This News Stinks, Thanks Consumer Reports

Posted on August 25, 2015 by dcarmack

Bacteria are everywhere, on everything, in everything. Some bacteria are beneficial, they help us digest foods, they created vitamins from nutrients in foods that did not contain vitamins. Some bacteria are harmful, and if you get them inside of you they will cause pain, discomfort, illness or death.

E-Coli is a bacteria that is most commonly found in the intestines and feces of warm blooded mammals. E-coli strains can be benign, they are know to create the vitamin K-2 for us. Vitamin K2 can be created in your intestines by your resident E-coli bacteria, and it is good for your artery health, and bone health.

E-coli is also a bacteria that can kill you. Certain strains of the bacteria that are harmful are typically found on feedlot cattle. Feedlot cattle are slaughtered in common with thousands of cattle per day, and all of them are smeared with feces, a product of industrialized meat production methods. Consumer Reports has done a study of meat and the article about the results “How Safe is Your Ground Beef?” is available online.

Long story short, any ground beef you buy at the grocery store is going to have e-coli contained in it.

CR-Health-How-Much-Bacteria-Chart-08-15

“More Sustainably Produced” means no antibiotics, organic meats. Such meat is still produced industrially, it is just treated a bit better at the feed lot. The bacteria is found on the carcass of some animals, but the meat trimmings that make up hamburger are from a host of animals, and they are ground in common machinery–sustainably produced mixed in with conventionally produced. The contamination spreads through the facility and practically all hamburger in the facility ends up with evidence of fecal bacteria contamination.

“We suggest that you choose what’s labeled ‘grass-fed organic beef’ whenever you can,” Urvashi Rangan, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for Food Safety and Sustainability at Consumer Reports says. Aside from the animal welfare and environmental benefits, grass-fed cattle also need fewer antibiotics or other drugs to treat disease, and organic standards and many verified grass-fed label programs prohibit anti­biotics. Sustainably raised beef does cost more (learn why grass-fed beef costs more), but it’s the safest—and most humane—way for Americans to enjoy our beloved burgers . . . cooked to medium, of course.

Grass fed beef do not stand cheek to haunch next to feces covered animals, on a concrete slab six inches deep in cow waste. They are not fed an unnatural diet that is a cocktail of deadly-to-them grains, antibiotics, and growth hormones. They are more expensive but eating hamburger from such an animal almost never leads to an emergency room trip, or even hot-trots to the bathroom.

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Debate Cannot Change Reality

Posted on August 19, 2015 by dcarmack

Ages ago, before my time, a dedicated scientist named Ancel Keys supposed that the explosion of white middle aged men who were suffering from heart disease and dying of heart attacks were doing so because they ate too much saturated fat for their own good. He went searching for evidence to prove this conclusion, found some, presented it to the world and the debate was begun.

People did not long remember the debates in the scientific community. For a variety of reasons Keys was able to get many government and non-governmental professional bodies to recommend that people in the US cut the amount of cholesterol and saturated fat that they consumed, for the public good. Details are available in the book “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz.

What ensued was the largest human food trial ever conducted. After 60 years the results of the experiment are in. According to government advice, cholesterol is no longer a dietary component of concern, and natural saturated fats are off the hook as components of dietary harm. At this point in time we are fatter, sicker and more confused than ever. The debate is largely over, but the damage to the national health goes on.

Winning a debate cannot change the facts on the ground. Keys managed to win the debate, but all of the talk in the world cannot change the fact that eating more carbs and eating less fats is a deadly practice. My mother had a heart attack three months ago and the doctors, who really wanted her to get better, to recover fully, warned her to eat no fats, eat no cholesterol, eat no sugar. They gave her a rainbow of medicines to help her not develop any more plaques, develop no more inflammation. That advice adheres to the guidelines developed by the losers of the dietary debate.

I have no white lab coat to compete, but I told her about the new advice, that had previously been given by doctors and scientists in every era of modern western medicine right up until Keys and the 1970s. I told her to eat no carbs, drink lots of water, don’t worry about natural fats at all. My advice is known to reduce inflammation, reduce the need for insulin drugs, reduce the creation of triglycerides in the blood. My advice is what she would have been given if her heart attack had been ten years from now, or sixty years ago. My advice may have kept her alive longer, but their advice did not work. My mother is gone. It is still not known whether or not any of the medicines that they tried on her did her any extra harm. I am certain, however, that the dietary advice did. If nothing else it made her meals taste awful for her last three months, to no avail.

And now, we are seeing new debates joined, as the Coca Cola company creates a new league of scientists to determine whether eating sugar is bad or not if you simultaneously increase your exercise and eat less of other sources of calories. Coke is going to significantly fund a group called “Global Energy Balance Network”, and their mission will be to muddy the debate. If the science is still ‘out’ they well know that they will not be required to put warning labels on, they will be able to sell their products to kids in school, they will still be in hospital cafeterias and delivered to patients in their bedside meals.

Reality cannot be changed by science, or debate. History will not care what Coke and their paid science decide that we are doing wrong in our daily food choices. Eating fructose every day is bad for you. If Coke keeps us blissfully ignorant of the dangers for another five or ten years, the result will be that we have many more people harmed, every illness contributing to the body of evidence required to prove that eating fructose is harmful, if eaten chronically. The march of science is inevitably toward truth, no matter what the authorities of the day espouse.

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Neural Plasticity

Posted on August 16, 2015 by dcarmack

There is hope for you. No matter how long you have had the habit it is possible to break out of it. My own addiction to sugar is a case in point. Your habit of thinking the worse of every statement a rival political party makes is a case in point. Literally, every thought, habit and practice that has become an automatic part of your mind’s daily activity can be modified by conscious practice on your part.

It doesn’t matter what the habit is, how long you have had it, what the substance is–sugar, tobacco, heroin–it is possible to get out of it without rehab time, psychoanalysis or hypnosis. Your brain is actually constructed in such a way that habits are easily formed, and not so easily re-formed.

A recent development in neural science technology is allowing brain geniuses to map the highways in use in the living brain. This morning in the online magazine Salon.Com there is a long article on the functionality of the developing brain. And there is this sentence:

Plasticity is the brain’s lifelong capacity to form new synapses, connections between nerve cells, and even new neural pathways, making and strengthening connections so that learning accelerates and the ability to access and apply what has been learned becomes more and more efficient.

Your normal brain has the lifelong ability to change the pathways that it takes when presented with a stimulus. You don’t have to think compulsive thoughts, compulsive thoughts are a feature of a normally functioning brain. I just read a great book on addiction, and a big feature of it was the discussion of neural plasticity. Your addiction is built by it, your future life will be consumed by consciously changing your brain back, getting rid of bad habits is that process. Here is the book I just read:

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

If neural plasticity is a normal function of the brain, and if addiction is not a disease, then you don’t really need a doctor to help you out of the hole you are in. Overeater’s Anonymous is then a great place to meet people on the same journey you are on, but you don’t need to admit to being an addict. You are not an addict. An addict is not a person that can only be helped by medicine, doctors, isolation. Shame is not a cure for addiction, nor is shunning by family members. You are not enabling the addict if you continue to love them through their journey toward life after addiction.

As infants your brain is a very simple thing, and all it is doing is forming habits. At that stage of life you are learning things that you must do without conscious thought–which is good because you cannot have a conscious thought at that stage of life. You are learning to eat, to crawl, to stand, to cry. Standing and sitting are very good examples of things that you learn to do by habit.

By the time you are able to actually form a memory, you already have a brain filled with habits. Walking down stairs is a habit. The only time you might have a conscious thought when walking down stairs is if there is something wrong with the stairs. A missing step or the end of the staircase before you expect it is a sudden change from habitual thought to conscious thought. We all know that feeling, too. You are startled into the present by a missing step, and that is what the difference between having a habitual thought and having a conscious thought feels like.

When you decide to make a change in your life you will have a period of time where you will have the feeling many times per day of conscious instead of habitual thought.  When I decided to quit eating carbohydrates I began to have conscious habit-changing thoughts at all parts of my day. At breakfast I had to build the habit of eating it instead of skipping it. Each morning from taking the omelet pan down and getting the bacon to putting the breakfast dishes away is a new habit. When I am at the grocery I have to exercise new habits. My old habit was to travel up and down each and every aisle so that I would not have to remember things to buy. Seeing them was a visual cue. Walking every aisle though gave my existing eating habits lots of triggers. When I stopped walking every aisle and began to just walk the perimeter of the store then things I didn’t need to be eating quit showing up at my house when I was putting the groceries away.

A person that is changing a major habit must be mindful every moment of the day at the beginning. Addictive and compulsive thoughts are very powerful. The processes that they use are automatic and a person must be very vigilant to keep from repeating behaviors that lead to destructive outcomes. Repetition is how we learn–good habits and bad. Constantly looking in the refrigerator is an example of a habit that triggers a habit. A smoker constantly touching their cigarette pack is a good example.

Addictions involve rituals. Constantly checking your cel phone to see if you dealer has a supply of your drug to sell is a ritual that reinforces the bad habit. Bad habits come with hundreds of daily rituals that help to establish the behavior at first, and then become automatic and then compulsive. Compulsive thoughts and behaviors are the final stage of addictive practices.

The good news is that your brain, while being changed by your addiction can be changed, through the same mechanisms back into a brain that does not support a bad habit. Breaking habits is the same no matter what the habit is. When you quit biting your nails you used the same exact brain to do it that you will use to quit eating habitually. You will train yourself in the same way. Just realizing that you are having a compulsive thought begins the process. Feeling what it is like to have a competing thought is a part of the process.

For children it seems to us that the process of learning is easy and automatic. Of course, it is not. It is 24 hour a day work, just like it is for us still. Children sleep a lot because it is such hard work. You may even feel fatigued if you are changing a nasty habit, because it is work to learn, and you are learning.

If you are an addict you are not defective. There is no reason for you to feel less than any other person in your circle. They all have habits, too. All you need to do to be the same as the best of your friends is retrain yourself to new habits. You might need to move to a new neighborhood, you might need a new job–or a job. A change of scenery can really be helpful. Vietnam soldiers were getting addicted to heroin, but when they came home they stopped just as suddenly. None of the triggers for using were there.

Find a way to change your triggers, think about them differently. Take advantage of the plasticity of your brain–it’s a feature, not a bug.

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A Chronic Problem

Posted on August 14, 2015 by dcarmack

There is a new documentary out of Australia called “That Sugar Film”. In it a healthy young man, that had previously given up processed and sweetened foods decides to only eat ‘healthy’ processed foods for two months. In the show he does not eat candy, cake, sodas–he eats yogurt, health foods and other supposedly healthy choices. The stipulation that they all must be processed foods is the only one.

Eight out of ten processed foods contain hidden sugars. The labels aren’t required to say what percentage of the recommended daily allowance they contain–so they don’t. In the near future they might, but for now, sugar is only detailed in the hard-to-understand form of grams. Almost no one realizes that one teaspoon of sugar weighs about the same as four grams. When you see that your yogurt contains 10 grams of sugar you probably don’t automatically realize that that is about two and a half teaspoons per tube.

People in the market are likely to make buying decisions based on the marketing labels, the health claims on the labels, and to a lesser degree on the ingredients labels. This from the New York Times:

There was a study done in Australia that found that 55 percent of people get their nutrition advice from food labels, compared with only 25 percent who get their advice from a nutritional advocate. That’s where we need integrity. People are taking at face value what these products tell them.

People that see “gluten-free” on the label at the Whole Food store are going to assume that the food contained within that package is healthier than it would otherwise be. “Fat Free” foods are known to contain sugar to replace the fat. Eighty percent of foods are not ‘fat free’ though, so there is a lot of sugar added for some other reason. Yesterday at the hospital we were offered, for free, snack bags of Lays Oven Baked Potato Chips. The health claim on the label was that there was 80% less fat than potato chips. The label went on to inform me that the product contained 2 grams of sugar. Normal potato chips contain no sugar. The missing fat flavor of the normal potato chip was replaced by the addicting sweetness of a half teaspoon of sugar per one ounce serving.

Sadly, there is no actual scientific reason to avoid the fats in foods. Eating fats do not make people fat, they never have. Eating saturated fats do not lead to cholesterol in the blood, they never have. Eating fats do not lead to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, Fatty liver disease, insulin resistance. Eating sugars lead to each and every one of these problems. Low fat foods are just about guaranteed to make people fat and sick. Sugar is far worse as a chronically eaten food than just about any other ingredient. Sugar is in eight out of ten processed foods.

If only our nation had never been good at keeping our food supply safe and healthy people would be far more skeptical of the claims on labels. The fact that the nation from time to time makes a company change a label to comply with the truth makes the fact that they let just about every company crow about the nutritional value of foods that are, for all intents and purposes, candy, so misleading. People assume that if its for sale at least it won’t be dangerous.

Sugar is not dangerous. If you eat sugar when the fruit is falling off the trees in the summer and fall it’s not dangerous. If you eat sugar in your birthday cake every year it’s not dangerous. If you eat sugar in every bite of food you eat–at every meal and snack–if you eat sugar in every drink of liquid you take–it is as deadly as smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. It is more deadly than that–because two out of three of us are fat and getting sick from doing it. Two out of three smokers aren’t dying of cancer after only ten years of smoking. Grade school children are getting liver transplants from fatty liver disease. You can’t blame that on exercise. You can’t blame that on too many calories. You blame that on fructose in their chocolate milk, breakfast cereal, fruit juice, soda pop, and most of the processed foods they are fed by their loving and concerned parents. Nobody is trying to kill their children with too much candy. Nobody decides to fatten up their babies by giving them cake and ice cream at every meal. They are being tricked into doing it with clever labels, with used-to-be-healthy foods that are now adulterated with sugar.

And Coca Cola is funding studies that will show that all we need to do is exercise more and eat less non-coke calories to avoid poisoning ourselves with the fructose contained in their Vitamin Waters. Nice try Coke.

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Uproar

Posted on August 12, 2015 by dcarmack

When your life is in an uproar it is good that you have been eating good for a long while. Having went for months eating very few carbs has given me the cushion I need for the past couple of weeks and the next couple. Life in uproar is very difficult to contain, especially where diet is concerned. In the past week we had lots of trips to the hospital, dining late at night at where ever happened to still be open. Next week proves to be the same, only there will be a half-continent road trip there and back to contend with as well.

This is where eating good 90% of the time is going to pay off. I am not going to add an element of worry as far as food is concerned. I will eat like every other road warrior eats, it will be carbs, artificial ingredients, road food. There will be snacks for the car, soft drinks, desserts when I get a chance. As soon as life gets back to normal I will gladly go back to eating local real foods. Until then I will eat when I can, what I can and not stress about it at all.

It takes years to get your body out of whack, it takes weeks to get it back in whack. I know how its done and I know I can do it. When life throws me curve balls, takes me thousands of miles from home, puts me on unusual time tables then its just for the best to not give myself a hard time about where my food comes from, who is cooking it, what all is in it. Nothing is going to hurt me over the short time frame of two or three weeks.

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Merchants of Doubt

Posted on August 11, 2015 by dcarmack

There have always been men, across all times and regions, that would do anything for money. Men are easily corrupted and you cannot single out a more prevalent occupation, creed or race as more or less corruptible than any other. The most disgustingly corrupt occupations have always been those whose nominal calling is for the advancement of society though. When we find that the police are corrupt it is newsworthy, when the clergy is corrupt it attracts the attention that it deserves. When science is corrupted hardly any notice is taken though, and science has a long history of corruption for cash. There is an entire cottage industry of ‘scientists’ that will sell their science out for sufficient money. These men are the Merchants of Doubt.

Coca-Cola is funding obesity research with a biased message, nutrition experts say

OR

Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets

This is just one ‘for instance’ of a large patron, with a vested interest in the results, financing a science project whose results are set out in the wording of the theory. Real science will take a question and create a hypothesis from it, then you test the hypothesis while only changing one variable. Subsequent tests strengthen the hypothesis, but negative test results might demand the formulation of an alternative hypothesis. Science actively attempts to disprove a theory, all of the time. Even a theory of gravity is modified when there are cases where gravity can be proven to not be a constant. Science is not a definite.

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Because science is not a definite, corrupt scientists can use this to sow dissent. They can use the media to spread the idea that ‘the science is still out’ on a topic. If there are ten thousand scientists that say that the global climate is being affected by modern man, but there are ten scientists who question the data still, the media reports the news like the science is controversial. Merchants of Doubt find and fund those ten scientists, and give them megaphones to broadcast their doubts.

Tobacco merchants found evil doctors to claim that cigarettes were healthy.

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They created scientific societies like the Council for Tobacco Research to study the effects of tobacco on human health. They did everything they could to postpone the day where we would all know that smoking cigarettes caused people to live shorter, more miserable lives. Eventually we didn’t end up counting on science to do this work. The 50 States got together and sued the tobacco industry for health care costs. They settled out of court, yet they continue to maintain cyborgs in the system…

Old ways, new means: tobacco industry funding of academic and private sector scientists since the Master Settlement Agreement

Read this article to see how it is done. This is how science is bought and sold in the US…and the sugar industry is following this exact playbook. Sugar is more harmful than tobacco ever was. Do you think I am being extreme?

  1. 29 million people in the United States (9.3 percent) have diabetes. 1.7 million people aged 20 years or older were newly diagnosed with diabetes in 2012. Type 2 diabetes is now rampant among CHILDREN.
  2. About 70 million American adults (29%) have high blood pressure—that’s 1 of every 3 adults. Being obese is known to cause high blood pressure. The one sure cure for it is losing the weight.
  3. In the United States, an estimated 60 to 70 million individuals are affected by insulin resistance. Statistics report that more than 40% of individuals older than 50 years may be at risk for insulin resistance; however, it can affect anyone at any age.
  4. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in children is increasing, with studies showing it to be the most common liver abnormality in children aged 2 to 19 years. This is cirrhosis of the liver in children that do not drink alcohol.

I could actually go on to list four or eight more things that are caused by sugar. Is the science on sugar being the ’cause’ of these maladies definite? SCIENCE IS NEVER DEFINITE. See the above passages on the scientific method. The fact is that these health care problems are soaring. It just so happens that the amount of sugar being produced and added to all foods is likewise soaring. We are all fat and getting fatter. We are all sick and getting sicker. Soon it won’t take a scientist to tell you that eating all of those processed foods and drinking all of those sweet drinks is killing you and your kids.

I actually hope that the sugar merchants all get sued like the tobacco companies did. It is the only way to claw back the profits they are making by merchandising poisons.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think eating sugar will kill you. I think eating sugar in every bite will kill you. I think taking sugar in every drink will kill you, it already is. Sugar is an addictive substance. You will crave it if you go off of it. You will crave it for about half a week. It is not the skin-crawling cravings like you get going off of tobacco, but it is really a thing. After you have been off of sugar for a few weeks then eating it again will actually give you a physical reaction to it. Right now you don’t know what I am talking about because you are immune to sugar’s effects, because you eat that much of it.

To get back to the original topic though, there is now evidence that the big sugar players are going to be funding ‘scientific research’ to show that sugar is not a health problem. No, their hypothesis is that you are fuckign lazy, so you are fat. If you would get off your arses and walk more then we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic. Alternatively you might be eating too many non-sugar calories–that might be why you are getting fat. The fact that little kids who are balls of energy, who don’t feed themselves, are getting fat and getting fatty liver disease proves that the problem is in the food not the eater. It will be proof that the hypothesis is full of shit. Corrupt scientists will discount this data point though. They are being well paid to find differently, so they will.

I should make a roll call of corrupt workers in this corrupt project. It would not surprise me at all to find that the out-of-work evil geniuses behind tobacco doubt are now food scientists. I would not be the least bit surprised. We should document the men and women in Congress that spout and promote these merchants of death. These people all care more about money than science, health, society. They deserve our scorn, their professional credentials should forever be stripped from them. A fellow can dream, right?

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Eye Catching Headlines

Posted on August 7, 2015 by dcarmack

As a blogger about weight loss and nutrition I get sent a lot of very interesting news from around the English-speaking world. Yesterday I was shown this article, under this headline:

Fat people don’t need ’empowerment’, they just need to lose weight

This headline appears in the British newspaper “The Telegraph” and it stirs up a great deal of conflicting sentiment within me. I have written articles about the idea that there are a lot of stories, movies, TV programs that are trying to make being heavy, obese even, something that is not to be considered something to be ashamed of.  “Fat Shaming” is actually something that begins in the schoolyard and never really ends.

Shaming the heavy is obviously not a way to convince people that they need to lose weight. Every heavy grade schooler has the will to lose the weight, to become normal. Their parents are on them to do it, their peers, themselves. Nobody goes into puberty wishing that they could stay fat. Nobody.

Wanting to lose weight is not the answer to losing weight. If that were the case, then two of three people in the US would not be currently overweight. If it were a matter of willpower, then we wouldn’t have an epidemic of weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Nobody wants these things. One reaction to the explosion of overweight in the US and Britain is this one:

Big Dude Clothing MD Darrell Freeman says, “We’ve seen a huge rise in the popularity of empowering plus-size women in recent years and I really hope that we can replicate this kind of awareness for overweight men also struggling to deal with the pressures that the media puts on us all.

“Overweight men should be allowed to embrace their bodies in exactly the same way that ‘curvy’ and ‘voluptuous’ women do.”

Yes, one reaction to adults getting fatter and fatter is to embrace our new curvy bodies. That doesn’t help kids that tease and bully the fat kid on the playground, but if we are talking about adults, one thing we can do is throw in the towel. We can buy bigger clothes, buy stronger furniture, widen the seats in the airplanes and cars. We can accept our new larger life. Don’t worry, be happy.

Accepting the new situation as the new normal, changing the way we see it will not just lead to a friendlier society, where we are all included. The ramifications of expanding waistlines are dire:

In May, the NHS chief executive Simon Steven said obesity is “the new smoking”. Obesity now accounts for 8 per cent of all UK deaths and if we don’t get tough on it, it will bankrupt the NHS.

So while Freeman claims the media “puts pressure on” overweight men, we’ve never been more obese. It is becoming the norm. Indeed the World Health Organisation predicts that three quarters of British men and almost all adults will be overweight by 2030.

We are not far here in the US from 3/4of us being overweight right now. Willpower is not the problem. We are trying to lose weight, but we are getting really shitty advice on how to do it.

Eat less is the number one thing we are told. They say “You are gaining weight because you overeat.” If that is the case then why do grade schoolers get fat? The weight explosion is not just occurring among people that feed themselves, but also in little kids that eat only what we give them. The problem isn’t how much we eat, it is what we eat.

People think that chocolate milk is healthy–its milk. But a serving of chocolate milk has as much sugar in it as a Snickers bar. People think that yogurt is healthy and give their kids GoGurt because they like it. It’s not healthy. Plain yogurt is healthy, Gogurt is just as bad as giving the kids cake for breakfast. The problem with the US diet is not that there is too much, but that there is too much sugar. Just about every processed food (8 out of ten items) contains added sugars. Any item that claims to be low-fat is going to be enhanced with sugar.

The second thing they tell you is that you don’t exercise enough. The thing they don’t tell you is that you would have to run for half an hour to burn off the calories in one cookie. Exercise will not make you lose weight. Some of the heaviest people in the country have the hardest, most physical jobs. You get heavy because you eat carbohydrate, not because you set at your computer too much. If you want the details on how your body gains and loses weight, get the book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes.

Do you want to lose weight? Don’t be ashamed. It’s not your fault. The advice you have been given on diet has been wrong for your whole life. Here is how to lose weight. Don’t buy any food in boxes, bags, or bottles. If it has more than one ingredient it is not real food, but processed food. Get your calories eating meat that has some fat on it. Cook your food in real fat…butter, lard, coconut oil. Nothing artificial is good for you to use if you are wanting to lose weight. At the grocery store stay out of the middle aisles. A health claim on a label means that the food is full of artificial things, many of which have untested effects on the population.

Shaming the fat in the US is just adding insult to injury. I do not blame any of the little kids that are overweight–and I don’t blame their parents. They are trying, but they are not trying the right things. Slowly the word is getting out. I found it, I am passing it on. I follow my own advice and I lost over ten percent of my body weight. I am now at my normal, natural weight. I don’t diet at all. I eat as much as I can stand to eat, and I eat the occasional dessert. I drink the occasional Coke. Most of the food and drink that I consume though are 100% real food and water. That is the ticket. Don’t be ashamed, don’t accept your situation as beyond your control, be real. Eat real.

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Birthday Debauchery

Posted on August 5, 2015 by dcarmack
de·bauch·er·y
dəˈbôCHərē/
noun
  1. excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures.

Uh. Yes, pretty much describes it. I turned 55 yesterday. Had a great day pretty much all day long–stayed home, watched the grand babies swim, ate good food for breakfast–bacon and eggs. That was the end of eating responsibly and the beginning of the debauchery.

One of my favorite desserts is Boston Cream Pie. As far as cakes go, it is not that bad. Lots of eggs, some flour, not as much sugar as the sweetest of cakes. Yesterday though, there was a first attempt at the cake that went south, so I had to help eat a yellow cake. That was lunch.

I got a Big Green Egg as a birthday gift. How great is that! As a first-fire meal on the Egg we had grass fed hamburgers on buns–more flour. We had potato salad. I had three non-alcoholic fake beers. We ate ice cream and we had a big piece of Boston Cream Pie. Like I said, debauchery.

As a result I sweated like crazy all night long, my joints even hurt a bit. I tossed and turned as my body did everything it could to get all of that sugar out of my blood and into my fat cells. I am happy to report that as of this morning I feel normal again, the sweats and jitters are gone. I am busily planning the next meat adventure on my Egg, maybe it will be a smoked pork roast–those are easy and decadent in a good way.

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Healthy is the Claim

Posted on August 4, 2015 by dcarmack

There is almost no more reliable indicator of the overall nutritional value of a food as whether the box or bag it is in contains a bold-text label to some healthy ingredient or lack of a harmful one. If a food package claims anywhere on it that it is healthy in some way you can bet that the overall product it contains is unhealthy. Perhaps not unhealthy for every single eater, maybe not even for the average eater, but it is unhealthy for many, and maybe you are in that number.

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Vitamin Water. The claim is right there in the name. This water is ‘enhanced’ with VITAMIN. Everyone born and raised in America knows before grade school that vitamins are necessary for health. I don’t really need to say it, but if you put vitamins in poison it does not make the poison healthy. Putting vitamins in water is no different than putting them in your mouth and washing them down with water, or chewing them. This water also has 120 calories. Water normally has zero calories. Vitamins contain no calories. I wonder where the calories in vitamin water comes from. Here is a blurb about what this very Vitamin Water contains, from not Coca Cola:

So, it contains less than 0.5 percent of a whole list of stuff (none of which has anything to do with this particular flavor’s namesake fruit, the orange), and thus at least 99.5 percent water, crystalline fructose, and sugar. Crystalline fructose, it turns out, is an even more processed version of high-fructose corn syrup—it provides a pure jolt of fructose.

So, what is your opinion, is a bottle of vitamin-enhanced water better for you than a similarly sized bottle of Coca Cola? Coca Cola doesn’t claim to have any health benefits. Both products contain the exact same amount of sugar. Sugar is the ingredient in Coca Cola that we should be avoiding. Sugar is the ingredient in Vitamin Water that we should be avoiding like poison. Adding vitamins to poison does not make the poison good for you. There fore… you should be avoiding Vitamin Water like poison…despite the healthy sounding name.

This same logic also applies to things you think are healthy because of what they are not. Ages ago, when not as much was known about body chemistry as now, it was decided to let everyone know that diets that contained ‘saturated fats’ may lead to a death of heart disease. The “MAY” part of the warning was not trumpeted as loud as the rest. It turns out that natural saturated fats–butter, lard, tallow, coconut–are not leading to heart disease, and the warning led to all sorts of unintended consequences.

This from Fox News:

If you think that sugar is the unhealthiest thing you can eat, you’re wrong. Apparently, the Worst Food on the Planet Award should actually go to soybean oil, suggests new findings published in the journal PLoS One.

Guess what other oils are way worse for you than any saturated fat. All of the PROCESSED oils are more fattening, lead to fatty liver, just as though they were loaded with fructose–even worse than fructose itself.

Deol and her colleagues aren’t totally sure what makes soybean oil so horrible, but they guess that it could have something to do with the way the stuff influences genes that determine how the liver metabolizes fat. And other processed vegetable oils might not be much better.

“We’ve actually tested corn oil, and we found that it was also causing more obesity than coconut oil, but not as much as soybean oil. We haven’t tested canola yet,” she said.

I can hazard a guess as to why these oils have this unexpected result in dietary testing. Gut microbes are feasting on this mystery material, turning the food into something fructose-like, that only the liver can metabolize. That is the problem with fructose, it can only be turned by the liver into fat, it cannot be used by the cells of the body directly. Am I surprised that man-made cooking oils are actually bad for us? No, I am not.

I am going back to nature. Making my own lard from real pigs raised on real farms is not hard to do at all. I go to the processing locker that is 30 minutes from my home, I ask them for leaf lard fat, and they give me five pound bags of it. I cut that fat up into chunks, throw it in the crock pot, where it just fits, and I walk off while it slowly turns into lard. I ladle it out though a reusable coffee strainer into mason jars, wide mouth so I can get it out easily, and let it cool. It keeps forever on the shelf. It’s GOOD for me, because my body knows what to do with it.

Making Tallow is just as easy. Same locker has five pound bags of Suet, which is fat from cattle. These cattle were not fed hormones, antibiotics and corn until their slaughter, so this fat will not contain any products from any of that unnatural food. The resulting tallow will heat nicely to 375 or 400 without smoking, making it perfect for deep frying chicken, fish, potatoes…it’s what McDonald’s used to use before we all were convinced that partially hydrogenated soybean oil was better for us that REAL oil. Tallow keeps indefinitely at room temperature. I made 20 pounds of it, and bought a “Lard Can” to keep it in.

That’s why, even though more research is needed to unveil the nitty gritty details of how soybean oil wrecks our health, it makes sense to cut back where you can, Deol said.

So, avoid processed food that lists the stuff as an ingredient as much as possible. As for cutting it out altogether? It’s worth a shot, but good luck.

“It’s so prevalent in our food system. If something says vegetable oil, it’s most likely soybean oil, or soybean oil is a component,” warned Deol.

Actually, cutting out mysterious ingredients is easy. You don’t have to read labels to do it, either.

If the food needs a label, it’s not food. If it contains more than one ingredient, it’s processed and you should probably be eating something else.

Stick to whole vegetables, naturally raised meats, whole dairy products (nothing low-fat), farm eggs (not industrially raised) and you will be avoiding all of the man made problems with modern food. If you do this, you can actually start eating sweet treats for dessert and it won’t hurt you or make you fat. All this other BS in your diet is what is making you fat. The occasionally sweet scoop of ice cream is as benign as you wish it would be. The FrankenFoods that you ate just before the ice cream are the deadly poisons that you think the treats are.

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Being the One

Posted on August 1, 2015 by dcarmack

First draft… 

 

Being everything to everyone

is a twisted form of greed

I relieve you of your neediness,

while on your gratitude I feed

 

It starves me of the time for me,

for myself I pay little heed

I want more than that, than anything

to be the thing you need

 

Not to give the thing, or to do the thing,

but to be the one you call

I want so to be needed,

to be wanted, to be all

 

Your first place to go for refuge

in my arms or in my care

I greedily offer solace

as I run my fingers through your hair

 

Nothing fulfills my neediness

like your coming here to me

A white knight on a sturdy steed

Is what I hope you see

 

I want this, though not just for you

But for everyone I know

I want to be this for everyone

everywhere I go

 

No distance is so great

that I wouldnt make the trip for greed

For the psychic boost I get

from taking on the burden of your need

 

I long to be the longed for

I want to be the one

I want to love and be loved

Like the shining of the sun

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