If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us.
We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone around him turns 180 degrees.
Bah. Eat what you want in moderation and unless you have a food allergy or diabetes or etc., you will do very well and have zero problems. I figure every kind of food that homo sapiens sapiens (and I’m not to sure about the sapient part) have eaten has been pilloried at some point in history. We should all be dead from Kate’s famine by now :):)
now I’m confused.
I thought we were all high functioning cockroaches the way the ‘system’ treats the unwashed ill informed masses . . . . .
all I know for sure is there are a LOT more boomp bap bap boomp lard asses out there.
otoh adversity does have certain advantages. for the 1st 4 yrs of my interesting life, I lived in an unheated uninsulated house with the only heat coming from a wood burning stove in the kitchen. thus my metabolism was wired to burn off the calories in body heat. I still do that. I’m a pig that eats all day cleaning out the chips, fries, leftovers, ice cream, steak, stuffed chicken, salads, snacks, etc et friggin cetera . . . . . regularly. and do it again the next day.
but I also bicycle everywhere.
But I just heard that the airline seats have now constrcted to a width of 16.5 inches.
I’m as thin as a starved rail and I barely make that!
I’ve been low carb, high protein and havent cared about fat since February. Down 30 pounds and never felt better. Fryin’ my eggs in butter this morning.
You can take this article and replace fat with carbon and understand how we got to this AGW mess.
OTOH blaming this all on sugar seems to be a bit too much. What also started happening in the 80’s? Less physical labour? Bit more unemployment? Even with the big fitness hype and craze there’s also been an increase of lack of physical activity. Blaming obesity on just high sugar intake seems to be a bit too much. I remember reading someone talking about “Big Sugar” a year or so ago. Giving it the same sense of the tobacco and oil industries.
It’s a combination of everything you said.
Over consumption of over refined carbohydrates(yes, sugar) combined with a sedentary lifestyle/work environment is the problem.
Carbs in the form of whole grains were never a problem when we were in a manual labour work environment. I have a cookbook that is a reprint that originated on the east coast of Canada. The breakfast cereals and carbs in there would make a “paleo” persons head explode, but people needed that food after working for a few hours in the fields and barns before breakfast. Never mind what went on in the labour heavy manufacturing sector.
Now, the carbs and sugar are over refined and over consumed for the amount of energy we use, which is a one-two punch to your gut size and health. Have a bagel for brekkie then sit at a desk. Have half a 24 of Bud while watching the NFL on your butt all Sunday afternoon. The “experts” hammer “eat fresh fruit” at us over and over again, which on the surface is a good message, but then I remember my dad having a pound of fruit every morning like millions of others, but never really losing weight after working his office job. Fresh fruit is pure carbohydrate, so no freaking wonder.
The fluctuating message coming from the nutritionists and nanny-statists doesn’t help. In the 70’s and 80’s, fat in all it’s forms was the devil. Now, it’s actually been realized that certain dietary fats have to be consumed for our bodies to function properly.
It never seems to end. Mind you, I’m currently reading a strength training book that was published back in the 70’s, and the carbs/fats/protein/refined foods dynamic was known to some back then. Bob Hoffman that ran York Barbell was talking about it in the 40’s. So where is the actual problem?
I was just thinkin you are correct. fat, sugar, tea, coffee, bacon, roast beef, potatoes carrots, butter, fat salt pork, cod fish, white bread and many other things were the staples of my parents and grand parents. they all lived to or past 88. my mother is still healthy at 96.
Eat what you want and without nutcases like Micheal Jacobsen,Marion Nestly,Ralph Nader and the rest of the wheatgerm inhaling health freaks and certianly without Micheele Obama’s consent
I agree 100%. My wife and I are now retired from farming and in our seventies. Our age does present a physical exercise challenge, but have reduced our food consumption, walk and bike when we can, and both have hobbies that add moving around during the day and evening.
Old white guy, exactly. We are about to celebrate my wife’s mother’s 100th birthday and she ate everything on your list. So do we and have almost no prepared meals. Almost every meal is homemade.
Good comments.
It is curious how the generations that came before us were able to eat meals laced with dietary fat c/w with a desert laden with sugar at the end of it and yet still reach a great age.
One of the reasons nutritionists stick with the dietary fat admonition is because it has become tied up with the green agenda. We’ve all heard how we could save the planet if we just quit eating meat.
One of my maxims in life is to examine the “type” of person most closely associated with a particular movement. If you have ever seen the Penn & Teller program “Bullshit” … they regularly put this principle on hilarious display. Not only was this true for their programs on “The Environment” and “Global Warming” … but one of the most hilarious was their show about the “Raw Food Movement” (very big in LA). The absolute brain dead Neo-hippie creatures who were the movements primary spokespeople were ROTFL hilarious. Many of these same mental midgets spoke of the horrors of sugar. And as is so predictable, they spoke of how sugar was a vile product of “colonialism” refined by the blood of Caribbean slavery. Yes, if you would only STOP baking brownies … you would SAVE brown people throughout the West Indies. I amuse myself.
Longish article to read but well worth the time. I thought this was insightful and it applies to pretty much all branches of science, including climate change (couldn’t resist).
“This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.”
As for weight loss and healthy lifestyle, I guess I follow the advice I read about exercise “the best exercise is the one you enjoy doing because you’ll stick with it”. Personally, I tried vegetarianism when I worked at a health food store as a teenager. I followed all the guidelines about protein alternatives and vitamin B but I never felt healthy or energetic. I gave up after 6 months or so. A high protein diet, otoh, had the opposite effect. I had high energy and staying thin is easy. Lucky for me I have hunters in the family so the freezer always has lots of deer and moose meat. There’s a theory that genetic differences based on where your ancestors came from might play a factor in which diets are more suitable but research is pretty thin, at best.
Speaking of “settled” science,
Japanese satellites images show that the nations that emit the most co2 are NOT us but the developing nations we give money to as a repentance for our alleged sin of emitting too much co2.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/11/co2-emitted-by-the-poor-nations-and-absorbed-by-the-rich-oh-the-irony-and-this-truth-must-not-be-spoken/
This was the gift of Climategate.
Behaviour so far from science, that only loons would defend it.
Yet talking heads,claiming to speak for scientists, actually defended the IPCC team or excused such as scientist behaving normally.
What do we know?
It turned out they were right.
We have seen endless health idiocy.
The longer we live, the longer the list of fads,absolute certain, certainly wrong pronouncements,government advice.
Better to be thought a fool,than open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Worked until “public education”.
Health has been exposed as riddled with expert opinion disguised as fact.
The current system of government funded evidence manufacturing,for policy purposes, is a health disaster.
Save the taxpayer,defund government experts.
The article is superb, something I don’t generally expect from the Guardian. The science behind the detrimental effects of sugar is getting stronger month by month. The poison is in the dose, of course. There is a person-specific threshold where the rate of fructose absorption exceeds the liver’s capacity to process it and fatty liver and fatty pancreas develop, resulting in insulin resistance and chronically elevated insulin. Once there is hyperinsulinemia, then carb tolerance goes down significantly and all starch is problematic. The increase in diseases caused by chronically elevated insulin (obesity, type two diabetes, Alzheimer’s (aka type 3 diabetes), cardiovascular disease and cancer) track very well to the timing of sugar introduction and increase in consumption in various jurisdictions and ethnic groups. Gary Taubes will cover this well when his new book is soon released (final title pending).
The frightening facts are that over 50% of adults in California now have hyperinsulinemia and it appears insulin resistance has generational epigenetic effects, as with the famous Pottenger cats experiments. Newborns are being born obese (too little exercise because they were surfing the Internet?) and 10-year olds are getting type two diabetes. A study of Pima Indians tracking the timing of the introduction of sugar to their diet and disease rates found that a child of a mother with gestational diabetes was 20 times more likely to have type two diabetes by age 23 and a child of a mother with type two diabetes at the time of pregnancy was 45 times as likely to have type two diabetes by age 23.
If I won the lottery, I would alternate between McDonald’s and Burger King every day for dinner and supper would consist of KFC. Why? Because the food is tasty, cooking is time-consuming and life is too short to eat stuff that tastes like library paste. I would walk the dog occaisionally to partially offset the effects of my dietary choices. I may knock a week or two off my lifespan but so what?
Before Big Pharma there was BIG SUGAR. Their purchase of public policy still troubles the US with subsidies to growers and producers.
American dentist Weston Price wrote about the benefits of natural fats and the trouble with sugar in the 1930s and his foundation continues his work to this day. http://www.westonaprice.org/
Almost all science that is accepted as “true” and makes tons of money for those who promote it is BS. From global warming to vaccine policy it is bought and paid for using the original Big Sugar tactic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, classic rent seeking.
The Guardian article contains two subjects: the science and scientists. It is an unnecessarily long read, in my opinion.
The science:
It is metabolically impossible to put on fat without insulin.
Carbs (both sugar and starch) cause the major insulin response.
Protein causes a minor insulin response.
Fat causes no insulin response.
That is the science, has always been the science, and will continue to be the science.
As for the scientists: self preservation is the primary human instinct. People will say and do anything when their survival is at stake. The universities graduate too many “scientists”. Too many scientists chasing too few research dollars results in many scientists fighting for there professional lives. The sugar industry, like all members of “big business” turns the most compliant scientists into whores. These scientific whores choke off the funds for the more legitimate scientists who, in turn, will get down on their knees and perform the oral chores required to get their share of the lolly. The result is a total corruption of the scientific culture.
Lastly, there are far too many subjects that have appropriated the term “science” to describe their endeavors. As for subjects beyond physics and chemistry and their related disciplines, it is hard to justify the term science to describe what any of them do. The corruption extends far beyond the pseudo-sciences; it is the universities themselves who are corrupt. As always, at the root of all corruption is the pursuit of power, money, and status.
I eat what pleezez me, so I died 13 years ago, butt hell refused to take me, so I’ma stuck here!!!!
Canadian Indians are having major problems with diabetes and obesity. The suspicion is that the sudden transition to the addition of a lot of carbs in the form of grains and sugars, and the consequent decrease in the protein and fat intake, is causing the problem. Some places (west coast BC – Alert Bay area) are experimenting with a return to the protein- and fat-rich diet they had previously. This seems to hold particularly true for those Indians who were not involved in agriculture and so had limited exposure to carbohydrates.
Do remember reading some years ago that the original diet of the Inuit was something like 40% fat. Obviously it worked for them.
Lastly, there are far too many subjects that have appropriated the term “science” to describe their endeavors. As for subjects beyond physics and chemistry and their related disciplines, it is hard to justify the term science to describe what any of them do.
AMEN ! BROTHER !
The vast majority of AGW is propped-up on nonsensical statistical mumbo-jumbo. Crunch the estimates, re-estimate the estimates, estimate the data, smooth the data, interpolate the data, tweak the data … and when you get it to match your desired result … call it … science. It is why I call these Environmental sciencitists … sciencitists. Because they are NOT scientists. They are statisticians, aka Gawd Dammmend LIARS.
Peter, Weston Price was indeed a dentist in America, but he was born in Newburgh, Ontario.
You said,
” … . The corruption extends far beyond the pseudo-sciences; it is the universities themselves who are corrupt. As always, at the root of all corruption is the pursuit of power, money, and status…. ”
And it is all true.
I simply wanted to add that as the amounts of money get bigger, and as the “rewards” for cheating get bigger – and they do get bigger every year – more people sucomb ( nah that may not be the right word, my first language is French ) to the temptation of cheating and lying and “prostituting ” themselves.
Most people would not cheat and lie and risk getting in trouble for $40,000 a year, but give them a million or even half a million a year and most will.
Human nature does not change, but the “rewards” for cheating do, they are getting bigger and bigger every year.
These arguments have gone back and forth for decades. Back in the mid sixties, my
mother warned against the consumption of too much starchy foods. After a heart
attack a while back I developed a diet of my own design. I immediately dropped
all sodas, deep fat fried foods, sauces, dressing, gravies and the like.
I ate one small meal a day like a chicken and rice bowl from a local sushi
joint. I lost 45 pounds in 45 days. Even after I went back to 2-3 meals
a day, I held that weight for 13 years.
I would go out on a limb and say that every diet ever conceived is as Penn and Teller
would say, bullshit! Just eliminate the high in fat and calorie stuff and eat less.
Things have gotten so bad that women all over America are latching onto “Gluten free”
bandwagon, thinking they can shrink the size of their asses by self-diagnosing themselves
as “Gluten intolerant,” a way of saying “I do not have Celiacs, but I do have a medical
condition that makes my ass fat!”
It is called eating too much lady. Look at the supermarket shelves. Gluten free
Rosarita canned refried beans? What next, gluten free steaks? The junk science
nutrition crap has been going on for all of my 60 years on this planet. These same
arguments will be raging 60 years from now.
I find this interesting. My husband and I eat same meals but I’m the one with the sweet tooth and since I’ve no weight issues I eat all the low cal & sometimes not so low cal sweet as I want. His blood tests are fine whereas mine said cholesterol was 7.8 – guess that’s high as Doc said should be around 5.something. So I’m cutting out all sugar as he suggested after asking what I eat.
I really don’t want to take the pills either so I’d better do something as to be honest can say I could feel better since I am cognitive of my lower energy and my own excuse of late – Ya ya getting old.
I’ll report back in Aug, my next blood test. I use to drink 3-4 colas a day as well as daily sugary snacks. (ya I know – no moderation there!) And I’m looking at all areas where I can eliminate sugar, although feel a little is fine too. I will continue to eat roasted red meat 1 or twice a week, as we cook it out of it’s own grease or BBQ, always eat veggies, but not a big fruit eater, so will work on that like adding a banana/apple to my new found love of rough cut porridge for breakfast, eliminates need for refined sugar. I was surprised I got the HC result since my HB’s didn’t and all that’s different is our sugar intake.
Doc was insistent on me addressing my sugar intake tho, kept saying cut out all sugar; very important, shell fish, reduce red meat, & back to exercise again…so we shall see.
So out goes the cake icing, jello’s, hot chocolates, and in comes healthy bulk nuts, dark semi-sweet chocolate and avocados for snacks. I’m lactose intolerant but have known this for a long time.
PS, don’t cook goats cheese it’s awful heated up. 😉
Our parents and grandparents did not eat processed ‘food’ laced with chemicals and ‘refined’ carbs. They also got a lot of exercise in fresh air every day. I follow the diet my grandparents ate and avoid processed ‘food’ and industrial meat. The meat I eat is raised and harvested by traditional farming practices. I also walk, hike and bike 4 to 6 km with my dog every day. The doctor says I’m extraordinarily healthy and fit for a septuagenarian, and healthier than most people 20 years younger.
Natural sugars like cane sugar are not a problem if consumed in moderation. It’s the processed and ‘refined’ corn/beet sugar that will kill you. People who require more than one daily ‘maintenance medication’ to stay alive are NOT healthy and not eating the right diet for their metabolism.
I have cancer, the same kind as the late Rob Ford, and will be having the surgery in early May at the same cancer unit as Mr. Ford (the sarcoma unit at Mt. Sinai hospital in Toronto). But unlike Mr. Ford, my tumor is in a better location (my right forearm). My cancer hasn’t spread, so my prognosis s very good.
Since being notified of my cancer, I have been on a modified Atkins diet, one devised by Johann Coy. I have lost about 20 lbs, and feel fairly good. I have read lot of literature on the internet as to cancer and diets, and there is a fairly strong consensus that sugar is not good for patients with cancer. And the most recent literature suggests that other carbs are not that good either.
So after the tumor operation, I am staying off of sugar. I will eat some carbs, but not much. I miss brown bread and butter!
“Lastly, there are far too many subjects that have appropriated the term “science” to describe their endeavors. As for subjects beyond physics and chemistry and their related disciplines, it is hard to justify the term science to describe what any of them do” blackfox
BUT..But we have tree-ring reading that absolutely determine Climate conditions 1000’s of years ago, a blind test of “Tree Ring Reading” would separate wild probability from scientific fact.
Note: the science of “bite marks” that resulted in convicting & 33 years in Jail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3529309/Sailor-cleared-raping-woman-murdering-husband-spending-33-YEARS-prison-crimes.html
We must be able to convict & jail fraudulent science schemes….Strip PhD’s & graduating Colleges, enough already…
Someone mentioned the “gluten free” trend. I recently was shopping for baby supplies and found baby shampoo with “GLUTEN FREE!” proudly splashed on the label. Baby shampoo. Gluten free baby shampoo. That’s when you know that the latest nutritional fad has officially jumped the shark.
This article is actually wrong. The most recent very large scale longtitudinal studies show that eating almost any diet has virtually no health effects as long as the basic bodily functions are supported. It is not sugar nor fat which produces obesity, but the 50/50 sugar/fat content of much processed food especially desserts. If you cut out the foods that have 50/50 sugar/fat content, you will almost certainly retain a normal body weight. You are welcome.
Ken, please convey my best wishes to your mother-in-law! 100 years is something to celebrate!
In my home town, several of the old farmers,one of whom I worked for as a kid, lived to be over 100,at one point the care home they were in boasted four residents over 100, three of them from my town.
The guy I worked for one Winter could outwork me at age 17, and he was 75!
Sending positive thoughts your way David.
Keep us posted on your progress. 🙂
Also on a side note was just learned a bit about drinking water since I’ve replaced my cola intake with our well water. (which we get tested regularly) I read an article that implies that drinking ‘pure’ highly filtered or Reverse Osmosis water on a regular basis isn’t that good, as it washes out the good stuff your body needs as well as not providing what you do need from it. Pure water is ok for few days of de-toxifying but then back to normally ‘hard’ ground water is best as it’s the right PH for human consumption.
Re: Well water sulfur smell, just nuke water in a big bowl for 2 mins to evaporate the odors, then bottle, fridge ready for next day. Just some (non)-food for thought.
Take care.
bagadonitz: You can take this article and replace fat with carbon and understand how we got to this AGW mess.
You can also take this article and replace fat with evolution to understand how evolution became (and still is)a fact. Prime example: Charles Huxley “Darwin’s Bulldog”; the nickname should tell you everything you need to know. Still going on to this day, with the some of the most creative research being done by Intelligent Design scientists, and them being vilified by “the establishment”.