Silent Assassin diabetes doctor James Muecke turns dietary 'science' on its head, favours fats over oils

Partly because Australia's obesity problem - the "TimTamworth" of yesterday's piece - is so obvious, but mainly because of what the series is saying about the embrace of vegetable oils over animal fats.

When I first read Thursday's piece by 2020 Australian of the Year Dr James Muecke, my first thought was: "That's a bit subversive."

Australian of the Year or not, blithely calling out the country's official, government-endorsed "healthy eating" guidelines as being a major part of the problem they are attempting to fix automatically pits Dr Muecke against the establishment view.

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While I have to confess to being lamentably unfamiliar with Dr Muecke or his work until now, I had recently read a few similar opinions and found the concepts intriguing.

At one level, nobody seriously argues with the idea that the developed world eats way, way, way too much sugar. But to point the finger at vegetable oils is something altogether different.

To quote Dr Muecke: "Seed oils found in cooking oils and margarine and many ultra-processed substances can also directly lead to insulin resistance within the liver and the laying down of dangerous visceral fat in the abdominal organs."

He went on to say: "We need to celebrate the natural saturated fats in our food, including those sourced from animals; fats that are critical to the health and development of our kids; fats like those found in unprocessed red meat, eggs and full-fat dairy; healthy saturated fats that are not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease; fats that have been demonised for over 50 years."

Them's fighting words.

On his Facebook page, Dr Muecke had posted a copy of the article, thanking Australian Community Media (publisher of the Newcastle Herald) for running the Silent Assassin series across its various titles.

As one person leaving a comment said: "Wow. Can't you believe an Australian paper allowed you to publish the promotion of consumption of saturated animals fats. So proud."

The "demonisation" of animal fats that Dr Muecke refers to came in the years after WWII.

My parents, raised in the Depression, still had a billy tin full of dripping in the kitchen, but even they succumbed to the lure of olive oil, promoted back then as "the Mediterranean diet:".

We all did.

Now, half a century later, Dr Muecke and others are promoting a new look at those seed oil certainties, seeing the invisible hand of industry groups guiding events in the background.

In Muecke's words, "religious ideology, corrupt science and the might of the corporate food industry" are to blame for society's problems with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

It's an old song. They who pay the piper, call the tune.

In 2016, an academic paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, was widely reported for its findings about the previously unacknowledged links between the sugar industry and researchers who - to quote the New York Times - "minimised the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat".

Disclosure rules have tightened considerably since then, and it's why such oversights as parliamentary lobbyist registers, and the publication of ministerial diaries, are so important.

They at least give the public an idea of who is talking to who, even if we don't know the detail of the conversations.

One of my favourite "backroom influence" stories is the role of the plastics industry in recycling, as told by America's National Public Radio (NPR) and carried here by the ABC.

Combining internal company documents and testimony from retired industry figures showed how recycling was conceived as a way to sell more plastic products, and fend off environmental critics, even though there were doubts that recycling could ever be made economically viable.

This was the late 1980s.

Today, there's more plastic than ever, and you only have to examine the wrappings on all sorts of items bought from supermarkets to see that much of it is still without a recycling label.

Big business is also involved in the recent explosion of vegan products, which have gone from a fringe niche to something marketed to the mainstream, together with a dollop of guilt that you are harming the planet if you stick with meat that was grown on a skeleton rather than in a factory.

By any definition, the manufacturing needed to turn pea and soy into an analogue of meat is so high-tech - using chemicals as well as heat and pressure - that these products would surely be criticised for their processed artificiality were they not being promoted on environmental and ethical grounds.

And that's without worrying about genetically modified soy plants absorbing the pesticides used to maintain monocultures.

But there's an answer there, too, with a recent New Yorker article describing how GMO crops were being positioned as better at withstanding climate change.

And so the focus keeps shifting.

READ MORE: The unfolding Silent Assassin series is here

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