What I’ve learned after 700 Monday notes

Introduction

This is the 700th Monday note. The first one was written in January 2011, although I had been doing some news type letters in The Harcombe Diet® club even before then. In May this year, I received a suggestion for a Monday note from a long term supporter (Jannes from the Netherlands). I thought it would make a good note to do for a landmark number of notes and 700 is a bit of a landmark.

Jannes suggested “Name 5 things you've learned in the last 5 years that surprised you the most, food and health wise.” Jannes added that for him, it was that ultra-processed foods are not as bad as we all thought. That was a good one. I shared Jannes’ surprise when I first looked into the NOVA classification system and the impact of ultra-processed foods on CVD (not as much as I expected) (Ref 1).

I’ve had some big projects/roles running alongside doing these 700 notes, which are worthy of mention. When I started the notes, I was an independent board member of the Welsh National Health Service (NHS) and Cardiff Metropolitan University and so I learned a lot about health and education at the highest level. I did a PhD between September 2012 and March 2016 and learned a lot about academia from the student, rather than board member, perspective. The Professor Tim Noakes tweet trial also ran in parallel between 2014 and the final appeal victory in June 2018. The Mail on Sunday articles were published in March 2019 and that case is still not fully resolved. I often wonder how I managed to keep writing a note a week during all of this.

I didn’t limit myself to five learnings, not least as it hasn’t been five years. I’m going to share personal experiences in this note, which I haven’t previously shared, in the interests of giving real examples. In order of explaining one point before the other (as opposed to in order of biggest learning), here are nine things that I’ve learned…