It's NOT about the Science!

EPISODE #87 IS LIVE! 

Metabolic Wellbeing Without the BS is back with another thought-provoking conversation.

This week I'm joined by Belinda Fettke for an episode titled:

"It's NOT About the Science!!!"

Together, we explore some of the biggest questions surrounding nutrition and public health...

 Who is Gary Fettke? Why has sugar become so deeply embedded in our food system? What vested interests have shaped nutritional guidelines? Why are ancestral lifestyles often missing from discussions about longevity, including the Blue Zones? What role has religious ideology played in influencing dietary advice? Who really decides what we eat... and why?

Belinda has spent over a decade researching the history behind modern nutrition policy, commercial influence and public health messaging. Whether you agree with every perspective or not, this conversation is designed to make you think, ask questions and explore the evidence for yourself.

 If you're passionate about metabolic health, nutrition and challenging conventional thinking, this episode is for you. A small favour...

This podcast is completely self-funded. Every episode is created independently because I believe these conversations matter.

If you've found value in the podcast and would like to help me continue bringing these conversations to you, any financial support—no matter how small—would be hugely appreciated. Your support helps cover production costs and keeps the podcast independent.

 Thank you to everyone who listens, shares, comments and supports the journey. It genuinely means the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, and welcome to another edition of Metabolic Wellbeing Without the BS. I'm Martin Gillespie, and we have a trailblazer from the wonderful place called Tasmania. Belinda Fekke, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Thanks so much, Martin. I can't believe I've travelled all the way over to Glasgow. It's very exciting.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Belinda, I've had the pleasure of knowing who you are for a very long time. But if I was to ask you the question, who is Belinda Fekke?

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Well, in the last 10 years, last 12 years, I guess a lot more people know who I am than they did before then. Martin, I had no idea when my husband, an orthopedic surgeon in Tasmania, decided to start recommending to his patients who were having to have deprivedment or even amputations of their lower feet, their forefoot, their even their lower legs from complications of type 2 diabetes, when he decided to speak up and as say start recommending reducing sugar and reducing processed carbohydrates. I think back in 2011, certainly by 2012, he was becoming quite vocal. And to think that he would get into trouble by the medical board. He was actually reported to the medical board by a dietitian here at his hospital. And so I often say I was thrown in the deep end of having to try to work out firstly how to get his name cleared. He was talking science till he was blue in the face. So were other people from this low-carb down under group that he joined. And I watched them all and I said to them, it's not about the science, guys. There's something bigger than this. There's something that's shaping dietary guidelines and health guidelines, and it doesn't want to know the science. So who knew? I would go right back into the pages of history to find these answers. I also never knew that I that religion played such a huge part globally in determining what people eat, when they eat, and why. Well, I suppose religion is why. That was my big question. And also the vested interests. There are so many vested interests, all the way from food, pharma, biochemical, you know, everything we've got. People wanting to shape this, I guess, processed food. They want to push that. They want to push a plant-based diet. And the way they do that is by demonizing animal proteins and fats. And I expected it just to be about sugar to start with, honestly, Martin. I just went, this expert witness that was brought into Gary's case must work for the sugar industry. But I was really, really surprised that I worked for a cereal industry here in Australia called sanitarium. Patented to take the place of flesh, meat, eggs, milk, and butter. And it's been an amazing 10 years. It started off probably as a passion. I was determined, I say, when Cereal Fabreckie came after my husband, the mama bear came out. And that's when I started getting laughs very vocal on social media and had an incredible response from these people who really, really helped us. You were part of that group to help us get Gary's name cleared. And it was by 2018, but for four and a half years, he was under investigation and silenced from talking about nutrition, talking about reducing sugar to his patients that were being harmed by this particular food. He wasn't saying they had to recommend that it would improve their health outcomes should they choose to do that. And there were some miracle results. One day he actually skipped down the hallway to me and he said, out of 2011. You won't believe this. When everybody knows what I know about type 2 diabetes, it's not going to be here anymore. And what are we? 2026 now. So yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of um push back to this messaging. But thank you for being on this journey with us and um let's keep being noisy.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Belinda, so many things there. And for the listeners, just to sort of clarify a little bit, you mentioned the work of your incredible husband in a nutshell. Who the hell is Gary?

SPEAKER_01 4:46

I met Gary when I was 16 years old, Martin, and he was 18. So I didn't make an adult decision in my life without him. I wasn't an adult. Um anyway, yes, we've been together for a very, very long time. And I think he is a say, an orthopaedic surgeon here in Tasmania. Sorry, I don't even hear my dog making so much note. Um he's an orthopedic surgeon here in Tasmania or was for 20 years. We originally were from Sydney and then we moved to Melbourne, and it's been an incredible journey of um understanding, understanding where um the dietary guidelines have come from. As I say, Gary was following the guidelines, he was telling people to eat low-fat diets, he was telling them to eat carbohydrates, because obviously that was important. He was telling people to exercise to improve their health, even though he wasn't an exercise physiologist. He was able to even encourage people to reduce smoking. And all of these things he just said, but you know, 20 years ago, he might have seen someone, or almost 30 years ago now, once or twice that needed an amputation of their leg for complications of type 2 diabetes. It was so rare. It was diabetes when I was a nurse back in the 80s, and that was because it really didn't happen until people were nearing retirement age or had well and truly retired. And now it's happening in younger and younger people. So by the time I think around 2016, Gary was seeing someone every single week in his clinic in northern Tasmania with a catchment of about 120,000 people, every week requiring some sort of debridment or a surgical amputation of a toe, a forefoot, or a lower leg. It was like he describes it as being like leprosy, Martin. It was it was non-communicable disease. And when he started to work out that sugar was impacting their not only their blood glucose levels and causing it to go on a roller coaster, so producing more and more insulin, it was also a vasoconstrictor. So it was so the diabetic ulcerations that people get on their feet aren't fixed with an antibiotic. It is vasoconstriction of the vessels that are causing this harm. And so, unless you start getting the blood supply back into there, unless you start giving people healthy proteins and healthy animal, when I say proteins, sorry, animal proteins and animal fats, they are not going to heal with a high sugar, high carb diet. And he'd say, you know, people would be given these incredible meals. I don't know what it's like in Scotland, but I know when you were here in Australia, there the diets in hospital for people with diabetes include three desserts per day. Now, how can anyone control their blood glucose on that sort of diet? How can anyone stop having really high levels of insulin over and over and over again? It's almost criminal, I think. And the guidelines are slowly changing. Gary, James Mickey, a big group of incredible thought leaders in this space in Australia have really, really pushed. And finally, by November 2023, the guidelines for diabetes now include low carbohydrate diets as a safe option should people choose them. But at least they're there. Because Gary was told back in 2012, if he wanted this to be part of the guidelines, he had to change them. So that was his next mission. He was determined to change the guidelines. But it's taking a long time still now. You just see over and over, they're still pushing a plant-based diet.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

You mentioned earlier, Belinda, around the dietary guidelines, vested interest, and sort of a religious marriage, if that makes sense. Can you explain a little bit more around here and particular around when you had those light bulb moments to go, wait a minute, there's something, if you want to call it, dark here.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Well, I think Gary diagnosed it first. I was saying to invested interest, but he he just started to look at the actual dietary guidelines, that the circle circular plate we have here in Australia. And he said, Oh my gosh, it's just covered in processed food, and you have to send out a search and rescue party to find the meat and dairy. So that triggered a little thing in my mind to go, well, that's bizarre. What did they used to look like? And then we started going back and having a look and seeing meat and dairy gradually, you know, they were essential back in the 1950s. In the dietary guidelines, sort of plates and graphics that you could find. Meat and dairy were essential nutrients. And by the I don't know, the um 2010s, the 2012, whenever our dietary plate was out, there were they were hardly there. And I think that was very indicative of me starting to go, where's this plant-based messaging come from? You know, well, why is sugar okay? Because obviously you need to make low-fat food palatable. So, this is what the Dieticians Association of Australia would say that you need to eat more fiber, you need to eat more cereal, and if you're eating a low-fat diet, then some sugar is okay because that makes you eat all the things that are healthy, which is just ridiculous. Because I've done so much research into ancestral diets and I've looked at Weston A. Price's work, which we'll come to in a minute. But yes, going back to where did this messaging come from? As I say, the expert witness in Gary's case for two and a half years was a man called Professor Mark Walquist. And when I looked, normally if you're being investigated by the medical board, you are compared to someone, or the expert witness would be somebody who was a peer, so another orthopedic surgeon maybe in a different state, or certainly in Hobart compared to Lonceston, it might be someone who is sort of maybe even in Gary's case, because he was doing a lot of work that um uh a different surgeon might do in particular because it was um about um diabetes, so endocrinologists might even get involved in making some decisions whether talking about low sugar was was was it okay, what wasn't causing harm. Instead, the biggest gun in nutrition science in the Southeast Asian region ended up as the expert. Gary had a Facebook page at the time with about 5,000 people following him. So he'd already been targeted by Coca-Cola, and because he was no fructose, Gary Fecchi, no fructose, so he was really ramping it up about sugar. And again, we thought it must be the sugar industry, it must be Coca-Cola who's coming down hard. But as I say, when I looked at this man, he he was working for sanitarium. And a little bit later, this is years of research, Martin, before we could finally clear his name. So I think about 2015, I discovered that uh a group called Serial Fabrecki, well, they were trading as Serial Fabrecki hashtag. It was the Australian Breakfast Cereal Manufacturers Forum, and they were a group with Sanitarium, Kellogg's, Nestlé, and Freedom Foods here. They were meeting once every three months to discuss strategies of how to increase sales and what was impacting their sales. And my husband was named, he was the only medical doctor named within these documents that I uncovered, saying he was targeted for active defense. And they at the time they had a sponsorship deal, they had a partnership deal with the Dieticians Association of Australia for $23,000 per annum. And in that time frame, what they wanted to do was for the DAA, the Dieticians Association of Australia, to use their members. So individual dietitians may not have even understood that this was happening. This is the Dieticians Association of Australia is the peak body for dietetics. They educate, they accredit, and they regulate dietetics here in Australia. They were accepting money from the cereal industry to influence, protect, and actively defend cereal grains and even sugars messaging. I can't even explain to you, Martin, when I found this, and as I say, when Cyril Fabrecki came after my husband, the mama bear came out. And and this idea that the expert witness was working for sanitarium at the time, he'd been very involved in the setup of Dieticians Association of Australia. And here's this man saying, Oh no, you know, he needs to be silenced. So Gary was allowed to operate, he just couldn't open his mouth. So I opened my mouth very loud. And the more and more I looked to understand, because you were saying um earlier you were spent time in Sydney as well. Well, I grew up in Sydney's North Shore and was aware of the Sydney Adventist Hospital. And I thought in my head, well, they served vegetarian foods, you know, little bits came back to me, but you have no idea how big they've got a very small footprint, physical footprint, but the influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on our diet globally, and they've even written a paper about it, and their influence on so many things, like the Health Star ratings here in Australia, which is put on so many products. The algorithms were written by someone who was the chief technical officer of sanitarium at the time. So the Health Star ratings are valuing processed food and demonizing animal proteins and fats. This is why you get five stars for up and go, which is a sanitarium product. And if you look at it, it's a you say like a swear shitstorm of chemical additives. And and butter gets too. So I I just started to really look into this. Um, I found an amazing guy called Reese Reese Southern on the internet. Unfortunately, his web he's he's closed up, got sick of it. But he had it there for a long time, and he'd been investigating the role of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on the American Dietetics Association, ADA, which is now AND, the American Nutrition and Dietetics, I think they call it now. And done an amazing summary of all of this influence with incredible links, like everything was referenced. And so then I wanted to work out well, how is this impacting us here in Australia? And it was unbelievable. It it we could talk all day, so I won't waste everyone's time on that. I've written a lot about it, and they're most welcome to go to my website. Uh it's called issupportgarry.com, of course. And um, yeah, I've I've written a lot about all of those things, plus, I've got a lot of talks that I've given online if people are interested in going into that further.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

So, one of the things that actually, just to take the seven-day adventus angle, Belinda, it hasn't gone away, it's got stronger globally now, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 16:35

It's gotten stronger and stronger. And I suppose to put it in perspective, I think people might need to understand, it was founded in 1863. A group of people from 1844 had started to collect together, they were called the Young Flock, or the Little Flock, but by 1863 they're incorporated as a church. And the founding prophetess, Ellen G. White, she made the statement in 1863 that fruit, grains, nuts, and seeds are the God-appointed diet for man. And she believed that flesh meat not only defiled men but women and children, morally, physically, and spiritually. And this was taken into a health reform message that became what they considered the third angel's message and part of salvation. So, medical evangelism, she said, was the right arm of the church and this health reform message, their entering wedge, to be able to take their version of the gospel because it's slightly different from the biblical version or the Christian version of the gospel, their version of the gospel into places where really where religion couldn't be taken. So, for example, China. They go in there with health, they go in there setting up the Senate Adventist Church owned 23 food industries worldwide, and here in Australia they pay no tax because they come under the church's religious charity umbrella. There's an arm in um in the UK. So I noticed even the British swimming team in the last Olympics were being sponsored by Sanitarium here in Australia. So there you go. Drinking up and go, that would have been good for them. So it's it's really quite incredible this messaging that she's been able to take. I mean, who'd heard of Ellen G. White? I certainly hadn't. Hadn't understood her influence and and how just well, I say how influential she is and their messaging is going forward into dietary and health guidelines. And it's because of this purpose, like medical evangelism, the right arm of the church, the health reform message is the entering wedge, and they are very, very big iceberg. The health reform, the Adventist health reform message is literally sweeping across America and embedding itself into the very fabric of their society. And in Australia, we follow. So whatever's happening in America, we get here. And particularly, so jumping ahead only because we don't have a lot of time, um, I'm going to say that it's it's come through not only through their hospitals and their food industries globally, but also a very big influence from a group called Lifestyle Medicine. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine was founded on the Loma Linda University campus, which is owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in America in California. And so this lifestyle medicine is going globally. We've got a branch of it here in Australia. They've tried to separate themselves, they say, from the religious side of things, but they're still very much pushing a plant-based diet, and there's integral Seventh-day Adventists still involved, or this messaging still very much involved in their teaching. I think the blue zones has been bought by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. So this ancestral branding has suddenly. I often say, how can their lived experience become a lifestyle prescription? And it's through lifestyle medicine and the blue zone branding. So that's also the American College of Lifestyle Medicine have now started credentialing Blue Zone doctors. Like it's it's the most incredible business plan you could ever have, Martin. I, you know, it's incredible. And and then you've just got so many doctors, dietitians. Like the American Dietetic Association was started by a woman called Lena Francis Cooper. She was a protege of John Harvey Kellogg, who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. And so about John Harvey Kellogg, they know about him studying cornflakes and all sorts of things. But not many people realize he was only 12 years old when he went to work for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, when he went to work for Ellen G. Walland, and he was typesetting. Because the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863 believed that it was the end of the world or that Jesus was returning soon. And so a lot of them stopped sending their children to school because they believed the end of the world was near. John Harvey Killogg was one of 12 children, and his father didn't send any of his children to school because Jesus was about to return. So instead, John was sent to the church to work for them. And you've had a 12-year-old, I've had 12-year-olds. They are very, very influential at that age. John was immersed in typesetting Ellen G. White's writings, this testimony is that she used to write this belief about the health reform diet. And he was, when he was 12, he was typesetting a book that she wrote called A Solemn Appeal to Mothers. And this book spoke only of mothers deterring their children from masturbating. Now, I'm not saying she said meat was the only cause, but she blamed it for the majority of the reasons that a child would masturbate because it stirred vaser passions, and as I said, it defiled people morally, physically, and spiritually. And she believed that flesh meat animalized people, and that was why they masturbated. So she also blamed a soft bed, and if you consider the times, a lot of children slept in the same bed, and that would have been when friends came over or families came or even within the same family, and she was really against the different genders sleeping together. So there were other things as well, and then she also blamed spices, tea, coffee, eventually tobacco. She blamed a lot of things for masturbating, but meat, flesh meat was the most important. And so, so much so that this book that she was writing, like John Habikellov was immersed in this. And I say, is it any wonder that when he grew up and they paid for him to go to medical school? Because by then, obviously, Jesus wasn't back yet, and so time was going on, so then they decided to start educating by over time, and so he he was paid to be a medical doctor, and then he became the superintendent of the church's Seventh-day Adventist Dum at the Sanitarium in Battle Creek, which he took over eventually. But this is this messaging, and then to think that his protege founded the American Dietetic Association with this bias. I believe she was the very first um industry dietitian because her cookbook that she put out actually stated, I think it was in 1914, she put out a cookbook stating that all of the recipes you had to use John Harvey Kellogg's inventions. Protos, nuttos, this, that, this. You couldn't actually make them without it. So Kellogg's, even though Kellogg's cornflakes ended up being bought or taken over by his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, and he added sugar to it and he made the serial empire. John Harvey's inventing, I think there's over 30 invent patents that he held for food and food processes by the time he died. So he made a huge inroad into the soy industry because he was one of the biggest advocates in the Western world saying processed soy should be part of human food. So it's really big, Martin, and I don't think anyone has any idea of all of that history.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

So one of the big thing that's coming out from me is what's next? Are they still going to vilify red meat as a toxin, if you want to call it that?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Oh yes, they can't stop because that was that was the word of the church. That was their prophetess. They can't suddenly change their mind about that. To join the church, you don't have to have given up meat. They're anti um alcohol, they're anti uh caffeine. So most people in the church, most people would not be publicly drinking alcohol, publicly having caffeine, publicly eating meat. So when they have their um potlucks and things, they would not be including any of those things. They would be very much vegetarian if not pushing towards vegan. Because if you think this original diet that she claimed was in the Garden of Eden, fruits, grains, nuts, and seeds, that the diet that she believed before sin, before the fall of man. So if we go back to that diet, she sort of says, How will Jesus? This is the reason why she talked about Jesus not coming back, because not enough people had given up these foods to be able to go back to heaven and live peacefully. Because she talks about the Israelites and said they couldn't give up their lust for flesh meat, and that's why she taught that the Seventh-day Adventist Church were the spiritual children of Israel. It's a really complicated story. Um, and yes, it gets very big, and a lot of the work I've done recently has been on the blue zones and on the looking into the Mediterranean diet with the Western construct, which has evolved, I believe, a lot from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but also their symbiotic relationship with the food industry, Martin. You can't get away from that either. And for both of them, this idea of demonizing animal proteins and fats, because then they can produce the fake oils, they can produce the fake food, fake soy, the fake all of these things, industrial processed food to take the place of flesh, meat, eggs, milk, and butter. And they are symbiotically aligned. And to do that, they they have to promote their sugar and cereals and whatever else, but their key point for both is demonizing animal protein and fat. And if you look back at Western A Price's work, like he was incredible. He was he was in that nutrition transition when industrial processed foods were really taking off in America. And he was witnessing firsthand within a generation people who were suddenly getting an incredible amount of tooth decay. And he realized as he started to travel the world, physical degeneration. That's what he called it. And when he went around the world to 14 different places in the 1930s as a dentist from America, he went to very, very different places. He was up in the Arctic, he was in the Swiss Gaelic region, he was off with the Polynesians and here in Australia. Really, really diverse diets because of their latitude, because of their geography. But all of them he found when he tested the foods that they were eating, all had very high vitamins A, D, and he called it an activator X, which a lot of people align now when they've done more studies, they say they believe it was K2. And K2 found in animal fat, organ meats of wild animals and game, and in shellfish and insects. So all around the world, these people were eating those things that were giving them exceptional health, longevity, straight teeth without, you know, their wisdom teeth were able to come down. They had very little dental caries because they were not eating westernized industrial processed foods. They were eating food, whole foods. And I don't know how we can possibly go to the blue zones and pick apart these ancestral communities. Because you've got to remember, we sort of we're targeted and we're looking at a lot of these people. Yes, some old people, but we're we're sort of convinced that it's the place. But if you look back at these people, they were living um isolated, self-sustaining communities, or four of them were. And I think in Sardinia, they didn't really get um, they didn't really have any influence of West until the 1970s. And Nicoya, the Nokoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, they they were founded recently, of course, over the centuries, that all of these places have been invaded over and over, but Western culture didn't come to the Nokoya Peninsula until the 1980s when the surfers discovered it and they wanted to go surfing there, and it became a tourist destination. So, you know, we're talking about groups of people that weren't eating Western industrialized industrial processed foods, and I think that's really, really important. Yes, they might have been walking a lot, they were out in fresh air a lot, they were in sunshine. You know, these people spent a lot of time outside. They had to walk hills, they had to walk places, they were hungry gathering, they were doing all of these things, but they were animals as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

So, Belinda, and I need to I need to hold it in a second because you've got so much information. You mentioned, and I want to get it again. To get more information from you is what is where. Where's your website again?

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Ah, my website. It's I support Gary, www.isupportgarry, all one word, all lowercase.com. Now I am in the process of setting up a new website because Nina Taishal said to me, I can't reference and send people to I Love Gary. So it's quite funny. So I'm setting up a uh belindafetki.com, but it's not fully up yet. But I've started doing a Substack. And so if people are interested in a lot of my work, I'm really trying to put everything on Substack this year. Uh everything I know. It's not playing.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

We're gonna have to stop there for a second. Um, but I want to get part two. Thank you so much for today. Um, you you and I could talk for hours, but really appreciate your time this morning.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

You are very, very welcome. And um, thanks for having me, Martin. We'll have to do a part two.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Take care, Valinda.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Thanks. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Bye.