Dry Breast Solution

Posted on November 19, 2015 by dcarmack

What is the worst thing that can happen to your Thanksgiving turkey tradition? Judging by the number of solutions on offer, it would have to be the dry breast syndrome. All fowl have large fat-free breast meat. Not that long ago low fat meats were all the rage, including bird breast. The only problem for the diner was that eating fully cooked breast meat was very much like eating sheet-rock. It comes out so dry and tasteless that dozens of ways have been dreamed up to keep it from happening or mitigate it if it does.

So, why does this happen to bird breasts? Part of the answer is in the bird, part of it is in your head. Your brain responds to the flavor of the food, to the sight, to the smell. When sufficiently stimulated it will jack up the saliva glands in your mouth to bring the food down. A white, odorless, unsalted and dense slab of turkey or chicken breast just do not have enough of what it takes to make your mouth slobberingly juicy. In the case of turkey there is just not enough skin, which is flavorful and often crunchy and greasy, to go with that slab of blandness. That breast just seems moister when you have a bit of skin to eat with it.

The second half of the equation is how to make the breast meat itself generate the necessary moistening ingredient, saliva. There are two ways to do it, one is hard and of course it is the way you have already heard of, brining. The other thing you can do is far easier and you probably have never heard of it, and that is “larding.”

I say that brining is harder, but only because it takes a day of planning for something as large as a 14 pound (1 stone) turkey. The bird must be completely thawed and it must be submerged in a solution of salt water for an entire day to ensure that the brine is incorporated all the way into the depths of the breast meat. Without doing anything else this will ensure that your turkey breast is a lot harder to overcook. Doing this helps the flesh to retain moisture as it cooks to a high enough temperature to ensure that it is safe to eat, all microbes extinguished, and that they dark thigh and leg meat is also completely cooked. The breast cooks quickest, unfortunately.

Here is an excellent guide to brining from the salt people over at Morton Salt:

BRINED & ROASTED WHOLE TURKEY

Overnight Brine:
Combine Morton® Kosher Salt and sugar in cool water in a large, clean stockpot until completely dissolved. Place the whole turkey in the brine until completely submerged. Cover and refrigerate overnight, up to 14 hours. Remove the turkey from the brine, rinse inside and out under cool running water for several minutes to remove all traces of salt; pat dry with paper towel.

I often soak the bird after brining in a full sink of water to get the salt off of the surface. Do not salt the surface or use anything like salted spices or butters after brining. It is very easy to end up with a too-salty final product if you do.

Larding is something that you have to go looking to find out how it is done. Ever since the middle ages cooks have been fighting too-lean meats. Venison and wild game, living as they do off of the natural forage available to them and constantly running for their lives, are lean for a reason. It makes eating the meats a challenge, eating deer is difficult because the meat is so ‘dry’. What it really lacks is fat and connective tissue. Larding the meat adds fat where you need it, inside the flesh. Here is what a larded turkey looks like, from an antique receipt book:

Corson Larded turkey.gif

The little tabs you see are pieces of pork fat, cut into ribbons the size of a matchstick, and threaded through the flesh using a larding needle.

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You can purchase a larding needle online, or in a well-stocked kitchen goods store. They are inexpensive and make putting the pork fat as easy as sewing. I have the kind with the hinged jaw which makes loading the needle with fat easy. I will use pork fat, not bacon, because bacon is brined, making it salty. Since I will be brining my bird I don’t want to add more salt to the meat, a brined bird is perfectly salted.

Once the bird is brined and larded then you will roast it exactly the same as you ever do, except you don’t have to worry so much about overcooking the breast. The 180 degree cooking temperature now will serve to melt the lard into the breast meat. Then when you bite into those white slabs of flesh there will be salt and there will be fat to generate that saliva as though the entire bird were that tasty succulent skin.

Bon Appetit!

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Don’t Wait for the World

Posted on November 16, 2015 by dcarmack

Over 40 percent of death certificates now list diabetes as the cause of death, up from 13 percent twenty years ago.

Lustig, Robert H. (2012-12-27). Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (p. 5). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Don’t try to fix the world, or change the law, fix yourself.

If you are fat it’s because you eat Carbohydrate. Stop doing that. If you have diabetes, it’s because you are eating carbohydrate. Stop doing that. If you have metabolic syndrome or you are taking statins, its because you are eating carbohydrate.

There are no healthy ones (carbs). Man is not designed to eat fruit at every meal, in every season. Stop doing that. Honey is for bees, to get it should be hard, dangerous and eating it should be rare. Honey is not health food. If you eat carbs at every meal you will slowly gain weight until the accumulated damage kills you. No diet that allows you to eat carbohydrates will make your weight go away permanently. Only ceasing to eat them works forever.

You can eat carbohydrates occasionally. Eating them is not poisonous, unless you eat them every meal, every day. If you eat carbs ever day they will fatten you, until they finally kill you.

Hope this didn’t sound too dramatic, but if you wait for the law to change, for the rest of society to finally get the news it could be too late for you and yours. Quit eating processed foods, quit eating anything sweet (even artificial sweets), quit eating starch, sugar, grains.

That is all.

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Bitter Tonic

Posted on November 14, 2015 by dcarmack

A long time ago, in another age and time, a group of scientists convinced the leadership of a great world power that the reason he had had a heart attack was that he had been eating eggs and saturated fats. He believed them and began supporting efforts to switch the world from relying on saturated fats for cooking to using liquid oils. Back then nobody would ever consider cooking with liquid oils. They grew rancid quickly. They smoked at too low a temperature. The foods cooked in them had a different feel in the mouth. You couldn’t make a cracker or biscuit with them.

The idea though, that this solid fat–butter, lard, tallow–turned right back into a solid fat in the veins to your heart had a simple street appeal. It was not difficult to imagine that if you ate lots of this kind of fat that it would lead straight to that kind of fat. It doesn’t.

That fats in your blood are manufactured by your liver out of the components that make fat, not from dietary fat itself. These fats are absolutely essential for the normal function of the body. All of your brain and nerve cells are made of fats. Every cell in your body is lined with fats. The word fat is unfortunately used to describe the plaques that form in heart arteries, but that is not what they are. The simple idea that eating fat leads to heart disease is just that, too simple. In fact, it is turning out to not even be right at all.

Consuming and cooking with liquid oils is not only less tasty than using natural fats (butter, lard, tallow) it is actually now known to be dangerous. In England scientists are studying what happens to these chemicals when you actually use them by heating them up…

But Professor Grootveld, of De Montfort University in Leicester, who carried out a series of experiments, said: “For decades, the authorities have been warning us how bad butter and lard was. But we have found butter is very, very good for frying purposes and so is lard.

“People have been telling us how healthy polyunsaturates are in corn oil and sunflower oil. But when you start messing around with them, subjecting them to high amounts of energy in the frying pan or the oven, they undergo a complex series of chemical reactions which results in the accumulation of large amounts of toxic compounds.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/cooking-with-vegetable-oil-releases-toxic-chemicals-linked-to-cancer-20151108-gktips.html#ixzz3rT9qcMZg
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

If you do still use liquid oils to cook with the best policy is to never reuse the oil. If you have a countertop deep fryer it should be filled with lard or tallow instead of a liquid vegetable oil. Your deep fryer will definitely change the chemical composition of the oil, creating trans fats, which have been practically banned in the rest of the world because of they are known to cause heart damage. In the US, while trans fats are not banned as an ingredient they are limited to less than one percent. Zero percent is the known safe limit of trans fats, and if you cook with liquid oil you are making and eating a banned product right in your own kitchen.

It is easy as can be to make your own lard or tallow, the procedure is the same for both. You start off with beef or pork fat. You cut it up into chunks. You put those chunks in the crock pot, you heat it up on medium heat for a long time. You ladle the liquid fat through a strainer into jars for storage at room temperature for forever. No need to refrigerate, never goes rancid. Watch this video…

Making Tallow from beef fat:

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Gluten Free Reading, Right Here!

Posted on November 13, 2015 by dcarmack

If there is one thing that food makers are sure of, it’s that health claims sell food. They don’t need to do any scientific studies to prove it, all they have to do is change the words on the box and watch the sales climb to prove it.

Gluten-Free sells just about everything that has no flour in it, even if the product never ever had gluten in it.

190cbilov3mrnpng

Fat-free includes things that will make you fatter than Santa Claus, like lollipops, and candy,  potatoes, or rice. Fat-free foods (that would normally contain fat) are never healthy because they are highly processed, but that claim in a big bold font will almost certainly increase sales. Win!

Fat-Free-Snack

Rarely are any of these bait and switch schemes ever exposed. It’s just about a joke if you go in the store and look around, almost every label has some stupid claim on it. However, General Mills finds themselves being sued for making a ridiculous health claim on a new product label.

The Washington Post this morning reports that a lawsuit has been filed over the ‘new’ product “Protein” Cheerios. I went ahead and put the protein in quotes because it turns out the the “increase” in protein is because the serving size has been doubled to account for the protein difference between this and regular old Cheerios. Here is the article:

This is how gullible General Mills thinks Americans are

A glance at nutritional information for the two cereals, which is available on General Mills’ Web site, reveals that a single serving of Protein Cheerios has seven grams of protein and seventeen grams of sugar. A serving of the original Cheerios, meanwhile, has three grams of protein and only a single gram of sugar.

They double the portion size and the protein dose per serving about doubles. The sugar amount goes up by a whopping SEVENTEEN TIMES. You might see this new product in the store and think, because it’s called something healthy-sounding, that your children would benefit by getting this every morning instead of regular old Cheerios. You would be as wrong as you could be. This product contains 4 teaspoons of sugar per serving, and if your kids were eating regular Cheerios and putting a teaspoon of sugar on it with milk like I did when I was a kid, they are getting 5 teaspoons of sugar at breakfast to start of their day. That is half of the daily allowance of sugar the government recommends, and about 5 teaspoons more than I recommend.

The amazing thing is that this product is no worse than any other boxed cereal found on the breakfast aisle. They all have different health claims on the boxes, vitamin fortified, gluten free, fat free, sugar free, protein enhanced (now), but nothing on this aisle is worth the box that contains it, as far as health is concerned. Don’t even go down this aisle if you care about your health or the health of your kids. This stuff is all highly processed, contains carbohydrates if nothing else, and will make you sick and fat, or at least get your day started that way.

I am glad that one of these con-artist companies is getting called to task over this, but the US needs to wake up to what it is that is making us sick and fat…carbohydrates. This includes, but is not limited to sugar. Processed foods like breakfast cereal are just not worth eating. They will make you hungry again right away as your insulin returns to below normal. They get your day started off bad, you will be hungry and wanting to snack every hour or two.

It makes me sick to think that we are being told to not eat saturated fats because it leads to serum cholesterol (so what), but not being told to quit eating carbs which leads to obesity, gastric trouble, high blood pressure, diabetes…I could go on.

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It Drives Me Nuts

Posted on November 9, 2015 by dcarmack

There really isn’t anything that a small cog in a big machine can do about how the machine works. I only have control over me and mine, and you only have control over you and yours. Every week, just about, I will read a lengthy news story that spouts all of the bad old advice, based on the discredited pseudoscience of the past.

Here is the article I am referring to, from the Paper of Record:

Lower Cholesterol With Diet Instead of Drugs

Wow, that was an exciting headline for me! I say that all the time, that if a person wants to stay sick the remainder of their lives, take drugs. If you want to get well, change your diet! You have heard me shouting that from way down here in the bowels of this infernal machine for the past two years, almost. I almost crapped when I read the New York Times giving that same advice.

I just hope that people only read the headline.

The actual advice contained in this article is depressingly familiar, and I will boil it down for you so that you don’t have to wade through it picking out the good and the bad.

Let’s start with the things that I think are right and lead to good advice.

  1. Try changing your diet before you go onto a lifetime of Statin drugs. Statin drugs lower your blood cholesterol, which leads to complications for your liver and other body functions. If you want to know what the problems are, just listen to a statin drug commercial where they list them at a rapid pace for the last thirty seconds of the TV commercial. I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that your quality of life would be much better if you would eat differently instead of eating the same and taking these nasty pills.

That is it for the good advice. The specific diet advice gives bad ideas and perpetuates the problem with the US diet. Eating like the Italians do is not a bad idea, but excluding saturated fats (butter) is not something that they do. Advising that you limit your saturated fats is really just bowing to fifty years of institutional advice instead of making intelligent argument.

There is nothing wrong with eating natural fats. Olive oil contains saturated fats, but not enough to make it solid at room temperature. Eating more olive oil leads to eating more saturated fat. Olive oil is better than vegetable oil, but not as good as lard or butter to cook with. Natural fats are good for you, and they keep you from getting hungry.

Carbohydrates lead to inflammation in your veins and they lead to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is when your body organs and muscles stop accepting glucose from your blood with normal amounts of insulin. This first leads to that glucose being converted to fat and stored. The glucose must not stay in your blood, as high blood sugar is toxic. Eventually it leads to uncontrollable blood sugar levels when your body cannot produce enough insulin to put the glucose into fat. At this point they give you insulin supplements so that you can keep the sugar level down in your blood. At the same time the metabolic changes start releasing triglycerides into your bloodstream and heart disease commences.

The article I referenced makes no mention anywhere of sugar or other carbohydrates. It is an article about heart health and implies that all one must do is keep cholesterol down in one’s blood to stave off heart disease. This is now known not to be true. The part of one’s diet that must change in order to get off of statins, blood sugar meds, and high blood pressure meds is to quit eating processed foods, sugar, and processed starches, like flour.

Eating lots of fruit is like eating lots of candy. There are those that will tell you that you can’t eat enough fruit for it to be a problem, but this is not true at all if you are already fat and sick. If you are already on statins, or insulin, or beta blockers, then you need to be off of sweets, which means all of them. Fruit is sweet.

The mediterranean diet is not a panacea. It will not cure your metabolic syndrome if you eat pasta at every meal, no matter how much olive oil you put on it. It won’t help you if you drink a bottle of sweet mediterranean wine with every meal.

The Times does us no favors telling us to keep on eating low fat foods. They call out low-fat greek yogurt as a health food. Where is the ingredient in there that is energy bearing. No carbs, no fats, no good, if you ask me.

They say limit Red Meat eating to three ounces a week. This is just repetition of bad advice, as eating naturally raised meats leads to getting the proper ratio of fat to protein, and gives you all of the nutrition that every other predator gets from being atop the food chain. We don’t need to eat the foods that our food eats. We can just eat them.

They actually say pick low-fat food choices despite the FACT that the government has finally changed it’s advice on that front. Now you should eat less meat and fats in order to save the planet from environmental damage, not to protect your heart. I wonder how many years it will take before the Times quits giving out this crappy advice (or doctors for that matter).

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It’s Just That Easy

Posted on November 4, 2015 by dcarmack

Once you have been off of processed foods for a while you will, like me, discover that you can eat some sugar from time to time and it doesn’t have the same effects on you that it did just a few months ago. Eating real home cooked food most of the time means that you aren’t eating nearly as much sugar as you did, even though you don’t know it.

Here in Kansas City we just went through a trying time. Our baseball team was in the World Series, and before that they were in the playoffs leading up to the big games. It was a trying time because these games are excuses to get together and eat junky foods. I don’t drink beer, but I will drink Non Alcoholic beer, and it is a processed food like all of the other processed foods. If I enjoy too many of them I might as well be drinking Monster Energy drinks, for the effect that they have on my body. We had more than one party at the house, brought in and consumed loads of chips, sweets and processed meats.

There was pizza delivery, too.

So, now that period is over. Now I am back to the normal diet and schedule, sort of. We have eaten down the supply of leftover junk foods, we have drank most of the canned sodas, and there is only a little bit of ice cream in the freezer. Soon it will all be gone. After all of that free and easy eating I did not gain a pound of weight.

I attribute this fact to the parts of my diet that were constant throughout. I ate a bacon and egg breakfast every morning. I ate a small leftover lunch of just meat in the middle of the day. At night I was tempted and failed myself eating pizza, potato chips, cakes, cookies–whatever was at hand during the baseball games. It was just one meal per day out of three.

When I would over indulge in carbs and sweets I would feel the effects–swollen hands, hammering heart, night sweats, cold sweats. It was bad enough to make me know that I had overdone it, but not so bad that I craved it during the day the next day. I made it through unscathed.

Your results might vary, but I have been off of processed foods now for over a year. I have been off of sweetened drinks that long, too. I don’t drink alcohol, I smoke the occasional cigar. It is worth it to quit eating carbs and processed foods, if for no other reason than it makes the now and then eating of them possible.

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What Does Spur Mean?

Posted on November 3, 2015 by dcarmack

Poor Sleep May Spur College Weight Gain

Here is an intriguing headline found in an article in the New York Times wellness blog. According to the article research has been conducted on a group of college freshmen and it confirms the old wive’s tale that kids put on five to ten new pounds in the first semester away from home at college. Wonder why?

A study in the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine looked at the sleep habits of first-semester freshmen. Researchers followed 132 first-year students at Brown University who kept daily sleep diaries. After nine weeks, more than half of them had gained nearly six pounds.

Ok, so 132 students are away from home for the first time, and their altered sleep habits occur during the same time period as gaining new weight.

Now new research suggests that an underlying cause for the weight gain may be the students’ widely vacillating patterns of sleep.

The ‘underlying cause’ of weight gain may be changing sleep patterns? Perhaps the good writers at the Times do not understand the meaning of the word ’cause.’ Cuts cause bleeding. Staying awake does not cause weight gain.

Here is what the actual study had to say about their results:

Later average bedtime during the workweek, in hours, from adolescence to adulthood was associated with an increase in BMI over time (b = 0.035 kg/m2 per min later bedtime per 6 years; standard error = 0.016; t = 2.12, degrees of freedom = 3,238, P < 0.05). These results remained significant after controlling for demographic characteristics and baseline BMI. Although sleep duration, screen time, and exercise frequency did not attenuate the relationship between workday bedtime and BMI over time, fast-food consumption was recognized as a significant partial mediator of the relationship between bedtimes and BMI longitudinally. (Bold not in original)

I see these results in a different light than they do at the Times. When I eat a lot of carbs, lets say a burger, fries and super size Coke at McDonald’s, I have trouble sleeping. It takes longer to fall asleep because I am burning carbs, I don’t sleep well as I toss and turn all night, and I tend to wake up sooner. All the carbs will make me fat, and I can’t sleep. I think that the problem is kids are away from home and feeding themselves. They aren’t making great choices of foods, and they aren’t sleeping well on top of getting fat.

Times, the underlying CAUSE of weight gain cannot physically be lack of sleep. The CAUSE must be a change in diet, with more of the diet coming from carbohydrate. If you want your kids to not gain weight then make sure they are used to eating breakfast meats for their first meal of the day. If your kids are used to finding low carb meals then they will not gain weight no matter what happens to the sleep pattern. Most kids don’t have this knowledge though, because most parents don’t. If the Times would look into the actual cause of weight gain then maybe something could be done about it.

So in my opinion, the horse of weight gain is not spurred on by lack of sleep, but the lack of sleep and weight gain are spurred on by eating more carbs.

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Where Bad Science Leadeth…

Posted on November 2, 2015 by dcarmack

When a really, really bad notion comes to be ‘common knowledge’ you end up with some very bizarre solutions to a very real problem. For instance, a long time ago it was thought that bad blood caused diseases, so it made sense to open up the veins of the very ill to allow that bad blood to escape. Bleeding treatments led to the weakening and untimely deaths of some very powerful and famous people.

The advent of the Scientific Method has greatly reduced the number of victims that bad science has generated, lately, but not all. Bad science still exists.

If you are morbidly obese you are right now the victim of bad science and the medical equivalent of Bleeding Treatment is the bariatric surgery, the Lap Band treatment, or gastric bypass surgery. What they are treating is how much you can eat, but the science behind thinking that you are obese because of how much you eat is flawed. You are not obese because you eat too many calories, or because you eat too much food–you are obese because of what kind of food you eat. Gastric bypass surgery will only let you eat a tiny amount of food, but because it is possible to eat lots of carbs in tiny amounts your results are not guaranteed.

img-med-lap-band-vs-gastric-bypass

Eating is not a simple mechanical process. Some people eat when they are not hungry, or should not be hungry. People who eat carbohydrates get hungry a lot. If you eat a gigantic bowl of spaghetti, you will be ‘hungry’ again in just an hour or so. You won’t really need the food, but because of the effect of the spaghetti on your blood sugar, which causes you to produce insulin to reduce the amount of glucose in your blood, you will be feeling hunger again as your blood sugar dips out of its normal range on the low side. This stuff happens even if you have a surgically altered tiny stomach. Fat comes from eating carbs, and it is possible to eat too many carbs even if you have the stomach size of an infant’s.

Being hungry all the time is no way to live. Getting your body changed so that you cannot eat a lot of food is correcting the wrong problem, it is treating a symptom of the problem. The problem is that you gain weight every time you eat ‘normally’. This is true because you should not be eating carbohydrates or any kind of sweetener. It is still unknown why some people react so much worse to carbohydrates than others, but it is no secret that the problem is sweets and starches because two out of three of us have this problem. But you wouldn’t know it to read the newspapers. They still spout the conventional reasons–calories and exercise–which leads people to think that they are fat because they don’t have enough self control to not overeat. 200,000 people per year in the US are victims of blaming themselves for not being able to lose weight and are so desperate for help that they would undergo surgery (even children), when the real culprit is the advice they are trying to take.

The number of victims of the bad advice are actually the 2/3 of all Americans that are now overweight. They are all trying to shed pounds, and the vast majority are trying to do it by ‘burning’ more calories than they eat. Fat doesn’t ‘burn’ in that way. Your body will not let you use more than you take in without you exercising great restraint. You are required to endure the continuous emotional and physical torment that comes in the form of hunger. If you exercise more than normal you will ‘work up an appetite’. As soon as you quit restricting your calories your body will put most of your foods right back into fats. This is the way it is designed. The advice “eat less, exercise more” does not work on 99% of the people who try it if you watch them for the rest of their lives. It might work for the six months it takes you to get back to a “normal” size, but once you go back to eating to eliminate hunger you will go back to putting on the pounds.

The hunger is the problem. In order to lose weight you have to eat when you are hungry. If you are eating carbohydrates you will be hungry all the time. If you are eating meats and natural fats you won’t. Here is the solution to the problem. Stop eating carbs. Getting your stomach surgically altered is curing the wrong illness, because you can still be very hungry if every time you are hungry you fill your tiny tummy with mashed potatoes. You will be hungry again very soon, but it won’t be because your stomach is tiny, it will be because your blood sugar has dipped because you ate carbohydrates. You will be hungry all the time and miserable. You will want to kill yourself to end the torment.

If you get the surgery your chances that you will kill yourself go up.

A Canadian study recently published in JAMA Surgery, led by Junaid Bhatti from the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, followed 8,815 patients in Ontario for three years prior to and three years after their bariatric surgeries. Nearly 200,000 weight-loss surgeries are performed every year in the U.S., and this new study suggests that people who have undergone the procedure are 50% more likely to commit suicide or self harm. Of the patients involved in the study, 158 had self-harm emergencies during follow-up, and 72.8% of the incidents were intentional overdoses.

Salon.com Mollie Hawkins

I cannot begin to imagine the horrific life that it must be feeling that you are beyond hope. You just got an expensive and difficult operation so that you can successfully lose all of the weight you have been fighting your entire life, but it has left you constantly hungry and tortured. Not only that, you find that you are once again gaining weight. What in the world can you do now? What hope is there for you, you obviously have no other choice but to diet for the rest of your life or to live fat and unhappy. There is one other choice if you believe the conventional wisdom on weight gain, you can just end it all.

Come on medical profession! I know that 200,000 surgeries a year is a big cash cow, but isn’t it time to start treating the human in a humane fashion? Isn’t it time to tell the overweight and obese that they are eating the wrong foods and as soon as they starting eating the right ones that they will finally live without HUNGER?

Hunger is the problem–not self control, not volume eaten. The fat man is not less than the thin man, he is the victim of your bad advice–and your bad science.

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Nothing Special About Kids

Posted on October 29, 2015 by dcarmack

Here is the headline:

Cutting Sugar Improves Children’s Health in Just 10 Days

“This paper says we can turn a child’s metabolic health around in 10 days without changing calories and without changing weight – just by taking the added sugars out of their diet,” he said. “From a clinical standpoint, from a health care standpoint, that’s very important.”

Folks, there is nothing special about kids, as far as this is concerned. In this study they took the sugar out of the diet, and that was all. They made sure the calories were the same, and they did not cut out all carbs, just sugar. Despite that, the biochemical markers they check to see if metabolic health has improved all were improved.

On average, the subjects’ LDL cholesterol, the kind implicated in heart disease, fell by 10 points. Their diastolic blood pressure fell five points. Their triglycerides, a type of fat that travels in the blood and contributes to heart disease, dropped 33 points. And their fasting blood sugar and insulin levels – indicators of their diabetes risk – likewise markedly improved.

The NIH only had enough money to run this test nine days. In my own experience after only about a week off of sugar I experience big changes in my body. My emotions are more stable and I can do finer work without a hint of hand tremor, despite the fact that I drink four cups of coffee each morning. I used to blame the coffee for my shakes.

When I have been off sugar for a while and then eat too much this is what happens to me:

  1. My heart begins to hammer enough that I can tell it is doing so
  2. I get a buzzing feeling all over my body as the chemicals enter my veins
  3. I sweat, a little at first, but if I keep eating sugar I will sweat quite a bit
  4. I toss and turn in bed and may get bed sweats

This all happens after what most people would consider not too much sugar. It happened to me last night and all I had was three single Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and some popcorn while I watched the World Series. (Go Royals) I did not drink any sweetened drinks. Oh yeah, did have two slices of pizza and ate the bready crusts. Had the typical sugar rush, sweats, jitters.

As important as children are in all of our lives, each of us, individually, is the most important person in our lives. If this study proves anything, it is that sugar is bad for you. It is very damaging to eat sugar in every bite of food you eat. Since eight out of ten processed foods contain added sugar, then it would seem that we should not eat processed foods. We should not drink sweetened drinks, including fruit juices. Sugar is sugar. There is no ‘healthy’ sugar, including honey, or agave, or….any other sweetener.

Save the sugar for dessert. The occasional treat did not hurt your parents or grandparents. The constant eating of sweets may have killed someone in your family with diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure. It does not have to kill you. Only nine days away from it leads too markedly better health. Keep that in mind. Go a week between sugar doses and you will live a mostly healthy life.

Don’t wait for the government to act. Do it for you. Do it for the kids.

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Bacon Causes Cancer

Posted on October 28, 2015 by dcarmack

Yep, you read that right, according to about half the headlines on this topic yesterday, if you eat bacon you will get colorectal cancer.

Here is one, for instance:

Bacon and Hot Dogs Cause Cancer, According to the World Health Organization

Cuts cause bleeding. Processed meats do not cause cancer in the same way. Gravity causes objects to fall to earth. Eating bacon does not make you sick. Lots of people have been eating bacon for lots of years and the vast majority of them do not get colorectal cancer and die.

On the other hand, about two thirds of the people in the US are getting fat, getting diabetes, getting high blood pressure and dying of heart attacks from eating starch and sugars. All of the health authorities are, in chorus, singing the same song on this front, “diet and exercise”. Eat less calories, exercise more, take your daily dose of medicine to manage the symptoms of your sugar poisoning.

At this late stage of the game it is really crazy for any government body to proclaim loudly that a food is dangerous, when they cannot say a word about the real clear-and-present danger in our food manufacturing system–sugar.

Bacon and processed meats do not ’cause’ cancer. Something that these people eat probably does, I would not be one bit surprised to find that the people who do get cancer also eat a lot of bread, or sugar, or both. Of course, nobody would think to ask a question like that.

I don’t fear processed meats at all, provided that they are natural and contain the fats I need. You shouldn’t either.

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