Tag: nutrition

Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 1

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

–Konrad Lorenz

It’s science today, folks. If you want to run screaming for the door, now’s the time.

I noticed two headlines in the news today. One illustrates total bias in the way something is reported; the other shows proper scientific reporting of a finding that may generate a hypothesis worth looking at. The first is designed to frighten you, the second is designed to inform you.

Continue reading Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 1

ຕີເນດ

One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink.

– Marco Polo

I’m going to talk for a little bit about the glories of the coconut. Feel free to turn away at this point.

I never grew up eating them. East Tennessee is remarkably free of coconut trees. I saw some in China when I moved there, but I didn’t know much about them, didn’t know how to open them, and didn’t really bother looking into it.

Then in the course of studying up on my high fat, moderate protein diet, I kept running across coconuts and coconut oils. Lots of people swear by it for energy, for skin care, as a cancer cure, as an HIV cure, for curing the plague, for regrowing limbs, etc. Some of the claims were so far fetched that I didn’t pay much attention to this little fruit.

But I did note in my reading that some of the people groups whose traditional diets involved very high levels of saturated fat–and yet who did not have heart disease, obesity, diabetes, or cancer–got their saturated fat from a daily diet of coconuts rather than seals or cattle. The Tokelauan diet in particular was over 50% fat, most of it saturated. If you look at the very end of the study I linked to, you see that when the Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand their overall and saturated fat intakes sharply declined: and then they started developing arteriosclerosis.

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The China Study

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.

–Charles de Gaulle

And that’s about the quality of the information we can glean from The China Study.

The China Study is a book by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell that purportedly proves without a doubt that the eating of animal foods causes all the chronic diseases of civilization, like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. It’s supposedly based on the results of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project which was, interestingly enough, directed by T. Colin Campbell and involved China, Cornell, and Oxford. As you can probably guess, the study followed Chinese people in rural areas of China and recorded what they say they ate, when they got sick, and how they died.

And The China Study is pretty much the “inspired by actual events,” made-for-TV movie version of the China-Cornell-Oxford project.

Now if you haven’t heard of this book, you obviously don’t have any vegan friends because this is their favorite thing in the world besides tofu. This proves, proves mind you, that if you get cancer it is entirely your own fault for insisting on eating chicken.

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A Mess of Greens

I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

–Doug Copeland

I’m going to say some things about vegetables now. It might hurt their feelings, but I’m not going to say it to their faces. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t repeat it to your asparagus, either. Hang on, here we go:

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Criminal Negligence

That’s not a lie. It’s a terminological inexactitude.

–Alexander Haig

If we hadn’t all been fed a bunch of never-proved hypotheses about fat, calories and exercise as incontrovertible fact; by people who thought we were too stupid to be healthy and wanted to stick their big noses in and tell everyone else what to do, we would never have ended up with something like this:

She seems like a sweet lady, and I’m sure she thinks she’s helping people. But this isn’t useful, it could be dangerous–especially for large people–and she didn’t get thin doing it. She was already thin and is active because she’s thin. She’s not thin because she’s active.

Dare I say it? If God had meant us to prance like horses, He would have given us four legs. We’re not meant to eat like horses, either. Put down that grass drink and go grill up a steak.

 

Plato says he’s hungry

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The Best Laid Plans

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

Especially if dragons make good eating. I’ll have to check on that.

I’ve gotten a few requests to be more specific about what I eat and especially to discuss the proportions and “how to” of it all.

Continue reading The Best Laid Plans

Bad News With Benefits

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

–Lao Tzu

Have you been waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well don’t worry: it won’t. This bad news is some of the easiest bad news you’ll ever get.

Eating this way–avoiding grains, sugars, vegetables oils, and excessive amounts of fruit, while embracing real animal fat, meat, and other fresh, real foods–has been one of the easiest things I’ve ever done.

It was certainly easier than spending half my life kneading my “healthy” whole wheat bread dough.

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It Ain’t

‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’ 

–Lewis Carroll

When I first read Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes, and even more so when I delved into his longer book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, I felt a kind of mental relief, as if someone had removed a splinter from my brain.

Continue reading It Ain’t