Unobjective Observer

Full Fat Milk good for the heart

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/04/full-fat-dairy-for-cardiovascular.html

Fat & Sugar are bad? Yeah, I prefer starvation…

The misconception that one should avoid fats and sugars come from the diet industry and the itty bitty peak of the food pyramid. The two organizations’ reasons are the same though with different motives.

The primary reason is that they know people are lazy. Seriously, responsible nutrition programs wouldn’t encourage consumption of saturated fats and sugar laden foods but there is no need to villainize them. Both provide dense caloric intake and can be quite useful in many scenarios. One scenario they are not good for is people who have an abundance of food and a sedentary lifestyle, ie America.
I will go along with the idea that people buying into these diets and folllowing the food pyramid may need to be told to minimize fat/sugar intake but only because my confidence in the average American to eat responsibly, particularly with respect to these foods is quite low.
Why am I bothering writing this then? Because when people stop eating sugar/fat heavy foods they rarely turn to vegetables and whole grains, they look for substitutes. Substitutes that often contain all manners of products the human body wasn’t built to process and long term results aren’t in or in the case of most artificial sweeteners, don’t look good (Splenda being the exception). Is it better to eat a bag of baked lays or drink a cola made with cane sugar, I would lean toward the cola.

The moral of the story remains to balance the calories consumed with you calories expended while trying to eat foods with ingredients you can pronounce. Eating responsibly need not be bland, it simply needs to be paired with a responsibly active lifestyle.

Beauty and the Tramp stamps of approval

This post is a continuation of a series exploring several questionable notions the American populace holds in regard to proper nutrition. This post targets the following:

• Stamps of Approval are Important: Various consumer organizations should certify that items bought are part of a balanced diet and those products can be eaten without further thought. 

Please bear with me if I begin to wax politicosophical as this post has implications beyond the pathway of food to your esteemed and collective bellies.

There are two facts in the case:

1. The Constitution of the United States was put in place to protect her citizens from the marketing machinations of manipulative miscreants via it’s overarching goals of protecting against force and fraud.
2. “Trusted” organizations, governmental and not, place their seal (not to be confused with the singer that was too aggressively kissed by a very thorny rose) of approval on various foods certifying different components of said food to fit certain guidelines.

Now, the Constitution at it’s most basic interpretation (satisfying both wings of the ugly vulture known as our political machine) would tend to support that it is bad to lie about items and thus safeguards should be put in place to sanctify the message being preached to the largely uninformed proletariat masses.  Perhaps we can all agree that the federal government does indeed have a role to play in the food industry whether you are a Constitution touting Tea-Partier or regulation revering big government fan boy, and that is to protect the American people from putting false pretenses into their bodies at the table above and beyond watching CNN.

The question then becomes whether:

a) Is the government doing a good job with what things they certify?

b) Do companies accurately represent an appropriate certification with their packaging, and other aspects of advertising?

c) If the government is already taking a role (whether or not they’re doing a good job), which 3rd party organizations (AHA, Breast Cancer Awareness, FairTrade) have anything productive to say and which are merely themselves cooked up fancy sounding organizations with catchy acronyms to lay misleading auspices about a product?

One quick example is that a chocolate covered Pop Tart laden heavily with high fructose corn syrup is “part of a balanced breakfast.”  And yes, that is true if you are also including that you’re only eating 1/2 of a pop tart, eating a cup or two of berries, some baby carrots with peanut butter, and a small glass of milk.  But in no way shape or form does a pop tart filled with fake chocolate at all represent the composition of healthy eating.  Why would someone put a seal on this? Who knows, perhaps the guidelines aren’t very rigorous or there are loopholes abounding. There are myriad reasons why this and many other products have labels slapped on the outside to calm the collective and overly preserved minds of the average shopper, but they are on there to sell a product and not to sell you a free education.

The point of this post isn’t to mobilize the masses in revolt against the organizations that toss their cheap sea mammal pseudonyms around at anyone that bats an eye.  But rather, the point is to encourage you to not take labeled foods at face value and to think to yourself how this would fit into your overall dietary scheme on its own merit.

Or Tide clothes detergent claiming “Dermatologist Tested”, Okay, great what were the results?!?  It’s unfounded statements that claim a scientific approach from self interested companies that really get my goose, and if you think about it and look closely, they’re ubiquitous.  

Keep on, eatin’ on.

Bigger is Better

This post is a continuation of a series of posts highlighting some common sense flaws in the American dietary psyche. 

Briefly, I’m going to attempt to illustrate that the average American will in fact choose bigger when given two options. *Sidebar: It really irritates me that Starbucks calls their small a “tall.”* How shall I convince the readership that there is in fact a correlation between American taste preferences and size? Well, back when I frequented Hardee’s in my unenlightened days their drink/fry sizes started in Medium and went up to several gradations of “extra” large to ensure adequate diuretic hydration.  Apparently 1/4-er pounders at McDonald’s are no longer in high fashion and have abdicated their throne of meaty metric to a whopping 1/3 lb angus patty.  I could go on and on, and I will about other things, but if you are an American citizen that has been above ground anytime since the Cuban Missile Crisis when you wanted to test out your really gnarly bomb shelter, you either realize that portions have become gargantuan or, in the words of my belovedly bearded Hangover friend Allen, a re-tard.

Now that we’ve effectively established the premise that portions are large, let’s think about how they became that way…Natural selection is a topic that I have quite the love/hate relationship with.  For thousands of years natural selection was highly relevant to humankind by weeding out those unfit to sustain lives for themselves in the wild.  Eventually our societies became sedentary to the point that we were producing food in excess and sectors evolved that focused on creating niceties, many that we now consider to be necessities.  Somewhere between that time and now on would have thought that evolution would dictate an approach toward food that extended above and beyond hoarding and gorging.  I’m bored? Better grab a snack.  Big day tomorrow? Better make sure I eat plenty the night before.  We constantly have the mentality that food is scarce and we need to center our lives around this notion. On a parallel track people began to work regular hours and thus live a more predictable lifestyle that somehow resulted in the development of three meals a day.  Once the two parallel paths converged, eating a lot and 3 meals, the natural consequence became big portions that continue to increase in size as society by and large is better able to afford mass quantities of food.  This has been even further spurred to the fore in our climate of highly mechanized and efficient Agro-business that is engineered to be highly productive and needlessly subsidized leading to dirt cheap food.

Anyhow, why do I care whether or not people are eating big portions?  Well, I used to eat big portions and still to an extent do.  Big portions are wasteful and habit forming, and while I do way more than I’d ever really care to about gastro-intestinal anatomy and secretions I can’t empirically state that stomach size or capacity can increase or decrease with respect to intake.  However, I can relay personal experience to know that it does, whether this has to do with basic drives in the brain or physical manifestations in the gut, I don’t know.  But my point is that those of us accustomed to eating large portions can gradually bring the size of portions down to more modest levels.  Also, the very notion of being “full” propagates this obsession we have of large portions.  When food is in abundance we need to eat in order to satisfy hunger rather than fill to the seams to bursting.  You look at all the fat kids in America and if they had a magical cause-effect mirror there would be large portions, high fructose corn syrup, electronics, and preservatives looking them all square in the eye.  

3 Meals is neither scientifically based nor was it sent from the sky inscribed on golden tablets, and it is silly to carry forward archaic traditions based largely upon irrelevant evolutionary tendencies into an age as informationally advanced as this one.

I keep dodging the question, “Why should I care?”

• If you’re fat, you could start focusing on ordering smaller portions and not getting your feelings hurt by the absence of the oh-so-reassuring that fullness gives you as it cajoles you into thinking that all is right in the world.
• If you’re a taxpayer (one of the 52%), as healthcare becomes more socialized more tax dollars will be diverted to its cause.  Obesity causes a lot of diseases that do not kill quickly, which unlike smoking, will place a heavy burden on you.
• If you’re an employer, soon will be the day when obese people will have rights and if my shiny new political barometer is correct, they will organize into groups like unions and fight to not be “discriminated against.”  My day entails standing, moving, and presenting a healthy appearance, if one of my employees becomes obese then there is little chance that he/she will be optimally representing and functioning within their role in the business.  

Maybe after reading this, you still won’t care or think about your portion size or satiety level.  Your choice.  But if you do, you’ll feel better throughout the day and probably have a more positive body image and long term health status.

**The love side of my “natural selection” ambivalence is that it theoretically would weed out certain people beyond those annually honored at the Darwin awards.  I’m not so cruel as to wish an untimely end to those weeded out, just that they’d refrain from producing, but more so raising, progeny.

Protein is King

If one is going to eat flesh, freshly killed is the way to go.  However, coming by flesh worthy of eating is becoming more and more a difficult undertaking.

First things second; Protein is indeed an important part of a diet.  Why? Well, unlike most animals, humans utilize a number of amino acids that are crucial to our proper functioning.  Also, our bodies rely on certain vitamins pretty much only found in animal products, B12 I’m looking at you. Though eating enough B9 (folic acid) can compensate for the majority of lost functionality, it really isn’t the way our bodies are designed to operate.  Thus, veganism, is not a particularly healthy alternative either, besides, who trusts extremists?

So why does the American psyche trick us into thinking that in order to be strong we need to eat items consisting of the same amino acids arranged in particular ways?  Well, humans are visual and like to follow things that are visually intuitive.  I see a big juicy steak and I imagine that my biceps look somewhat and there you have my logic for wanting to consume a slab of meat to beef up my arms.

The fact of the matter is that in eating most meats, particularly the ones that most closely resemble what we imagine our muscles to look like, we are taking in all kinds of things (fat, cholesterol, hormones, preservatives) that we don’t picture going into our bodies.  Our obsession with meat is a perversion of the old adage: “You are what you eat.”  I say that not because it doesn’t hold true, it is true enough, but that it doesn’t represent the truth that we envision it to.

The same proteins can be had from any number of legumes, beans, and other organic matter without most of the ancillary ill effects, organic is even better.

If you are going to eat meat (I do), eat a diet heavy in fish low on the food chain (they’ll typically be whiter).  Also, try to eat animals that were naturally raised (killed in the wild is better, but let’s be realistic).  The reason that it matters whether you are eating a free-range chicken, grass raised beef, and other historically traditional raised creatures once again goes back to the notion that everything you ingest makes itself a part of your body and there are numerous practices taking place in industrialized farming that you’ll want to avoid.

• Cortisol (stress hormone)- most of us tend to have enough stress in our daily lives without artificially adding it.  Cows may be dumb, but when they spend all of their time tightly confined and eating an unnatural diet (corn) their bodies respond by producing cortisol, and their version is close enough to the human version to have the same effects on our bodies.  For some relatively unknown reasons, high levels of stress hormone results in fat gain in traditional trouble spots (abdomen and love handles primarily). If you want to see exaggerated effects of too much cortisol, look up Cushing’s Syndrome. 
• Anti-biotics-  What’s wrong with anti-biotics? Sound good to me.  Well, the reason that animals survived for millenia without anti-biotics is that they weren’t crammed together and wallowing in feces and ingesting the same bacteria that they previously excremented, they weren’t eating their own shit. That is in and of itself disturbing, but additionally if you think long term you don’t want to be aiding in the creation of an highly resistant Super Bacteria which is what will happen/is happening.
• Growth Hormone- I really don’t have any evidence of this affecting humans in terrible ways, but it is cruel to animals as different structures develop at different rates and it effectively cripples their movement.

Try not to fall into the typical American trap of thinking only in terms of costs in the short run, take into account impacts on your health and the environment.  Remember, ever dollar you spend is a vote for your values, such is the great democracy of capitalism (however, corn subsidies provided by the gov’t that make corn cheap to put in feed and every other product undermine the market significantly), and the more often that you choose to “vote” for products you believe in the more likely it is that costs for those products will go down in the long run.  

**If you see a pun, however bad, I intended it.  I loathe the practice of dropping a clearly intentional play on words and then qualifying it with a pass at non-intention.

Common Sense Eating-Flaws in American Perceptions

Pervasive Misconceptions:

• Protein is King: Meals should be centered around a protein, preferably freshly killed.
• Bigger is Better: Portions should be the driving point of an acceptable meal.
• Stamps of Approval are Important: Various consumer organizations should certify that items bought are part of a balanced diet and those products can be eaten without further thought.
• Fat and Sugar are Bad: Foods containing fats and sugars should be avoided at all costs, they lead to obesity
• Eating Organic is only for Yhippies*: Life is made unequivocally better through science, only extremist lefties are afraid of agri-capitalism.

There are many other fallacies bought into by the American public, please post them in the comment section.  My next post will lay out the rationale and arm-chair science that debunk these commonly held beliefs. 

*A “yhippie” in this sense is an amalgamation of yuppies and hippies that can afford to buy things they don’t need in order to establish for themselves a moral high ground that exists only in their delusional heads and PETA rallies.

Pain “Killers”

It’s kind of hard to juxtapose,

the sun’s rays, with unseen death throes.

One life of promise being filled,

against a future, that never will.

Who ever thought it could be this way?

A supernova dimmed, and passed away.

There’s so much he had in store,

his many dreams, will be dreamt no more.