[Wayner]

Here is the truth. It really doesn't matter what you eat, as long as it's something God made. Man made foods kill. Zanthium Gum isn't a food.

It's also in our DNA. Bad DNA = early grave. Sit on your ass all the time = early grave. Smoke, drink like a bastard, eat like there is no tomorrow, and sit on your ass some more = early grave.

Case in point: both of my grandparents ate bacon, eggs fried in bacon grease, toast drenched in butter, every day and lived into their 90s.

Bacon = good
eggs = good
butter = good

margarine =  death food
fruit juice = death food
snack foods = death food

Wayner.

[Diamond Dog]

Data? Trends? Analysis? 

D.D.

[rodge827]

Tyson,
Thanks for this awesome post. Most of what you write here I am aware of. The bit about cholesterol and how it is broken down in the body was most informative.

One issue that could also fit in this discussion is the influance that drug companies have on how medicine is practiced in the US. Most doctors are symptom treaters and not address the cause of said sympton.
Yeah sure they will hand you a pamphlet about what you may need to change, but that usually comes along with a nice fat prescription. Sometimes, if not most, the drug will take about as long as a change in life habits to take affect. Usually I get the line "take this and come see me in six months and we will evaluate your progress", yeah right!
 
Case in point:
 
Our medical insurance changed and my old Doc was no longer in the plan. My new Doc came as a recommendation from my wife's dentist boss. Hey a Doc - Doc recommendation, so this guy must be good right? Wrong!
I had gained about 20lbs, was feeling slightly lethargic, and my feet were swelling a little. Most of this happened due to a "I don't give a s#*t" attitude towards my diet, which I and he was keenly aware of. Being 45 at the time, he ran a battery of tests and I went to see him about a month later. Well all the tests came back perfect except my cholesterol was a little high at 214. So he prescribed me an antidepressant   What the...? Apparently said antidepresant will cure my lethargy and I will loose some weight also  .
Not so fast pusher  !
Script went into the shredder, changed back to low carb good protien diet, and dropped 22lbs.
Went back 6 months later, was lambasted by his enormous nurse for not taking the drug (very few men could out armwrestle this gal), and all tests came back normal!
Well whaddya know bout' dat !
So what would have made me better the drug? or the diet change?
Hmmm...maybe if he pushes enough of that crap, he and his wife can go to Hawaii paid for by (insert drug company here).
I kinda lit into this guy about his "fast to script" method of medicine and promptly FIRED him right in his office!
Got a new Doc and all is well...this guy will spend some time with you and wants his patients to become proactive in their health.

Moral of the story:
There is a huge system in play that we are finding out doesn't work. From archaic food subsidies, to a backwards nutrition pyramid, to medical system that needs to wake up and begin to go about it's business in a different way.
The data is there and the results are in. We are eating ourselves to death and we all need to take this seriously.

Chris   


 
   

[ctviggen]

A total "cholesterol" (really a misnomer) of 214 is "high" only because the statin manufacturers want you to believe it's "high".  Also, these tests have quite a bit of variation in them and judging by a single test is stupid. 

While I think the "food pyramid" (or whatever they're calling it these days; food plate?) is scientifically unsound, you can't really look at a few individuals and make any judgments, especially if you don't take genetics into account.  For instance, my grandfather lived to be near 90 yet smoked (unfiltered cigarettes) for 30 (or 40?) years and was an alcoholic for 20 years and ate a terrible diet by any standard.  But one wouldn't want to base what to eat/not to eat on his life. 

As an example of the poor scientific analysis given by the USDA, read the following:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/02/04/the-new-usda-dietary-guideline/

[rodge827]

A total "cholesterol" (really a misnomer) of 214 is "high" only because the statin manufacturers want you to believe it's "high".  Also, these tests have quite a bit of variation in them and judging by a single test is stupid. 

Agreed!
 
Isn't it amasing how the "standard" for cholesterol levels has been lowering ever since the drug companies have been advertising on TV?

Ya know, those commercials do cost a lot!

I can't wait till my granddaughter begins to ask questions about the erectile dysfunction epidemic that affects most adult men .

Sorry a little off topic, but I couldn't resist.

Chris

[Cheerwino]

Thanks for posting, Tyson! I highly recommend "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes to anyone interested in diet who hasn't read it. It's quite a tome, being targeted to doctors and health professionals. He has a newer one called Why We Get Fat that's more consumer oriented (which I haven't read but intend to).

The documentaries y'all mentioned, King Corn and Food, Inc., both do a good job showing how government subsidies only drive us to eat foods that are bad for us (refined wheat, corn, soybeans, vegetable oils, sugars, Soylent Green...). I enjoyed the humorous documentary Fat Head as a response to Spurlock's anti-business Supersize Me.

[WGH]

A year ago I realized that my dietary beliefs were completely flawed.  I changed over to a very low/ no carb diet.  I eat almost exclusively meat now, with small amounts of eggs/dairy type products occasionally. 

Mamba you are right, your diet may not be for everyone.

My woodworking business is real close to my residence so every day at noon I lock the door and ride my bike home for lunch. During my lunch hour I check the News at Noon to see what is happening in the world and the afternoon's weather (it's monsoon season).

The TV ads at that time of day are informative too, there are a lot of personal injury lawyers as you would expect but what was completely unexpected are ads to cure Gout, a disease popularized by King Henry VIII in the 1500's. Well it's back, even NPR did a segment on gout - From Kings To The Average Joe: Gout Makes A Comeback.

"...federal health surveys to compare rates of gout in 1988-1994 to 2007-2008 and found the disease had increased 44 percent over those two decades."

Strange times indeed.

[TheChairGuy]

Good going, Tyson! You and I have dialoged offline a lot on this, nice for you to bring further to the masses here at AC.

The USDA details were illuminating - but two factors to be considered that are not stated are today's increasingly sedentary lifestyle (from industrial to service/desk jobs in front of computers to long commutes in cars from faraway suburban communities, etc) and the use of processed foods (per Wayners post) for calories. In particular, process vegetables in place of farm fresh...with those raw as healthiest of all.

Do all check out www.rawfor30days.com and www.LetMeBeFrank.com for more prospective on this.

You are and become what you eat, and in general we eat a fair amount of shit. We all have genetically predetermined levels of tolerance for eating the shit peddled by most large food processors in stores today - but we all succumb to it at our own level.

I have a VERY intolerant system and have found over the years avoidance of certain foods had tremendous positive (and immediate) results for me...no milk or eggs, no corn of any kind, extremely infrequent red meat helpings (maybe 10x a year?). Get in tune with your body...the fine tuning steps are apt to be a bit different from one another.

At least 1 fresh, green organic salad a day is eaten - avoiding packaged products as much as possible - and I move around a lot and as much as possible.

[genjamon]

Tax sugar because it's bad for the body - and do what with it?

Tax gasoline because the CO2 emissions are bad for the environment - and do what with it?

Tax the number of children we have because of the Earth's limited resources - and do what with it?

When will we realize that education makes much more sense than taxes?

Why can't we just educate people instead of taxing them? Good grief 

You brought up some very good points until you brought up taxes. I don't want that kind of "Nanny State". There is nothing illegal about someone that eats too much high-fructose corn syrup. If they want to kill themselves prematurely, that's their decision. That's the same decision that's made by the person who drinks too much or sits in front of their television for 18 hours a day. Should we tax people for not exercising? Maybe we should have everyone in the country hook-up to a national grid for 20 minutes three times a week to make sure they're doing their required cardio exercise. Suddenly sounds silly - doesn't it?

Do WHAT with it?  How about fund education...?  As someone who works in a public university, the government has been slashing funds for public education for decades, leaving my particular university with over $330 million in deferred maintenance issues with our buildings, among other significant deficiencies in our academic programs that reduce our effectiveness...  K-12 is just as bad off or worse...

And the irony is that because of lack of funding from the State, the only option open to us as a university if we want to offer quality programs is to seek private funding.  And who built our entire grain science research and education complex at my university?  You got it, a partnership of Monsanto, ADM, and Cargill.  Guess what that does to the kinds of research questions our grain science and agronomy students are asking and researching... 

How do you think high fructose corn syrup was invented in the first place?  You got it, a research lab in the late 70's and early 80's funded by those same companies so that they could create a vast new market for the major grain commodities, especially corn, bumping their profits on their seed technologies and chemical inputs to agriculture, as well as creating vast new food processing business models.  And where was the research on health impacts of these new products at the time?

[Tyson]

Good going, Tyson! You and I have dialoged offline a lot on this, nice for you to bring further to the masses here at AC.

The USDA details were illuminating - but two factors to be considered that are not stated are today's increasingly sedentary lifestyle (from industrial to service/desk jobs in front of computers to long commutes in cars from faraway suburban communities, etc) and the use of processed foods (per Wayners post) for calories. In particular, process vegetables in place of farm fresh...with those raw as healthiest of all.

Do all check out www.rawfor30days.com and www.LetMeBeFrank.com for more prospective on this.

You are and become what you eat, and in general we eat a fair amount of shit. We all have genetically predetermined levels of tolerance for eating the shit peddled by most large food processors in stores today - but we all succumb to it at our own level.

I have a VERY intolerant system and have found over the years avoidance of certain foods had tremendous positive (and immediate) results for me...no milk or eggs, no corn of any kind, extremely infrequent red meat helpings (maybe 10x a year?). Get in tune with your body...the fine tuning steps are apt to be a bit different from one another.

At least 1 fresh, green organic salad a day is eaten - avoiding packaged products as much as possible - and I move around a lot and as much as possible.

There's a place across the street from me that makes awesome salads and gazpacho, I eat there frequently. 

I kinda got off topic from my original post - mainly I just wanted to illustrate with the data that cholesterol and saturated fat cannot be the drivers of heart disease or diabetes, since it's consumption was in sharp decline during the same time period that those disease were sharply growing.  So there must be another cause.  Looking at the things that were trending upwards, the most likely culprit seems like sugar, wheat (processed foods), and vegetable oils (inflammatory to humans). 

Personally, I almost never eat processed garbage, because giving up wheat and sugar eliminates almost all the "crap food" in one fell swoop.  Meat, fish, eggs, and veggies make up almost all of my diet.  I find veggies are a lot more palatable nowadays, since I cook them in butter

[Wayner]

We need to get government out of all businesses. Don't matter if it's farming, education or making 2 wheel carts. Government is bad at doing everything. Propping up phony industries (like ethanol) and having everything subsidized is what has broken the bank.

And our wonderful government propped universities are the same folks that made all this hybrid and genetically modified foods. That is the crap that is killing or will kill us all. Cows don't like eating genetically modified corn, the beef tastes like crap, so do chickens and pork. Young people don't have a clue what a good steak or hamburger tastes like.

In the old days, chickens where free to roam. Now, they are fattened up in an 18" square cage, yum, yellow fat. When I was young and butchered chickens, there was hardly any fat.

So if this is what universities have brought us, then it's time to shut them all down.

Wayner

[jtwrace]

We need to get government out of all businesses. Don't matter if it's farming, education or making 2 wheel carts. Government is bad at doing everything. Propping up phony industries (like ethanol) and having everything subsidized is what has broken the bank.

YES!!!!

[Wayner]

And another thing, my poor niece has developed an allergy to gluten. Try and find some food that doesn't have gluten in it. It pretty much leaves you with water.

Why do so many people have acid reflux disease?
Why are so many people allergic to many different kinds of foods?

I basically grew up on a farm. Lived in town, but did lots of work for my uncle and also helped out at my best friends farm. Bailing hay, straw, milking cows, pickin' eggs (and rocks), the whole bit. Those were the days when food was awesome. It was natural. You start screwing around with mother nature, like all of our universities have done, and you've contaminated the food chain.

Wayner

[Tyson]

Wayner, I think you are on to something - food has become less nutritious.  One trend that is noted from a previous post in this thread is that caloric consumption has increased.  One theory I've heard is that it's the sugar consumption that actually causes us to be more hungry and thus eat more.  That's plausible, IMO. 

But, another theory I've heard is that the level of nutrients in our food has taken a nose dive, but our bodies NEED those nutrients, so it ramps up our hunger mechanisms until we consume enough to get those nutrients. 

Either way, the best thing to do is avoid sugar, wheat, and processed foods (including GMO foods).  My grandparents were single family farmers their entire lives, I spent a lot of time there and you are right about the quality of the food being markedly higher than now.

[dwk]

And our wonderful government propped universities are the same folks that made all this hybrid and genetically modified foods.

Oh, please. Government involvement in agriculture certainly is not something I'm going to defend, but if you think "the free market" would lead us to a different place then you don't have your head screwed on straight. The entire problem is that EVERYBODY involved in agriculture considers commerce more important than nutrition.  Gov't has aided and abetted the process, but it's the agri-biz entities that are driving it. The drive towards GMO etc is a pure profit motive - more yield per acre to drive down source input costs and enable more profit in the processing, and even better if it's PATENTED so that they can lock everyone into a captive supply, nutritional effects be damned.  Your implication that this dynamic would change without gov't involvement is laughable.
 To be clear, I agree that gov't should get out of interference with agriculture. But that doesn't mean I expect anything magical to happen to cause things to get better.  If we're lucky it'll make natural pasture-raised livestock more price-competitive with grain-fed, but that may also be a pipe dream.

And another thing, my poor niece has developed an allergy to gluten. Try and find some food that doesn't have gluten in it. It pretty much leaves you with water.

Actually, going gluten-free is a fairly easy part of eating better. There are lots of alternate flours available, and many restaurants are offering gluten-free menu choices.  The REALLY hard part is avoiding PUFA vegetable oils.  Just try to find a commercially prepared meal out there without soybean/canola/safflower etc oil in it.  The propaganda about "artery clogging saturated fat" has so thoroughly permeated the food supply that avoiding "vegetable oil" effectively means you have to cook everything you eat yourself.

[Wayner]

I guess a gluten free diet is easy when you don't have the problem.

Farmers today don't milk the cows, they milk the government (that would be us tax payers) and they know every program to milk. Example, if a cow were to have died during our recent heat wave, the farmer would get 75% reimbursement of the animals worth.

At every conerstone where government has made itself involved, things have gone horrible wrong. I do believe that if government would not have meddled into argiculture, food would be much different. If a free market makes thing bad, then at least we can blame ourselves. It's real funny what the power of choice does to markets.

Wayner 

[genjamon]

We need to get government out of all businesses. Don't matter if it's farming, education or making 2 wheel carts. Government is bad at doing everything. Propping up phony industries (like ethanol) and having everything subsidized is what has broken the bank.

And our wonderful government propped universities are the same folks that made all this hybrid and genetically modified foods. That is the crap that is killing or will kill us all. Cows don't like eating genetically modified corn, the beef tastes like crap, so do chickens and pork. Young people don't have a clue what a good steak or hamburger tastes like.

In the old days, chickens where free to roam. Now, they are fattened up in an 18" square cage, yum, yellow fat. When I was young and butchered chickens, there was hardly any fat.

So if this is what universities have brought us, then it's time to shut them all down.

Wayner

It's pretty amazing that you seem not to have absorbed the main point of my post.  It has been government getting OUT of higher education at my university that has led to greater perversion of the academic process and the research and education outcomes that result.  It means that university academic programs have to prostitute themselves to industry to sustain their existence, not to ask questions about the public good.

[Tyson]

Could people please stop having political discussions in my Nutrition thread?

[geezer]

I guess a gluten free diet is easy when you don't have the problem.

Wayner 

I am on a gluten-free diet, and it IS easy. Essentially, I only have to stay away from wheat, rye, and barley (as well a few little-known grains such as spelt, e.g.) That leaves all meats, poultry, fish, vegetables and fruits, as well as other grains.

Of course, you need to stay away from most processed, packaged foods, because, among the dozens of types of junk they put into them, they often also find it convenient to include wheat-based substances.

In any case, as you well know, there are other reasons to stay away from processed food anyway. Wasn't it you who said (to paraphrase) eat food in the condition in which God made it?

[Tyson]

geezer, it's only easy if you are committed to making most of your food from scratch.  The moment you start to buy pre-prepared anything you are screwed.  Same with most restaurants.  Restaurants also like to load up the veggie oils and the sugar, too.