Dietician to know-it-alls: Put a fork in it
Mandy-lee Noble warns nutrition is ground zero when it comes to misinformation – and she has Pete Evans, naturopaths, osteopaths, chiropractors, supplement giants and the weight-loss industry in her sights
TODAY is possibly the most dangerous day of 2022.
Why? Because it’s the day all those resolutions of “new year, new body” begin.
It’s the day we decide to adopt whatever diet promises the fastest course to kill those Christmas kilos.
It’s the day we are most likely to fall prey to any Insta influencer shilling a slimmer’s tea or five-minute workout that will transform our bodies in five days.
It’s the day that drives nutritionist and dietician MandyLee Noble crazy.
But this year, she has a resolution of her own … to fight dangerous fad diets with evidence and research.
And this mother of four has form … she’s the reason conspiracist and controversial chef Pete Evans was fined $25,000 by the TGA for spruiking a “Biocharger” he claimed could cure Covid.
In fact, Mandy says the field of diet and nutrition has become ground zero when it comes to misinformation … and the Gold Coast, home of beach bodies and an outdoor lifestyle, has long been a fierce battleground.
She says her own experience as a working mother struggling to complete her university degree in nutrition and dietetics fuelled her passion to protect qualified and accredited practitioners.
“I was at university, I had four children under the age of eight, I was putting myself through university by work
ing at a b lood bank either really early or really late, and then along comes Pete Evans starting to tell everyone how to eat,” she says.
“I just thought, ‘ what makes you qualified?’ For me to do this properly, to be an accredited dietician, took so much sacrifice … it was a real sense of personal indignation.
“Then I started digging deeper into what he was doing and it was just lunacy. Telling people not to drink milk, linking it to the Whiskey Rebellion in America … I mean, what?
“Then I saw there was a dietician supporting him and she was recommending all sorts of things that were not evidencebased and that just made my blood boil. She was sullying my industry. I made a complaint and action was taken against her and that’s what opened my eyes to all of this.
“The thing is that because everyone takes part in nutrition, everyone has their own experiences, everyone feels a sense of ownership. If you ever see an evidence-based practitioner step out of their field, it will be into nutrition. You don’t see a cardiologist publish a book on orthopaedics, but they’ll write a diet book.
“The real danger is that by telling someone to ‘eat perfectly’, you’ve written a recipe for an eating disorder.”
She says she educated herself as to how to make her complaint count with the TGA, and waited for Evans to say too much.
“For a long time he had been dipping his feet into the antivax pool, and as soon as Covid came around and the possibility of a vaccine, I knew he would be fuelling the fire.
“I kept constant tabs on him and one day as I watched his live stream, I realised I got him, I knew the rules and I knew he broke them. It was a pretty great moment.”
However, for every victory against an anti-vaxxer or diet influencer, Mandy says her concern for the victims far outweighs any sense of relief.
Within her own nutrition practice, Nourished Approach, she says
countless clients have been affected by this stream of misinformation.
While she will continue to wage her own one-woman war, she says governments and regulators need to do more to protect the vulnerable.
“For many of my clients it is not a question of whether to choose full-fat or skim milk but how to actually get enough nutrition to survive and thrive,” she says.
“What breaks my heart is that so many of them have mental health concerns and that makes them so susceptible to the misinformation out there. The conspiracists find fertile ground in our most vulnerable.
“I’m not frustrated when vulnerable people choose not to vaccinate, I’m mad at those with influence who share misinformation about vaccination.
“When Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer say don’t trust the health system, and you’re someone who has struggled in that system for different reasons, of course you start to question it.
“We need our regulation systems to work, we need to protect our vulnerable. We need to educate the public so they can call this stuff out when they see it.”
Mandy says the government should also stop spending public money on practices that are not evidence-based, such as the study of naturopathy at a tertiary level.
“Naturopaths are just out there in the wilderness with no regulation and some of the dietary things they prescribe are leading people to become really unwell, physically and mentally,” she says.
“It’s the same with osteopaths and chiropractors, why are they being subsidised by Medicare? They are not evidence-based practitioners.
“Then there’s the whole industry of supplements. Our food and drugs are regulated, but not our supplements. Vitamin and dietary supplement sales are worth $3.1bn in Australia alone, that is staggering.
“Then there’s the whole organic farce, it’s just a moneyspinner.
“There are no proven benefits to eating organic, and those products still use herbicides and pesticides, they are just ‘approved’ ones.
“The truth is that if you were to go out and eat all the fruits and vegetables with the highest risk of herbicide and pesticides for three months, it would be the equivalent to one glass of wine in terms of increased cancer risk.”
Given that she describes herself as a non-diet dietician,
Mandy’s disillusionment at the diet industry is perhaps no surprise.
But it also fuels her passion to continue to try to make a difference.
“I already had a science degree but after I had my children, I went back to university and studied dietetics … but halfway through that four-year degree I nearly quit,” says Mandy.
“I realised that the whole weight-loss thing is a scam. No one loses weight long term, trying to lose weight is more likely to make you unwell than healthy, and no one talks about why.
“The more often you try to lose weight, the better your body becomes at putting it back on – hormones are very useful for that.
“All of our research for weight loss and the associated health benefits are flawed. We’re comparing overweight people to naturally thin people, no one is looking at people who lost weight long term … and that’s because that cohort doesn’t exist.
“We’re comparing apples to oranges and drawing dangerous conclusions.
“The more you get into weight science the more you see that shrinking bigger humans into smaller human beings is really terribly flawed. It has all sorts of physical risks, not to mention mental health risks and the social risks of a world that stigmatises larger weight people.”
Mandy says just as she had this epiphany while studying at university, she met like-minded academics who introduced her to the concept of a non-diet approach.
She says it was this realisation which set her on the path of evidence-based nutrition.
“The non-diet approach recognises the scientific evidence that weight-loss diets do not work and the majority of people will regain all their weight,” she says.
“I encourage people to accept and embrace their bodies, listen to their internal cues for appetite, treat all foods equally and find intrinsic motivators for nourishment and movement.
“It’s definitely not as sexy as losing five kilos in five days, but it’s a hell of a lot healthier and long-lasting.”
And ditching the diet for 2022 sounds like the perfect resolution.
I realised that the whole weight-loss thing is a scam