I have had the absolute pleasure of knowing Dr Peter Brukner personally from the day when he came on his first tour with the Australian Cricket Team in Dubai in 2012. Of course, I’d already heard about the famous Dr Brukner: from my days studying anatomy and physiology at university, where we were using the textbook Brukner & Khan’s Clinical Sports Medicine as our bible, to his high-profile work with the Olympic teams, the Socceroos and especially Liverpool in the English Premier League. So I certainly knew how privileged we were at the Australian Cricket Team to have someone of his calibre on tour with us to look after and guide us.

Doc Brukner (as I call him) and I spent a lot of time together on tour – especially our almost daily dry needling sessions, which he’s a master at! – so I had the opportunity to get to know him extremely well. The thing that stands out to me the most about Doc is how much of a realist he is in an industry in which people get seriously caught up in all of the propaganda and the supposed truths that sweep up entire generations.

The big catalyst for my own low-carb, healthy-fat journey was on Australia’s infamous tour of India in 2013, where Doc started to open my eyes up to another world of health principles that was so different to anything that I had previously studied, heard about or witnessed. Noticing that Doc had trimmed down quite a bit, I was very interested to find out the techniques he’d used to attain his svelte new figure – and so started my education about a world that I had thought I knew pretty well. As elite cricketers we were always told: Load up on carbohydrates before a big game, and eat low-fat to keep your skin folds (or body fat percentage) at an optimal range. So I’d do a cycle of ‘carbo-loading’ before a day’s play to ensure that I had plenty of energy in case I had a big day of batting and bowling. But in reality, if the day didn’t work out to plan – as it often didn’t – I ended up with all of this carbohydrate to store, which made keeping my skin folds at the optimal level a constant challenge. Now I can see that that approach just doesn’t make sense.

Doc was very generous in sharing his tips from his personal experience, and thanks to his recommendations I also started to read some life-changing books: Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It by Gary Taubes, The Real Meal Revolution by Tim Noakes and Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss. They started me on a fascinating journey of self-education, explaining in shocking detail the misleading propaganda and cover-up of facts in the US in the 1960s, and giving me a new-found understanding of why I had a family history of type 2 diabetes. It also brought much-needed logic to my inexplicable battle to maintain my weight and skin folds even while devotedly following the dietary advice I’d been given as an athlete.

Doc and I would chat for hours about all of the various issues that surround people’s health, good or bad, and how so much of this could have been – and still can be – prevented by providing everyone with very simple and, most importantly, accurate information that they can apply to their own lives. We have the right to know how simple it is to prevent the many diseases that cripple our society, and yet we’re still being fed information that’s incorrect, or from hidden sources, or subject to huge conflicts of interest centred around money and power instead of the needs of society and future generations.

That’s why A Fat Lot of Good is so brilliant. You will never have to read any other book on this topic: it brings together all of the information that you could need to know about the myths and mistruths that have led us away from good health, and the practical steps we can all take to set us back on the right path for life. I have no doubt that you will enjoy reading it as much as I did and that this new understanding will be as life-changing for you as it has been for me.