In this week’s episode of The Weekly Grill podcast series, host Kerry Lonergan turns up the heat on orthopaedic surgeon, Gary Fettke, who this year has emerged as a powerful advocate for a diet containing adequate amounts of red meat.

The sense that red meat industry is under attack from powerful and aligned forces, and urgently needs to better align its own resources and “get off the back foot”, has been a central and recurring theme across the meat industry this year.

Gary Fettke

An independent medical practitioner with no commercial ties to, or any financial interest in, the red meat industry, Dr Fettke explains that over the past 30 years he started seeing more and more complications arising from diabetes and lifestyle disease, that led to him having to perform amputations  which he believed should have been avoidable.

The further he delved into the science, he said it became clear that diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates were the underlying cause – diets that effectively reflect the recommendations of Australia’s (and most other developed countries’) official dietary guidelines.

He spent several years exploring the evolution of plant-based vegetarian guidelines, and has uncovered the extent to which powerful processed food corporations and anti-meat religious groups have influenced global dietary guidelines and policies universally in place today, which effectively demonise red meat while promoting increasing consumption of grain, sugar and carbohydrates.

Check out our previous Weekly Grill podcasts here, including competition BBQ King, Grant Coleman; our regular cattle market outlook with TEM’s Matt Dalgleish and Stockco’s Chris Howie; Live export class action facilitator, Tracey Hayes; Signature Beef’s Blair Angus; Consolidated Pastoral Co chief and Livecorp chairman, Troy Setter, nutrition scientist and MLA special skills board member, Manny Noakes; CCA independent northern and southern directors, Alice Greenup and Olivia Lawson; Australian Agricultural Co head Hugh Killen; Sydney independent red meat retailer Stephen Kelly; lotfeeder, Charlie Mort; processor and supply chain manager, Terry Nolan; livestock transport operator Ross Fraser; and Organic supply chain manager Alister Ferguson.