So Little Time

Posted on April 25, 2015 by dcarmack

So many stories, so little time to discuss every issue that they raise.

First issue is MY relationship and THE relationship between alcohol and sugar. The first time I read the Atkin’s diet book, back around 2003, I noticed that while beer had carbohydrates, clear liquors had zero. Back then I quit drinking beer and started drinking rum. After Atkins I went back to beer mostly, had a Keg Refrigerator in my basement, and drank a bunch of beer every night. I never considered myself to be alcohol dependent, but my Dad did. He was the only person who would tell me I drank too much.

Three years ago I gave up beer and alcohol altogether, and without giving up any other source of carbs I lost some weight. There is a lot of carbohydrate in good beer. I felt better and looked better. I was alcohol free for one year. At the one year anniversary I had a shot with a friend to celebrate. After that I drank occasionally from liquor that was still at the bar in my house. It was isolated instances and it was occasional.

Then, last year I went sugar-free. I went carb free, for a month. My sneak-drinking exploded. I got a bottle of vodka and I would drink every night. I discovered that when I was not having any carbohydrates at all my craving for liquor was through the roof. I was substituting one addiction for another. Addiction substitution is something covered in any book on addiction. At AA and other substance abuse groups they even encourage their members to go from drugs or alcohol to sugar. I was doing it naturally, because it was helping me to get off of carbohydrates. Now I read this:

This Is Why You Crave Sugar When You’re Stressed Out

If you are quitting something and drinking instead, or if you are quitting liquor and sweeting instead, you are not really breaking a habit, you are switching habits. I am going to try quitting both liquor and sweets now. I will be letting you know, of course, how that goes for me. Last night I went without any liquor, and ate breaded chicken, mashed potatoes and white gravy, sweet corn, and had a sugary cream soda. So, yesterday I gave up one thing, and had the other. I can certainly vouch for the news below:

Researchers at the University of California-Davis recently found that 80 percent of people report eating more sweets when they are stressed. Their new study, published in the the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, offers a possible explanation. Sugar, the researchers found, can diminish physiological responses normally produced in the brain and body during stressful situations. With stress levels on the rise, this could explain why more people are reaching for sweets.

Now for some other news and information gleaned in one day looking for nutrition news. So much to say, so little time to say it. Please click the links in blue today, so that you can see what is out there.

ADHD in children is in the news again, and this piece discusses how in the US some professions have taken to the practice of making a diagnosis based on what medicine works to make the patient feel better. Unfortunately, ADHD is one of those things. ADHD medicines are KNOWN to cause side effects, and the side effects come with their own medications to correct them. Some of the side effects to ADHD meds and it’s subsequent meds are permanent things, like nervous tics.

In the article they give a shoutout to curbing children’s nervous energy by changing their diets. I say always try this first. There are so many artificial ingredients in processed foods that are untested, and just labeled Generally Regarded as Safe by the FDA, that it is no wonder that youngsters have allergic reactions to some. If you think your child is wild, try no sugar and no processed foods for a month before you curse them with a lifetime of twitching.

This article in Salon.com is concerning the state of food safety inspections in the US. As I always say, good government costs money. Cutting the budget of food safety inspection is something that food industry doesn’t mind. Just like tax cheats love it when the IRS doesn’t have the money to audit anymore, the food factory would love to spend less money on cleaning their machinery, so that they can make more profit. Doing things right is always an option that they have, but since all the American public cares about is which product is cheaper, and since cleaning and maintenance cost money, and since the competitors are cutting corners and prices, the only choice available is to take risks. If the inspectors keep everyone honest, then no one has to cheat. It’s that simple. If you follow the rules when everyone doesn’t have to, you go broke. We need good government. The listeria outbreaks in ice cream prove it. People had to die to get this issue attention.

…much of our safety depends on trusting that the industry …will act in customers’ best interests. As Civil Eats reports, it’s typically up to producers to do their own testing, and then to notify the FDA when they detect a problem. There’s no law, meanwhile, mandating when they must issue a recall, or how many products they must pull — once a food is traced to illnesses, Morse explained, the FDA has the power to force a recall (and the company is unlikely to resist), but until then, the decision falls under more of a legal gray area. Sabra likely decided it could best protect its brand reputation by issuing a recall out of an abundance of caution — no illnesses were actually associated with the contamination — but that might be the exception instead of the rule.

Next up is an article about avocados. If you have missed the big “eat more avocados” bandwagon, well it’s too late to get on it. It turns out that all of the places that have been providing you cheap avocado are now in distress. It is a jungle plant that is grown in a desert in the US. In the jungle countries where it is grown there are growing pains. If avocados are someday six dollars each, I would be very happy. There are none grown within 500 miles of my home, which means that a one dollar avocado is taking advantage of too-cheap transportation to get to me. If they cost what they really cost the Earth by wasting so much oil to get to me, they would already be six dollars per. Eat local.

…imports, primarily from Mexico and Chile, now make up 85 percent of the avocados consumed in the U.S. year-round. But those countries have avocado issues of their own. In 1990, Chile had fewer than 8,000 acres of avocado trees; now it has more than 60,000 acres, and large avocado growers are draining the country’s ground­water and rivers faster than they can replenish themselves. In Mexico, where avocado farms are so lucrative that avocados are referred to as oro verde, or “green gold,” the problems are even more troubling. Seventy-two percent of the avocado plantations in Mexico are located in the state of Michoacán, and much of the industry there is controlled or influenced by the Caballeros Templarios drug cartel.

Then Salon had an article about the Ornish New York Times editorial. They, like Nina Teicholz take it apart bit by bit. Read it just to see how little evidence there is to shun any nutrient, except carbohydrate. If you want to live, live on delicious meats and fats. Eat vegetables and fruits, but if you eat good meats they are already eating vegetables and fruits for you. Get your veggies by eating good pork.

During the time in which the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. nearly tripled, the percentage of calories Americans consumed from protein and fat actually dropped whereas the percentage of calories Americans ingested from carbohydrates—one of the nutrient groups Ornish says we should eat more of—increased. Could it be that our attempts to reduce fat have in fact been part of the problem? Some scientists think so. “I believe the low-fat message promoted the obesity epidemic,” says Lyn Steffen, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. That’s in part because when we cut out fat, we began eating foods that were worse for us.

If you think that something that has “Organic” proudly displayed on it’s label, and has a price tag that is thirty or fifty percent higher than it’s non-organic neighbor is really and truly better for you, read this one. Mother Jones Online magazine describes the conditions under which organic confinement raised chickens are grown.  Here is the risk of adding an animal welfare standard to the organic label standard:

And large farms often have the most to lose when higher standards are put in place. In 2012, a year after the NOSB’s recommendations, the USDA conducted an economic impact analysis of poultry raised with a range of animal welfare standards. The study found that birds with more living space (two square feet per bird) and with more consistent access to the outdoors would cause the price of organic eggs to “increase substantially” among large organic egg producers and “likely cause a substantial number of producers to exit organic production and switch to conventional production.”

Less “organic” producers would mean that all of your industrial confinement-raised chicken and eggs would be identically labeled, which would be nice, because there is, for all intents and purposes, no nutritional difference between them right now. Corn fed chicken is not as good as local chicken that eats its natural forage. It doesn’t matter if the corn was organic or not.

The FDA has finally decided to follow Canada, the European Union, and the sellers of the majority of the supplements containing the untested stimulant BMPEA. The FDA warned us back in 2013 that it was in the supplements, but at that time they said there was no evidence of danger. Over the next two years they didn’t look for any either. They waited for a foreign nation and an independent group of scientists to volunteer to do that work for them. Good job FDA. Great example of leading from behind. Good use of scarce government resources. Maybe no one died.

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Leptin

Posted on April 23, 2015 by dcarmack

Never heard of it before yesterday. Leptin is an energy controlling hormone excreted by fat cells. It turns out that leptin is mentioned once in the book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. I am going to quote the SINGLE mention of this hormone at length. We will discuss after:

One consequence of this sub-specialization of modern medicine is the belief, often cited in the lay press , that the causes of obesity and the common chronic diseases are complex and thus no simple answer can be considered seriously. Individuals involved in treating or studying these ailments will stay abreast of the latest “breakthroughs” in relevant fields— the discovery of allegedly cancer-fighting phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables, of genes that predispose us to obesity or diabetes, of molecules such as leptin and ghrelin that are involved in the signaling of energy supply and demand around the body. They will assume rightfully, perhaps, that the mechanisms of weight regulation and disease are complex, and then make the incorrect assumption that the fundamental causes must also be complex. They lose sight of the observations that must be explained— the prevalence of obesity and chronic disease in modern societies and the relationship between them— and they forget that Occam’s razor applies to this science, just as it does to all sciences: do not invoke a complicated hypothesis to explain the observations, if a simple hypothesis will suffice.

Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 324-332). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Yesterday I watched the latest installment of the HBO documentary “Weight of the Nation:The Biology of Weight Loss“. Clinical studies are being performed that actually control the variables associated with gaining or losing weight. The researchers documented here discovered that YOUR body will do everything it can to maintain it’s normal weight. Apparently an obese person’s normal weight setting is at a value much higher than a lean person’s. Apparently there is a hormone excreted by fat cells (leptin) that controls hunger pangs, among other things. A person that is fasting experiences a reduction in fat cells, but simultaneously experiences a reduction in energy usage by muscles, and an overall reduction in resting metabolism. If you eat less, your body automatically ramps down your energy usage to compensate, resisting your efforts to lose weight. It also makes you famished and changes the way that you think about food. It drives you crazy so that you will once again eat, so as to maintain your setpoint weight. Once you are done fasting your leptin levels ensure that you will eat enough to regain the weight.

After hearing about leptin for the first time, this morning I Googled it. Guess what, there is a pill you can take. There is a great deal of information on the internet about leptin.

Reread the passage above from Taubes.

…they forget that Occam’s razor applies to this science, just as it does to all sciences: do not invoke a complicated hypothesis to explain the observations, if a simple hypothesis will suffice.

Leptin moves up and down in Lock Step with insulin. Ergo, the things that cause insulin system over reaction are liable to be the same things that cause ‘leptin resistance’ or your body’s ability to ignore leptin signals of fullness or overreact in the direction of hunger. If your insulin level is constantly high, if you were starving recently (on a diet), if you are obese, then whatever caused your obesity originally has your insulin and leptin hormones out of whack. Here is Dr Oz on what seems to cause leptin resistance:

If you’re eating lots of foods with high-fructose corn syrup or lots of carbs, or if you’re very stressed or sleep deprived, you’re more likely to feel like you have an appetite you just can’t satisfy.

Here is Wellness Mama’s advice about controlling your leptin issues:

In short, the (non-negotiable) factors that will help improve leptin response are:

  • Eating little to no simple starches, refined foods, sugars and fructose
  • Consuming a large amount of protein and healthy fats first thing in the morning, as soon after waking as possible. This promotes satiety and gives the body the building blocks to make hormones. My go-to is a large scramble with 2-3 eggs, vegetables and left over meat from the night before cooked in coconut oil.
  • Be in bed by ten (no excuses) and optimize your sleep!
  • Get outside during the day, preferably barefoot on the ground, in mid-day sun with some skin exposed. There are many reasons this is helpful and I’ll be explaining them soon)
  • DON’T SNACK!!! When you are constantly eating, even small amounts, during the day it keeps your liver working and doesn’t give hormones a break. Try to space meals at least 4 hours apart and don’t eat for at least 4 hours before bed. This includes drinks with calories but herbal teas, water, coffee or tea without cream or sugar are fine.
  • Don’t workout at first. If you are really Leptin resistant, this will just be an additional stress on the body. Let your body heal a little first, then add in the exercise.
  • When you do exercise, do only sprints and weight lifting. Walk or swim if you want to but don’t do cardio just for the sake of cardio. It’s just a stress on the body. High intensity and weight lifting, on the other hand, give the hormone benefits of working out without the stress from excess cardio and are great after the first few weeks. Also, workout in the evening, not the morning, to support hormone levels.
  • Remove toxins from your life as these are a stress on your body. There will be more specifics on how to accomplish this in the next few weeks, but getting rid of processed foods, commercial deodorants (make your own) and comercial soap (use microfiber) will go a long way!
  • Eat (or take) more Omega-3s (fish, grassfed meats, chia seeds) and minimize your Omega-6 consumption (vegetable oils, conventional meats, grains, etc) to get lower inflammation and help support healthy leptin levels.

So, let us apply Occam’s Razor to this problem. Eating carbohydrate causes high insulin levels. Insulin levels that fall as your blood sugar falls cause tiredness (low energy) and hunger–both symptoms of the hormone leptin. Eating more carbs (snacking) to satisfy hunger bring insulin back up and the cycle repeats. Fructose can only be metabolized into fat by the liver. Starches and sugars are metabolized into fat. Fat cells cause leptin levels to rise. Over a lifetime of eating this way your ‘normal’ weight setpoint gradually moves higher and higher. Obesity is not an acute illness, it is a gradual, chronic illness.

Now let me throw in a couple of more FACTS that I know by personal experimentation. If you don’t eat any carbohydrate, if you only eat real meat raised on it’s natural forage, you will not get hungry, despite eating far less calories than you normally eat. You don’t get hungry. You don’t have insulin spikes or crashes. Without any scientific data to back me up, I would bet that the lack of post-meal fatigue and post-meal hunger also means that my leptin levels are following the lead of my insulin levels and are not overreacting.

I am not losing weight rapidly. I don’t think losing weight rapidly is desirable. I didn’t gain weight rapidly, so losing it rapidly would be as alarming to my body as putting on ten pounds per week. I would rush to the doctor if that happened. I would know that I was sick if I went from 160 to 170 pounds in just a month! I can understand the obese wanting it gone as quickly as possible, but it is my sincere belief that if the obese quit eating carbohydrates they will lose a great deal of water weight immediately and then lose their fat at the rate that they gained it. As a bonus, they won’t be hungry all the time, and their body won’t be fighting them by lowering their metabolism and making them crazy about food.

I wish I could get one obese person to just eat meat for a month or two to see if any of this works for them. It worked for me. I went on a meat-only diet for a month. I didn’t experience any symptoms of vitamin deficiency. I didn’t experience any unusual fatigue or lethargy. My mind was just as sharp as it ever was. I am still on a greatly reduced carb intake, and I am still as sharp as ever. I do not fear a diet devoid of carbohydrate in any way. I do not fear red meat. I do not fear saturated fats. I think the true paleo diet would involve eating naturally raised animals internal organs. I may try eating internal organs this year (offal). Medieval society valued the internal organs in their diet far more than the primal cuts that we eat today. Offal only fell out of favor when we began getting meats that were processed in central rendering plants, and it was too hard to get the offal to the public without it spoiling.

Am I surprised that you can take a leptin supplement? No. It will not work to lower your weight if you continue to eat carbohydrates. It does not matter to the leptin seller that you won’t get what you want from eating leptin. Eating leptin will be just as useful to you as eating insulin would be. Ever wonder why there isn’t an insulin pill? I just said that without Googling it, for all I know there might be an insulin pill.

The solution to the problem is to quit eating carbohydrate. Diets don’t work because your body will resist efforts to lower your weight. Watch the documentary where they describe this better that I can here…a picture is worth another thousand words.

My advice, as always:quit eating processed foods (this includes ‘health powders’), eat real, single ingredient foods. Eat real meat from a local farmer, grown on its natural forage. Don’t avoid the natural fats from meat and contained in meat, they are where your energy should come from.

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I Have Stopped Losing Weight

Posted on April 22, 2015 by dcarmack

I heard this before from friends that are on the No Carb way of life. I have stopped losing weight invariably means that I have stopped losing a pound or two of weight per week. Until you are at your natural weight for your frame size, you have not stopped losing weight. If you don’t eat any carbohydrate other than what is naturally included in the fresh foods you eat, then you are losing fat volume all the time. Until your fat volume is practically gone you will keep on losing that every day–its just not enough to see in a one week timeframe.

The reason that people lose so much weight at the beginning of the No Carb way of eating is that they are losing water. When your body has consumed all of the carbohydrate you contain and instead of being geared up to fuel off of carbs it is geared up to fuel off of body fats, the extra water it takes to metabolize carbs is released from duty. Bye-bye weight.

After this period, which may be as long as two weeks, depending on how much carbohydrate you were used to consuming, you will shed water–so much water that you will notice how much water you are shedding. At the same time, you will be drinking a lot of water to keep yourself from drying out. I know it doesn’t seem to make sense, but believe me that if you aren’t eating carbs and you are not drinking enough water, you won’t lose weight and you will dehydrate. The reason that this is true is that when you are metabolizing your body fat, one requirement in the chemical equation is water. A water molecule is produced in the reaction. If you don’t have any water to spare, because you are dehydrated, that chemical reaction will stall. You wont have all of the energy you need, and you won’t lose weight. Here is the chemical equation:C55H104O6+78O2 —> 55CO2+52H2O+energy.

That’s fat + oxygen turns into carbon dioxide and water. Energy weighs nothing, so it has no bearing on the outcome of your body weight. The proportion of mass that ends up as CO2 versus H2O is 84 percent compared to 16 percent. When you are talking about weight, you lose the fat you are ‘burning’ through breathing out your carbon dioxide and peeing, but mostly when you exhale.

When you eat your no carb meal, your body uses the fats you just ate pretty much as they are. The immediate needs of your system, your muscles and organs, take from the fats in your dinner. Just before you begin to eat, your pancreas will secrete some insulin and it sweeps all of the energy out of your blood to prepare it for the energy of your meal. When your meal contains no carbohydrates, you don’t need to secrete more insulin to deal with the increasing blood sugar from eating sugar or starches. Your liver begins to metabolize the protein in your meal. When you are done eating you once again metabolize fat stores for your immediate energy needs. Your fat stores don’t increase, you draw down on them right away.

This process happens like this normally even for people eating carbohydrates overnight. Usually sometime in the middle of the night everyone will go into ketosis where they are using fat stores for immediate energy needs for the long fast while we sleep. For people on a no carbohydrate lifestyle it just happens way sooner, or is happening all of the time.

We on the no-carb bandwagon are losing a little bit of weight all of the time. I have been right here at around 139 for a few weeks, but it is still slowly trending down. I didn’t jump immediately from 125 pounds to 160, it took me decades to get to 160. It might take me decades to get back to 125. I will get back to 125, and I won’t be exercising a whole bunch to get there. I will be eating what I want, I will be eating no carbs, I will be eating real meat from a real farmer. I will be getting all of the benefit of a healthy food chain to get me the exact proportion of macronutrients I need. I will be getting the benefit of the microbes contained in and on my real foods. The good microbes in me will be getting all of the help they need from my natural diet.

Is this Paleo dieting? I don’t really know, I have never read a Paleo diet book. I don’t really need one to eat like this. The recipes are all simple. Cook the meat and eat it. I suppose even cooking the meat is optional, but I am used to eating cooked meat. I have eaten raw fish, but it has always been wrapped in rice and seaweed at the sushi restaurant.

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I Am Not Ashamed

Posted on April 21, 2015 by dcarmack

This weekend at work a colleague saw me eating a snack cake. He lit into me about how I was violating my diet, and that he wanted to see an article about how it was okay to eat a snack cake when you are on a diet. Okay, buddy, here it is.

I am not on a diet. I wasn’t on a diet this weekend, either. When I was eating only meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner I was not on a diet. I have dietary guidelines that I attempt to live by and if you commonly read this blog, you know exactly what they are. I don’t eat processed foods. That snack cake was a highly processed, sugar filled violation of a guideline that I live by. The fact that I ate a snack cake did not fill me with shame. I was not eating it in a closet, I did not hide and try to eat it. I decided to have a sweet and I had one.

Living as I do, three meals a day following the rule to eat no processed food, it is not unsafe or a sign of anything at all when I step over that bright line. The occasional variation from a norm is not a pattern, but it can become a pattern. The way that it becomes a pattern is to hide it. The way that it becomes a pattern is t0 be ashamed of it. The amazing thing about your brain is that if you do something under cover, that you must keep a secret, it is instantly a dangerous habit beginning to form.

Here is a video of doctor Renee Brown discussing shame. Hiding something is a behavior that happens when you think what you are doing will lower your standing with the people you are hiding it from. The fact that you are hiding means that you fear that you are not worthy of your friends, family and peers esteem. If you feel that you are unworthy it is a symptom that you don’t believe you are who you should be and has no connection to how your relations will view you.

Your feelings of unworthiness and disconnection lead you to more and more shameful behavior. When I didn’t accept the accusation that I should be ashamed to be eating something processed and sweet, I defused the power of that cake to become something that I could not control.

A person that is addicted to something, drugs, alcohol, food, if they are wanting to stop, benefit so much more by being connected to everyone around them, instead of being scorned and shunned by them. Connection to other people leads to a healthy and happy environment to heal in. I wrote an article sometime in the last year that talked about this, and one story in there is about lab rats that chose to use drugs and to eat junk. The first study showed them getting addicted, and what the rates of addiction were. Another researcher had the idea to compare these animals, who were living the miserable existence of a lab rat to identical animals that were living in a happier environment. The research showed that misery led to addiction, and that substances weren’t just naturally addictive.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

Feeling ashamed of yourself is a real problem, it is a source of misery, and the problem is all in your head. Your greatest fear of what would happen if your big secret were exposed is way overblown. Your wife won’t leave you, nobody will hate you (except all of the commenters of Facebook) and even they wouldn’t hate you if you were their mom or dad. Your shame is your shitty cage, and you made it.

The place to combat shame is when you think of what you are. You are not an addict that can’t resist temptation, you are just you, a person that needs to love and respect himself enough to ask his loved ones for help. You don’t need them to stand guard over you to prevent you from hurting yourself and that’s not what you would ask for. You are worthy of their help and support. All you have to do is ask for it. Open yourself to the vulnerability of your life for one second and ask for help. That cage that is keeping you ashamed and addicted instantly vanishes. And you are free.

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Getting Rid of Fat

Posted on April 20, 2015 by dcarmack

I don’t know why anyone would throw away perfectly good fat, and by fat, I mean grease.

images

I have a mug with a strainer atop it on the stove. Every meal that generates grease, like frying bacon or sausage, ends with me draining leftover grease into this mug. The bits of food stay on the strainer, the grease solidifies in the mug. When the mug fills up we transfer the grease into a quart mason jar. We keep it all at room temperature and the stuff never goes bad.

This kind of recycled grease is very flavorful. It contains some of the flavor of the smoked and cured bacon and some of the spices of the sausage. If you cook with it there will be a hint of smoky flavor in whatever you are making. Try sweating some green beans in fat until they begin to brown. The caramelized bean and the bacon flavor are incredible together.

I have bacon grease that is a year old. Yesterday I used a bunch of it to cook one and a half pound batches of Buffalo wings. I fry my wings in 325 degree fat (just at the smoke point for bacon grease) to half fill a stock pot on the stove top. Put 1.5 pounds of chicken in at a time and watch for foam-over, add the pieces gradually. The oil will cool off, but it will only take ten minutes or so for the oil to get back over 300. When the pieces are floating and browning remove them to drain in a bowl. Repeat this process until they are all cooked. Melt a half cup of REAL salted butter in a pan and add an equal amount of Red Hot sauce. Stir it up and coat the wings with it. No restaurant you have ever eaten at makes better wings than these. These even taste good if all you do is fry them. This will take quite a bit of grease to fill your stock pot half full, so start saving yours now.

To clean my grease between batches I will pour hot fat through a reusable coffee filter, one of those gold metal filter kind. You can also use a fine tea towel or maybe a paper coffee filter…cheese cloth works ok, as well.

When this grease gets old I am going to figure out how to make soap with it.

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My Secret Is Out

Posted on April 19, 2015 by dcarmack

“My secret is out, now I can finally quit!” These are the words that go through an addict’s head the second that his secret using or hidden bad behavior is discovered. It doesn’t matter what your addiction is, be it drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, women, crime…they are all the very same in your head.

Every day you go about your business normally as you can, and when it comes time to deal with the demon you put a little marker in the sand just a step or two ahead of where you are. That marker says “Quit here”. Maybe it’s when this bottle is empty and you say you won’t buy another one. If it is food, then it is the hidden store of sweets that is all gone. If you have people you love then you will think about how much you will hurt them if you don’t get quit before you get caught. That moving marker is the demon winning another round.

Getting caught is another marker in the sand. It is another chance to do the right thing for yourself. It is a chance to once again become honest with yourself and the world. There is danger on the road ahead but now, with everything once again in the open, there is a chance to go forward without any guilt. Now your only hurdle is that DAMNED voice in your head that says, “you will break again, might as well be now”. It says “why suffer, using just a little bit doesn’t hurt anyone”. It says “you have quit for a long time, give yourself this one treat”. It says, “you are your own boss, are you not? Then be a man.” Except you can’t be a man, you have to hide, so that no one gets hurt, because you are not going back to doing it all the time in the open, you just want this one. Hiding is the demon making plans for his comeback. A secret is a way of life.

You can’t blame anyone else for your demon. It is strictly your own. If you get discovered you might want to say “mind your own business,” but that is the demon talking. If you get angry it is the demon wanting what it wants. You might be tempted to use getting discovered as a reason to give up all efforts to quit. That is a victory for the dark side.

That voice is the enemy of the good life. A person has to be able to reckon with that tiny voice, the devil on the left shoulder. It only wants what it wants, and can’t see the future, even though it claims it can. That voice only cares about the moment. It creeps in in tiny steps. It makes little plans on the way to getting you set to continue the old life.

Keeping a pack of cigarettes hidden in your car–just in case. This was the Voice’s idea. You are one step closer to giving it what it wants. The angel on your right shoulder knows what the left is up to. You will remind yourself that you shouldn’t take even a minuscule step in that direction, because that is the slippery slope you are always hearing about. At any point on the curve you can step off the merry go round, but every time you don’t you are still on the ride.

That demon will tell you that your life is a wreck and that the only hope is to hold the secret dear. It is making sure that you will keep on operating in the dark. It wants what it wants, and the enemy of the demon is daylight. Everything out in the open, everything aboveboard is going to mean that the demon lost.

Your life is not a wreck. At this very moment you can listen to the dark whispering and call the demon out. “I don’t want to buy any cigarettes, because I don’t want to smoke. I don’t want to gamble because I hate losing. I don’t want to drink, because it makes me feel rotten.” You are not a bad person, you do things that you don’t really want to do, but that does not make you bad. Eating a snack cake in secret is a symptom of something, but it is not a symptom of you being evil or weak. You are stronger than your habits, but you are not exercising your strength.

Breaking every habit is exactly the same. Here is the process. You know when you are thinking about doing something that will put you on the path to hidden behavior…when you have that thought, say to yourself “there is one of those times”. Even thinking something that simple breaks your train of thought. If you are standing in the candy aisle looking at a box of sweets, just stand there. Think to yourself, this is where it begins, right here. Even standing here is an act of the demon. Right then it is easy to step back and say that going that way leads into an area that is hard to get out of.

I know that these things are easier to say than they are to do. Believe me I know, but I have broken habits. I will break more in the rest of my life. As a compulsive person I tend to get into habits, and as a thoughtful person I tend to obsess on my sins. I suffer when I am not doing good, and suffering leads me into not doing good. The cycle is vicious and the solution is easy to dream about. Life is long. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t change for your loved ones, do it for yourself.

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Multiple Themes

Posted on April 18, 2015 by dcarmack

This morning I read on Nina Teicholz’s book website, “TheBigFat Surprise.com”, a complete blow-by-blow takedown of the advice that Doctor Dean Ornish put forth in his New York Times op-ed from about a month ago. At that time I had written my own critique of Dr Ornish’s points, which you can read here…“Doctor”.

What Nina does is what she does best, analyze the scientific studies that Ornish cites and then report on the confounding evidence and the hasty conclusions that are arrived at by doctors like Ornish, who are trying to prove a point more than they are trying to advance a hypothesis. For instance:

This is a quote from Dr Ornish’s op-ed:

A study published last March found a 75 percent increase in premature deaths from all causes, and a 400 percent increase in deaths from cancer and Type 2 diabetes, among heavy consumers of animal protein under the age of 65 — those who got 20 percent or more of their calories from animal protein.

And Teicholz rebuts in this way:

It’s somewhat embarrassing that Ornish would cite this study. The finding above is an association calculated in a highly flawed manner, as analyzed in thorough detail by Zoe Harcombe here. Moreover, the paper was written by an owner and three employees of a plant-based diet company named L-Nutra, which was very likely biased the outcome.

The study Ornish cited was written by the owner and three employees of a plant-based diet company. Here is the thing. Doctor Ornish knows that you, the reader of his NYT piece will not look up the evidence he cites. He knows that most of you will leave that piece thinking that you should eat less meat, and maybe go buy an Ornish diet book. He may well believe what he is saying, there may not be a profit motive, but cherry-picking evidence, no matter how flimsy, if it supports your hypothesis and rejecting all evidence that confounds it is a hallmark characteristic of PSEUDOSCIENCE. My bet is that Dr Ornish has a staff of ‘researchers’ that are always on the prowl for any evidence that supports the boss. He doesn’t read or evaluate the evidence himself.

Dr Ornish’s piece is full from one end to the other of this sort of logical error. Read the work of Teicholz and click through one or two of her links to actual evidence to verify what she is reporting. After doing so you will, like me, realize that there is no evidence condemning meat or saturated fats. There is no health-based reason that a person would avoid eating meats, and change the basis of their diet to fruits and vegetables. There are other reasons, but none of them is that you will hurt yourself eating meats.

Ornish claims–

When fat calories were carefully controlled, patients lost 67 percent more body fat than when carbohydrates were controlled.

Teicholz analyzes–

This is an unpublished study on 19 men, lasting only 6-7 days, on an experimental diet so low in fat (7-8%) that is has virtually no comparison in human history. Again, one must ask: why is Ornish citing such obscure, speculative and even unpublished data for his argument? After so many years of studying the low-fat diet, don’t we have better data? Of course we do. There have been many tests of the low-fat diet on tens of thousands of people, but their findings do not support the hypothesis that this diet helps people lose a significant amount of weight. In head-to-head diet trials, the low-fat diet nearly always performs the worst.

This back and forth between competing studies is how tobacco escaped any serious challenge to its “cigarettes are good for you” argument that they hid behind for years. I say this–look around. Use your own eyes. We have all been on a diet pressed upon us by industry for many decades. Low fat foods and cooking oils and shortening were invented so that we could all get off of saturated fats. Industry has invented veggie burgers and tofu burgers and other ways you could replace meats. We have all been on diets because we were getting fat. We all know that nothing works to reduce the weight. We all know someone who has type 2 diabetes. Some of us even know grade school children who are suffering from “adult onset diabetes”. Both of my parents had heart attacks and had to have their coronary plumbing repaired. The fact is that none of these trends are getting better, even though it’s hard to find a saturated fat to cook with, or that meat costs ten dollars per pound these days. The trend for eating ‘bad’ foods is down and going down, yet two out of three of us are overweight. One out of three of us is obese. Babies are getting Fatty Liver disease and getting liver replacements. Trying to eat low-fat Is THE PROBLEM. You shouldn’t wait for the science to be definite. You need to quit eating carbohydrates at every meal now.

Ancient man (before long distance refrigerated trucking) could not eat fruit at every meal. No orange juice for breakfast every day on any table before the turn of the century in the US. Our healthy pioneer kin could only eat foods from the ground on which they lived. They could keep some things in root cellars for a while, but nothing lasts from growing season to growing season. They had to ferment foods so that they would keep. Every bite they took was a food that was teeming with life. Bacteria, natural vinegars, cheeses were all providing real life to them. The soil the food was grown on was all natural. Nobody knows what kind of difference that it makes inside the human body to eat foods that are living a natural life compared to those eating an artificial industrially produced life. It would be idiotic though to assume that the artificial, processed food is the equivalent.

I don’t care what the science is doing now. I understand that the government has backed off it’s caution against saturated fats for health reasons. That is good, but it does not persuade me. What does persuade me is my own experience. I am eating meats and fats, and I have cut my carbohydrate consumption to the minimum, and I am FAR healthier than I was previously. I am far more alert, my nerves are better, I can do more detail work without a tremble. I am harder to anger. I am not hungry between meals.

I can go on and on. I could write 500 more words on my own personal benefits from eating meats and saturated fats.

However, I will just give you a bit of free advice.

Stop eating artificial foods. If it is in a bag or box, if there is a health claim on the label, do not buy it. Find someplace to get meat that allows the animals to eat their natural forage for their entire lives. Get eggs from birds that can eat grass and bugs. If you can’t get natural meats, industrial meats are still better than dead foods. You can’t put enough vitamins in a breakfast cereal to make it as healthy as a plate of bacon and eggs.

Whole Foods is recalling raw macadamia nuts from California. These macadamia nuts are tainted with Salmonella. From the CDC:

Every year, Salmonella is estimated to cause one million illnesses in the United States, with 19,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths . Most persons infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection.

The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most persons recover without treatment. However, in some persons, the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized.

People should wash their hands after contact with animal feces. Because reptiles are particularly likely to have Salmonella, and it can contaminate their skin, everyone should immediately wash their hands after handling reptiles. Reptiles (including turtles) are not appropriate pets for small children and should not be in the same house as an infant. Salmonella carried in the intestines of chicks and ducklings contaminates their environment and the entire surface of the animal. Children can be exposed to the bacteria by simply holding, cuddling, or kissing the birds. Children should not handle baby chicks or other young birds. Everyone should immediately wash their hands after touching birds, including baby chicks and ducklings, or their environment.

See where salmonella comes from? It comes from animal feces. Somehow these macadamia nuts were smeared with feces. Lots of weird things are smeared with feces every year. One year it was all the spinach at all the stores, it caused a shortage. Alfalfa sprouts and bean sprouts get recalled a lot.

I think the point I am trying to make is “Eat local foods”. While it is possible to get salmonella just from holding a pet chicken, or stroking a pet lizard, it is not terribly likely that you will get it from your farmer’s market salad fixings. Your local meat locker is not going to be as likely to contaminate your hamburger, because they are not processing one thousand animals per hour. It is easy to spread shit on your food if you are in a big hurry.

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Unsustainable, Sustainable

Posted on April 18, 2015 by dcarmack

Modern farming is unsustainable. It costs more to raise corn and soy that a farmer can get at market prices. If it were not for the welfare of the Federal government, farmers would all go broke the first year.

2 farmers’ stories: The fall and rise of the mid-size farm

“You know, the soil is alive,” Brown said. “It’s just that our management, over the last 60, 70 years, has turned it into a sterile petri dish, more or less. All I’m trying to do is mimic nature. I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done for eons of time.”

Because Brown doesn’t buy fertilizer or pesticides, his costs are low — it only costs him $1.44 to produce a bushel of corn. And how does that compare to the industry standard?

“Nationally, the cost to produce a bushel of corn is close to $5 a bushel,” Brown said.

That’s how much it costs to grow the stuff. But the price of corn is now around $4 a bushel. Which means most farmers are losing money on every kernel they sell.

You know, the soil is alive when you farm without chemicals. That life is passed on to the plant, both soil and plant benefit from their interaction. The life of the soil is passed up the food chain to the plant, who then passes it on up the chain to the animal. Mostly it is cattle and hogs that eat the corn and soy. When the soil is dead, none of those nutrients are being passed up. It is unknown at the present time just how much we miss the nutrients that our beef and hogs would be getting from real forage that is growing on living soil. I can only imagine that a lot of the health problems in the modern American are from our fractured relationship to the soil.

They are only farming that way because of the subsidies. If it were not for the Federal welfare program for farmers they could not grow corn at such a cheap price, it wouldn’t then be cost effective for ranchers to finish the cattle at the feed lot. That is only practical because the corn costs next to nothing. Corn that costs next to nothing is only possible because the government is paying the living expenses of the farmer. Only gigantic corporations can actually make any money farming. These mid level farms are being driven out of business, and out of farming entirely.

It is possible to grow food the right way and not go broke doing it. It is possible to sell products for more than the competition and make money (see Apple Computer). It is possible to not damage your farm and still make healthy food.

There are two important innovations that Gabe Brown has made. First there’s the technical innovation: figuring out this no-till holistic grazing system. The second is a business innovation: figuring out how to appeal directly to final customers and convince them that his product is worth a premium. Now, the thing about technical innovations is that they can always be scaled up. Lots of other farms, and bigger farms, can do the same thing. So this won’t be a panacea for mid-sized farms forever.

But his second innovation, the business innovation, could be the answer. There’s little future for mid-sized farms in the mass market. But, as a farmer, if you can convince eaters that you do an especially good job as a steward of the land and of their health, they’ll be happy to pay you for that.

I am convinced. I pay more. I go to a lot of trouble to find real food, produced on real soil, sold by real farmers. I won’t live forever, but while I live I will be happy, healthy and guilt free.

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Everything is Relevant

Posted on April 16, 2015 by dcarmack

There is a huge problem with epidemiological studies that propose ‘relationships’ between foods and health outcomes. All of the statisticians and scientists are fully aware of the problems with the ‘correlations’ that these studies expose, but they still draw those conclusions, they still cite the studies when trying to recommend policy changes to the government. Here are the known problems with epidemiology:

Selection bias is one of three types of bias that can threaten the validity of a study. Selection bias occurs when study subjects are selected or become part of the study as a result of a third, unmeasured variable which is associated with both the exposure and outcome of interest.[48] For instance, it has repeatedly been noted that cigarette smokers and non smokers tend to differ in their study participation rates. (Sackett D cites the example of Seltzer et al., in which 85% of non smokers and 67% of smokers returned mailed questionnaires.)[49] It is important to note that such a difference in response will not lead to bias if it is not also associated with a systematic difference in outcome between the two response groups.
Information bias is bias arising from systematic error in the assessment of a variable. An example of this is recall bias. A typical example is again provided by Sackett in his discussion of a study examining the effect of specific exposures on fetal health: “in questioning mothers whose recent pregnancies had ended in fetal death or malformation (cases) and a matched group of mothers whose pregnancies ended normally (controls) it was found that 28% of the former, but only 20% of the latter, reported exposure to drugs which could not be substantiated either in earlier prospective interviews or in other health records”. In this example, recall bias probably occurred as a result of women who had had miscarriages having an apparent tendency to better recall and therefore report previous exposures.
Confounding has traditionally been defined as bias arising from the co-occurrence or mixing of effects of extraneous factors, referred to as confounders, with the main effect(s) of interest.

Most nutritions studies suffer from every one of these defects. Study participants are selected out of a community that is already sick, for instance has already had a cardiac event. Study participants may be different in many ways from the general public. For instance, when studying the effects of the Mediterranean diet they might only have people who are already very health conscious join the study. Confounding is hard to compensate for because finding a correlation that is a single cause is impossible in people where you cannot control or catalog every bite of food they take.

Yet, despite this, the government, with no better data to go on, makes dietary recommendations to a sick and sickening public. Even though their scientists know that the data are not conclusive, they fear that making no recommendation will cause more problems than making a premature recommendation. At least that was how they thought back in the 70s and 80s. Now that we have all been Guinea pigs for forty years, eating low fat and high carb like the government recommended–now that we are all fat and getting fatter, sick and getting sicker–the government is free to change the recommendation, and to admit the flaws.

The bad thing is that the government doesn’t do that explicitly. Their once-every-five-years recommendations still contain a caution about meat and fats. The justification changed, but not the recommendation. Now we shouldn’t eat meats and fat because it’s bad for the environment. Well, actually, industrially produced meats are bad for the environment because eighty percent of all the grain grown for food is fed to livestock to fatten them up. It turns out that the ill effect on the environment is that. If you can find someone to sell you meat that is not raised on grains like corn and soy then there is nothing wrong with eating meat and fat.

This distinction is lost on dietitians and doctors, though.  My mother just left the hospital after a cardiac event and the diet advice she got was “low fat”, “low cholesterol”, which is the same old advice. She should be hearing that she needs to eat way less carbs, and that if she wants to reduce her carb intake by eating local meats that would be the best course, going forward. I knew she was going to get this bad old advice and I warned her. I don’t know whether my non-professional opinion will carry as much weight as a doctor in a lab coat who has had very close to zero formal training on diet or nutrition, but we will see.

People get sick when they eat too much sugar and starch over a long period of time. If you eat margarine instead of butter you are probably harming your heart. Eating unnatural foods with unnatural ingredients is risky. Eating processed foods, with their added sugars and lowered fats is risky. Eating the Western diet is risky. Nobody is sounding the alarm though that has a big enough bullhorn to get everyone’s attention. Our government is not even likely to warn us even if there is an illegal ingredient in foods. (See yesterday’s post for this news). Money and profit are trumping every other consideration, including Federal law.

You are really and truly on your own these days. Science has been coopted by industry. Your government is being coopted by industry. Look to foreign lands for honest advice about what you should eat and what you should avoid. When Canada bans something, you should quit eating it. When the European Union restricts something, you restrict it, too. Someday our nation might, but it could be decades before it happens. Real science is being performed in the world, but it’s just not around here. Real government is being enjoyed somewhere in the world, but its just not in the USA.

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When Some is Worse Than None

Posted on April 14, 2015 by dcarmack

I happen to believe that there are some cases where the only entity that can be effective at curing an ill of society is government. There are those that believe only the market can effectively cure ills that take place in the marketplace. In my opinion, because money is the actual incentive for business, and good outcomes are the incentive for government, in cases where it is profitable for businesses to cheat, lie, and steal then government’s rightful place is to act as referee, and make all of the businesses operate to a minimum standard, making it less profitable to cheat.

Take supplements, for instance. Once again dietary supplements are in the news.

Retailers to Stop Sales of Controversial Supplements

Vitamin Shoppe, one of the country’s largest specialty retailers of dietary supplements, said that it planned to stop selling all supplements that list on their labels a plant known as acacia rigidula after a study published on Tuesday reported that many of these products contained an amphetamine-like stimulant called BMPEA.

This may be a case of the market reacting and curbing an industry practice before the government has had time to react. This may be a case of industry protecting itself from future litigation. It may be a case of a retailer noting that the government of Canada has banned all of products containing this chemical and sees the writing on the wall.

The Food and Drug Administration itself discovered in 2013 that some weight-loss and workout supplements sold in the United States that list acacia rigidula on their labels also secretly contained BMPEA. The agency found the chemical in at least nine products but never named those products or warned consumers about the risk. Nor did it ask the companies to remove the stimulant from their supplements.

There is a new study of supplements that contain this synthetic stimulant, BMPEA. This stimulant was invented in the 1930s as a replacement for amphetamine, but was never tested on humans.

Although BMPEA was first synthesized in the 1930s as a replacement for amphetamine, it was never introduced as a pharmaceutical drug and its side effects were never studied in humans.

Under federal law, dietary supplements — with some exceptions — can contain only ingredients that are part of the food supply or that were already on the market before 1994. Dr. Cohen said that BMPEA has never been sold as a food or supplement, and as a result any product that contains it is considered adulterated, which would give the F.D.A. the authority to send warning letters to companies that add it to their supplements.

The FDA would be perfectly within its rights to pull these products. These few retailers pulling them is not the same as a national ban. Retailers who continue to carry the products are now benefiting from less competition. The companies doing the right thing are actually acting against their short term business interests.

Why isn’t the government doing the regulation of a potentially dangerous drug properly? This is what Canada said…

The Canadian government issued a public health alert about BMPEA to consumers: “Amphetamine stimulants can increase blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature; lead to serious cardiovascular complications (including stroke) at high doses; suppress sleep and appetite, and be addictive.”

This is what the FDA said….

The Food and Drug Administration documented two years ago that nine such supplements contained the same chemical, but never made public the names of the products or the companies that made them. Neither has it recalled the products nor issued a health alert to consumers as it has done with other tainted supplements. The F.D.A. said in a statement that its review of supplements containing the stimulant “does not identify a specific safety concern at this time.”

On what basis does the FDA claim that a synthetic stimulant is not a safety concern, when Federal Law states that “dietary supplements — with some exceptions — can contain only ingredients that are part of the food supply or that were already on the market before 1994.” There have never been drug trials for this stimulant. Not finding a safety concern when, in fact, you have never looked for one is malfeasance. Why would a government agency abdicate it’s responsibilities totally, like this?

Daniel Fabricant, who ran the agency’s division of dietary supplement programs from 2011 to 2014, had been a senior executive at that trade group, the Natural Products Association, which has spent millions of dollars lobbying to block new laws that would hold supplement makers to stricter standards. He left the F.D.A. last year and returned to the association as its chief executive. His current replacement at the F.D.A.’s supplement division also comes from the trade group.

“To have former officials in the supplement industry become the chief regulators of that industry at the F.D.A. is like the fox guarding the hen house,” said Michael F. Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.

Normally I would say that just because you used to work in the industry you are being asked to regulate you are not disqualified. If you leave your government post and immediately go back to the industry you were regulating, likewise you’re not automatically assumed to not have done the nation’s business properly. However, if, during your tenure at the post you make a decision like this one, that allows and maybe even encourages Federal law to be broken, I would say that makes you an accomplice to law breaking, is grounds for impeachment and or imprisonment.

This is a case where some government is worse than no government. We all grew up in a nation where you could count on the Federal government to protect you from the worst abuses of industry and the marketplace. In the past twenty years or so, that safety net has gotten big holes in it. People still think that if it is on your Kroger shelves that it has been deemed to be safe. You just assume that if it’s not on the label, it’s not in the bottle. You guess, wrongly, that if it’s on the label it’s in the bottle. Some regulation, partial adherence to law, and now some looking the other way by government regulators leaves us more vulnerable to shady actors and industry predators. You are going to be more gullible if you think your government is protecting you like it used to. If the government isn’t going to defend us, they should get completely out of the protection business. If we are on our own out there it would be nice to know that in every case and not find out that dietary supplements are unregulated, and that even if they are banned in other countries our country won’t ban them because they have never yet killed any one. I don’t want to ‘beta test’ drugs and supplements and artificial ingredients for industry. Personally, I think the government owes us regulation of business, since we are paying for it.

Stop buying supplements. They are unregulated and they are dangerous.

Don’t wait for government to protect you, they are currently unreliable.

Stop eating processed foods, or anything in a box or bag or bottle, because it’s like the wild west out there. Snake oil salesmen are proliferating. Eat real food from real people that you can know. Take your health into your own hands.

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