As the world now well knows, celebrity chef Pete Evans doesn’t have much time for conventional sunscreen.
Or baby formula.
Or the addition of fluoride to drinking water.
And while ordinarily I’d be like, “okay kooky affluent man, you do you,” I can’t when it comes to Pete Evans.
And that’s because I grew up in a household that would have set his paleo-loving heart racing. And it’s cost me thousands of dollars in medical bills.
Pete Evans with his daughters. Source: Facebook.
For the most part, my early childhood was the kind of experience many of us, Pete Evans included, dream about.
My family and I lived on a small farm where we grew our own fruit and vegetables, collected eggs laid by our pet hens, drank rain water fresh from the tank, and spent our mornings feeding poddy lambs.
My parents made almost all of our food from scratch, with preservatives and food colourings being big no no's.
Katy with her mum. Source: provided.
And thanks to my older brother's allergies, my mum spent countless hours throughout the 1980s listening to the advice of doctors, specialists and alternative therapists all in a bid to learn how to keep her children healthy and safe.
So when the local dentist told my mum that drinking rain water was great and assured her that her three children didn't need to take fluoride tablets, she believed him.
Pete Evans proudly wearing an anti-fluoride tee in Western Australia. Source: Facebook.
He promised her that fluoride would naturally come into our rain water because it sat in a concrete tank. And given his status as someone who knew more than the average Joe, my mum believed him. I'm sure most of the town did.
Because just like Pete Evans, his voice had power and carried weight.
But then years later, when I learned I had teeth riddled with cavities, that we learned our dentist's water-sitting-in-concrete theory held about as much legitimacy as our fears around the Y2K bug.
Katy with her mum and sister. Source: provided.
And suddenly after an entire childhood of brushing and flossing and doing everything I'd been told to do, I faced a mountainous dental bill. And all because a personal theory was peddled by someone who had a scientifically unproven opinion.
Several fillings, a root canal, and countless fluoride treatments later, I'm thousands of dollars down and still furious.
And call me a negative Nancy, but I have a feeling that in 20 years time another generation of people will be coming out of the woodwork to share similar horror stories about those who, like Pete Evans, have labelled fluoride "unsafe and unethical".
Pete Evans
So if you're wondering why I don't just stop listening, the answer is this: on Facebook alone, Pete Evans has 1.5 million people listening to his opinions.
And if you spend just five minutes looking through the comments section you'll see that almost all of those people truly believe what he says.
"You rock Pete, love your work, love your spirit and you're a huge inspiration to thousands of Aussies who are boldly taking control of their own health," one follower wrote following his sunscreen comments last week.
"Keep spreading the truth Peter... you are awesome," another commented.
His feed is dedicated to those worshipping at the alter of his scientifically unproven theories.
And as someone who unwittingly attended a similar church for years, I'm here to say the wellness cult club is highly flawed.
But if I'm really being honest, perhaps what makes me more furious than anything is that despite admitting she feels guilty for believing our dentist's crackpot theories all those years ago, my mum is now one of the 1.5 million Facebook users that follows Evans.
Top Comments
I grew up on fluoride water & have a head full of fillings my kids are now in their 20s & 1 has 2 fillings the other one has none. They both had concrete tank water. I think we need to look at diet, stress & gut health.
I think the balance is somewhere in between. I grew up in northern Sweden where the public school dental nurse would show up once per week with a little fluoride in a cup that she would hand out. On her cue we would all put it in our mouth and flush around for a minute and again on her cue we would spit it in the cup for her collection on a tray. I'm sure it helped a lot and is a better solution than to put it in the drinking water. I find it amazing that people zero in on this guy, when there are so many multinationals putting all kind of fillers (sugar, trans fats, preservatives etc) in the stuff they sell to us as food. They put the world natural on the box and we even pay extra. I guess a guy like Pete Evans is easier to target than the multinationals. Nothing wrong with eating fruit and veg and cooking your food from scratch, humans have done that for ever. Doesn't mean you need to go all extreme and as one of the 1.5 M people who has liked his Facebook page, I don't. We do use sunscreen, although never stay in the sun much and if we go before 10am, or after 3pm we may not put it on because all but one of us in the family react with allergy to the stuff to various degrees. A non allergy screen has turned out being the one we can tolerate the best. Why knock the eating your own fruit/veg/rain water when it doesn't do you damage; not tending to the dental health did. We don't have fluoride in the water but we rinse once per week and use fluoride toothpaste.