Caring About Everyone Is Hard

Posted on January 8, 2015 by dcarmack

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I have finished the gigantic tome “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholz. I am depressed. I am depressed because I am one hundred percent convinced that every word found in the final, summary chapter is true. I am depressed because I will probably never see the day when all of that truth is considered the working science on the subject. It is an unfortunate truth that bad science is never defeated by truth, truth must wait for the men that have made their living espousing bad science to pass away.

In summary of the book (but please get it and read it) you should be getting all of the calories that you are currently getting from carbohydrates from saturated fats instead. There is nothing wrong or unhealthy with eating red meats that contain natural fats. Eating foods cooked in vegetable oil is dangerous, since vegetable oil is unstable when heated or reused because it creates oils that cause heart disease.

You can’t look anywhere in the media or in diet advice that has that good news in it yet. I read Mother Jones online magazine for diet articles all the time and this morning I find this:

I Used to Be a Snob About Fake Meat. I Was Dead Wrong.

In the article we see quotes from Mark Bittman about the energy balance of eating meats instead of eating the foods that meats eat. We see the argument that it might be better to eat processed plant proteins that factory farmed meats because:

The argument is powerful. Factory-farmed meat doesn’t taste like much, yet generates all manner of wreckage, from antibiotic-resistant pathogens to fouled water and air to horrific working conditions and what amounts to systematized animal torture. Indeed, why not just eat some soybeans tarted up to look and taste like meat instead?

When you compare factory meat-like creations against factory farmed meat you can make these decisions, but when you compare factory meat or factory fake meat to locally produced meats from local farmers raised in the way that nature intended all of the meat disadvantages go away.

This is why I always say that you can’t wait for everyone to be helped by the system. Our government is not about to mandate any kind of food. They are still making exactly the wrong recommendations, after all. Our food industry is still trying to crank out foods with no fat, no meat, that closely resemble the look and feel of the real thing. Meanwhile the real thing is available to you. Does it matter to you that currently there is not enough locally grown meat to feed you and all of your neighbors? It makes me sad that there isn’t, but that does not stop me from advocating the real thing for me, my family and my readers. That means you. I am advocating that you join me in doing the very best thing for you.

Caring about everyone in my neighborhood, that they are getting bad official advice, that they are reading bad advice today from Mother Jones, that it is hard for them to lose weight or maintain their health because of all that bad advice makes it hard for me to be happy. I would be happy if suddenly we could all see the obvious, that we were misled with the best of intentions back in 1960, that there has never been any reason to choose carbohydrate over saturated fat. I would be happy if I never read again that you should do everything you can when cooking to lower the amount of fat in the finished food. I will never see that day, probably, except for on this blog, and occasionally in the media, as another clinical trial proves what the others ones have proved, that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. Tom Philpott says:

While I still maintain that you’d be better off just eating beans than hyperprocessed beans made to simulate meat, I can acknowledge that most people don’t want to eat just beans—and that these products are likely nutritionally superior to the factory-farmed meat they aim to replace. And Jacobson supplies evidence that such products are already luring meat eaters away from meat at fast-food joints. “When Chipotle added shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few California restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations,” he reports. “Half the Sofritas buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters.”

Most people don’t want to just eat beans. No truer words have ever been spoken. It is sad that we can’t just say “Go ahead and eat meat, real meat.” People that are lured to the Soy Simu-Meat at Chipotle are convinced that it is healthier. It is not. Nothing is healthier than healthy meat, raised in natural conditions. Nothing is healthier than that. I just read it, saw it proved to the utmost of my intellectual satisfaction in a seven hundred page book about nothing else. Eat real food, feed your family real food.

Stop eating processed foods, it’s not necessary and eighty percent of the time it is harmful.

Get your calories from saturated fats, there is nothing unhealthy about them, especially compared to liquid fats (vegetable oil) or carbohydrates that you would have to eat to replace the calories from fat.

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Take Stock

Posted on January 7, 2015 by dcarmack

Today in the New York Times we find a long article about the newest trend in hip places to drink bone broth instead of coffee. As a health ‘drink’ broth or stock has a great deal going for it. Firstly there is no sugar in it. Any drink that an American takes that does not contain any kind of sweetener in it is a step in the right direction.

Recently, this prehistoric food has improbably become a trend beverage, ranking with green juice and coconut water as the next magic potion in the eternal quest for perfect health. Like other health foods that have taken off in recent years — yogurt, quinoa — broth combines mystical connections to the ancient world and demonstrable nutrition benefits in the modern one.

In my food stores I have gallons of meat stock stored away. It could not be easier to make, it keeps forever in the freezer, and it makes just about anything you put it in leap from ordinary to extraordinary.

Here is the basic method to make stock, and it doesn’t matter at all what kind of bones you use, the procedure is pretty much the same. Let’s say you just carved your turkey, you have a pile of disgusting trash on your cutting board. I take all of those bones, break the back away from the breastbone, and throw them into an eight quart stock pot, with a heavy bottom.

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Add a gallon of water and put the fire on medium high to get it boiling. Once it boils you can add an onion cut into quarters, a carrot or two that is broken into big chunks, and a stalk of celery or two that is cut into big chunks. None of this stuff has to be pretty because at the end of the operation it will all be trash. Once the stock is boiling again you can spoon off the foam, but you don’t have to. Now you reduce the heat to low and cover it up. Let it cook for as long as you can. When you are done cooking it, strain the trash off and reserve the stock. I strain mine into another stock pot, it doesn’t have to be an eight quart one. Then I clean my eight quart one and pour the stock back through a fine strainer to get most of the solids out of it. Once it has cooled off completely I then pour the stock into ice cube trays and freeze them. Each ice cube is two ounces of stock, so if I need a cup of stock for something it takes four ice cubes.

The resulting stock when refrigerated looks like jelly. To make soup with it you would cut it one to one with water. You can use it anywhere that you would use water in a recipe, say you are making canned vegetables, you put in stock instead. It makes whatever you put it in very hearty. I guess you could also keep some ready in a teapot for drinking, too. That never occurred to me, but I really like my coffee and cream in the mornings.

If you are making beef stock you do all of the same things, but you roast the bones in a high temperature oven before you boil them. You will be amazed at how much oil will come out of those bones. If you get them very brown your beef stock will be the color you expect. Beef stock does not have to be brown to be good, but it is attainable, so I usually try to brown the bones first.

In my stock supply I have pork stock from ham bones. When I smoke a ham I always make the stock the same day, and you cannot beat smoked pork stock. I have smoked turkey stock from my turkey carcass. I have beef stock from soup bones that I get when I get a side of beef. I finally made some vegetable stock.

When my stock ice cubes are frozen I put it into quart zip top bags. One ice cube tray will fill one quart bag. If the stock lasts very long then I will put the cubes into vacuum bags. In vacuum bags they should last just about forever.

I guess that broth and stock is an important ingredient in the paleo diet. My understanding of this diet is that you don’t eat butter? If I am wrong about this then my apologies, but I am going to eat butter. Saturated fats were wrongly smeared decades ago and we are all still paying the price in health and weight gain.

Making stock is easy, but it’s not quick. It is worth the time and effort to do, as is anything you do for yourself in your kitchen.

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Disgusting

Posted on January 6, 2015 by dcarmack

Money distorts just about everything, and gobs of money produce gobs of distortion. I say that even though I don’t need to, because you already know it. I am finishing reading the book “The Big Fat Surprise:Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet”, by Nina Teicholz.

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For the most part in the history of the saturated fat advice debacle, the influence of money has not reared it’s ugly green head, but now that we are into the final stages money is everywhere, turning science into pseudoscience, turning food industry executives into demons. I have always said that men will do anything that they are allowed to do, and Chapter 9 is proving it to me once again.

Trans fats are a kind of solid dietary fat. They are created by taking liquid oil, like soybean oil, and adding more hydrogen atoms to the molecules. It turns the liquid into a solid that is then suitable for replacing butter and lard in recipes. In the frier it crisps foods like tallow would, which was used to fry french fries before the big saturated fats panic. At one time, because there was so much heart disease terror and the initial suspect was saturated fat, vegetable oil converted to solid fat was seen as a possible savior for our diet. It didn’t take long before dark clouds arose, though, and the soy bean oil industry was quick to respond.

By 1992, the number of studies on trans fats and cholesterol amounted only to a handful, yet the accumulated evidence was sufficient for Unilever to announce that it would remove partially hydrogenated oils from most of its products within three years. “We had seven large hydrogenation plants at margarine-production sites across Europe, and we had to close all of them,” says Korver. Unilever is such a significant leader in the European food industry that many other companies soon followed suit, switching over to palm oil. In Europe, “industry was open to change,” observes Katan. “In the US, industry really dug in its heels.”

Teicholz, Nina (2014-05-13). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Kindle Locations 4430-4435). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Perhaps, like most Americans, all you know about trans fats is that it is now showing up as one more health claim on your food labels. “Zero Trans Fats” is like gluten free, sugar free, fat free. Who knows why trans fats are being kept out of our foods? Must be because there is something the matter with them. Finally getting to the point where we are eating foods free of trans fats in 2015, when Europe began banning them in 1992, allowing US hearts and health to be damaged for 23 MORE YEARS, is a study in how money the only consideration that matters in America. Money trumps the health of millions.

If people are dying on the highways because GM doesn’t want to put safety belts in the cars, so what! Belts cost money, and people won’t buy it, and we don’t want to do it, and people won’t use them anyway and. and. and.

Studies show that tobacco may cause health problems but people love to smoke, and all people don’t get sick, and it might be these other environmental factors, and it’s not our fault people get sick using our products. The science is still out. The science is in dispute. It’s the user’s fault that they got hooked.

Then there is the cooking oil industry…

Here is yet another common tactic that food companies have used to steer scientific understanding of food: they pay reputable scientists at prestigious institutions to conduct studies that are intended to find positive results on behalf of their products. Best Foods played this game, funding studies to establish the safety of hydrogenated oils in the first place, and Unilever and other oil giants have influenced the science on vegetable oils this way ever since.

Teicholz, Nina (2014-05-13). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Kindle Locations 4439-4442). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

However, just like Big Tobacco learned, science cannot be bought off indefinitely. Eventually, because the world is big, and science around the planet is too big and expensive to purchase forever, the rising tide of history engulfs poor little Big Food.

The beginning of the end for trans fats came not from any American scientist, since critics of trans fats in the US research community had effectively been marginalized. Instead, it came from Holland: from Martijn B. Katan, a molecular biologist and nutrition professor at Wageningen University, and his graduate student, Ronald Mensink. “ Mensink and Katan were the start of the whole ruckus,” grumbled Hunter of Procter & Gamble.

Teicholz, Nina (2014-05-13). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Kindle Locations 4394-4397). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, finally, the effort to cloud the view of trans fats as anything other than the deadly poison that they are is over. The battle for that particular ingredient is won by the forces of good science. The entire episode is detailed in disgusting page after disgusting page. It makes one sick to think that men would work so hard to hide a truth from a public that has been convinced that one fat is bad, only to be directed to a worse one. Finally we know that saturated fat in lard is harmless. We know that trans fats in margarine and shortening are deadly, and we know why. That we spent so much time trying to get around the obstruction of the industry, and that said industry faces ZERO PENALTY for this crime against humanity is unfair in the extreme. At least the car manufacturers were sued and lost. At least the tobacco industry was sued by all fifty states for health care expenses and lost. That no similar thing will be happening to the trans fat makers just doesn’t seem fair.

We now turn to Big Sugar. Big Sugar is now in science’s sights. Big sugar is now testifying before Congress that not only is sugar innocent in the obesity epidemic, it is a health food “according to one scientific study.” A Congress inclined to encourage an “every man for himself” society, where all of the risks to business are socialized, while all of the rewards are privatized is inclined to accept these idiotic delays. There will be no Big Sugar or Big Fat fifty state lawsuits. There will be no sin taxes on sugar like there are on alcohol and tobacco. There will be no US bans on even trans fats. Your foods can contain them while showing zero trans fats if the amount is below a threshold level, which is greater than actual zero.

Stop eating artificial fats, artificial sweeteners and sugar right now, without the help of your government. Make them pay by stopping the money flow to them. Eat no processed foods. Nothing in a box or bag in your basket…Nothing but real single ingredient foods in our pantry. Do your own processing at home. Use butter and lard to cook with. Use palm oil or coconut oil, but don’t use any liquid oils. This diet change will save your life and the lives of your family. Do it now.

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Don’t Lose Weight

Posted on January 5, 2015 by dcarmack
By All Means, Live It

By All Means, Live It

In my honest opinion, nobody that thinks that they weigh too much should be trying to lose weight. Sounds crazy, right? Well, if a person tries to lose ten pounds, or seven percent of their body weight or any other goal, and if they do all of the right things then someday they will have lost that weight. At that point, if the steps that they are taking to shed said pounds is something that is not intended for every-day-for-the-rest-of-your-life practice, then they will return to the old way of living. Whatever they were doing to gain that excess weight will once again be the daily norm and the weight will come back.

Smokers who quit for a long period of time and then return to smoking daily know that it is far harder to have the same success again. Quitting the second or third time after failing leaves a person with the memory of how hard it was to quit the first time. If you try to quit eating a certain class of foods, or try to fast your weight away, starving or denying entire branches of delicious foods and sticking to something that you don’t want to eat, and can’t keep eating from now on, then it’s a lot like quitting smoking.

Dieting is work. Work is something you don’t want to do if you aren’t getting paid. Nobody is going to pay you to lose weight. As soon as you quit dropping pounds you are going to drop the diet. As soon as you drop the diet you are going to begin regaining the pounds. It is as certain as the pendulum stopping at the top of the arc and heading back. The pain of dieting you will remember, so your next diet will be harder to start, it will be easier to quit early or fail to do right.

Don’t diet.

Quit eating sugar, sweetened drinks and processed foods. Don’t Diet. Break habits. Break the habit at the grocery store of going up and down the processed food aisles. There is nothing that a person needs to live located on any of those aisles. The foods you need to live are located conveniently on the outside walls of the grocery store. Fresh fruits and vegetables, then meats and then dairy and eggs.

There really is nothing found in a box or bag that is even good for you, let alone something that a person who is overweight should be eating. In fact, the middle aisles of the store are why you weigh too much. Low fat is a big fat lie–a marketing tool, designed to get their products in your cart. Sure, they took the fat out, but what you don’t know is that eating fat does not make you fat, and no scientist EVER said that it does. Look it up, no scientific study in human history has shown that eating fat, any kind of fat, leads to obesity. Some said, for a time that it might lead to cholesterol, which might lead to heart disease, but nobody said it leads to weight gain.

If you stop eating processed foods and sugar then you will be eating a lot less calories, and you don’t need to count them. However, you may just want to count them, because it is possible, and I know this from experience, that you will not eat enough calories per day to meet your basic dietary needs. When that happens your body will shift into a starvation mode of chemistry. When that happens it actually makes it more difficult to lose weight. The pounds you don’t want will not go away right away, and you will be hungry and miserable. That is not necessary.

That is why I recommend that you get a smart phone app to keep track of what you are eating. It will warn you that you are starving, and if that happens, what you should do is EAT MORE FAT. You see, when you started thinking you should avoid fat those lost concentrated calories were thoughtfully replaced by food industry with added sugars and carbs. If you start cutting those things out on purpose, you might think that you can replace them with vegetables, but it takes a huge volume of vegetables to make up that loss. Only fat can do that job with the working volume of the average human stomach.

Quitting sugar and carbs (or at least the eating of them in processed foods) will require that you retool your menu to include foods cooked in saturated fats. They aren’t unhealthy, when eaten in a normal diet. Your grandparents and great grandparents know this. Retooling your menu will require a couple of modern tools to make sure you don’t make it too hard on yourself.

Try the MyFitnessPal app its available for iPhone and android or on your internet browser. This is the one I decided to use, it is the one that pointed out to me that I was starving for no good reason, other than I was ignorant of dietary requirements and calories.

The Weight Watchers App is also one that will help you track your intake. These apps have a huge database of foods that you can scan the barcode on and the nutrition info goes into your journal. Myfitnesspal also has a way that you can put a recipe of ingredients into it and it will estimate the calories in your home cooked meals. Good scientific guesses are all that is really needed for our purposes. If you quit eating processed foods you will lose weight without trying to lose weight.

They also will track your activity. Someday, if they don’t already, they will synch up to your iwatch or fitbit to see what you have been up to. I don’t track activity. I am losing weight without going to that trouble. Track it if you want.

I won’t say it’s painless, because change has its uncomfortable spots, but I am saying that if you switched your family over to this ‘diet’ or lifestyle, they will not even know it happened. The biggest change will be at breakfast for them, because there will be no cereal, oatmeal or pancakes. These things are processed. No No.

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One Large Coke

Posted on January 3, 2015 by dcarmack

UnknownWent to the theater yesterday and watched the movie “Whiplash”. Had a bucket of popcorn and a regular sweetened Coke. I didn’t drink it all! I shared it and we left about half of it in the theater. Earlier we had shared a rum cake desert at one of the good local food restaurants in Kansas City. It was mildly sweet, instead of being over the top.

So, Resolution number one has been violated…or has it? By way of explaining my understanding of what I have set for myself as a goal, when I say “No Sugar” I really mean that I will not eat sugar mindlessly. I will do it when it is called for, in dessert, or once a month in the theater (sometimes), at other times when eating something sweet is the point of the eating or drinking. Abstinence is not the goal.

The movie “Whiplash” is about a young man at an elite music school. He is incredibly self-driven and comes into the inner circle of a very domineering and authoritarian instructor who pushes him even harder than he pushes himself. To me it is related to our lonely struggles to eat right in a world where everyone else wants to make excuses for eating wrong, to the point where we would get sick and take pills to make it where we can KEEP eating wrong. As someone who is fighting the causes of dietary illness and not the symptoms it is a kind of solitary struggle. Would we be helped if someone were pushing on us from the outside to do it right?

This is kind of the 12 Step program mentality. I am sure there is a 12 Step program for overeating, but what about sugar addiction? I don’t know if having a group of people that you can turn to in times of stress is really that helpful in the relationship between you and your food. Since it is SO available, the trigger to the crime is so fast, it leaves no time to call for reassurance or assistance. Lots of 12 Steps are about breaking the addiction cycle at the planning to execution stage. For food addiction there really is none of that. You are at the store and buy a candy bar, you are at the theater and buy a Coke. Since we all can’t have a bullying coach with us at all times then we must be able to turn to ourselves for help.

First and foremost you must believe that you are the one that you are cheating when you cheat. If you are trying to live better to satisfy your husband (or god, in the case of 12 Step), and when you don’t live better you feel responsible to him, then you are not ready mentally for the real work of living better. You have to know that you owe it to yourself to do the right thing. Once you realize that, then you know that you can’t hide your sins from you. It is then that you begin to realize that the beneficiary of you behaving right is also you. When I think about it you also know how hard it is to do the right thing. Your partner or whoever you think you are eating right for, is blissfully unaware of how many times you have avoided the traps of living like you do. They have no idea how hard it is to not submit to temptation. You do. You can give yourself credit. You can also give yourself permission.

On the topic of permission, this is where the trouble begins in addiction. It goes like this…you have worked hard all week. Your brain is demanding a quart of ice cream. This is where you have to realize that a quart of ice cream is not a reward. It is not something that you would give yourself as a planned reward. By that I mean at the beginning of the week you did not set yourself down and say “If you can go the whole week without eating any sugar, you can eat a whole quart of ice cream in a single sitting”. That is a plan. At the end of the week, saying, “hey I went a whole week, I deserve ice cream” is a trap. Your mind knows how to keep the addiction cycle going and this trap is the one you have to watch out for. If you find yourself offering yourself rewards that are counter to your lifestyle, you have to get out of it in some way. You might try saying “If I can go another week I will eat a whole quart of ice cream, but not this week.” You might try enforcing the no sugar rule at that moment and give yourself some other reward. Just realize that your reward should be public. You should tell your spouse, I think I deserve a box of Twinkies for eating so good this week. You wouldn’t do that, would you? Then your reward is no reward at all, but still something that you would not be proud of. Keep that in mind.

Living and eating right is it’s own reward. Being tough on yourself and being able to make you do what is best for you is a learned behavior, just like your addiction was a learned behavior. It took you years to get to the point you are at. But, the point you are at is that you are ready to put your addiction behind you. It won’t be easy for you, because it is you against you. Nothing is easier than doing nothing different. Nobody benefits from living the same way and giving in to temptation. Only you really benefit from growing and taking responsibility for your own decisions. Once you realize that you can’t trick yourself, you can’ t lie to yourself, you can’t cheat yourself, then you are ready to stop living wrong. You are doing it for you, and you alone. If you start eating right you will be healthy and you will lose weight. That will make other people happy, too, but the one that matters is you.

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Whereas….therefore

Posted on December 31, 2014 by dcarmack

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Today I will make up a New Year’s Resolution Template™ for some easy-to-keep promises for 2015. I thought that I would make these resolutions in the legislative, Robert’s Rules of Order style. I will include a Whereas for each resolution, for the benefit of the people who have not followed this blog all year like you have, dear reader. If you are reading my preamble please resist the urge to mentally argue against the reason for the resolution. I include the preamble not as proof of the necessity of the resolution, but as my own justification for putting it on this New Year’s Resolution listing. These resolutions are necessary.

First, Whereas, eating sugar in amounts greater than the World Health Organization’s maximum daily amount (6 teaspoons) leads to diabetes, obesity, liver disease, and heart disease, in addition to other health problems,

Whereas, eight out of ten processed foods contain hidden added sugars, therefore,

Let it be resolved that I will eat no products with added sugars, drink no liquid with added sugar (or artificial sweetener) and only take fruit juices in their natural state (in the fruit)!

Second, Whereas, manufactured food products contain ingredients whose safety has never been tested by a neutral party (the government),

Whereas, manufactured food contains added sugars to replace more flavorful ingredients (fats),

Whereas, manufactured foods are lifeless and contain no helpful food bacteria so that they will last in perpetuity on the shelf, therefore,

Let it be resolved that I will eat no processed food products from a box, bag, or bottle!

Third, Whereas, beef, pork and chicken raised in confinement are fed corn, antibiotics and growth hormones,

Whereas, meats fed corn, against the natural inclination to eat grasses, contain essential oils that cause inflammation,

Whereas, meats that are fed antibiotics pass those antibiotics on to me when eaten,

Whereas, antibiotics passed on to me contribute to weight gain in me and bacteria resistance is developed by bacteria in me due to this, therefore,

Let it be resolved that I will locate a source of grass fed meats, dairy, and eggs and only purchase those products from farms that I know and trust.

Fourth, Whereas, saturated fats are proven to have no negative health effects,

Whereas, all liquid oils used for cooking are known to convert into trans fats after as little as one use,

Whereas, trans fats are known to be a primary cause of heart disease, therefore,

Let it be resolved that I will only cook with lard, butter or coconut oil!

If you would make and keep those four easy, simple, no problem resolutions for just the first month of the new year you will want to do it for the rest of your life. In my own case here are the things that doing these things has corrected…

I no longer have indigestion. If you have acid reflux it will cure this too, provided you also quit eating bread.

I no longer wake at night sweating. I suspect that this was a side effect of my body metabolizing sugars and starches. When I do eat sugar now, in a dessert or similar, I do wake in a sweat at night so I am pretty certain of causation, not just correlation.

I have lost ten percent of my body fat. My BMI (body mass index) has gone from ‘overweight’ to ‘normal’. People also tell me that I look ten years younger, but I really can’t see it myself.

I very infrequently have flatulence (fart). When I eat breads or sugars flatulence does return.

I have noticed changes in my mood for the better. If I consume sugar or carbohydrate I tend to be angrier than if I do not. I can do much finer detail work at my job without frustration interrupting me. I do not tremble when doing detail work, my hands are much steadier.

The effects of quitting the eating of grain fed meats and dairy are not externally apparent. Eating a proper ratio of omega 6 essential oil to omega 3 essential oil is good for my heart, and my general health. This is now an article of faith for me, as I have read enough good scientific reports on this topic to know that this is so. If you want to see the proof I have found, search this blog for the Tag “omega 6”. I have written many substantiated articles about it. You can also search for other key words to find articles that feature the other topics of our resolutions.

Avoiding processed foods and their artificial ingredients is also something whose benefits are long term. For some people doing this will have instantaneous benefits. Children who seem to be hyperactive and uncontrollable will benefit from this due to the prevalence of food coloring allergies. Quitting all processed foods ensures that the only artificial ingredients that can be introduced to my digestive system are those included in GMO vegetables. I do not discriminate against any kind of vegetable yet because even if they are GMO they are thousands of times better for me than the processed foods I would eat instead.

I plan to never again eat a product labeled low-fat. I will never eat margarine and if it is the only option I will eat nothing. I will never again buy cooking oil, but only use lard or butter. Fats are essential for health. Saturated fats got the pseudo-science treatment in the 70s and 80s by our government and many science societies for a variety of reasons, but the real science is finally winning the argument. Women and children especially need to eat saturated fats, as not doing so leads to proven health and developmental problems for them. Eating low fat or otherwise manipulating cholesterol in a man has the side effect of causing depression and in some cases cancer. Any hearth health benefit is outweighed by those negative consequences.

At any rate, and no matter which if any of these resolutions you adopt with me, let me say “Happy New Year” to all of my readers, young and old, sick and healthy. If you do adopt any of these resolutions in your new year, please come back to this bookmarked post and leave a comment about how much better off you are for doing so!

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The Science is Still Out!

Posted on December 31, 2014 by dcarmack

I love this one. Here it is again. Enjoy

dcarmack's avatarOne Small Change at a Time

When writing about scientific progress, one of history’s greatest physicists, Max Planck wrote in 1950, “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.” There is one opponent of scientific innovation that can never die, though. A corporation, that deathless, soulless entity whose only purpose in ‘life’ is to generate and protect it’s profits can be counted on to resist science that would restrict it’s profitability in  perpetuity.

The tobacco industry showed us how long a corporation can muddy the waters. For decades everyone knew that tobacco was a dangerous product, that it’s designed use would cause heart disease, pulmonary problems, cancer of the lung and mouth. Learning how it was done, the sugar industry has done exactly the same thing…

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Food Hangover, Sugar High

Posted on December 30, 2014 by dcarmack

There is more to food than energy. People will pay huge sums of money for prepared foods and it is not because that food contains more energy. Well prepared foods made with quality ingredients have more capabilities than just to get you to the next meal. Eating well leads to feeling well. Depending on what you eat it may not lead to being well, but at least the food made damaging your health seem worthwhile.

The scientists of food have begun to change their mind about what foods promote health and which are detrimental to health. The study is breaking down into two basic camps.

There are now those who feel that eating the right fats, natural saturated fats or uncooked oils, are healthy for you. They know that some fats must be eaten, because they cannot be made, but they have to be eaten in the correct proportions or they are not healthy but are detrimental. Omega 3 and omega 6 come immediately to mind. They feel that good inputs equal good outcomes, and they are unsure of the mechanism by which the good outcomes are arrived at in your body. These scientists are trying to figure out what is and is not good by doing trials and studies on study participants that are difficult to track (people).

The second camp of scientists think they are beginning to understand how the body is making it’s food demands and choices, why some foods are bad that would seem to be at worst neutral (artificial sweeteners for instance). These scientists are studying the microbes that reside in the human digestive tract. These studies have the advantage of being conducted on subjects that cannot deviate from the diet or tests being conducted on them (lab animals). These scientist believe that the outcomes we are getting from our foods are directly tied to the microbes that help us consume our foods.

Science has long known that without living microbes in the human bowel that we would die. We cannot survive if all of the microbes are gone and if just a couple of strains remain they can become toxic. We are finding that the foods we eat contribute or harm different varieties of germs. These germs, in turn can cause or inhibit certain health outcomes, good or bad. Eating a diet that is low in fat and cholesterol has been attributed to increased incidence of death from other causes than heart attack:

…other cholesterol-lowering studies where diet had been the only intervention consistently found higher rates of cancer and gallstones in the experimental group,

Teicholz, Nina (2014-05-13). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Kindle Locations 2261-2263). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Once again, the science is pointing to an outcome based on inputs, but how or why it happens is not so easy to discover. New science is pointing to microbes actually creating stimulation for us on their own to influence our behavior in their behalf.

It sounds like science fiction, but it seems that bacteria within us – which greatly outnumber our own cells – may very well be affecting both our cravings and moods to get us to eat what they want, and often are driving us toward obesity.

I did not know until recently that there are one hundred million nerve receptors in the digestive tract. The gut actually can affect our moods and a sugar high is probably not originating just in the brain. Likewise the depression you feel if you eat the same foods over and over are probably not emotions that only you are sharing with yourself, but with the billions of microbes that are crying out for variety in your guts.

Research suggests that gut bacteria may be affecting our eating decisions in part by acting through the vagus nerve, which connects 100 million nerve cells from the digestive tract to the base of the brain.

Diet has long been know to affect mood. People on low-fat low-cholesterol diets have always been known to die more often from suicide and violence than people who are on the pre-1980 diet of bacon and eggs every morning. Until now no one had a very good handle on why that would be the case. Trying to find chemical reasons alone was unproductive. Now they are learning that what we eat affects how those microbes behave and what THEY produce with our foods, which have a direct bearing on hunger, moods and emotional wellbeing.

…a metanalysis of six cholesterol-lowering trials found that the chance of dying from suicide or violence was twice as high in the treatment groups as it was in the control groups, and the authors posited that the diet might cause depression.

Teicholz, Nina (2014-05-13). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Kindle Locations 2259-2260). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Eating real foods is what the microbes that live in us expect. They eat what we eat, and they evolved with us over millions of years so that we both get what we need from the relationship. Now, we are changing the bargain without considering their needs. Artificial sweeteners are not what they expect. This new chemical is undoubtedly being changed by our germs on the way through. What they change it into is their business. How it makes them feel is why people who are using diet drinks aren’t losing weight. They use everything at their disposal to get you to provide what they need, and processed sugar or artificial sugar is not it. Nothing new and modern has only the expected results when interacting with our age-old microbial friends. Rashes, allergies, asthma, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, auto-immune disorders, eczema, dandruff, bad breath, tooth decay, ulcers, acid reflux disorder are all ways that our microbes are fighting back.

The Paleo diet may be onto something, but no diet can work. Only change can work. Ridding ourselves of the bad idea that fats are causing obesity or heart disease–they are not–can work. Our microbes expect natural fats, we should give it to them. We must stop eating foods that were dreamed up in industrial kitchens and go back to using ingredients that our great grandparents used. It’s what the gut demands. Actually demands.

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One Small Change Blog 2014 in review

Posted on December 30, 2014 by dcarmack

This is the second post for today. Keep reading to find the one I wrote below this one. this is a statistical roundup of the Blog for last year. I was interested in which articles got the most attention. The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

These are the posts that got the most views in 2014. You can see all of the year’s most-viewed posts in your Site Stats.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Feeling For The Amish

Posted on December 29, 2014 by dcarmack

Now I know what it is like to try and live differently than the society I live in. Now that my family is eating real fats, not excessive sugar or carbs, and no processed foods we know what it is like to try to live outside the mainstream in America.

Amish modernity

Amish modernity

Eating out requires you to either not think about it, or to eat somewhere where you know that the chef isn’t using institutional products. Sysco provides a great deal of the foods that are prepared in the Kansas City area. Sysco provides industrially produced beef, pork, veal, lamb and dairy. Without further research I can assure you that none of the meats that you get at a local restaurant that are provided to them by Sysco will be free range, or grass fed, or hormone free, or antibiotic free. They will be, perhaps, the choice cuts of meats that are produced in the industrial system. They will be sources of omega 6 oils, instead of omega 3. They will contain sub-therapeutic amounts of the antibiotics that they give to animals in feed lots so that they will grow faster on less feed, to market weight. How do I know that my restaurant is using Sysco meats? I have to ask–it’s the only way to find out. However, if your restaurant serves grass fed meats, you can bet they would be shouting that out on the menu.

Changes in schedule can play havoc on my menu plans, too. This weekend I got called in to work at 3AM and worked for twelve hours. Going in so early meant no breakfast. No breakfast means that my body will begin to call for food, any food. Hunger is a trigger to eating outside the box that I have tried to contain myself in. Snacks that are available and at hand are difficult to stay away from when you are hungry. I am sure that it takes great willpower for my Amish examples to not indulge in modernity when they are completely surrounded by it. When it comes to willpower it is so easy to take one cookie and attempt to convince yourself that it’s not a trend. After the third cookie that self-deception must be acknowledged. Eating right would be a lot easier to do if everyone else did it too. Then there would not be cookies to tempt me if I didn’t get an opportunity to eat breakfast before a long work day.

Just try and find bread without artificial ingredients in it. It will not be in your grocery store. The raw ingredients will be there, but you will have to make the bread yourself. The same is true of bread crumbs and bread cubes for stuffing. There is nothing available that is just pure food. Every single choice is ‘shelf stabilized.’ This weekend we wanted stuffing for pork and had to settle for something in a box. After preaching since April (eight months) about not eating out of bags or boxes, don’t think that I didn’t feel some remorse at passing boxed stuffing mix over the scanner at the store. I wonder if the Amish feel this pang of remorse when they have to use an electric device, because there is now no other choice.

Living different is a twenty four hour a day job. Having to do other than the perfect way for a short spell, for a unique reason is acceptable, and unavoidable. Eating something that is not perfectly in line with the perfect ideal is no reason to stop trying for perfect. Being the best possible is the best possible approach. Giving myself credit for trying and trying instead of beating myself up for not being better prepared keeps me happy to be on the road that I am on. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Right, brother Johan?

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