health into dietetics. So this group had a Gisun declaration, and they determined with his name, Justin Leeban? In Germany and so they had this big meeting there. I found a photo so Gary’s expert witness, Mark Ahlquist. He’s there. Tim Noakes’s expert witness against him, Esther Vorster is there. Joan Sabate is there, like, talking about a group of people in 2004 might have been maybe it was later that so many dates in my head, but they were at this huge meeting, determining that dietetics had to include planetary health. And I’m fascinated that the coordination of Gary and Tim Noakes as cases were almost identical, that same period, I think Tim Noakes was cleared sooner than Gary. But they started almost exactly the same time. And here’s Esther Vorster, in South Africa, and Mark Ahlquist is here in Australia. And they’ve both been at this meeting, determining that we should be reducing meat and getting rid of meat out of our diet. Mark Ahlquist’s working for Sanitarium, he’s putting out things in the newspapers saying meat will cause cancer. And I don’t think we’ve understood where this messaging is coming from. And I believe it’s a combination of industry and ideology that just sits so nicely demonizing animal proteins and fats.
James Connolly
Yeah. I had recently I had a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer. And, you know, she’ll be fine, I think. She went to the doctor. And you know, just during the moments of conversation, as they were kind of working through prognosis and how to move forward. She was like, Is there anything that I can do lifestyle-related, that will help my recovery or reduce my chances of it coming back? And then the only thing this doctor said was reduce your meat consumption? That’s it.
Belinda Fettke
Well, they didn’t tell Gary to reduce meat, but they taught him to have a lot of sugar. They didn’t give him any nutrition advice. And when you start to realize that it’s an option, I mean, this is what Gary’s saying, why can’t we give advice, okay. Maybe not everyone can go low carb, maybe not anyone can give up their sugar, but people should be given the right to make that choice. And to have a go because your friend would know, when you have cancer, you feel like you have no control of what’s happening, you know, not saying the radiotherapy and chemotherapy and surgery wasn’t all needed at the time Gary’s was diagnosed because it had become very extensive, and it was a very aggressive tumor. But he was not given any dietary advice whatsoever. And he was on chemotherapy for 11 and a half years. As a practicing doctor, you know, he was just, he was brilliant, but it does make you sick. And when he worked out that he could reduce the sugar, anything else within a year, under supervision, he was able to come off chemotherapy, and he’s never gone back onto it because it does not slow down his tumor, as much as changing his diet. So, you know, I think that’s fascinating. They’ve done the PET scans, they’ve tried different chemo, they’ve done different things, and nothing uptakes like glucose, and seems to slow it down in the same way and then to have all those side effects of the chemotherapy to live with, compared to the side effect of giving up sugar. He’s decided that’s pretty much what he wants to do.
James Connolly
I mean, obviously, science is always changing. But we’ve studied this for so long. Otto Warburg, in Germany 1930s was working on… the book, Ravenous goes very deeply into this. The effects of glucose and fructose on cancer development was being studied back then. And you know, just find it so hard that we’d like to feel like we were in this circle. Constantly reliving experiences, you know.
Belinda Fettke
I just wanted to talk a little bit about Sanitarium and I don’t know if it’s the same in America, so speaking from an Australian perspective here, but this company, Sanitarium, not only do they provide resources for doctors, and at the time I was looking into them and calling it out. They’ve since made it that you have to go through a couple of steps to get there without providing resources branded as Sanitarium, and often recommending their own products in within these documents, that doctors just had to push with a click of a button on their computer to give out a fact sheet to a patient, for cancer, for diabetes, for anything and everything and everything was high carb, minimize meat, sometimes no meat. They tried to do it as cleverly as they could. But these doctors haven’t even thought like Sanitarium has got such a health and wellbeing… that’s how they call themselves the health and wellbeing company. They’ve managed to brainwash Australians to believe that they know the best about our health. The doctors were prepared to print off fact sheets for patients to take home to work out how to eat for all sorts of conditions. And they even have on some of them for the Type 2 diabetes that even had sugar does not have to be restricted. And it was endorsed by Diabetes Australia. Wow, you know, where is this coming from? So they are in Australia, Sanitarium are the biggest provider of corporate wellness programs. So, you know, it’s at every level. It’s not just the food that they’re producing. And if you go to the church, but they’re running cooking classes to people, and this corporate wellness program that they’re running throughout Australia and New Zealand, the corporate wellness program that they use about nutrition is called well, it’s a slightly broader than just nutrition, but it’s a big one, and it was called the Complete Health Improvement Program. Hans Diehl at Loma Linda devised it after working for Nathan Pritikin. So a lot of people would have heard of the Pritikin diet. So Hans Diehl had studied at Loma Linda moved to work with Nathan Pritikin, and I was thinking, is Nathan Pritikin a Seventh-Day Adventist? Yeah, I’ve sometimes you have cognitive dissonance and you spend a lot of time trying to find and prove something. The best I could find was that he had read Ellen G. White’s books during the Second World War, and was fascinated by the books and adopted her principles. I don’t know if he ever became an Adventist. Can’t prove that. But he was an adjunct professor at Loma Linda University. Hans Diehl went to work as a politician and created this CHIP program, which is if you look at it, they say it’s vegetarian and veganism is not a mandate for using this program. And we know we don’t do it. But if you have a look at one of the facilitator pages, meat, dairy, eggs, then caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and then processed food. Meat and eggs, and dairy are the top of the red panel that says the worst possible health outcomes and reduce those. And it’s been rebranded in America, it was the Complete Health Improvement Program that Sanitarium bought the rights to from Hans Diehl, it’s now been rebranded as PVO Health, so don’t think it’s not there running through your health and wellness programs, corporate wellness programs, Cummins, Inc had it, Vanderbilt University.
James Connolly
Yeah, I read an interview, Seven Day Adventists interview with Pritikin. It seems to be the he didn’t necessarily kind of want to go anywhere near a lot of the sort of religious religio-spiritual elements of it, but I think they had alignment there. But I thought Pritikin was he was the doctor who treated Dr. Michael Gregers mother grandmother, and then kind of like sort of red-pilled him into vegetarianism and veganism. Just realize like how small this little world is, you start pulling it strings and you’re like…
Belinda Fettke
Senator McGovern read Nathan Pritikin’s eulogy. So yeah, and then you’ve got Nick Modern, who wrote the dietary goals for the US. And he was a vegetarian. I’ve heard, I can’t prove it, but I have read that he was a Seventh Day Adventist. So that’s a really interesting concept as well. Here’s someone who’s writing the dietary goals. You’ve got Nathan Pritikin influencing George McGovern, and you’ve got his aide, Nick Modern writing the goals. And certainly that 50 years ago, the demonization of animal fats became a government determination. Yeah, a government consensus. And I believe that was hugely influenced by also some of the top researchers at Loma Linda University or the College of Medical, college of medical evangelists was something that they were presenting at that Senate Select Committee too.
James Connolly
Yeah, let’s kind of move on to what we were discussing before we started recording, like what’s happening now? No, because I do think it’s like…
Belinda Fettke
We sort of laid it background.
James Connolly
Yeah. We laid a background. So many different things. And I don’t want to necessarily lose the audience because I think it’s so important that we start to understand the level to which the influences. So please go tell me what’s going on.
Belinda Fettke
I believe the Adventist Health Reform message is literally sweeping across America, and embedding itself into the very fabric of your society. And my fear is if it happens there, you’ll come here next, because we tend to follow your dietary guidelines and all of those things, and we just don’t want it. So what I looked at was, so I’ve been researching Lifestyle Medicine for a very long time. Loma Linda University was the campus where the Christian Association of Lifestyle Medicine was founded in 2003. They changed the name to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine in 2004. But all nine committee members and higher-ups were all Seventh Day Adventists at Loma Linda University at that time, so the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, again, it’s that talk of it’s based, it’s actually rooted in the beliefs of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and it won’t change because these people are still hugely influential in that space, and it started with them. You’ve also got Harvard University who… you got Eddie Phillips, “exercise is medicine,” Coca-Cola funding. So Eddie Phillips, and Steven Blair, from Coca Cola joined Lifestyle Medicine, I think in 2010-2011. And certainly Coca Cola was funding their events by 2012, including the Global Energy Balance network at the time. This is like, so you’ve got these two entities, again, that symbiotic relationship, which I keep looking at from prohibition, it’s the church and Coca-Cola. But it’s bigger than that. But these two entities that just massive, and they both want to demonize animal protein and fat.
James Connolly
Yeah, and for context of a lot of the energy balance network stuff is really, I mean, we hear this all the time, it’s a mantra, it is just spoken over, and over and over again, we need to move more and eat less, move more and eat less. And that’s really devised by these institutions.
Belinda Fettke
And Coca-Cola founded and funded the Global Energy Balance Network was called out by a New York Times, I think, in 2015. So it collapsed. But my belief is, they don’t mind that that got called out because they’d already embedded themselves into Lifestyle Medicine, and Lifestyle Medicine is running global exams everywhere, like it’s embedding itself into third world countries, major Asian countries, Australia, of course, and everywhere else. So this Lifestyle Medicine when people hear their endless, benevolent agenda of there’s more and all sorts of other things sleeping and alcohol, mental health, whatever. But the diet… in Australia we say, “Well, we’re not part of the church, no.” Where the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine said, yes. But as soon as someone joins, and they do the exams that are set by America, they’re being indoctrinated into this demonization of animal proteins and fats. And when you keep reading this and you keep doing this, you will be indoctrinated into that message. So that’s there, then you’ve got it last October 89th US Congress of Mayors, last year 1400 mayors of cities of 30,000, or more signed to agree to adopt the Blue Zones. Now most people have heard of Blue Zones and health and wellness, longevity. They were primarily founded by Michel Poulain, and Giovanni Pes and demographers doing PhD research into statistics. They discovered geographically isolated places for that they considered had this health and wellness and longevity through statistics where they looked at their birth certificates through to death certificates that they were able to access. And there’s a lot of questioning happening around that, especially by a guy called Saul Newman here in Australia. He’s questioning the loss of some of those birth certificates and then reinventing their ages to get pensions and whatever else. But yeah, let’s just look at these geographically isolated places where people spent their entire lives. They tended to be poorer, but they were self-sufficient. Yes, they did eat plants, but they also had livestock and they had some of the areas had chickens. Some of those had pigs, some had goats and sheep. All of them had raw milk, yogurt and cheese. And this concept that’s come through as a Blue Zone, as a branding – since Dan Buettner in 2005, decided that an American area had to be designated as well because it didn’t look so good. You can’t prescribe a pill. So what they determined to do is prescribe a lifestyle. Yeah, let’s brand this and we will bring a Blue Zone to your community. We can turn your community into a Blue Zone to improve the longevity and the health and wellness of your area. So 1400 mayors have signed up for this. And when it is passed as a resolution, it becomes official policy that is then given to Congress and passed on to the President of the United States. If you look at the documentation in this blue zones project, the branding of it, it says it’s a 95 to 100% plant slant. In fact, you really should get rid of all meat. These original blue zone areas did… They even ate lard from pigs! Shock! Horror! They weren’t vegan, but Loma Linda, the one that Dan Buettner does describe as a Blue Zone – it’s a… we talked about before, you know, well-educated tend to be more affluent. And these people have moved there for education at the University for maybe health, to work in the hospital, it’s a massive hospital, I’ve been to Loma Linda. I had to go and visit it. I came to America and I said to Gary, please. And you know, I talk about it and I say that I’m concerned about a lot of the things with the church. I have to admire Ellen G. White and all that she achieved, got to sit in her seat and look at this hill, lovely and see, you know, where her inspiration came from and just walk those streets and think this woman has just influenced so much. This diminutive little person who says that she was getting visions from God, it has honestly, I believe impacted our world hugely. And no one has really even heard about it till the 1990s, when someone said that they were going to hack into all of the archives and put them all online, if the Seventh Day Adventist Church didn’t put them up themselves. And so that’s how many more people have found out about it. Obviously, Ronald Numbers was writing about his concerns from the 1970s. But as a, as a general public, I mean, we still mostly don’t know about her, but it certainly became a bigger understanding of the church. And you can certainly access a lot of the resources and things. But if you’ve got this group, now planning to commit to 75 communities on the West Coast and Hawaii that… sorry, I didn’t say Adventist Health bought it, did I?
Belinda Fettke
Adventist Health bought the Blue Zones, or the rights of the Blue Zones Project in 2020. So not only have you got this group saying it’s 95 to 100%, plant-slant, but now you’ve got it backed by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. They bought the rights in 2020. And this has just been passed by the US Congress of Mayors. And even the Blue Zones, if you look it up, they’re planning to run it all across the west coast and Hawaii, 75 communities, and 10 million people becoming Blue Zone certified. And one of the documents I found in 2019, the certification cost six and a half million dollars for that community to become a Blue Zone certified community. So sorry, that’s right. Or rolling around each other. But yes, so it’s not cheap. And they’re certainly it’s got a seemingly endless Neverland agenda with all of the wonderful things that they’re going to do create, bike paths and do all this. But they’re determining they’re going to take this vegan messaging into restaurants and schools and all the things. I know it’s already happening a bit, but it will become official policy to be certified as a Blue Zones community.
James Connolly
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think if you are, because we’ve seen this in London, and we’ve seen this in a lot of European cities as well, you know, I think, New York, I mean, who knows what New York will decide to do. But I think when you look at transitioning people to a plant-based diet, which which it already is the global diet, the American diet. It doesn’t matter where you go, we’re all plant primarily plant-based, it seems like a no-brainer to kind of move towards that. Because you say, look, these studies say that people will be healthier, the less coronary heart disease, there’s less rates of cancer, all of that stuff. But you don’t actually have to do any of the other things that are associated with the blue zone. You don’t have to build community, you have to create an environment where somebody’s not working 90 hours a week, you don’t have to do any of that all you’re doing is to essentially virtue signaling to the rest of the world that you’re moving towards a healthier and you can ignore all of the rest of this stuff, which I just find it so frustrating. I’m deeply paying attention to a lot of the messaging that’s coming out of this because we are seeing within nongovernmental organizations plus this the environmental sustainability goals, and the multinational corporations like Unilever and Nestle, Kellogg’s, Morningstar Foods, any number of different organizations that are already aligned with because they have access to these cheap commodities that they can process into things that look like meats, meat amalgams. You know, you feel like you’re living 100 years ago, right? Like Kellogg’s just came out with [garbled], you know, peanut butter thing that looks like a meatloaf.
Belinda Fettke
Gelatinous
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, you just feel like we’re reliving all of it in a way. At the end of the 19th century, in the early part of the 20th century, we had farm crises, we had a global population, we had a Malthusian complex, that we were going to way overshoot population growth. And so therefore, every nation state sought scramble for Africa, or, you know, new territory for farmland, all of that stuff is all happening in real-time right now, almost to the letter, right, in terms of 100 years ago. And the natural result of that, obviously, is this sort of territorial expansion that then ends up in war. You know, but it’s these ideologies that are pushing a lot of this stuff. And so thank God we have found communities like that we’ve found online of people from Tasmania, in Australia, and South Africa, and, you know, Belgium and London, the UK. And thank God Diana is just going all over the place.
Belinda Fettke
I know she’s coming to speak in Australia. I wish I could get up to Brisbane to hear. I mean, it’s very exciting. And honestly, I just have to plug for Sacred Cow here. I just loved that documentary. And I think it was… what was so good about it was it really marketed itself to younger people – show how younger farmers and I can tell you here in Tasmania, we have got some really innovative younger farmers working on some amazing things. So if ever, you would only get a chance to come down here. It’s just stunning. And we are lucky. We are blessed to be on this island community that has incredible natural resources. And the cows out the back of me just here they are on natural pasture. So this idea, but that’s what Sanitarium’s doing their marketing, they’ve got their alternative meat company. So it’s hidden under a multitude of umbrellas, really that even belongs to Sanitarium. So Sanitarium produce alternative milks and cereals under their main branding. They also produce liquid breakfasts, which is so processed, it isn’t funny. But then they have another umbrella and another umbrella to get down to this alternative meat company, which is really, really targeting the millennials looking for world solutions, as they say. And so you know, they’ve got the graphics up, the cows are just so bad, like this massive picture of a cow and how much water they’re taking up. And then you’ve got, say two-thirds of Australia becoming vegan? Well, pretty much to I don’t know how they get to that. But I’ve found that Sanitarium, their Life Health foods brand, they’ve been marketing with. Gosh, what’s his name? The guy who was very involved with the Eat Lancet, the young guy who – Food Frontiers. So they’ve been doing big studies with them. And you would not know it was from Sanitarium. You would not know it was from a church, and they’re talking about how important alternative meats will be because of disease in cows because of this because there’s so much water. The propaganda and the marketing that they’re doing is just so different to the marketing from the church, which is why I say it’s the corporate church is becoming a real concern here in Australia. And it’s the corporate church that’s pushing veganism and working with companies to create alternatives. They’re really pushing very, very hard. And they’re even creating alternative barista milks, which again, to me just does not make any sense because the church – Ellen G. White originally said reduce sugar. She said no caffeine, and here they are making barista milk so their company will make money off people drinking coffee, or caffeine. So if the corporate church isn’t aligning necessarily, in all its messaging – Sanitarium might look like it is but its subsidiaries aren’t necessary. So it’s about profit. And this is the concern. I say that vested interests and religious ideology have this symbiotic relationship protecting profits and a prophet. But they merge and they blend and we need to get the church off the table, separate church and plate and we need to work out how do we get this messaging out further because I think, as you said right at the very beginning, James, people do not understand how much religious ideology the global influence of the church on our diet and not just our diet, but our dietary guidelines, and fact sheets coming from doctors, health and wellness programs. Like this Lifestyle Medicine will do the same. They’re… the American College of Lifestyle Medicine endorse all of these Seventh Day Adventist Church programs as corporate wellness programs too, so it’s a real concern.
James Connolly
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and so now it’s just, it’s, it’s part of the air we breathe. We’re fishing water. And we think that this is normative. And when we see the explosions in diabetes, or we see explosions, what used to be called adult-onset diabetes is now called type two diabetes because it affects children. And you’re seeing, you know, kids have to take insulin shots, and we see the explosion in obesity. So it’s just incumbent upon us to be so much more aware of what is happening to us and who is preying off of the seminal moments in children’s lives, right? Where’s Coca-Cola? They’re at every baseball game, every soccer field, every pitch, they’ve infiltrated high schools, and, you know, grammar schools…
Belinda Fettke
Infiltrated medical education.
James Connolly
The people are supposed to heal us from the toxic environment.
Belinda Fettke
And so that’s why I’m saying our doctors have feared saturated fat since the 1970s. And now, this Lifestyle Medicine, they are working on getting the demonization of animal proteins and animal fats into medical education in America, they’re already got it into, I think, at least eight universities included, including Stanford, Harvard, and Loma Linda University, of course. And they’re wanting to bring it into medical education here through the Australian Society of Lifestyle Medicine. And I’m the one jumping up and down going, “No, no!” And they did actually send out a newsletter saying someone was suggesting that they are a religious group, some bad person. And I said my name because I’m the only one doing it. But again, if we don’t understand where this anti-meat, anti-saturated fat message is coming from, how can we fight it back with science? And what you and Diana have done, where you guys are going is that meat is not just important for people’s health, but livestock so important for planetary health. And I can prove to you – Gary did a talk. And he went picked up one of the cow pat’s down there and just was telling you, right, this is full of nutrients. This is just so healthy, and he’s pulling up a teaspoon. And we’ve forgotten where our foods coming from which I think Sacred Cow did a beautiful job of reminding people, this is where our food is coming from. It’s not just the supermarket, and here in Tassie, we can see ours. We can see animals, we can see where our milk is coming from, like, it’s very different compared to being in New York City where you may not see a single animal. And this reconnection, I think, with where our foods coming from is so important in moving forward. But we also need to challenge this anti-meat narrative because I don’t believe it’s about health of anything. I think, unfortunately, it’s very, very much driven by a religious ideology and a corporate vested interest in profitability. And it’s, that’s so sad, and it’s causing us to band-aid sick care because our doctors are falling for it.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, I just feel for doctors because then you’re, you have so little choice, the protocols put in place when somebody starts to, you know, over the course of their lifetime, sort of fall into a place where they’re taking medications for chronic disease. Most of it is metabolic dysfunction, or they’re, you know, dealing with all of that stuff. And then they get blamed, right, they didn’t exercise enough. They didn’t move enough. You know, they’re gluttons. We know… I mean, that’s part of the reason why we had Walter Willett in our film, he said, we’ve known for generations that if you want to make people, you know, enormously obese, you lock them in cages, you know, you… animals, if you want to make animals enormously obese, you lock them in cages, and you feed them grains. I mean, this is the Harvard epidemiologist, right? And so this is what we’ve done. And now this – I watched in real-time, the transformation of the processed food industry into the plant-based agenda. It used to be called margarine. Now it’s called plant-based butter. And…
Belinda Fettke
Do you know who called it plant-based? Colin… Colin T. Campbell claims that he used plant-based as a euphemism for vegetarian or veganism because it was going to be much more palatable. He claims that he was the one who turned that. Yes. Yeah.
James Connolly
Yeah. A lot of studies looked into that. I had heard Earthling Ed say this on a talk. He said that they looked into individuals within society that most people consider to be really abhorrent people, and two, they found the absolute top of the list were vegans and drug addicts, for whatever reason. This is him talking. This is not me saying it.
Belinda Fettke
But Gary would say that maybe people who’ve been vegan for a very long time actually start to have changes in their mental health.
James Connolly
Lierre Keith talks about that she would, she just had no ability to regulate emotion anymore. She would alternate between just total despair and anger. But I think so when you get the corporate influence, they focus the groups together and they say, alright, we’ll have we can’t call this vegan because watch it’ll be a decline in sales. So what do we do? What is the word that we can use? Yes, it’s green. It’s plant-based. And so like, what is what is the symbology behind that and who doesn’t like plants?
Belinda Fettke
Pretty leaf. It all looks so pretty. Yes. Yeah, exactly.
James Connolly
I mean, it’s, you know, we have red lights and green lights, right. Green lights mean, go. Red meat? Oh, you know, stop. But we can continue this forever.
Belinda Fettke
I know. I know. But I do think it’s great.
James Connolly
Yeah, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. You know, I know it’s years of research and years of work and putting into a narrative that I think people can really understand. And looking into all of that is just a wonderful,
Belinda Fettke
I just wanted to clear Gary’s name at the beginning. And so that’s the only reason I was doing it. But then I actually became so fascinated with the research, I just going this is amazing. History is amazing. And we even thought history stopped at 1977 for a while, and a lot of people, not everyone, obviously. But in our little community, it was 1977. And actually goes way back beyond then. And I really appreciate the fact that you’ve invited me on to have a discussion about it all because, as you say, we could just talk all day going, Oh, my gosh. But I do think it’s very concerning that this Adventist Health Reform message is just permeating so much of our society without us realizing, and particularly medical education, and this blue zones, so watch out for it.
James Connolly
All right, we’ll sign off on that. And thank you so much.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you liked the show, please leave a review on iTunes. And if you’d like to support the work I’m doing on Patreon, please visit sustainabledish.com/join. As a Patreon subscriber, you’ll get access to ad-free podcasts, plus exclusive video podcasts, never before seen interviews, and a discussion community. Go to sustainabledish.com/join, and thank you for your support.
