Category: Interesting Information

Information I want to share in a non-essay form

Interesting Information: How Much Sugar Are We Eating Today?

Interesting Information:  August 4, 2012

How Much Sugar Are We Eating Today?

Tim Boyd reviews DVDs in the Weston A. Price Foundation’s journal WISE TRADITIONS.  In the summer 2012 issue, which I’ve just finished reading, he reviewed a DVD by Nancy Appleton, PhD, called SWEET SUICIDE–HOW SUGAR IS DESTROYING THE HEALTH OF OUR SOCIETY, made with help from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.  (Pottenger did, among other useful things, the famous study of cat health, based on what they were fed.)

Here’s a revealing quote–which answers the question in the title of this entry:

During George Washington’s time we consumed thirteen pounds per year per person on average.  During George Bush’s time we consumed one hundred fifty pounds per person per year.  The difference in cancer and degenerative disease rates during those times is clear.

Those figures would be AVERAGES–which means some of us are eating way more than 150 pounds!!!!! each year.

And, remember, these figures do NOT include the sugars you’re eating that derive from grains and all carbohydrates.  Remember that two slices of whole wheat toast is the daily limit for a woman in Luise Light’s recommendations for the 1980 USDA food guide (that got erased) AND on the Glycenic Index puts more sugar into your bloodstream than a Mars candy bar or a soda (which has about 16 teaspoons of sugar if I remember correctly)  , according to WHEAT BELLY.

So how much sugar are you eating?

I’m finding that my desire for sugar–even the raw honey I use to sweeten my tea–is drastically decreasing since I cut out wheat and most grains.  For whatever that’s worth…

Interesting Information: First State-wide Ban on Plastic Bags

Interesting Information:  July 26 2012

First State-wide Ban on Plastic Bags

Hawaii is the first state to pass a state-wide ban on plastic bags, effective July 1, 2015.

YEAH!!  Go Hawaii!!

I hope all of you are NOT using store-used plastic or paper bags when shopping.  Both are environmental nightmares and about equal in terms of harm.  Get yourself some bags and take them with you when shopping–for ALL your shopping.  Start asking for your purchases to be put in your own bags everywhere you go.

I have been using bags for food purchases, but now I’m going to up the ante and start taking clean bags for all purchases.

There is a film that is referenced in the Mercola article I saw this morning:  BAG IT.

I found it on Netflix and could instantly download it on the Roku.  I’ll take a look at it soon, though I am so far behind on watching documentaries.  Sometimes the psychic burden of watching all that’s wrong with our world–there’s so much–is just too much, and I have to take a break.

Here’s the whole article if you want to read it:  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/26/no-to-plastic-bags.aspx?e_cid=20120726_DNL_artNew_1

Interesting Information: More FDA Shady Dealing With A New Vaccine For Babies

Interesting Information:  July 24, 2012

More FDA Shady Dealing With A New Vaccine For Babies

Here’s a quote from Dr. Joseph Mercola’s article–the link is below–on the FDA’s approval of a new combo vaccine for meningitis for babies.  Meningitis is a rare disease.

Ironically, on June 14, the FDA awarded GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a license to sell MenHibrix, a new vaccine that combines two meningitis vaccines into one shot.  The FDA had rejected the license in 2010 and 2011 because, reportedly, the British drug company giant was having trouble proving the vaccine actually worked.

This time, FDA staff did not bother to ask for an opinion from the agency’s own vaccine advisory committee before giving GSL the green light to market MenHibrix in the U.S. for babies as young as 6 weeks old.  In a letter, FDA official Marion Gruber, PhD, told the company that:  “We did not refer your application to the additional VRBPAC [review] because our review of information submitted in you BLA, including the clinical study design and trial results, did not raise particular concerns or controversial issues which would have benefited from an advisory committee discussion.

Really?  Sounds like some FDA officials didn’t want Advisory Committee members to ask the drug company lots of questions about this new vaccine, just like the CDC and AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) officials don’t want parents to ask lots of questions about ANY vaccine.

Mercola goes on to note that MenHibrix has “not yet been studied in combination with every one of the other vaccines already given to babies simultaneously.”  And, “even premature babies weighing less than four and a half pounds are subjected to the mindless one-size-fits all `no exceptions’ vaccine schedule.  Where is the solid scientific evidence that it is safe or effective to give eight or nine vaccines to an eight or nine pound newborn?”

Mercola also notes that there is no evidence proving that vaccinated children are any healthier than nonvaccinated children as no studies have been done.

The CDC will vote in October on whether or not to make this new vaccine optional or whether to add it to the already bloated vaccine schedule–in the process giving “another big pharmaceutical corporation a guaranteed, liability free market [underline mine] by adding four doses of an expensive new vaccine to the child vaccine schedule so parents can be forced to buy it and give it to their newborns–no questions asked and no choices allowed….”

A June  2012 study published in Pediatrics concluded that “about 10 percent of parents living in Portland, Oregon are making independent decisions about how many vaccines their babies should get and when they should get them.  Those parents are rejecting the CDC’s aggressive vaccination schedule promoted by the AAP that directs pediatricians to give 2- to 6-month-old babies between seven to nine vaccines on the same day, without exception.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/24/new-vaccines-for-babies.aspx?e_cid=20120724_DNL_artNew_2

Interesting Information: “Vaccinations, The Ongoing Debate”

Interesting Information:  July 23, 2012

“Vaccinations, The Ongoing Debate”

Well, here’s a must read for everyone from young parents to grandparents.  Vaccinations are a very charged subject in our society and parents who are looking more deeply and asking questions are being called crazy or ill-informed or irresponsible.

Are they?

Leslie Manookian published this piece in The Weston A. Price Foundation’s journal, Wise Traditions, summer 2012 issue.  Manookian has made a film, THE GREATER GOOD, in which she has attempted to determine where the facts and hard science are with relation to vaccinations.  She notes that the “vaccine debate is a scientific debate,” or should be so, and is not “one between emotional parents and their doctors.”

The tagline from the film is the following:  “If you think you know everything about vaccines…think again.”

The School of Public Health at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, awarded the film its Koroni Award “for a documentary feature addressing an issue of importance to public health.”  The film was featured at the Amsterdam Film Festival, where it was awarded the Cinematic Vision Award.  The film was aired nationally on Current TV and has been shown at film festivals all over the world–where it has been “applauded by lay, medical, and film audiences alike….”

You can read Manookian’s article at http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/vaccinations.

Here are some highlights:

Children today receive 26 doses of 9 vaccines by their first birthday.  In 1983, they received 11 doses of 4 vaccines.

By age 18, children today receive 70 doses of 16 vaccines.  In 1983, they received 23 doses of 8 vaccines.

Big Pharma has an estimated 200 vaccines in development for use across the population.  The CDC recommends an annual flu shot from cradle to grave.  There are many adult booster shots for childhood diseases and new vaccines like the shingles vaccine, which I recall reading only covered about 30 percent? of the potential to get shingles.  Flu shots still contain mercury.  “Many diseases vaccinated against today were considered fairly benign in past decades (flu, chicken pox, mumps, rubella) or quite rare (hepatitis A and B, meningitis).”

No one knows if vaccines are safe because no “large, long-term clinical study comparing the medium or long-term health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups of people” has ever been done.

Children are given as many as TEN vaccines in one visit, but there are no safety studies evaluating the safety of simultaneous shots.

No study has been done to evaluate the “different ingredients of human infant vaccines taken individually or in combination.”  This list of ingredients can include, “but is not limited to” the following:  “mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde [a known carcinogen], cells from aborted fetuses, cells from monkey kidneys, chicken embryos, viruses, antibiotics, yeast, polysorbate 80 and detergents.

Most vaccine trial only last a few weeks, so long-term effects are not known.  Worse, Big Pharma is allowed “to use another vaccine or a liquid containing an adjuvant such as aluminum as the placebo”–so the “vaccine producer can say that the vaccines cause no more adverse reactions than a placebo.”

Mercury is still used in the manufacturing process and trace amounts remain.  Aluminum–a “demonstrated neurotoxin”–is used as an adjuvant (a substance added to vaccines to stimulate an immune response–without which the vaccine is useless).  Medical science’s “understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor….[but] Experimental research…clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans.”

Much evidence exists now that vaccines are harming children, and Manookian discusses some of those peer-reviewed studies.  She includes the notion that ‘there is in fact peer-reviewed scientific evidence connecting both [mercury and vaccines] to autism.”  She notes that “research has also shown impaired immune function and autoimmune disease in humans following the administration of these same compounds [alluminum].”  Neurological damage, “including motor function deficits, cognitive impairment, and behavioral changes in mice given the aluminum in vaccines.”

What is most disturbing are the behavioral changes in vaccinated children. “Normal” reactions are considered to be “swelling, soreness, tenderness and a lump at the injection site, fever, fussiness, tiredness, and vomiting.”  But “no studies exist to determine what happens to the body’s systems and tissues when a vaccine is given.”  Manookian writes:   “In the making of the film and while conducting screenings, we have come across many parents who said their child had these `normal’ reactions after a round of vaccines but never was quite the same again and went on to develop a learning disability, allergies, ADHD, or another type of chronic disease.”

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, signed by Ronald Reagan, “acknowledged tha vaccines can cause injury or death.”  “To date, the program has paid out more than two billion dollars and has about three billion dollars in reserves” as a tax is paid on each vaccine given.

It’s important to realize that “doctors are taught that vaccines are safe and effective; they are not taught how vaccines are studied, the components of vaccines, or the gaps in research.  Doctors are taught that decades of clinical use of vaccines have demonstrated their safety and that vaccine side effects are rare, but there are no large, long-term clinical trials comparing the health and well being of those vaccinated to those unvaccinated to back up these assumptions” (underlining is mine).   IN OTHER WORDS THIS “KNOWING” IS A BELIEF SYSTEM, CREATED BY BIG PHARMA, THAT IS SOLD TO DOCTORS AND PARENTS USING FEAR ABOUT CHILD SAFETY.  THERE IS NOT DATA BEHIND IT.  Plus, Big Pharma has ZERO LIABILITY for vaccines that cause harm.  You cannot sue them for damages.

What about the notion that vaccines have reduced infectious disease?  Bernard Guyer et al published in Pediatrics (December 2000) a history showing that “`nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among U. S. children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”  Guyer et al’s consensus was that public health measures (water treatment, food safety. organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices) were what made the difference.  “Moreover,” writes Manookian,” disease outbreaks regularly occur in fully vaccinated populations so vaccinations may not be as effective a preventative as generally believed.”

You should look deeper before making any decisions about vaccinations for yourself or your children.   You might be putting them at more danger than any disease they might catch would.

You should know that in California right now your child who is twelve or over can be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease by a school nurse without your consent or knowledge–since parents will have “no access to the child’s medical records that pertain to these shots”!!!!  How can that be in a country that touts freedom as its organizing principle???  This is a perfect example of the power of industry to work its will on a population.

One excellent book is Neil Z. Miller’s VACCINES, ARE THEY REALLY SAFE AND EFFECTIVE.”   This book was my first introduction to the idea that vaccines might be really dangerous.

Here’s an article by Dr. Mercola that came in the past few days about how the Merck mumps vaccine is not effective, how they knew it, and how the whole story, which appeared in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, has now been covered up.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/23/merck-vaccine-fraud-story-buried.aspx?e_cid=20120723_DNL_artNew_1

Here’s The People’s Chemist, Shane Ellison, on why the whole “herd” protection assumptions are nonsense.  Ellison can be flamboyant, but he’s a pretty solid scientist:      http://thepeopleschemist.com/blog/

I can tell you that if I had young children today I would not vaccinate them.  I’d take our chances, knowing I might lose them.  But, losing a child can happen just as easily with vaccines and with all of the other really dangerous things children do every day.  In the end, you can only protect children so much and overprotection is just as harmful to their development.

.

Interesting Information: Priming the Gall Bladder

Interesting Information:  July 22, 2012

Priming the Gall Bladder

Lori Lipinski has an article in the May/June 2012 issue of Well Being Journal that addresses the need of most Americans to enhance the health and performance of their gall bladders–which are not functioning optimally due to years of eating low-fat diets and/or bad fats, like all those highly processed vegetable oils and margarines and vegetable lards.

Lipinski states up front in the article that her clients who eat low-fat diets “are usually the most unhealthy.”

Good fats are butter, tallow, olive oil, and coconut and palm oils.  I would add lard from pigs raised in a healthy manner.

Lipinski writes that the “gallbladder is shaped like a little sack that sits alongside your liver.  The liver produces bile, a substance made from cholesterol that emulsifies fat and makes it easier to digest.  The gallbladder stores and concentrates bile, then secretes it into the small intestines when fats are present.  If you don’t eat fat, the gallbladder won’t get any exercise and can begin to atrophy.”

BUT, you cannot just suddenly start eating a lot of good fats as your gall bladder does need priming.  Plus, if you eat too much fat for your system to handle right now, you will throw up.  So go at increasing fat consumption gently and gradually.

Symptoms of a problem gall bladder include gas, a full or heavy feeling after meals, bloating, acid reflux, and “pain in the right side radiating into the right shoulder blade, and loose or light colored stools that float.”  (Light-colored stools indicate your body is not absorbing and using fat AND other nutrients as well, which is not a good thing.)

How to help your gall bladder?

First, don’t use antacid pills.  Your system needs more acid, not less, if you’re having issues.

Second, “enhance your digestion with raw apple cider vinegar.  Mix 1 teaspoon with 2-4 ounces water and drink with meals.  A nice acid environment in the stomach stimulates the gallbladder to do its job.”  Get the kind of living apple cider that includes the “mother,” not the dead kind good only for cleaning the house.

For additional support, Lapinski recommends Dr. Schulze’s formula to “cleanse the liver and gallbladder.”

Other helpful remedies “include Swedish Bitters, 1 teaspoon in water taken just after meals, and lacto-fermented foods such as sauerkraut and beet kvass.”  (Recipes are in NOURISHING TRADITIONS, Mary Enig and Sally Fallon Morell.

Lapinski, like Mary Enig and Sally Fallon Morell, in EAT FAT, LOSE FAT, notes that if you need to up your fat (and you do if you’ve been eating low-fat) start with UNREFINED coconut oil, which is easier to digest.  Enig and Morell suggest up to 6 tablespoons spread out over a day.  (Make a yummy yogurt smoothie and add gently melted coco oil and lots of egg yolks.)

If you do not have a gall bladder any longer, look into supplementing with bile salts to handle fat consumption.  I’m out of my depth with regard to how much fat one can eat without a gall bladder…

Don’t let a surgeon take out a gall bladder unless you try some diet measures first–like the GAPS diet.  Unless, of course, your gall bladder, like my dad’s became, is too sick, too infected, to fix with good food.  Try not to get to that place by changing how you eat now.

Interesting Information: “What Really Makes Us Fat”

Interesting Information:  July 6, 2012

“What Really Makes Us Fat”

Husband John reads The New York Times every Sunday.  It’s a national paper, and we are lucky to be able to get a national paper way up here in Mid-Coast Maine.  We don’t get The NYTs until mid-morning on Sunday, but we do get it delivered to our driveway–which did not happen until about a year ago.  Before that time, one had to go to a nearby market mid-morning on Sunday to get a copy.

I rarely have time to read the Sunday paper, so John brings me articles in which he knows I’ll be interested.

This Sunday he put Gary Taubes’ “What Really Makes Us Fat” at my place at the dining room table.

I’ve written about Taubes’ work in my essays.  He’s a careful researcher, and he’s telling a story that has a lot of scientific data behind it but which isn’t catching much fire in the mainstream understanding of how the body works with regard to obesity.  His work has pretty thoroughly debunked the “calorie is a calorie” and you-just-need-to-cut-back” theory of fat accumulation–showing that what kind of calorie one eats does matter rather a lot.

In “What Really Makes Us Fat,” Taubes cites a very recent article (last week) in The Journal of the American Medical Association detailing the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and his collaborators.  This study, writes Taubes, speaks to a fundamental issue–what causes obesity.

Ludwig’s team did something that has never been done before.  First, explains Taubes, they “took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight.  Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back.  Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same.  This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss.”

Next, “Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them.”  But, the subjects were “rotated through three very different diets, one month for each.  They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of their diets was very different.”

One diet was low fat so was high in carbohydrates–it’s the “diet we’re all advised to eat:  whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein.”  One diet had a “low glycemic index:  fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested–from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources.”  The third diet was Atkins, which “is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.”

The “results were remarkable” write Taubes.  “Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended.  On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss.”

On the low-fat diets, participants “had to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet.  If the physical activity made them hungrier–a likely assumption–maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder.”

Taubes notes that if we consider the weight-reduced participants as being “pre-obese,” their reactions to foods tells us what can make us fatter.  This study showed that “the fewer carbohydrates we eat, the more easily we remain lean.  The more carbohydrates, the more difficult.  In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect.  What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.”

Taubes notes that “from this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do:  eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.”

Taubes notes that these conclusions are controversial, and he calls for experiments to be “replicated by independent investigators.  We’ve been arguing about this for over a century.  Let’s put if to rest with more good science.   The public health implications are enormous.”

In his books, which I wrote about in my essays on this blog, Taubes discusses many ongoing clinical trials and numerous obesity clinics (like the one at Duke) which are showing that people lose weight and improve their health data on an Atkins-type diet.  Many other diets utilize parts of the Atkins approach–Paleo and GAPS among them.

Interesting Information: The China Study Myth

Interesting Information:  July 4, 2012

The China Study Myth:  Flaws in the Vegan Bible

T. Colin Campbell published THE CHINA STUDY in 2006.  Campbell is a “heavy hitter” in terms of credentials:  a PhD from Cornell, authorship of over three hundred scientific papers, and decades of research in the field of nutrition.

Campbell’s premise in THE CHINA STUDY is that ALL animal foods cause modern ailments like heart disease and cancer.  This idea came from a rat study done in India and rat studies Campbell did, from which he extrapolated his flawed conclusions.   The rat studies point to animal protein as being protective, not deadly.

THE CHINA STUDY rocked the nutritional world and about half a million copies have been sold so far.  Vegans call this book their “bible” and have taken to shutting down all questions about the health of their diet choices with “read THE CHINA STUDY.”  But, beware that only one chapter is actually devoted to the actual China study–a tipoff that belief system might well be at work in Campbell’s conclusions.

Chris Masterjohn, who is associated with the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF), critiqued Campbell’s work early on.  You can find his analysis on his blog and on the Weston A. Price foundation web site.  See, for instance “The Curious Case of Campbell’s Rats”–http://www.westonaprice.org/blogs/2010/09/22/the-curious-case-of-campbells-rats-does-protein-deficiency-prevent-cancer/  And, Denise Minger, a health writer, editor, researcher, and vegetarian for about a decade, started digging into Campbell’s data.  She concluded that THE CHINA STUDY is “more a work of fiction than a nutritional holy grail.”  And, that the book “is not a work of scientific vigor.”  And, “the book’s most widely repeated claims, particularly involving Campbell’s cancer research and the results of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project, are victims of selection bias, cherry picking, and the woefully misrepresented data.”

 Minger’s article “The China Study Myth:  Flaws in the Vegan Bible” was published in the spring 2012 “Wise Traditions,” the journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation–you can read it for yourself at http://www.westonaprice.org/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/the-china-study-myth.  And if you harbor the notion that meat is unpure or bad for you and that vegetables are pure and good for you, I hope you take the time to do so.

It’s pretty clear, after reading Minger’s article and Masterjohn’s early analysis, that Campbell’s belief system got in the way of what his data was actually telling him.

Minger explains that Campbell’s now-famous rat study involved exposing “rats to very high levels of aflatoxin–a carcinogen produced by mold that grows on peanuts and corn–and then feeding them a diet containing varying levels of the milk protein casein.”  Rats eating low levels of casein remained tumorless, but rats fed higher levels developed tumors.  Only, the casein was separated from the rest of the components in milk, which “work synergistically” together in countless ways.  Certainly isolated casein can’t be generalized to all forms of animal protein–which Campbell does.  And, Minger notes that “an impressive number of studies shows that the other major milk protein whey, consistently suppresses tumor growth rather than promoting it….”

Campbell’s studies showed that wheat or soy protein did not produce cancer, even at high levels.  But, what he discovered but left out of his book is that “when wheat gluten is supplemented with lysine to make a complete protein, it behaves exactly like casein to promote tumor growth”–which shows that “animal protein doesn’t have some mystical ability to spur cancer by mere virtue of its origin in a sentient creature–just that a full spectrum of amino acids provide the right building blocks for growth, whether it be of malignant cells or healthy ones.”  Minger notes that, therefore, “theoretically, a meal of rice and beans would provide the same so-called cancer-promoting amino acids that animal protein does.”

Minger references Materjohn’s analysis–using the very Indian study that jumpstarted Campbell’s research–which showed that rats on a low-protein diet experienced increases in the acute toxicity of aflatoxin.  The high-protein diet for rats was at least keeping them alive.  Iin other words “when the aflatoxin dose is sky high, animals eating a low-protein diet don’t get cancer because their cells are too busy dying en masse, while animals eating a higher-protein diet are still consuming enough dietary building blocks for the growth of cells–whether healthy or cancerous.”  This fact highlights  a major problem with Campbell’s conclusions about plant-based diets and prompts Minger to write that “in a nutshell, the animal protein fear-mongering in THE CHINA STUDY stems from wildly misconstrued science.”

Campbell, writes Minger, cannot prove a relationship between animal protein and diseases because “that relationship does not exist.”  Indeed, with plant proteins “we find almost three times as many positive correlations with various cancers as we do with animal protein, including colon cancer, rectal cancer, and esophageal cancer.”  And, animal-food eaters in rural China “are getting less cardiovascular disease than their more vegetarian friends.”  In short, once again we see that plants are NOT nutrient dense and do not fully support abundant human health.

Minger goes on to show that “although wheat gets nary a mention in the China Study chapter, Campbell actually found that wheat consumption–in stark contrast to rice–was powerfully associated with higher insulin levels, higher triglycerides, coronary heart diseae, stroke and hypertensive heart disease within the China Study data–far more than any other food.”

Minger’s arguments, born of her in-depth analysis of Campbell’s data and his previous papers, is, obviously, much more detailed than I can repeat here.  Yet, the paper is easy to read.  And, it shows clearly that, once again, correlation has been used to target causation and that belief systems blind one to what science is actually telling us.

Minger writes a blog dedicated to revealing the bad science with regard to food issues (www.rawfoodsos.com), and her upcoming book DEATH BY FOOD PYRAMID will be published in late 2012.  I, for one, look forward to reading it.

Interesting Information: A Healthy Diet Includes 50-70% Healthy Fats

Interesting Information:  July 3, 2012

A Healthy Diet Includes 50-70% Healthy Fats

How’s that for a shocker?

It’s especially shocking when the idea that plant-based diets are your healthiest choice is being pushed so strongly by the USDA and way too many health practitioners who have hopped onto this bandwagon without adequate scientific data for support.  The health of plant-based diets is another one of these food myths that I’ve been writing about for the past few years.  I can’t find any science that supports it that has stood up to peer reviews.  I can find TONS of science that refutes it.  Plants are NOT nutrient dense.  Period.

Dr. Joseph Mercola’s health web site published “Why I Believe Over Half of Your Diet Should Be Made Up of This,” on May 31, 2012 (http://articles.mercola.com).

The “this” was healthy fats, and Mercola noted that his own diet included 60 to 70% of healthy fats daily.

Mercola’s article begins with a history of Crisco, the industrial, white, vegetable-based lard made by Procter & Gamble and introduced a “little over 100 years ago.”  “Atlantic Magazine” published a history of the introduction of Crisco in their April 26, 2012, issue–using an excerpt from the book THE HAPPINESS DIET by Drew Ramsey, MD, and Tyler Graham.  (Mercola’s article contains a link to this Atlantic article.)  Up until Crisco, people used animal fats for frying and in baked goods like pie crusts.  But, the introduction of Crisco included a wildly successful ad campaign claiming that Crisco was “modern” and was healthier than the use of animal fats.

Crisco is an hydrogenated vegetable oil.  Actually its made from the “waste product of cotton farming,  cottonseed oil.”  It’s what we call a “trans fat.”  It causes heart disease for sure and “contributes to cancer, bone problems, hormonal imbalance and skin disease; infertility, difficulties in pregnancy and problems with lactation; low birth weight, growth problems, and learning disabilities.”

Mercola walks readers through the myth of saturated fat being harmful–and gives a history of the misinformation that is still very much present today–misinformation that has no science whatsoever behind it.  (Many of the Mainely Tipping Points essays on this blog discuss this history and what clinical trials and science are actually showing.)  Mercola retells how Ancel Keys ignored countries which contradicted his premise that saturated fat caused heart disease.  Mercola also cites the often-cited statement of Dr. William Castelli, former director of the famed Framingham Heart Study, wherein Castelli notes that “the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol….We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active.”  Mercola also includes a video of his  interview with Gary Taubes, whose work I’ve written extensively about also in the essays on this blog.

Saturated fats “provide a concentrated source of energy in your diet.”  I’ve read elsewhere–and I’ll need to find this discussion again–that when your body is burning energy from carbs and sugars, it puts a lot of pressure on the body, causing it to malfunction, causing energy swings, and constant hunger.  Saturated fats don’t have this effect–they provide sustained, steady energy for long periods of time.  And, Mercola discusses why trans fats and sugars, particularly fructose, are the “true culprits of heart disease.”  The Weston A. Price Foundation would add that overuse of highly processed vegetable oils (canola, safflower, etc.) are also a root cause of heart disease.

Saturated fats , notes Mercola, are also carriers for many of the minerals and vitamins that are crucial for the body’s health.  Saturated fats are needed for the body’s conversion of nutrients to useable forms in the body–like the conversion of carotene to vitamin A.  Saturated fats are building blocks for cell membranes, help lower cholesterol levels, act as antiviral agents, modulate genetic regulation, and help prevent cancer.

So, writes Mercola, don’t eat processed foods.  Elsewhere, Mercola has advocated not eating grains.

And, writes Mercola, do eat organic butter (hopefully made from raw milk), use unprocessed coconut oil for cooking, and eat raw fats, such as “those from avocados, raw dairy products, and olive oil, and take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.”  (The Weston A. Price Foundation recommends unprocessed, fermented, high-vitamin cod liver oil instead of fish oils and would add beef fat (tallow), pork fat (lard), and chicken fat–all from healthy animals NOT raised in CAFO environments–to the list of saturated fats to use and consume.)

Mercola notes that Paul Jaminet, PhD, author of PERFECT HEALTH DIET, and Dr. Ron Rosedale, MD, “an expert on treating diabetes through diet” both agree that “the ideal diet includes somewhere between 50-70 percent fat.”

TurkeyTracks: Essex Farm in Essex, NY–THE DIRTY LIFE

Turkey Tracks:  June 13, 2012

This is Part I of a longer story…

Essex Farm–THE DIRTY LIFE

About 10 years ago, Kristin Kimball, a Harvard graduate, was earning enough with her free-lance writing to live in New York City.  One day Kristin drove six hours (Pennsylvania, I think) to interview a first-generation farmer named Mark, a Swarthmore graduate who had cobbled together an agricultural degree since he always knew he wanted to farm.  Kristin’s life changed forever upon meeting Mark.  She left behind high heels, meeting for coffee, and all the entertainment a large city offers.

That meeting started Kristin on a journey which led to Essex Farm in Essex, NY–which is just south of Burlington, Vermont, and, of course, across the narrow end of Lake Champlain.  Essex Farm had been leant to them to see if they could make a go of it, which is, in itself, a large bit of the magic that surrounds this story and this journey.  Essex Farm, when they first saw it in the fall, was “sleeping,” as Mark expressed it.  They spent that first winter in an apartment in town (while waiting for the leases of the current tenants of the farmhouse to expire) and spending the days on the farm repairing equipment and some of the buildings.  They bought their first cow and learned to milk her.

Together, over the past nine years, Kristin and Mark have built a farm that feeds 220 people all year long with all the food they need–pork, chickens, beef, milk, eggs, various grains ground into flour, maple syrup, honey, and about 40 different kinds of vegetables, including all the root vegetables that get one through a “north country” winter.  They now have hired 12 employees  and are the largest employer in Essex.  And, they have produced two beautiful little girls and are going to build a family home just behind the major farm buildings.

Kristin’s memoir of their first year on the farm–a year culminating in their marriage–was published in 2010–THE DIRTY LIFE.  It’s a tale of great joys and great despair.  It’s a tale of learning who you really are and what’s important in life.  It’s a tale of learning a whole passel of new skills–like farming with draft horses.  It’s a tale of commitment and how they supported themselves and how a community supported and held them in their times of greatest need.  It’s a tale, now, of many lives being lived fully and, perhaps, of the raising of a new generation of farmers, for Essex Farm has spawned four farms now and two children who will, at least, grow up to know how to farm.

So, Tara Derr Webb read THE DIRTY LIFE about 18 months ago.  Tara grew up with our two sons and had recently moved from the West Coast to Charleston as she and her husband Leighton were ready to put down more permanent roots.  Both Tara and Leighton have forgotten more about food than I will probably ever know.  And now they both wanted to participate in some major way in the farm/food/restaurant matrix.

After reading THE DIRTY LIFE, Tara knew she wanted to do more, personally, with the farm end of the foodway.  So, she signed up to visit several WOOF (Worldwide Organization of Organic Farmers or, also, Willing Organization of Organic Farmers) farms.  The first was near Atlanta.  After being there almost two weeks, a goat mother died just after birthing.  Tara put the baby in her car and brought her home to Isle of Palms, SC, and raised her.   She also made what will probably be lifelong friends on that farm.

Tara wanted to move further north–to the Husdon Valley area of New York–itself a farm foody place.  So she and Leighton rented land for a year to try out the northern farming experience.  They didn’t like it–didn’t like the cold, didn’t feel it was right on their skin.  So, they have just rented land north of Charleston that they will begin to farm.  (They now have three goats and plan on getting about 100 chickens.)  There will also be a restaurant, but you can let Tara herself tell you that part of the story on her Farmbar website.)

When we were in Charleston in late May, Tara was there as well–figuring out fence lines, working out details for their move back South and so forth.  She told me Kristin was having an open house June 9th and asked it I would like to come.  I slept on it, but knew I had to go.

Yes, I said, and got out maps as soon as I got home.

XXX

Interesting Information: 10 Salt Myths

Interesting Information:  June 4, 2012

Ten Salt  Myths

This past Sunday’s New York Times ran a long piece by Gary Taubes called “Salt, We Misjudged You” (Opinion, 8-9).  Taubes traces the history of how salt became demonized in the 1970s and 1980s–without adequate scientific data to justify such a stance.  It might seem like “common sense” to relate salt intake to high blood pressure problems since salt can make one thirsty.  But that HYPOTHESIS has not proven to be true–as I related in Mainely Tipping Points Essay 38, located on this blog.

Meanwhile, Taube notes, many prominent organizations are promoting a low-salt diet, among them the USDA, the Institute of Medicine, the CDC, and the NIH.  Their view is based on a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study.  That study suggested that lowering salt intake “modestly lowered blood pressure,” but it “said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.”  And, I would ask, how would one know if the salt reduction was a factor or if other foods eaten or not eaten were factors?

The recommendations from these large organizations is ignoring, deliberately, recent research showing that salt reduction is dangerous to human health.  Recent research using some 100,000 people in 30 countries showed that salt consumption has been, Taubes writes, “remarkably stable among populations over time.”  Four recent studies “reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range.”  This “normal range” is considerably higher than recent recommendations by the USDA in its food guide.

In November of last year, Taubes writes, both the USDA and the FDA held hearings to “discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt).  Proponents speaking against salt consumption argued that “the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored.”

OK.  That’s not scientific.  That’s BELIEF SYSTEM, and I’ve said many times on this blog, uncritical BELIEF SYSTEMS are dangerous.  They can, like this one about salt, kill you.  Taubes says the following:

“This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades.”

Mortin Satin, PhD, Vice President, Science and Research, The Salt Institute, writing in the Spring 2012 Wise Traditions, the journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, lists 10 myths about salt (http://www.westonaprice.org/vitamins-and-minerals/salt-and-our-health).  Some will surprise you.

Myth 1:  We eat more salt than ever before.  NOPE.  Our salt consumption today is about one half of the amount consumed between the War of 1812 and the end of World War II–which was about 3.3 teaspoons per day.  Increased refrigeration and not using salt as a preservative are factors.

Myth 2:  Our knowledge of the major sources of salt in our diet (80% from processed foods) is unquestionable.  NOPE.  This notion is based on a single paper from 1991 which involved 62 people and dietary recall–which is not reliable.  (It’s amazing to me how often dietary recall is being used in studies  The most recent I can recall is that study saying red meat was bad for you.)

Myth 3:  Our salt consumption continues to rise every year.  NOPE.  See Myth 1.

Myth 4:  The thirty-year public health initiative in Finland represents a successful model of salt reduction.  NOPE.  Health benefits were marginally worse than countries that did not reduce salt consumption.

Myth 5:  Current levels of salt consumption result in premature cardiovascular disease and death.  NOPE.  Data shows that the higher the salt consumption, the longer the life expectancy.  (Mainely Tipping Points 38 discusses the connections between cutting salt consumption and heart problems.)

Myth 6:  Cutting back on salt will improve the overall diet.  NOPE.  Salt enhances foods that would be bitter without it, like the all-important greens.  (Somewhere else I read that salt helps you break down and digest meats.)

Myth 7:  Reduced salt levels are critical to the DASH diet.  NOPE.  Data shows moving to a DASH diet significantly impacts blood pressure without any changes in salt consumption.  (I am NOT a fan of the DASH diet–too many carbohydrates and fructose.  It’s useful if you’ve been eating junk food, but I believe the GAPS diet and the Paleo diet are better choices.)

Myth 8: There is a clear relationship between salt intake and blood pressure.  NOPE.  There, famously, is not a clear relationship.  Satin gives a really good example using the standard hospital saline IV drip, which gives about 4.5 teaspoons of salt per day in addition to the teaspoon of salt taken in food.  Blood pressure, checked every 4 to 6 hours, does not change.

Myth 9:  Reducing salt intake can do no harm.   NOPE.  It can seriously harm you, and Satin gives a long list of worrisome outcomes.  Mainely Tipping Points 38 does as well.

Myth 10:  The U.S. Dietary Guideline process is valid.  NOPE.  Satin notes that these guidelines have not been peer-reviewed and are based on the lowest quality of information–opinion.  Or, in my terms, on BELIEF SYSTEM.  These guidelines are not independent or objective, according to Satin, who walks through why.   I would say that the USDA guidelines about so many food issues–among them consumption of salt, saturated fat, meat, the amount of carbohydrates deemed ok, and so many of the issues I’ve been covering in my essays–are now so far off track that it’s far, far better to totally ignore them.

Let your body decide your salt intake.  But, use GOOD salts–as discussed in Mainely Tipping Points 38.  They include real salt dried from seawater–not the fake salts in the grocery store.  Real salt is full of minerals.