What if it’s all been a big fat public relations campaign?

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Bill Shrapnel

If your job was to sell products rich in saturated fat, current nutrition guidelines and policies would be a real impediment. So what would you do?

In the 1980s, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson became a media personality hosting a television series dealing with ‘Hypotheticals’. He would outline a hypothetical situation and then invite prominent citizens to play imagined roles of the key players addressing various aspects of the situation, thereby exposing the various interests at play.

Let’s play ‘Hypotheticals’. I’ll be the moderator. You can play the role of the food company Chief Executive, Public Relations Guru or Ethicist.

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Sugar as a measure of nutritional quality: more from ILSI

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Bill Shrapnel

I concluded my presentation at the recent ILSI carbohydrate symposium by stating that sugar content is a poor measure of the nutritional quality of a carbohydrate-rich food. Here is a summary of the argument presented.

Discriminating between carbohydrate-rich foods

To illustrate the argument I used the model for discriminating between carbohydrate-rich foods developed by Professor Manny Noakes and myself. For more information on this model please refer to my previous post or the published paper.

In brief, the model is based on nutrient density and glycaemic index (GI). Nutrient density was chosen as it reflects the fundamental nutritional role of foods – the delivery of essential nutrients. And GI was chosen because it relates to the physiological effect of the carbohydrate itself. When carbohydrate-rich foods are run through the model they end up in one of four carbohydrate quality quadrants.

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