Bring back meat & three veg: Star diabetes guru’s blistering attack on Aussie health guidelines

Modern Aussie diet guidelines are making us sick, says SA’s Australian of the Year-winning diabetes guru, in a blistering call to bring back 70s-style menus.

Former Australian of the Year Dr James Muecke wants the nation to go back to the 1970s when grass-fed meat and three veg ruled, launching a blistering attack on the Australian Dietary Guidelines as a factor in soaring rates of type 2 diabetes.

The Adelaide ophthalmologist is angry little has been done to promote remission of the disease through diet and lifestyle changes, saying it is usually portrayed as a prog­ressive condition needing drug intervention as it worsens.

He says the controversial keto diet is a key to dealing with diabetes – and has drawn up his own “food diamond” as an alternative to the usual food pyramid, showing what you can enjoy as staples and what to keep to a minimum.

Dr Muecke has released a powerful video attacking the dietary guidelines and calling on health authorities to do more to treat type 2 diabetes as both preventable and reversible after guiding his own eye patients into remission.

He was treating almost 100 patients with type 2 diabetes-related, sight-threatening retinopathy when he realised their diabetes could be put in remission – but he found only one patient knew it could.

Since then, patients such as Bevan Bruse, 69, of Beaumont, who went temporarily blind, and Lina DiFonzo, 59, of Fulham, have gone into remission in a matter of weeks after dumping sugar, processed foods and carbohydrates in favour of a diet rich in grass-fed red meat, fish, eggs, bacon, butter, leafy vegetables, olives, natural yoghurt, unprocessed cheeses, avocado and berries.

Former Australian of the Year Dr James Muecke with Lina Di Fonzo, Bevan Bruse, and Rachelle Martin. Picture: Emma Brasier

Even carbohydrate-free beer is allowed.

Dr Muecke believes national dietary guidelines – now being reviewed – are based on “weak and unreliable data” and the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet people had been steered into was causing them harm.

The 2020 Australian of the Year notes 15,000 lives a year nationally are lost to type 2 diabetes, two million people are pre-diabetic, while 1.7 million have it.

“It is now the leading cause of blindness in working-age adults in Australia. We have a sugar-laden chronic disease crisis killing and blinding people,” Dr Muecke said, blaming the push away from animal fats on a food industry promoting sugar, refined carbohydrates and “ultra-processed foods”.

Dr Muecke said more than 100 clinical trials now showed low-calorie and low-carbohydrate diets could prevent and reverse type 2 diabetes.

He wants red meat to once again be a staple part of the national diet – but grass-fed rather than grain-fed beef.

“At a minimum, with type 2 you need a low-carb diet, but if you want to be in remission you may need to go hard and go keto,” he said.

“If you are serious about it, at a minimum, if you are pre-diabetic, you need to go low-carb which is under 130g of carbs a day. However, if I had type 2, I would go keto which is under 50g.”

The updated Healthy Food Diamond.

Dr Muecke’s confronting video challenges groups such as Diabetes Australia, Dietitians Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Royal Australian College of GPs for not doing more to promote diet and lifestyle changes as a key to dealing with type 2 diabetes. “In the 1970s, dinners were often meat, leafy vegetables, maybe some cheese, and not always a potato, and Australians generally were lean and one of the healthiest nations on Earth,” he said.

Nutritionist Rachelle Martin, who has helped guide Dr Muecke’s patients into remission, said for many people “having high levels of healthy fats and dropping carbohydrates is a big leap of faith.”

“Back in the 1970s, people had an egg or largely skipped breakfast but now we are told that it’s important and everyone obediently has cereal,” she said.

“Back then, it was a sandwich, fruit and water for lunch and meat and three veg for dinner – and everyone was lean,” she said.

“Even a potato was more of a winter food. Fat has been demonised.”

Dr Muecke said: “People have a right to know type 2 diabetes doesn’t have to be a progressive life sentence, it can be prevented in pre-diabetic people and put into remission in those with it.”