Butterflies, Warming, and Politics

Some years ago I could write a long blog post, and know that people could take the whole thing in, long sentences, long paragraphs and all.  But today, most people expect to get the gist of a post from the top few lines, and so it's safe to think that no one gets much from my blog at all.

Without doubt, this trend towards impatience with any sort of sophisticated idea has resulted both in Climate Change, and President Trump.  Read on, if you dare.

Let's start off with Cholesterol. It has been most of a century since Cholesterol has been identified as an accessory to heart attacks.  When the raw information hit the news, the public made a quite forgivable leap to the conclusion that eating Cholesterol-containing foods would lead to heart-attacks.  Soon there were numerous witch-hunts to identify these foods, and the following were discovered as the worse culprits:

Eggs. Bacon. Butter. Milk-fat. Shrimp. Oysters. Red meat. Organ Meat*. Meat Fat**.

People stopped eating these things, and kept worrying about them for years.  [*E.g. liver  **E.g. bacon and lard].

The reaction was extreme.  People began to stop eating butter (which was a good thing, if a little extreme), and fell back on a butter-substitute that had been used during WW2, namely Margarine.  Margarine was not only cheaper, now we 'knew' that it was better for us.  Consumption of all these Cholesterol Culprits fell off dramatically.  Some folks, however, regarded all this with deep resentment.  Some bacon-lovers viewed the 'ban' on bacon as a personal attack, and defiantly began eating it more extensively than ever before, sneering at those who cut down on it, and the beginning of Hostility to Science, I believe, can be traced to these individuals.  This falls under the generalized category of killing the messenger.  "Uncle Bill scorned the idea of Cholesterol! He thought it was an invention of the Communists, to make life miserable for us, you know. He died young, but he lived well, God bless him."

Some in the medical education business were delighted, and others nervous, because, of course, the Press was not reporting the ifs, ands and buts that had a lot to do with this information.

The first major issue to be dealt with was that the human body itself was able to manufacture Cholesterol. (The only reason I capitalize Cholesterol is to make it easier to pick out the word if by some amazing miracle one of my readers want to go back and re-read some useful bit of information I have provided here.) Now there was a rush to dismiss the Cholesterol scare as hopeless anyway; evidently the body creates its own --poison, if you will-- so we may as well eat all the butter we want, while we're alive to do it!  No.  The truth is somewhere in-between. Read carefully.

Cholesterol does have something to do with the plaque that is deposited in places in the arteries where the blood goes a little more slowly, or changes direction, and gradually this plaque (with the help of certain strains of bacteria) begins to slowly block the artery, which can cause a stroke, or a heart-attack.  But by being careful with your food, you can make sure your system does not have extra cholesterol that it tries to dump in your arteries.  Get it?

(Cholesterol is not all bad for us; in small amounts it helps with healing.  Don't try to manage the use of Cholesterol in healing yourself; I don't understand enough of it to be able to advise you; leave that to experts, one of whom I certainly am not.)

How does the body make Cholesterol, and out of what?  Most people (who still believe in science!) know by now, that it is out of certain sorts of saturated fats that we eat.

Once again, hordes of people (generally those whose scientific backgrounds were a little on the weak side, and who did not think to learn the whole story, because surely there were important details that had not been revealed yet) started to shun saturated fats with a vengeance, but not other fats.  (In case you're thinking of stopping here, let me give you a quick remark for those who think of reading as an unwelcome aerobic activity:

Fats in moderation are needed for general health.  As far as I know, avoiding only saturated fats (and so-called Trans Fats) and eating all other fats without other restrictions will probably lead to obesity.  Which is bad, because it makes the heart work harder, doing unhealthy work. Sure, the heart needs to regularly work hard doing so-called aerobic activity, brisk walking, aerobics, running, climbing, etc, briefly. Not doing regular aerobics so many times a week is bad for your heart, but making your heart simply labor--lugging your weight around, if you're overweight--is also bad.   (BTW, conventional margarine contained saturated fats. Modern butter-substitutes are not so bad, but read the labels.)

This is typical: "Tell me, are fats good or bad?" This is the kind of answer those who dislike and don't understand science are seeking.  Well, I ask them, are slum landlords good or bad? Well, they would probably waffle: It depends. Okay, think it over, and write me an essay for Monday.

Salt

Most of our salt comes from salt mines; or at least, it did, until recently.  But, over the years, sea salt, initially a sort of exotic thing, acquired a cachet; so much so that various processed food manufacturers began advertising that their product contains sea salt.  After a while, salt manufacturers were able to charge more for sea salt than they did for regular salt.  (It tastes exactly the same.) But wait: It has recently been reported that little bits of plastic have been found in many samples of sea salt.  Plastic in food is bad, isn't it.  Guess what's going to happen.  As millions of consumers line up to trade in their sea salt for non-sea salt, regular salt prices will snake up again.

Tell me what to do!

There is a reason why a simple answer cannot be given for almost any practical question.  (1) We still don't know everything about everything; (2) The quantitative consequences of any policy decision is still not available, so that we still can't precisely calculate how bad eating sea salt really is. (3) It depends on how the prices are set, how methods of extracting sea-salt are changed over the next few years, and what we discover about the long-term effects of plastic particles in our bodies.

That's the sort of situation that the Science-phobes who constitute the Alt-Right hate. This is the worst sort of pseudo-science, as far as they're concerned, and they're all set to cut funding for any sort of science, e.g. cancer research, genetic research, ocean research, because they do not want to hear any more bad news, and they want to lower taxes for themselves.

Light a Little Candle

I want to now head in a slightly different direction.  So far I have focused on the sad consequences of how food marketing, and how news about scientific findings result in mass movements which change people's perception of food items, and how people's eating habits sometimes result in major changes in health, often not for the better. (Furthermore, public discourse about people's self-images, especially those of kids--initially led by Liberals, admittedly--have resulted in curtailment of any public discourse about healthy weight in children, as Mrs. Obama discovered to her cost.  Nobody likes anyone saying that their kids are obese, even if they are.  Looking around you, you have to agree that the US population is getting distinctly portly, which has resulted in cars getting bigger, because some of our prosperous Baby Boomers would not even fit into a older model family sedan.  You watch: we're going to see some very large Chinese very soon, if eating habits in China progress as they have done here, and some of our least responsible fast-food chains are permitted to open up stores over there.  The logic here is that mankind was intended to be obese, and we did not achieve our perfect shape in years gone by, because food was scarce, or we could not afford it.

Have you noticed how untidy and full of trash streets and highways are becoming? No, they're not desperately trashy, because the municipalities have steadily deployed trash cans in convenient locations, restaurants are making it easier to put trash in receptacles, and little school-aged kids are enthusiastic about recycling, bless them, so that the tendency to be irresponsible about littering is partially offset by moderating forces.

In the past, a lot of the litter was paper litter; now it is almost exclusively plastic litter, some of which flows down the rivers into the sea, messing up the lungs and gills of whales and fish, and slipping into our Sea Salt. You might have blamed the litter on blacks, minorities and immigrants, and doubtless they are partly to blame, and you can easily arrive at excuses for them. Little kids rarely litter, in my experience; they're usually very indignant when they see littering. It is kids in their teens and twenties who are probably the culprits, especially those whose parents do not have much of a positive influence on them. I, for one, pick up a quarter to one half of the litter I see on the sidewalk, and drop it (sometimes illegally) in a trashcan. A FaceBook friend of mine supports a meme that says: New Rule: Every time you visit the beach, pick up at least 3 pieces of plastic!

Trying to find a nice graphic to accompany this section of the post, I stumbled on this page from the National Geographic.  Since National Geographic magazine was bought by Rupert Murdoch I have not supported it, nor depended on it for important information, but by all means read it; there is some information that you might like to see. But there seems to be a lot of we can't do anything until we know more, but it's impossible to really know rhetoric in there. Until some business discovers an angle to this problem that they can exploit, we're likely to remain in a state where acting on Ocean Plastic is considered premature.

Well. Business interests do tend to slow response to any environmental problem; consider, for instance, climate change. Exxon has known for years that use of gasoline is heating up the planet, but they hid behind the We need to know more excuse, just as the cigarette manufacturers did. (Until we do know more, let's give everybody cancer. That would be great.)

Unlike shunning saturated fats, picking up beach debris is unlikely to become an instant mass movement, but it is important to give young people a clear signal, by your actions, that de-littering the environment is not just a concern for mean teachers, but for the other adults in their lives as well.  I just do this, not worrying about whether I would be a significant influence on anyone, but now I have noticed that some of my friends are doing it too!  Yay for friends, but, well . . . Let it go, as Disney would say.  (Apropos of that, you might have noticed a lot of litter in the Star Wars movies.  Is that intentional?  Is it just a subtle way of making the protagonists and their environment more human?  It is sad to think that litter is a characteristic human concomitant.)  (Not sure whether 'concomitant' is the word I want.)
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Stay Tuned: The Whole Cholesterol / Saturated Fat Business Needs to be ReThunk

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The path of true knowledge seldom runs smooth.

Ever since people began turning the eye of suspicion on cholesterol,the general public has been subjected to contradictory recommendations about what to eat.  A recent blog post in the New York Times draws attention to a study from some 40 years ago that seems to suggest that eating less meat and saturated fats did not necessarily increase your expected length of life.  Read the article carefully for yourself; often the studies and their aims are not what you expect from the titles of the articles.

I myself recently almost had a heart attack, and I’m obviously interested in what an ideal diet should be, both from the point of view of eating stuff that tastes good to me, and from the point of view of increasing my chances of avoiding a painful, and potentially harmful heart “event” as much as possible.  A full-blown heart-attack can end up restricting your activities, especially in your work, and in your fun, as well.  And it is no joke going through an almost attack; I can hardly imagine a complete heart attack.

[Any restriction in blood flow into the heart muscle—in contrast to reduction of blood through the heart, which is also troublesome; when the heart doesn’t do its job, you need to have those little nylon Oxygen tubes going into your nose—causes pain, because the heart needs a constant supply of Oxygen to do its work.  A minor reduction is slightly painful, but doesn’t injure the heart.  A complete blockage of one of the blood supply vessels (arteries) results is terrible pain, and actual injury to the heart.]

Anyone who has lived through the last three decades has got the general impression that

• Cholesterol is bad generally, and the LDL Cholesterol is the worst.
• A lot of heart artery blockage actually consists of Cholesterol.
• There is something called Plaque in the artery walls that also blocks them.
• Saturated fats are bad.
• Fats in red meats are the worst.  Fats in eggs and dairy are also pretty bad.
• Unsaturated fats and monosaturated fats are good for you.
• Omega fatty acids are ... what?  Maybe good for you.  These are found in eggs, and Avocadoes, and some sorts of fish, e.g. Salmon and Trout.

The first break in my cognitive structures that had to do with these matters came when I read that saturated oils were actually good for certain sorts of cooking, e.g. frying under high heat.

Now, you’re not supposed to fry under high heat if you can avoid it.  High temperatures are bad for most foods, because it changes the chemistry of the foods in a bad way.  (It’s supposedly worst when you fry cured meats, e.g. bacon and ham.  I’m not completely sure that I’ve got that right.)  But I seemed to read that the high temperatures made unsaturated oils themselves dangerous, whereas saturated oils didn’t change very much when heated.  This is called the stability of the oil; saturated oils are more stable, precisely because they’re saturated.  So Coconut Oil was considered a good oil for frying, stir-frying in a wok, etc.  To date I have not seen anything to contradict that belief.

Is Cholesterol really bad for you? Is being overweight really bad?

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The available information about the interrelation between heart disease, cholesterol, Omega-3 fatty acids, saturated fats, and high blood sugar is confusing, to say the least.  It is at least as confusing to medical practitioners as it is to laymen, because of the onslaught of vast amounts of information (some of it not very good) that physicians are regularly bombarded with.  Every doctor is constantly being given information from pharmaceutical companies, their alma maters, and medical agencies, and a significant proportion of this information is contradictory.  In addition, doctors are constantly under the threat of malpractice lawsuits.  Some of these lawsuits are frivolous and vicious, some of them are simply patients desperate to find financial resources to correct their medical conditions, because medical expenses are so high that not infrequently a lawsuit is the only way to obtain the means for pursuing treatment.  Not all doctors are quacks, and not all doctors are brilliant, and obviously a large number of doctors are just tired and jaded, and not as altruistic as we would want them to be.  Let's face it: we all suck, and doctors are no exception.  We have to be grateful that the health services in this country are not in worse shape than they are, given the conditions under which they operate.

Just recently, one Dr. Dwight Lundell, a former surgeon, was quoted as saying essentially the following:
(1) It isn't cholesterol that causes heart failure.
(2) Heart failure is caused by inflammation in the blood vessels.
(3) Inflammation is caused (among other things) by excessive amounts of processed foods, e.g. refined sugars such as corn syrup, lots of sugar generally, and Omega-6 fatty acids, such as found in Soybean oil.  (Omega-3 fatty acids are the good ones.)

This information, we find, was announced by Dr. Lundell as far back as 2007, though the information has begun recirculating once again this year.

On further examination, a sort of medical quack-hunting vigilante called Dr. Stephen Barrett has looked into Dwight Lundell's story, and has turned up that he has been in financial trouble with the IRS and has been on the brink of bankruptcy, and has lost his license to practice medicine in 2008 (though he has been practicing since about 1970).  He was also sued by at least two patients for incompetent post operative care.

Despite the hostility of Stephen Barrett, I find Lundell's analysis of the situation persuasive.  People are always looking for a silver bullet to remove the threat of heart disease once and for all.  Constantly consuming large quantities of polyunsaturated oils (Canola oil, for instance) is not the answer.  Lundell might be bad at managing his finances, and careless in his management of surgical patients (after-operation care is important, and intelligence on the part of the caregivers, the patient, and the patient's family is all needed for a good outcome), but he seems to be on the mark as far as his advice is concerned.

It is unfortunate that everyone wants the cure-all to solve all their problems.  To be healthy, you need to do a number of things.  I know what is needed, even if I don't do it myself!  Here is some obvious advice.  Bear in mind that (paraphrasing the immortal words of Robert Young) I'm not a doctor, though I play one on the Internet!

A.  Don't use poly-unsaturated oils exclusively.  Small quantities of Olive oil is good for most purposes; if you're stir-frying, Coconut oil is good.  Do your own reading; if you learn that this advice is not the best for you, act accordingly

B.  Don't consume too much fat.  A couple of slices of bacon once a week is probably fine, even if you're a seven-foot lumberjack.  Look up the ideal body weight for your height, and stay within a dozen pounds of that.

C.  Don't eat too much sugar.  The more you eat, the more you should exercise.  Don't eat too much of anything.  Don't eat too much white bread.  Don't encourage kids to eat sugar and white bread, because they will crave it when they're older.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with wonder-bread might be a convenient soporific to administer to annoying kids, but in the long term they will pay the price.  Hopefully you won't be around to see when your kids become 300 pound couch potatoes.  All this propaganda that heavy is beautiful is a bunch of bull.  Nobody should weigh more than 5% beyond their ideal weight, even if they've been persuaded that they belong to a special "heavy" variant of the human species.  Especially kids should remain within their ideal weight, because heavy kids are at risk of turning into heavy adults.

There is general belief that a healthy self-image is more important than a healthy weight.  This is nonsense; both are important.  This trend of making the messenger feel guilty for delivering an unpleasant message is the creation of some idiot, and if I get my hands on him or her I will not be responsible for what I'll do.  Of course an overweight child is not entirely to blame for his or her condition: it is the family that must take the responsibility.  Occasionally it is some genetic or thyroid condition that is to blame.  But often thyroid conditions, I'm reading, are triggered by psychological factors.  I don't know how to deal with people who are eager to have their families classified as dysfunctional.

D.  Do eat unprocessed, or natural foods, which have a certain amount of fiber, such as oats, salads, green vegetables, whole wheat bread.

E.  Eat locally-grown produce.  I have started buying locally-grown lettuce, and it is awesome.  We also live in an area that has more than its fair share of Pennsylvania Dutch.  Now, PaDutch are not the healthiest people in the world; they do tend to eat a richer diet than will work for most of us.  But there's no faulting their produce.

F.  Choose your meat carefully, if possible.  Cold cuts in the summer months are difficult to avoid, but a healthy mix of meats is better than eating only chicken, or only turkey, or only beef.  Smoked meats should be eaten sparingly, i.e. once a week at most, and in small amounts, like a slice or two of bacon or ham.  It appears that eggs are not bad for us, if we stay under an egg a day.

G.  Do exercise in moderation.  Do not put too much stress on your feet and your knees.  If you're past the age of 50, consider wearing knee braces when you walk or row, or whatever.  This is to stave off problems later on.  Take your advice from your doctor; I don't want to contradict the doctor if he insists that knee braces are unnecessary.  (Check around, to see whether his other patients have bad knees.)  Avoid running, unless you run on padded surfaces, or run carefully on grass.  Do not run on asphalt or concrete.  Even if you don't exercise every day, try every other day.  Failing that, at least once a week.  Failing that, every other week.  Walk to church, if going to church is one of your vices.  Take a backpack, and put your jacket in it for the return walk, if you don't want to perspire in it.

H.  Prepare your own food.  Eating out should be an occasional thing.  Teach your kids to cook, starting early.  Kids of eleven and older can learn to fix simple food, and can certainly help with more complex food preparation.  Don't be intimidated by their reports of what their friends do or don't do.  Just because junior's buddies can't even slice bread for themselves doesn't mean junior should be just as inept.  Don't take klutziness as an excuse.  Klutzes are learned, not born.

Finally, be objective when judging how competent your family physician is.  Find a good one.  Keep an ear out for who your friends think is a good doctor, and switch when the opportunity arises.  Be a full participant in your health; learn the facts about any condition you have, and be a full partner when you or someone in your family falls ill.  This is good general advice, just as you must be a full participant in your child's education.  I'm not suggesting that you debate things with your child's teacher; I simply want to encourage you to take an interest in the material, help with preparation, give positive feedback, and be sensible about criticism.  Don't outsource important things like health and education, as if you're handing it over to H & R Block.  Even your taxes, for that matter, deserve your full participation.

I'm sorry to come across as being preachy.  It is important to be unambiguous about certain things which people like to misunderstand in the direction of taking it as an endorsement of bad habits.  "See, Barbara, it says here that it is okay to be overweight!"  No; I only said that 5% overweight is the most that you should allow yourself.  Don't misunderstand this sort of advice.

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The Challenges of a Diet Guru, and their Roots in Education in the USA

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Suppose you want to educate your fellow-citizens about proper nutrition, weight-loss, and how diet influences the health of a typical modern human.  You want to become a Diet Guru.  In addition, since you’re performing a service, you’d like to make some money while you’re at it.

You look at all those who have tried before you, and failed, or those who have succeeded, but whose successful adherents have gone on to curse their diet guide, because they’ve gone off their diet, and put on more pounds than ever before.

In recent decades, many diets have been centered around gimmicks: Grapefruit, or what have you.  All of us recognize these gimmicks to be exactly what they are, but we have a sneaking suspicion that it just might work.  It’s like the people who go to church, who don’t believe in anything they hear there, but are nervous just in case some of it might be true, and they might get turned into a pillar of salt, or whatever.

Many emerging diet gurus have to deal with two things: gimmicks, and superstition.

Gimmicks
These have to do with marketing.  It doesn’t matter how good your mousetrap is.  It truly doesn’t.  All you have to do is to make a big fuss about it, and put up enormous billboards all over our little town, and (so the theory goes, and make no mistake: the Marketing gurus are total masters of persuading the public that marketing is all that matters, and if you’re selling your mousetrap to people who don’t have the time or the sense to check out their product, marketing is all that does seem to matter) the world will beat a mindless path to your door.  If you charge enough for your glitzy new mousetrap, it doesn’t matter if your product turns out to be totally useless: you’ve already made your money.  Foithermore, if you sold stock in your company, the stockholders are left footing the bill, or eating the losses.  Everybody knows this.  Or they should.

Superstition

This has to do with education, and also a little with marketing.  You see, the USA has achieved almost zero dropout rate in high school, by doing a few questionable things.  Firstly, everybody is taught a vast number of things in high school, all considered basic.  Since nobody is essentially allowed to drop out, these things are all pre-digested and fed to the students in tiny doses which they can easily swallow, but the vast majority of kids in school are not interested in any of this, and don’t have the mental equipment to really assimilate much of it, and therefore cannot remember it.

A basic part of grade school education is human physiology.  Everybody is taught how food is digested: fats, carbohydrates and proteins are digested in different ways, and at different points in the alimentary tract.  Everybody has heard the words Ptyalin, Bile, Lactase, Hydrochloric Acid, catalysis, and so on, but less than one in a hundred outside of the medical profession (or health-related professions) remembers any of that crap.

Everybody learns the circulatory system in school.  You know about the aorta, the pulmonary vein, the arteries, the capillaries, the veins, the lungs, the brain, the heart, the left ventricle, and so on and so forth.  Most people don’t give a damn about any of this.  You were told that the digested food enters the bloodstream, but you weren’t probably told that the food you eat keeps waltzing around your body until it gets either used up, or dumped somewhere.

If someone asks you, of course you exclaim that it is obvious that the food travels around your bloodstream until it is used up, or deposited somewhere.  That’s obvious, you iterate.  But just do not have a mental picture of a cheeseburger being helplessly hauled all over your body until some muscle mercifully puts it out of its misery by either burning it up, or allowing it to take a nap in its cells.  (A very long nap, which could last about 20 years.)

Instead of actually believing what they were taught in school, many folks end up believing various superstitions.  Americans are a superstitious people.  Many of the superstitions are about cholesterol and carbs and calories and steroids and sugars and saturated fats and Olive oil.

Many of these superstitions were actually created by diet gurus, or their marketing consultants.  Marketing consultants have rules of thumbs that help them sell things.  Unfortunately for all of us, many of us have discovered that our lives are made easier by using these same rules of thumb.  Things would be a lot easier if I used these rules of thumb, too, and many of my fellow-teachers use them too.  A major one is to create useful superstitions.  The superstitions, of course, are useful for the diet guru, or the teacher, but ultimately not for the consumer or the student.  It gets the consumer or the student doing the right thing quickly and easily, but once you want the consumer (or the student) thinking about the information in a more sophisticated way, the superstition actually gets in the way.

One of the most recent inventions is the idea that gluten is bad for you.  There are many reasons that gluten might be bad for one: Celiac Disease, if you have it, means that gluten aggravates it painfully.  For various reasons, it has been reasoned, that gluten is bad for everybody.  At present, as far as we know, only fewer than 1% of people have an adverse reaction to gluten.

However, you probably know that a lot of your friends are sort of addicted to pizza, or pasta.  Arguably, it is the elastic, chewy characteristic of pizza dough, and the sweet taste of the tomato sauce that makes pizza taste so good (though most of us are under the illusion that it is just the melted cheese that is the miracle ingredient).  Many of us are also addicted to bread (and butter!), so if a diet guru can turn you off of gluten, which means all sorts of bread products, that immediately removes a whole lot of pizza and bread from your diet, and we all know that all our friends who adore those two foods are well on their way to being Pilsbury Doughboys.

I do not know, not being in the inner circle of those who undertake food research, whether gluten is clinically addictive.  But it seems a far cry from educating people to avoid gluten because it is possibly addicting, (and because it is usually accompanied by a ton of starch!) to telling them that wheat is bad for them.  Gluten itself is a useful protein, and was an important component of the diet of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists, for instance.  You may not approve of the denomination, but, for any of us not suffering from Celiac Disease, gluten seems to be, from what little I know, a perfectly reasonable food to be eaten in moderation.

Like my spouse, if you find it impossible to eat gluten in moderation, and if you find that eating a little gluten (in any bread or wheat you might eat) at any time of the day makes you hungry all day long, then clearly you could make greater loss in your weight (if you want that) by staying away from gluten, but remember: it is really the extra calories that we’re really trying to avoid.  If you happen to ingest a little gluten, there’s absolutely no need to induce vomiting.

But doesn’t it seem silly to you, to create a whole wheat is bad for you superstition, just to get you to avoid eating gluten, in order to lose weight?  Must we swallow lies, in order to do what is best for us?  This is what religion is, you see.  Don’t bully your sister, or Santa will give you coal for Christmas.  This is what we’ve come down to, because everyone wants to be treated like a kid, because being adult is just a little too difficult for us!  (In fact, one author actually made a point that whole wheat is very bad for us.  Why?  Because people tend to eat a little more whole wheat, believing that a lot of whole wheat is better than a little white bread.  Good calories do not offset bad calories.  Good calories are preferable to bad calories.  Choose between them, and eat just a little of the one you have chosen.  You cannot cancel out calories with calories, generally speaking.  They all add up.  But if you don’t exercise very much, every additional calorie is going to settle in for a long stay.

[How about negative calories?  You may have heard that certain foods, such as cauliflower and broccoli, actually use up more calories from your body than they contribute.  Is this true?  Yes.  These vegetables are mostly fiber, so they provide a feeling of satisfaction, or fullness in your stomach, without contributing calories.  They do have a little carbohydrate in them, but the stomach has to work so hard (and so long) to digest those foods that you use up more calories in digesting them than you get back from them.  Unfortunately they stay in your intestines so long undigested that they survive far, far down your 22 feet of guts, where certain sorts of bacteria get hold of them.  Unfortunately, the digestive process of these bacteria create a little gas, which many people feel uncomfortable about.  Eat broccoli or cauliflower early in the day, so that the methane finds its way out before you go to sleep, or you’ll be rolling about in bed.  Maybe.  Making like a gas well for an hour or two is probably well worth the loss in weight you might experience.]

You might know lots of other superstitions, that might have started out well-intended.  In fact, budding diet gurus, as I said, actually manufacture superstitions, to get their clients to lose weight, and experience seems to show that the superstition works better, at least in the short run, than the actual information.

So if you’re a diet guru wannabe, (1) you have to identify some old superstitions that are getting in your way, and mark them for attack.  (2) make up some new superstitions of your own, and keep hammering them.  The sexier they are, the better name you make for yourself.  Make your money, and leave town before your people go off their diets.

I know what I have to do to lose weight.

(1) I have to eat moderately.  Eating a big breakfast actually helps me eat less the rest of the day, so I eat an egg or two for breakfast, whenever I have the time to do it.  I start work at 7:45 on some days, and it’s hard to get motivated to eat in time to get to work.  I try to eat moderately at lunch, and very moderately at supper.

(2) Remember, your food finds its way into your arteries.  It’s that simple.  There is no special delivery system for food; food and oxygen slosh along together in the blood.  Blood is a mixture of Oxygen, protein, sugar, fat, water, and hormones, which are essentially switches for the body to respond to some condition in a concerted way (all at once).  In the mornings, when you’re walking about, the food can get used up fairly easily.  At night, if you’re asleep, not only does the food not get used up, it doesn’t travel far from your intestines (which is where they got into the blood, obviously), so it gets deposited close to your belly.  Men and women with big bellies (including me) eat late at night, and aren’t active after that last meal.  If you kept working for about an hour after your last meal for the day, doing the laundry, walking the dog, whatever, you’re less likely to develop a big belly, but you might gain weight uniformly all over, if you don’t use up the food efficiently.  If you use up all your dinner, you will not gain weight at all.

(3) I’m guessing here, but if you’re concerned about cholesterol, keeping active after each meal ensures that fat deposits are not made close to the heart, but (if they’re made at all) uniformly throughout the body.  Furthermore, occasional vigorous activity helps flush away fat deposits from the heart itself.  There is a certain amount of blood circulation going on in the walls of the heart itself, just like the engine oil that circulates around the pistons in your car engine.  (You must realize that the engine oil doesn’t normally go inside the pistons: that space is reserved for the gasoline-air mixture, which will be ruined by lubricating oil.)  The blood that the heart itself uses must be kept free-flowing, and fat deposits in the blood vessels of the heart means that it will start to have problems, and it usually signals blood starvation by flashes of pain.  If the blood is completely blocked, you have a heart attack.

Fat in the bloodstream is not good, but a tiny bit is ok.  Generally speaking, thin oils, like olive oil, is better than thick oil, like lard, and less oil is better than more oil.

(4) To get rid of stomach fat, exercise focused on the stomach has to be used.  If you lose weight all over your body, some of the stomach fat will go, too.  But if you want to do body-sculpting, you have to do some exercise that will use up the fat in your stomach.

Again, I’m no expert, but the body prefers to use sugar (specifically glucose, and other sugars must first be reduced to glucose) as fuel for doing work.  If you keep doing steady work for about 20 minutes, from what I have been told, the body begins to use stored-up fat reserves.  (Remember, this happens only after it has used sugar for a while.)  So --and I realize that this might be a superstition too, and I urge you to back this up with your own reading-- if you do 25 minutes of stomach exercises, you use up sugar for the first twenty minutes, and then burn stomach fat for the remaining 5 minutes.  Whichever muscle is being exercised, it grabs fat from the closest fat location.

If you’re suddenly required to lift a heavy weight, or to sprint a short distance, the body “burns up” protein to do it.  The burned protein creates lactic acid in the muscles, which manifests itself as a cramp.  Once the lactic acid is spread away from the muscle that had to bear the brunt of the exertion, the cramp subsides.  But, as you can see, doing sudden, intense exercise does not burn fat, but burns (or, more properly, consumes) a little of your muscle tissue.  Only steady exercise burns sugar and fat, so to help keep your heart healthy by flushing out fat deposits from the walls of your heart, you need (occasional) steady intense exercise.  This is why aerobic instructors make you do jumping jacks; it increases the heart rate dramatically, but doing one enormous jumping jack will probably just use up a little protein. The same goes with bench-pressing an enormous weight.

Very recently, I learned something very depressing.  Apparently all your stomach fat is not stored in the actual muscles of your stomach; a lot of it is stored around your organs: the liver, the heart, the pancreas, the kidneys, etc.  It is not really attached to any muscles you can exercise, so by working on your abdominals (my sources claim), you cannot get rid of all your belly fat.  On the other hand, when I try to feel how thick my abdominal muscles are, they do feel soft and flabby, so I don’t know whom to believe...

(5) It is obviously important to work with your own addictions and eating habits, and if    you’re so feeble-minded that you cannot succeed without swallowing some weird superstition, well, do what it takes.  There is a new diet making the rounds called the Wheat Belly Diet, which will probably work for those whose weakness is pasta, pizza and bread.  Once in a long while, it may be as well to give in to your cravings and eat an occasional pizza slice.  Some folks just do not do well with long periods of deprivation.

So, firstly, eating sensibly will ensure that I don’t gain any more weight.  To actually lose weight, I have to do some sort of exercise, and I walk the dog every once in a while.  This doesn’t really work, because she doesn’t keep up a steady pace, and stops to sniff at every tree and fire hydrant.  But a really long walk does burn up some calories, and some activity after supper helps me deposit my supper all over, rather than all near my guts.

If you’re a Diet Guru to be, do us all a favor, and encourage your clients to incorporate exercise in their regimen.  Diet alone will not work, unless you’re like, 15 years old, in which case you probably should not normally have a weight problem.

Finally, there was something I read that said that extra Insulin in the bloodstream encourages the conversion of carbohydrates and sugars in your bloodstream into fats.  Man, I’ve never heard a better argument for postponing the use of Insulin injections.  But if you need Insulin injections to keep your body functioning, I guess you have to cope with this additional problem.

Arch

Oils, Cholesterol, and all that: What's the Story?

. For years I have resented the deprivation I have suffered from avoiding cholesterol. Cholesterol burst on the public scene in the sixties, after having lived exclusively within medical circles for years, scattering fear and excitement among nutritionists and laymen alike. By the end of the seventies, Cholesterol was Public Enemy Number 1, closely followed by Saturated Fats. Coconut Oil, long a major component of the diet of tropical island peoples all over the world, was condemned alongside all the other saturated fats, thus casting a pall over many foods that were delicious, especially in confections, and Thai food. But last year, on a visit to my sister, I was told that there was new research that coconut was not only not harmful, but good for you. Living in the US, we're all a little suspicious of research. In this country, particularly, a great deal of research is unduly influenced by commercial interests. Recent news stories have made the Food and Drug administration look very much like a den of goofballs from whom one is unable to get the merest vestige of unbiased information. So what's the story? A few remarks may be helpful for readers who hate this subject, but feel obliged to read through anyway. The early parts of most of the articles below do give an accurate description of the basic facts: (1) Fat is a component of almost all the food we eat and drink, but there are different types, hence the plural: fats. Both food from animals (meat, fish, eggs, milk) and food from plants (veggies, fruits, juices, grains, oils) contain fats, but oil and lard, of course, contain the most fats of all, ounce for ounce. (2) Fat contains many times the calories of sugars and starches, so we tend to store excess calories as fat in our bodies as a guard against the "lean times." People who eat more calories than they burn up will put on weight, are more likely to get diabetic, high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks generally speaking. This includes me, so don't get mad. (Though fat is unsightly, we would look incredibly worse if we simply stored the carbohydrates. Fat is actually the low-volume alternative, sort of zipfiles for calories.) (3) Many vitamins are carried only in fat: A, D, E and K, though I don't know what vitamin K is, really. This means that in order to get these vitamins naturally through your diet, you have to eat foods rich in these vitamins, which will carry them dissolved in fat. (It does not mean that all fat contains vitamins.) So you should not totally avoid fat. Kids, especially, should not be put on strict low-fat diets. However: obesity in children is just as bad as --or worse than-- obesity in adults; if your youngster is less active in good ways (games and sports) and overactive in bad ways (inattention in class, inability to concentrate) move him or her towards less sugar and less fat. I remember seeing a study in which obese childhood was linked with obese and unhealthy adults. (You don't need to cut down the amount of food, nor do you need to eliminate fats entirely. You just need to alter the balance.) (4) Unsaturated fats are fats with many carbon-carbon double bonds, for you chemistry freaks. You can force hydrogen into these bonds using a catalyst, which is called saturating the fats. This artificial "saturation" results in the hated Trans Fats, and no study I know has anything good to say about those. Why does anyone want to saturate a fat? Because then they become more thick, and can be made into sticks, just like butter. (5) There are polyunsaturated fats, and monounsaturated fats. Until recently, the polyunsaturated fats (canola oil, for instance has a lot of these) were considered very healthy. New research is showing that there are problems here: frying with polyunsaturated fats can cause something --free radicals-- which is associated with cancer formation. Don't panic right away; a lot of things can cause cancer. But maybe we should avoid frying with polyunsaturated fats. Monounsaturated fats have fewer carbon-carbon double-bonds, and so are less likely to be a problem. At the same time, monounsaturated fats have been associated with improved levels of Good Cholesterol. (6) Cholesterol is a substance found in artery blocks after heart attacks, etc, and was naturally implicated as the culprit. But apparently cholesterol is an essential part of the body's chemistry, especially in growing children. There are different types, though, and as far as I can understand, there is a Good Cholesterol, ("high density" lipoproteins) which helps prevent heart attacks and clogging of blood vessels, and Bad Cholesterol, ("low density" lipoproteins) which does the clogging, and some fats result in increase of one, and some fats result in increase of the other. It was thought that any animal cholesterol you eat is immediately converted into people-cholesterol inside us. This is not apparently the case necessarily, though it's hard to get a definitive word on the matter. (7) Omega-3 Fatty Acids. These are just another kind of oil commonly found in fish, and flax seed oil. This oil is considered very beneficial --it is also an unsaturated oil-- so much so that it is encouraged in the diet, especially for the elderly and children. (8) Trans fats are unsaturated fats that have artificially been partially saturated. All I know about them is that they are harmful, and there is universal agreement that the tiniest bit of trans fat can cause large increases in Bad Cholesterol. They are the villains of the fat world (for the moment). The State of California has passed laws that will eliminate trans fats from all restaurants by next year. (If someone discovers that Trans fats are good for you, I swear I will go totally postal.) The following is simply a brief survey of what's available on the Web. The heading links to the original article. Do please follow up on your own, and act on what you discover. [My own remarks are in green.] Harvard Schools of Public Health : My summary:

• Choose healthy fats, limit saturated fat, and avoid trans fat.
• Monounsaturated fats are healthy,
• polyunsaturated fats are healthy (possibly even healthier?)
• saturated fats are unhealthy,
• trans fats are very unhealthy.
• Omega-3 fatty acids are especially beneficial.

[Note: there is no indication in the Harvard article that some saturated fats might actually be beneficial. - Arch]

Mayo Clinic My summary:

• You don't need to completely eliminate all fats from your meals. Instead, choose the healthier types of fats and enjoy them in moderation.
• Mono- and poly- unsaturated fats are healthy, and reduce both total cholesterol and low-density cholesterol in your blood.
• Saturated and trans fats are "less healthy", and increase your total and low-density cholesterol.

They also provide useful information about sources of fats:

Monounsaturated fat: Olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil, avocados, nuts and seeds Polyunsaturated fat: Vegetable oils (such as safflower, corn, sunflower, soy and cottonseed oils), nuts and seeds Omega-3 fatty acids: Fatty, cold-water fish (such as salmon, mackerel and herring), flaxseeds, flax oil and walnuts Saturated fat: Animal products (such as meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, dairy products, lard and butter), and coconut, palm and other tropical oils Trans fat: Partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, commercial baked goods (such as crackers, cookies and cakes), fried foods (such as doughnuts and french fries), shortening and margarine Dietary cholesterol: Animal products (such as meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, dairy products, lard and butter)

Suggestions:

• Saute with olive oil instead of butter.
• Use olive oil in salad dressings and marinades. Use canola oil when baking.
• Sprinkle slivered nuts or sunflower seeds on salads instead of bacon bits.
• Snack on a small handful of nuts rather than potato chips or processed crackers. Or try peanut butter or other nut-butter spreads — nonhydrogenated — on celery, bananas, or rice or popcorn cakes. [Note: I believe that some peanut butter products are, regrettably, hydrogenated, and thus sources of trans fat.]
• Add slices of avocado, rather than cheese, to your sandwich. [I endorse this idea!]
• Prepare fish such as salmon and mackerel, which contain monounsaturated and omega-3 fats, instead of meat one or two times a week.
• Do not consume large amounts of any fats; fats add excess calories.
• Butter or margarine? Answer: Margarine, provided you choose one without any trans fat.

Stephan's Whole Health Source My Summary: some major studies that relate reduced saturated fats to reduced cholesterol and heart problems are flawed, or actually indicate the opposite.

[Note: Stephan's blog is directed towards medical students, but the conclusions are easy enough to understand. - Arch]

American Heart Association My Summary: no summary information, but a plethora of minutiae (which would be obviously interesting to specialists). Perhaps their Fats and Heart Disease Bulletin for the public is hidden somewhere I (and The Public) cannot easily find it. If nobody else, these folks, at least, should give us an unambiguous statement about the facts. Penn State at Hershey My Summary: eat a low-fat, high fiber diet. Trans fat is identified as definitely unhealthy. Recommendations

• Choose lean, protein-rich foods such as soy, fish, skinless chicken, very lean meat, and fat free or 1% dairy products.
• Eat foods that are naturally low in fat such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
• Get plenty of soluble fiber such as oats, bran, dry peas, beans, cereal, and rice.
• Limit fried foods, processed foods, and commercially prepared baked goods (donuts, cookies, crackers).
• Limit animal products such as egg yolks, cheeses, whole milk, cream, ice cream, and fatty meats (and large portions of meats).
• Look at food labels, especially the level of saturated fat. Avoid or limit foods high in saturated fat.
• Look on food labels for words like "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" -- these foods are loaded with bad fats and should be avoided.
• Liquid vegetable oil, soft margarine, and trans fatty acid-free margarine are preferable to butter, stick margarine, or shortening.
• Children under age 2 should NOT be on a fat-restricted diet because cholesterol and fat are thought to be important nutrients for brain development.

[Generally a disappointing report from Hershey Medical Center, which enjoys great admiration as a center of health education. Still, the suggestions, in line with 20th-century research, are not terrible. Some sources say that eggs, milk, cream, etc are not bad, and possibly good for you: see below. Finally, this report is almost identical with the NY Times article below.]

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics My Summary: Excessive fat intake is linked to obesity and certain cancers. Saturated and trans fats are are bad. Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats are good.

[Again, not very informative, and restricted to conventional wisdom.]

New York Times

[Article essentially the same as that of Penn State at Hershey. Someone has been copying their homework assignment, but who?]

National Institutes of Health Women's Health Initiative My Summary: Reducing Total Fat Intake May Have Small Effect on Risk of Breast Cancer, No Effect on Risk of Colorectal Cancer, Heart Disease, or Stroke.

[Study was terminated prematurely, because some of the treaments (not related to diet, but to estrogen, etc) had to be discontinued.]

BBC Health My Summary: Keep total fats low. Avoid saturated fats. Sweets and juices are bad for your teeth.

[At least the bit about sweets and juices was refreshingly different.]

Coconut Research Center My Summary: coconut oil, unlike the majority of saturated fats, has a different fatty acid structure, which makes it actually more beneficial to use than most other oils. Recommendations:

• Once mistakenly believed to be unhealthy because of its high saturated fat content, it is now known that the fat in coconut oil is a unique and different from most all other fats and possesses many health giving properties. It is now gaining long overdue recognition as a nutritious health food.
• Furthermore, saturated fats might not be the villains they were thought to be. (Certainly, cooking with saturated fats minimizes the free radical problem.) And eggs and dairy products could be a part of a healthy diet.

[I'm just as cautious about adopting their recommendations as I am suspicious of the opposite recommendations of more conventional sources. On one hand, coconut research is (naturally) funded by the coconut industry. On the other hand, if any of these claims are false or misleading, refutations will surely be forthcoming soon. I'm planning to enjoy a bit of cholesterol and coconut oil --which is great to cook with-- until and unless the AHA or the ADA or AXA comes out against these recommendations. Note: Eggs and dairy products should be used in moderation, but that's true about anything.]

Archimedes