Label over Substance
Truths by Fanatics
"We ordered healthy, non-greasy food."
"We ordered healthy, non-greasy food."
"Shooo, you're gonna be a butterball after eating all that fat."
"The Japanese live a long time - see what a low-fat diet they have. Sushi is 'low-fat' !"
"I can't wait to chow down on some meat. I'm on my way to clogged arteries and a heart-attack!"
"I gotta get out and run all that fat off I just ate!"
"I'm getting fatter by the day. No more butter on my Wonder Bread, that's final."
"I only use olive oil now. I've really gone low-fat."
"Ok, no more cheesecake and icecream since the doctor told me to watch it. Check out these low-fat chips-a-hoy with carob! They contain sugar, preservatives, bleached wheat, sugar, carob with sugar. Ummagod no fat."
*********************************************
"The Japanese live a long time - see what a low-fat diet they have. Sushi is 'low-fat' !"
"I can't wait to chow down on some meat. I'm on my way to clogged arteries and a heart-attack!"
"I gotta get out and run all that fat off I just ate!"
"I'm getting fatter by the day. No more butter on my Wonder Bread, that's final."
"I only use olive oil now. I've really gone low-fat."
"Ok, no more cheesecake and icecream since the doctor told me to watch it. Check out these low-fat chips-a-hoy with carob! They contain sugar, preservatives, bleached wheat, sugar, carob with sugar. Ummagod no fat."
*********************************************
Now Look Here
*Grease? Life-debasing word. Congealed car oil. Go eat that. But don't you dare throw out that pan grease. Remember the Lakota word for Minnesotan immigrants? "Those-That-Steal-the-Fat". Why did Lakota starve? Someone stole their fat, their life. Fat and Life are interlinked across the globe. Why do you think French, Japanese, and Czech women look perfect? They don't skimp on their fat intake, that's why. Lakota had no animals to eat, no fat. We killed them with prairie grass and potatoes.
*Fat is beautiful. It's perfect. It's the only caloric macronutrient essential to life.
*Nobility imprisoned in Middle Ages were sometimes tortured (at discretion) on a diet solely consisting of dried or soaked out meat with ALL FAT carefully removed - a kind of mega jerky. Their bodies couldn't process the rich nutrients they were taking in. They toxed on unuseable protein, and their calories gradually got vacuumed out of their bodies. They shrivelled and died.
*Every cell making up every tissue in your body - including 'lean muscle tissue' - has a bilayer of fat around it. Otherwise you couldn't move, think, breathe, or keep an organ from shifting! Every rum cell you have is composed of both saturated *and* unsaturated fats, the former for resilience, the latter for flexibility. Upteen functions besides. Remember your nervous & lymph systems, bonemarrow, inner organs, brain! Your body isn't just a mass of muscle or fat tissue. Without fat, you're a shrivelled rat.
Your brain would be bubble-wrap. Low-fat is Stupidity, Usury, Fraud, Food Industry Glutony, and Waste.
*Most non-hybrid life-sustaining carbohydrates have a 1:1:1 ratio of fat: protein: carb (seaweed, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, wild rice, almonds, olives, cashews). Humans love drugs and the feeling drugs give them - sugar feels good and gives food longer shelf life. Sugar and grain carbs should be enjoyed - but on the same level as alcohol. They're not meant (by god) to *live* off of. Not for us post-Eden humans. Wheat, barley, maize, rice, rye - all are carb-loaded unbalanced allergenic foods. Our cattle-swilled grass-grains, fermented in multiple stomachs, are the most resilient anti-digestive plant matter on Earth. Tough European cattle cut their gums and tongues on the silicon sharpness of Midwest prairie grass. If only humans were bison. We could burn switchgrass in our cars and homes while eating the richness of it for supper. All our problems would be over.
*Carbs (if over 30% of your diet) bulk up FAT-ONLY CELLS. FAT-ONLY CELLS lead to Fat People.
*Fat people are NOT Renaissance women! Big Hips are Big Life. True fat people are most often commercialized Irish, British or Americans - saggy, big up top APPLES with balloon uppers and meat-less lowers.
*The fat you eat isn't directly pumped into a Fat Cell Zone. No more than gasoline creates gasoline tumours hanging out the side of your car!
*The fat you eat is burned in your muscle tissue (if you have any) for energy. It can even be burned twice. That's certainly not its only vital function, but for now enough said.
*Alas *fat* is both a noun and unflattering adjective in English. A nice pickle we're in. When I complement a person I admire for his/her thickness, I use the adjective I mean: THICK.
*Grease? Life-debasing word. Congealed car oil. Go eat that. But don't you dare throw out that pan grease. Remember the Lakota word for Minnesotan immigrants? "Those-That-Steal-the-Fat". Why did Lakota starve? Someone stole their fat, their life. Fat and Life are interlinked across the globe. Why do you think French, Japanese, and Czech women look perfect? They don't skimp on their fat intake, that's why. Lakota had no animals to eat, no fat. We killed them with prairie grass and potatoes.
*Fat is beautiful. It's perfect. It's the only caloric macronutrient essential to life.
*Nobility imprisoned in Middle Ages were sometimes tortured (at discretion) on a diet solely consisting of dried or soaked out meat with ALL FAT carefully removed - a kind of mega jerky. Their bodies couldn't process the rich nutrients they were taking in. They toxed on unuseable protein, and their calories gradually got vacuumed out of their bodies. They shrivelled and died.
*Every cell making up every tissue in your body - including 'lean muscle tissue' - has a bilayer of fat around it. Otherwise you couldn't move, think, breathe, or keep an organ from shifting! Every rum cell you have is composed of both saturated *and* unsaturated fats, the former for resilience, the latter for flexibility. Upteen functions besides. Remember your nervous & lymph systems, bonemarrow, inner organs, brain! Your body isn't just a mass of muscle or fat tissue. Without fat, you're a shrivelled rat.
Your brain would be bubble-wrap. Low-fat is Stupidity, Usury, Fraud, Food Industry Glutony, and Waste.
*Most non-hybrid life-sustaining carbohydrates have a 1:1:1 ratio of fat: protein: carb (seaweed, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, wild rice, almonds, olives, cashews). Humans love drugs and the feeling drugs give them - sugar feels good and gives food longer shelf life. Sugar and grain carbs should be enjoyed - but on the same level as alcohol. They're not meant (by god) to *live* off of. Not for us post-Eden humans. Wheat, barley, maize, rice, rye - all are carb-loaded unbalanced allergenic foods. Our cattle-swilled grass-grains, fermented in multiple stomachs, are the most resilient anti-digestive plant matter on Earth. Tough European cattle cut their gums and tongues on the silicon sharpness of Midwest prairie grass. If only humans were bison. We could burn switchgrass in our cars and homes while eating the richness of it for supper. All our problems would be over.
*Carbs (if over 30% of your diet) bulk up FAT-ONLY CELLS. FAT-ONLY CELLS lead to Fat People.
*Fat people are NOT Renaissance women! Big Hips are Big Life. True fat people are most often commercialized Irish, British or Americans - saggy, big up top APPLES with balloon uppers and meat-less lowers.
*The fat you eat isn't directly pumped into a Fat Cell Zone. No more than gasoline creates gasoline tumours hanging out the side of your car!
*The fat you eat is burned in your muscle tissue (if you have any) for energy. It can even be burned twice. That's certainly not its only vital function, but for now enough said.
*Alas *fat* is both a noun and unflattering adjective in English. A nice pickle we're in. When I complement a person I admire for his/her thickness, I use the adjective I mean: THICK.
8 comments:
Amen. I wish people were more logical when it came to food.
maybe. but people are not ILLOGICAL either. they just presume based on surface evidence combined with hearsay. i can't figure it out quite. maybe people defer to cultural and authority figures for food norms much as they would for political or commercial trends - they miss the obvious lasting or healthy things by getting lost in abstract symbols about 'FOOD' or 'A GOOD PURCHASE'.
It's weird. I think people's deception concerning carbs and fat almost parallels their perception about good and evil. People think in stark dichotomies without asking themselves 'well what KIND of good? what KIND of evil?' The cynics and agnostics then (blindly) decide to believe in neither! What NO ONE seems to do is to ask the real question: What is the primary thing BEHIND caloric burning that makes us healthy or unhealthy? What is the primary thing BEHIND good and evil that leads us to see these distinctions?
Combine with this people's lopsided and onesided focus on physics and chemistry. People wrongly assume that nutrition is too flakey to make appeals to either. They simultaneously (no offense) are able to learn more about how their computers or lawnmowers work than about how their own BODIES behave!! That's a strange disjunction of priority in my opinion, and reveals (again) an almost supernatural prejudice about anyone's ability to understand the human body.
Nate, I cracked and ate a variety of nuts tonight, luxoriating in their fatty oilness and not giving a scat about it.
a health nut after my own heart! hearty greetings to wellfed Uncle.
I'm still having trouble figuring out exactly what your opinions are on the current "state of the art" academic research on diet and nutrition. (That would be represented by, say, the Harvard School of Public Health's alternative food pyramid.) Some of the things you say are consistent with that research, and some of it seem iconoclastic and suspicious of authority.
I'd say that the standard Mediterranean diet is probably a good compromise between various extremes, and that seems not too badly inconsistent with what you're saying here. Most academic diet researchers would say that there are "good" types of all macronutrient sources (good grains, good fats, good sugars), which tend to be naturally occurring, but that highly processed variants of those categories are unhealthy.
The questions that remain are:
1. Are all wheat (corn, rice, etc.) grains out of your favor, or just the processed/refined grains sold in most grocery stores? I tend to eat plenty of whole grains, but try to avoid things that use less natural grain-based derivatives or additives (like refined flour or corn syrup). I tend to have high cultural regard for wheat as a foundation of civilization-- probably a reflection of my identity with a Christian culture that celebrates bread as a component of religious iconography (in the Lord's prayer, Eucharist, Paul's concept of the church, miracle of the loaves, etc.)
2. Why are you unconcerned about saturated fats? It seems like there's a fairly respectable body of evidence that suggests that unsaturated fats are less likely to lead to cardiovascular impairment than saturated fats, and I don't see any evident that saturated fats have unique health benefits. So far as I know, the human body can synthesize its own saturated fats as needed.
I'm not averse to certain fatty foods, like nuts and olives and avocados, but I do try to avoid eating anything with primarily saturated fats. I've reduced consumption of beef or pork, for example, to only a few times a year.
Edward--
I don't have much time at the moment to give you a thorough answer (and cite nutrionists). A 2-hour face-to-face discussion would go further.
I don't follow most alternative nutrionists' beliefs about fats, and definitely not the American Heart Association's.
Eades and Eades (husband and wife), proponents of pre mass-agricultural humans' diets, draw from a combination of their medical training, anthropological research, and other nutritionists sympathetic with hunter-gatherer type nutritional variety. They've influenced me a fair bit. Sam Thayer and Steven Budiansky have also had some influence. In the main, i've read around since i was 8 years old and tried to synthesize the whole of the contradictory nutritional information i was receiving and come to a less relativist individualist skeptic's conclusion about which foods are healthy and which are not, and in WHICH combination.
Combination is everything. That's the most important point i'm trying to make, and will make today. A carb, as a carb, isn't 'good or bad' for you. A fat, as a fat, isn't 'good or bad' for you. A protein, as a protein, isn't 'good or bad' for you. All foods and growing/living food items work SYNERGISTICALLY, and in ever bigger combinations and combinations of variety before, during and after consumed.
The key is to discover the propo combination and still be able to generalize about which food types can be slotted into it. I believe strongly in a real-food-based nutritional theory, not a purely theoretical one based on food constituents, but i DO have a theory - it's just much harder to state and easier to EAT.
As long as carbohydrates form the bulk of your caloric intake, it doesn't matter what their sources are, you are setting your body up for being less efficient with what it has to do every day, and setting yourself up for flabbiness, fat tissue, aching joints, crooked body, de-invigorated age, sedentary adaptations, food addictions (carbs are drugs, not food when above a certain limit), autoimmune disorders (diabetes, MS, arthritis, etc), cancer, heart problems, bad cholesterol, slow metabolism, inability to create a more active enduring sinewy body, crumbling bones, crumbling teeth, poor body pH, bad inefficient digestion, and yeast overgrowth in your bowels which will ultimately make you feel like a zombi most days of your life. you will also sleep less deeply on more carbs.
As long as you don't exercise, or are very angry, sad, or 'helpless' continually, your body won't benefit as much from dietary considerations. OVerall health is much bigger than diet. Genetics play a huge role, obviously.
Genetics also predispose humans to eat bits and bits of tons of variety of shoots, leaves, seeds, berries, bugs, bison joints, honey (a treat now and then), and work and slave and grind to get every ounce of energy and nutrition OUT Of the damn wild food. THAT's what makes a person healthy - the small and frequent meals, the occasional bison binges, the drug-out times on honey (not a staple, never, it's only for fun), the continual slaving to wrest any bit of carbs s/he can out of wild plant (non-hybrid) sources because carbs do not naturally occur in high volumes in many plants AT ALL. Grasses themselves, though very resilient to the human body from tiptoe to hairtip, have been bred over time to produce more and more useless and addictive carb. Plants generally have mostly fiber and 'other compounds', then carb value tends to equal or only barely supercede the amount of proteins or fatty acids in the plant. That's because that's what the plant needs to stay vital in its environment and exist for more things than to placate human drug urges. Mass-agriculture of grass-grain is drug madness.
Humans are even closer to animals (than to plants) in the proportions of things they have in them. Raw animals, though often too difficult or dangerous (due to microbes) for humans to consume, give you the ultimate nutritional balance since all the constituents of such beasts quite accurately mirrors the very ones you have and need in your own body, and your body incorporates them quickly and easily. Bugs are excellent for you, and it's only empty cultural biases (and many of them are very young) which forbid us to eat them. But your body needs to 'work' too - and that's where plants come in. Plants (raw) also have endless healing compounds that stimulate cellular activity on every level to function at a higher level. Raw plants give you enzymes. They are necessary for optimum human digestion. But plants are not 'BREAD' . Bread, esp wheatbread, is no longer a plant. Bread was never a staple in the ancient world anyway, just a filler, and existed mainly because it could be STORED, controlled, and ongoingly reared by a servile population class. I have absolutely no regard for it (though a bit in an experiential sense) as it's just a neutral cultural icon which happened to be the one in which later Hebrew culture and divine revelation flourished. (I've much more sentiment for oats than to rice, barley, wheat, spelt, rye, maize, and, as it turns out, oats are the healthiest and safest grass grain to consume. Hail to the shorts and the BANNOCKS!! Guid Scots take a'!) But the patriarchs already had access to many other plants and animals for their more balanced nutrition. Hebrew diet was likely somewhat healthier than the Egyptian or the urban aspects of Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Persian cultures.
The mediterranean diet is upper-middle tiered in my ratings of what is healthy. it's healthy, but mainly in the mountains or along the sea (traditionally), not in the flat fields. Overall, that diet is not as healthy as japanese, south asian, pacific islander, caribbean, californian (traditional), alaskan, andean, himalayan, canadian (traditional), and siberian diets. THOSE are the world's most healthy diets and not all of them have existed to this day in their early healthier forms (Canada, Siberia). The Scandinavian diet was also very healthy in its earlier, pre-agricultural form, as was the diet of most of what is today Europe and Eurasia.
The Middle East, mainland China, most of agro-Africa (don't count herders who mainly subsist off of herds or herd blood), and Meso-America are the Death Bowls (Bowels) of the Planet. Central Asia is comparable to the Plains and the AFrican herders - it's a diet healthier than in the DEath Bowl, but not as healthy as the Island Eaters and Coastland Dwellers.
Seaweed. Eat it! It's superior in every way to any grain you could spit at me. Humans will come to rely on it to avoid starvation in the near future, as they have done so in the past.
Soy. Also way superior to grass grains.
leafy plant Seeds, Nuts and nutty fruits - much more nutritional benefit than grass grain seeds.
I already listed the healthy carbs in my blog: healthy plant sources of carbohydrates are NOT GRASS GRAINS. There ARE 'grains' which are not grasses (quinoa, amaranth (both a type of pigweed), buckwheat, flax, wild rice), and it's very difficult to consume such things w/o getting an even ratio of carb, fat and protein. And that's the thing you want. YOu don't want carbs slipping much over 30% of your total caloric intake. To make up the difference, you will be forced to eat more fat, protein, and FIBRE (which contributes to a feeling of being full, and helps maintain a healthy intestinal tract and healthy bacteria there).
Ach another saturated fat hater, you. Coconuts and palm nuts have saturated fat. Some other nuts have portions of it. Pig bones have monounsaturated fat inside them. Pig intestines and organs also have more unsaturated fat. Nut oils (olive oil one) are great for you - should be eaten raw. Borage, flax, and evening primrose oils are lovely omega3/6/9 polyunsaturates - eat the oils cold. Some nut oils, and esp Cottonseed oil, corn oil, canola oil, soybean oil ALL are unstable in your pan under high heat and turn to lipid peroxides when heated too long - lipid peroxides damage your LDLs and blood constitution, making you vulnerable to damaged and therefore sticking LDL cholesterol. Better to heat lard or butter in your pan, or sesame or olive oil. Blood sugar (triglycerides being the best reflection of it) plays the strongest role in damaging your cholesterol - a role which cholesterol itself doesn't even play. Saturated fats do not have any particular benefit to cholesterol ratios or stability, but they are simply present in your body and in animals in a balanced way. In fact, animals (when healthy) are just like healthy people - they have a pretty equal amount of saturated and unsaturated fat already in them. That's why it's so bloody safe to eat healthy meat - because it already has the right balance of every nutritional property you could possibly seek for - the very balance which is already present IN YOUR OWN MEAT, in your own self. It's pure balderdash that saturated fat is 'bad' for you. The meat and dairy industry has many enemies... Just balance it out with the other fats - that's all i'm saying and that's all i said in my blog. If butter is your sole source of fat, you should diversify. Even then, saturated fats are not near as harmful to people who eat a lower carb diet which includes raw vegg matter. Why? They are burned up, gone, used. Don't you get it? Fat is ENERGY for people who consume it in the context of a lower carb diet. It is not stored unless insulin levels are high, and insulin cannot will not be high when your blood sugar is stable. Your blood sugar will be stable when you eat a lower ratio of carbs which are balanced out by everything else. That's why you will also not have highs and lows during the day if eating a balanced diet. Just make sure that the REAL FOODS in that diet are eaten in the most raw and unprocessed form as possible w/o compromising their safety or digestability; and make sure that all those foods are eaten in as many different combinations with each other, and that the overall variety of food types is as broad as you can make it (or gather it). Look at my breakfast again. That's the kind of Vim i'm talking about.
Nuff for now. more coherent later maybe. didn't proofread any of this. -Nathan
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March 27, 2006
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The Benefits of Saturated Fats
Categories
Health through Nutrition
Practical Health
Further to and all those brainwashed fat phobics here is more data on the importance of saturated fats and the wisdom of traditional diets.
For example healthy lungs require saturated fats to function properly avoiding "the very important phospholipid class called lung surfactant is a special phospholipid with 100 percent saturated fatty acids. It is called dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine and there are two saturated palmitic acid molecules attached to it. When people consume a lot of partially hydrogenated fats and oils, the trans fatty acids are put into the phospholipids where the body normally wants to have saturated fatty acids and the lungs may not work effectively. Some research has suggested that trans fatty acids are causing asthma in children.
Recent research shows that having enough saturated fat prevents stroke; and to protect our kidneys from disease, research shows we need certain kinds of saturated fatty acids, which are found only in the natural fats such as animal fats and coconut and palm kernel oils."
The following extracts/article should help destroy the myths surrounding Saturated fats and allow many to regain their health through the use of of this healthy fat such as organic grass fed butter....
The Benefits of Saturated Fats
The much-maligned saturated fatswhich Americans are trying to avoidare not the cause of our modern diseases. In fact, they play many important roles in the body chemistry:
* Saturated fatty acids constitute at least 50% of the cell membranes. They are what gives our cells necessary stiffness and integrity.
* They play a vital role in the health of our bones. For calcium to be effectively incorporated into the skeletal structure, at least 50% of the dietary fats should be saturated. (38)
* They lower Lp(a), a substance in the blood that indicates proneness to heart disease. (39) They protect the liver from alcohol and other toxins, such as Tylenol. (40)
* They enhance the immune system. (41)
* They are needed for the proper utilization of essential fatty acids.
* Elongated omega-3 fatty acids are better retained in the tissues when the diet is rich in saturated fats. (42)
* Saturated 18-carbon stearic acid and 16-carbon palmitic acid are the preferred foods for the heart, which is why the fat around the heart muscle is highly saturated. (43) The heart draws on this reserve of fat in times of stress.
* Short- and medium-chain saturated fatty acids have important antimicrobial properties. They protect us against harmful microorganisms in the digestive tract.
The scientific evidence, honestly evaluated, does not support the assertion that "artery-clogging" saturated fats cause heart disease. (44) Actually, evaluation of the fat in artery clogs reveals that only about 26% is saturated. The rest is unsaturated, of which more than half is polyunsaturated. (45)
(38) Watkins, B A, et al, "Importance of Vitamin E in Bone Formation and in Chrondrocyte Function" Purdue University, Lafayette, IN, AOCS Proceedings, 1996; Watkins, B A, and M F Seifert, "Food Lipids and Bone Health," Food Lipids and Health, R E McDonald and D B Min, eds, p 101, Marcel Dekker, Inc, New York, NY, 1996
(39) Dahlen, G H, et al, J Intern Med, Nov 1998, 244(5):417-24; Khosla, P, and K C Hayes, J Am Coll Nutr, 1996, 15:325-339; Clevidence, B A, et al, Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol, 1997, 17:1657-1661
(40) Nanji, A A, et al, Gastroenterology, Aug 1995, 109(2):547-54; Cha, Y S, and D S Sachan, J Am Coll Nutr, Aug 1994, 13(4):338-43; Hargrove, H L, et al, FASEB Journal, Meeting Abstracts, Mar 1999, #204.1, p A222.
(41) Kabara, J J, The Pharmacological Effects of Lipids, The American Oil Chemists Society, Champaign, IL, 1978, 1-14; Cohen, L A, et al, J Natl Cancer Inst, 1986, 77:43
(42) Garg, M L, et al, FASEB Journal, 1988, 2:4:A852; Oliart Ros, R M, et al, "Meeting Abstracts," AOCS Proceedings, May 1998, 7, Chicago, IL
(43) Lawson, L D and F Kummerow, Lipids, 1979, 14:501-503; Garg, M L, Lipids, Apr 1989, 24(4):334-9
(44) Ravnskov, U, J Clin Epidemiol, Jun 1998, 51:(6):443-460. See also: The Cholesterol Myths
(45) Felton, C V, et al, Lancet, 1994, 344:1195
see more of above at http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2006/03/27/the_benefits_of_saturated_fats.htm
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