Month: August 2013

Germany

Andere Länder, andere Sitten.

–German Proverb

So today I was in Germany for a while. I had a ten hour layover in Frankfurt and I took off into the city on the regional trains to spend three hours hiking about Worms. Running about it, actually.

If it’s getting hard to keep track of where I am, I’m sorry. A friend gave me this trip as a gift, to go see family posted abroad for work. I haven’t seen them in years, so that’s the background to this little story.

I got off the plane after a miserable flight (note: Lufthansa seems to have the smallest seats of any airline ever, and that is saying a lot. I’ve flown all over Asia 145 pounds heavier than I am now and I was never so cramped as I was on this trup.) I wanted some food when I got off, and the first thing I found was a little restaurant in the airport advertising breakfast. More than half the breakfast choices were very heavy in fat and protein with only some token carbohydrates to go with them.

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And The Winner Is…

Grass fed beef.

Yup, sorry, but it is.

Back home in Asia, I can order grass-fed beef and lamb directly, in bulk, bypassing the middle man. That enables me to afford it. Just. Sometimes I have to compromise and get some grass-fed and some grain-fed. It’s just cost.

But since I’ve been back in America I have not been able to eat one bite of grass-fed meat in about six weeks. I’ve also not been able to find any grass-fed butter. I’m sure I could if I was in one place for long enough, but in six weeks I’ve been to ten different states. So I’ve had to subsist on “organic” butter, which though it is from cows not fed weird things, it is from cows fed grain.

Back when I first started doing this, I wondered aloud how important the grass-fed, grain-fed argument really was. There seems to be evidence to suggest grass-fed is the superior nutrition, but the reality is that it is more expensive. It’s out of the reach of many people and eating even grain-fed meat is still better than eating a lot of carbage and calling it healthy.

Continue reading And The Winner Is…

America

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.

― François de La Rochefoucauld

I haven’t been able to post as much due to being on the road in America for weeks. Either I have no internet, ala the World’s Worst Hotel, or I’m just not in one place more than a night or two and am trying to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in years and won’t see again for more years.

Oh, and I’m eating.

Everything.

In sight.

You see, Americans have this habit of eating constantly. Since I hopped off the Blood Sugar Express myself, I don’t need to eat like that. In fact, I actually prefer not eating a lot of the time.

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Inflammatory

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

–Thomas Sowell

A little insanity is good early in the morning. It keeps you young. It revives your zest for life. When I was staying with Brother 4 a few weeks ago, their 1-year-old provided that for me in the form of various games such as “Crazy Head.”

Now that I’m away from their place, I am forced to search for insanity in the news. Thankfully, it’s not hard to find. I was assaulted by an insane article a little bit ago in Time. The gist of the article is a common one:

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Cholesterol Mythology

Not really, and actually my cholesterol was 190 when I had the heart attack. 190, which isn’t that high.

–Mike Ditka

Guess who else’s cholesterol was well within the Mythical Safe Range when he had his first heart attack? Dwight Eisenhower, who was the ideal weight for his height and was very fit when his first heart attack hit at age 64. His cholesterol was 165.

So of course he was put on the now ubiquitous low-fat diet, which included lots of healthy whole grains like oatmeal and lots of margarine, almost no meat, and no fats but margarine and corn oil. What was the result of this amazingly healthy diet? Well, strangely he started gaining weight for the first time in his life. So much so that he kept cutting his food portions down till he was nearly starving: to no avail. Even more oddly, his cholesterol just kept going up and up. From 165 to 259. Just a couple days after Eisenhower got that highest reading, Ancel Keys got his face on the cover of Time for promoting the new “lipid hypothesis,” which blamed fat for everything and advocated, for the first time, a low-fat diet as the cure for all America’s heart disease problems.

Which, as we all know, has clearly been an incredible success, since Americans have no heart disease anymore.
Continue reading Cholesterol Mythology