This post is going to be one of those potpourri posts that allows me to catch up on a few issues that aren’t significant enough to require a post for each one.

Lubricant

I want to start out with a funny Q & A that I can across while catching up on my The Spectator reading on one of the countless flights I’ve been on lately.  As most of you who are regular readers of this blog doubtless know, I am a huge The Spectator fan.  I love the writing, the book reviews, the movie reviews, and even the advice column.  Said column is written by a woman named Mary Killen who deals with the social conundrums of the British gentry class.  Her columns are not of the ‘Me and my uncle got in a fight after I yelled at him for crushing my cigarettes during sex. He ran off but I still love him. What can I do to get him back?’ variety that are more typical over here.  Those Mary routinely deals with are of a more genteel variety, and she typically dispenses invaluable advice as she does to the questioner below:

Q. Please can you advise on a matter that, although seemingly trivial, is causing some tension in our household. Like many families, rather than spreading butter on our toast at breakfast time, we have switched to one of the supposedly healthier alternative low-fat spreads. Our problem is by what name should we refer to this new product? My wife continues to ask if I’d please pass the butter, but as it isn’t butter, I find this irksome. If I refer to it as margarine, she is annoyed by the implication that we are using some inferior low-quality butter substitute. To request that someone passes the low-fat spread is hardly elegant. Please, Mary, can you advise on the correct terminology?

C.S., Woodbridge, Suffolk

Why not use the word ‘lubricant’? The products to which you refer are, technically, lubricants, and when you have guests they will enjoy laughing at your use of this term.

Hilarious, no?’  And a great idea.  We never, ever use margarine or its low-fat equivalent, but now I wish we did just so I could call it ‘lubricant.’  Perhaps from now on I’ll start asking: Is this butter or is it lubricant?’  The possibilities are endless. I encourage everyone to start using the term.’  Makes this schlock sound like what it really is.

New shipping policy

As many of you may know, we have a products page on our website that can be accessed from the tab at the top of this blog labeled, appropriately enough, Products.  We never intended to be in the ‘products’ business, but when our first book Protein Power came out, our clinic in Little Rock was inundated with phone calls from readers wanting to know how they could purchase the specific supplements we used with our patients.  We began providing these supplements to readers who called from all over the place.

When we moved our clinic to Boulder, Colorado in 1998, we changed our practice from a local one to a more national one since, thanks to the success of Protein Power, people began coming to us from all over.  We put up a website listing the supplements we used so that people could purchase them directly instead of having to go through our receptionist, who wasn’t always available.  We have maintained some kind of online presence since.   But we have never really sold enough product to make it worth our fooling with.   We’ve always done it kind of as a service to those people who wanted to use the very supplements we used ourselves and used with our patients.

Since we never really paid much attention to the products or how many we sold, we simply set the price at whatever the different manufacturers recommended and added whatever the shipping and handling actually was to that price.  The shipping and handling fees were pretty high, but that’s what they actually were.  We backed up and looked at the whole operation a few weeks ago and discovered we were selling more product than we thought we had been, even with the high shipping.  When we figured our costs, we decided that we could underwrite some of the shipping and still pay expenses, including paying the outfit actually doing the warehousing and shipping.

We instituted new pricing for our shipping.  It is now $5.00 on any orders from $0.01-$100.00.  $3.00 for orders between $100.01 to $200.00.  And free shipping on orders over $$200.00. As those of you who have previously purchased from our website know, this is a huge decrease in the $10-$20 it used to cost.

For those who do purchase through this site and for those who enter through Amazon.com, a heartfelt thanks.  Virtually everything we make goes back into the site in upgrades and tech work.  These two sources of income are the only ones we have for this site since I decided that all the Google ads I used to have on the site were tacky and ditched them.

Just another reason I hate the government

Again, most readers of this blog know my libertarian leanings and sentiments, so I’m against vastly more government policies than I’m for.  One that really ticks me off to the max, however, is that governments (local, state and federal) all pass laws that they themselves don’t have to obey.  If congress had to abide by the laws congress passed, there would be a whole lot fewer passed.

On October 15 I had to mail in my tax return that I had to get extended because I had’t received all the documentation I needed to complete it.  When I got my completed tax return from my accountant, I discovered that I owed an extra $48 above and beyond what I had already forked over.  I was traveling and filed my return electronically but I had to somehow pay the $48.   My accountant sent me information on how I could pay electronically, which I did.   Of course I ran afoul of one of the many rules that the government plays by that it prevents others from playing by.   I don’t know how many people know this, but when you purchase goods or services on a credit card, the merchant who accepts the credit card has to pay a fee on each transaction.  This fee is typically about 2 percent.  So, if you buy $200 of groceries on your credit card, the grocer has to pay $4.00 to the credit card company.

Some clever merchants figured out long ago that they could avoid paying this fee by simply adding it to the price for anyone who paid by credit card.  So there would be two fees for any given product: one fee for payment by cash or check and another (about 2 percent higher) for those paying with credit cards.

Can’t have that, says the government.  Laws are passed so that no one can charge more to those who purchase via credit card.  (One wonders how much lobbying the big banks, MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express did to get these laws passed?)  So now, if you pay by credit card, you get the same price as someone paying by cash or check.  And the merchant eats the 2 percent.

But not the government, the same government that mandates that those in the private sector can’t charge more for credit card purchases.

As you can see below from the screen shot of my payment to the IRS, they charged me a ‘convenience fee’ of $3.89 on my $48.00 tax payment, which calculates to a little over 8 percent.  Just let a merchant try to squeeze a paltry (in comparison) convenience fee of 2 percent out of a buyer, and the same government is all over them.

What’s probably worse, is that I’ll bet the government beats the credit card companies into a much lower rate than the 2 percent most merchants pay.

Blog Comments

Once again, it’s time for me to whine about the comments.  Only this time it’s not a whine, I’ve solved the problem.  I think.  I’ve started just posting the comments pretty much as they come in.  I don’t know if I’ve developed a greater readership lately or what, but each post seems to generate about 200 comments, all of which I read.  But if I had to comment on each one, it would take me vastly longer than it took to write the post.  And I’m assuming that most people would rather read new posts than plow through the comments looking for my answers to specific questions.  I’ll continue to answer a comment here or there, but don’t feel ill used if your comment isn’t one of the ones answered because I simply don’t have the time to answer them all.

I had coffee a week or so ago with Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal.  He suggested I set up the comments to auto-post as they come in, which is how he does it on his blog.  He says it makes for a better dialogue among readers because they get instant feedback.  I’m tempted to do this, but I’m afraid if I do, I won’t read all the comments myself.  They’ll just hit the blog, and I wont know what’s going on.  Plus, nasty comments and spam (of which I get plenty despite a great spam filter) could make their way in.  If my new method doesn’t work, I may give Richard’s suggestion a try.  Any folks out there have a preference?

Finally, and once again, for the zillionth time for those who haven’t read it yet, I can’t make diagnoses and recommend treatment over the internet, so please don’t ask.  Thanks.

My nightstand, real and electronic

I realized in looking through the last few posts that I’ve fallen down on listing the books I’ve been reading. I’ve been traveling a huge amount lately (in fact, I’m writing this post at 37,000 ft between Dallas and Phoenix), so I’ve cut back a bit on my reading.  I usually stack up all my magazine reading and read it on a plane so I can jettison it along the way and lighten my load.  Since I’ve been traveling as much as I have lately, I still bring the magazines, but my book reading has suffered.

I’ve been reading most of my books on the Kindle app on my iPad simply because I don’t have the room to bring books on my carry-on along with all the magazines.  I’m somewhat limited in the books I get on Kindle because I absolutely refuse to pay more than $9.99 for an electronic book.  MD thinks I’m unreasonable, but I don’t care.  That’s my cutoff.  So, if any of the books discussed below can be had on the Kindle for less than ten bucks, that’s probably how I read them.  If they’re more than that, I got a real copy of the book.  We’re talking fiction here.  When I get non-fiction books, I almost always get the real thing so I can mark them up and go to the index and page back to what I’ve already read or check footnotes – all of which are difficult to do with a Kindle.

I’ve been working my way through The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf, who graciously sent me a copy.  Since I have the hard copy and since I’ve been on the road so much, I haven’t finished it because I haven’t had it with me.  I very much like what I’ve read so far and plan to review it here when I’m finished.

I’m also reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From in fits and starts because I have it in the hardcover version as well.  Steven (who is an avid golfer) and I have been trying to figure out when we can get together and play on one another’s home course.  He’s on a brutal (scheduling-wise) book tour and I’m all over the place myself.  The book, like all his books, is excellent, and I highly recommend it.  If you haven’t read his The Ghost Map, you should.

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22, which I loved.  It starts out with his ruminating on his own death, which is kind of creepy since he found out he has terminal esophageal cancer in the early days of  his book tour.  And I’m sure it was growing away as he wrote the very words contemplating his own demise.  (If you haven’t read of his discovery of his disease, you can read about it in his own words here.) I especially enjoyed the last chapter of the book because it describes Hitchens’ changing his mind politically as he gained more experience and wisdom with aging. His description of the creeching that burst forth from his former political cronies and allies who felt he was a traitor to their liberal causes is something to behold.  I didn’t enjoy it because of Hitchens turn from liberalism because his politics and mine certainly aren’t the same, but because his description of what he went through is pretty much the same thing long time vegans go through when they publicly renounce their religion and begin eating meat. Most of you know the tough road that Lierre Keith has been tredding.

Reading Hitchens’ book inspired me to pick up copies of Martin Amis’s Money and his father, Kingsley Amis’s book Girl, 20.  I’ve just started both and they’re both hardcover so are sitting on my nightstand while I’m all over the place.

I’m slowing picking my way through a difficult but worthwhile and enlightening book called Bureaucracy in Representative Government.  It’s an older book published in 1971 (and recently republished, I noticed when checking Amazon) when economists, in a fury of jealousy at physicists, all thought they could prove economic laws with equations.  The book is equation and math heavy, but despite that is a thought-provoking read.  The author’s thesis is that bureaucrats running big government departments (including those at the very top, i.e., secretary of agriculture, treasury and all the rest) have the same goals and aspirations as all of us.  They want to increase their income, authority and prestige.  In business, one does this by being a better business person, negotiating deals with suppliers (which I’m learning all about now that I’m in the appliance business), pricing product correctly and running a profitable operation with good growth.  If you are the head of a bureaucratic agency, you achieve these goals – more income, authority and prestige – by increasing the number of people in your agency and increasing your agency’s budget.  As a consequence, no one in a position of bureaucratic authority wants to see his/her agency diminish in size, scope or budget.  Therefore, due to human nature as applied to bureaucracies, the size will always grow, making governments at all levels larger and larger.  It’s the natural state of things.  An interesting but sobering book that, due to its complexity, probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

I read Peter Robinson’s latest book, Bad Boy, which I enjoyed much more than his last.  If you enjoy Brit detective fiction, any of Peter Robinson’s books are worth a read.  If you’ve been put off of Brit detective fiction because you have trouble understanding the British police hierarchy, try Robinson.  He grew up in England, but has spent the last 30 years in North America, so his books are much more accommodating to American readers than those of many other UK mystery authors.

Speaking of Brit authors, I just finished Quintin Jardin’s Death’s Door, a convoluted novel with a plethora of police characters that are all either married or are ex-spouses of one another.  It was okay, but it will be a while before I pick up another of his.

I recently read Long for this World, a semi-jaundiced view of the anti-aging movement and Aubrey de Grey, one of its leading proponents.  Some halfway decent science and a lot of really great insight into de Grey, who apparently consumes almost nothing but beer and constantly floats around in an alcohol-induced, semi-conscious state.  If you’re interested in the anti-aging movement, I recommend this book.  If you really want to read the best book on anti-aging I’ve ever read (and I’ve read them all), pick up a copy of Stephen Austad’s Why We Age.  It’s one of the best written and most interesting books I’ve ever read.  Pick it up and you’ll find out how Paleo man lived as long as we do.  You will then be prepared when you present the health benefits of the Paleo diet to someone and he/she responds inanely with, yes, but they all died in their 20s.

Last night I had one of those wonderful experiences that can be experienced only by book freaks such as I (plus it tells you a lot about the dullness of my everyday life that I can get worked up by something like this).  I was laying in bed at about 1 AM, wide awake reading between three different electronic books on my iPad, none of which could really hold my attention.  I was reading on The Dark Vineyard, an acclaimed mystery set in the French countryside, Billy Boyle, a mystery series that has promise, set in WWII (Billy Boyle is a Boston cop who ends up in the army and acting as a sleuth in various WWII settings), and All the Dead Voices, a mystery set in Dublin.  (BTW, Billy Boyle is free on the Kindle.) None of these were really grabbing me, and I was wanting to read the latest Michael Connolly book The Reversal, but at $14.99 it violated my never-over-ten-bucks-for-an-electronic-book rule.  I was sorely tempted, but I held off.  I was searching for all manner of mysteries and everything violated the ten-dollar rule.  As I was looking at one (can’t remember which one now), I noticed a John Lawton book down in the section in Amazon that shows what other people liked who had read the book in question.  I about broke my finger navigating to the page and found that a new John Lawton Inspector Troy novel, The Lily of the Field, was available on Kindle, and that the price was only $9.99.  My lucky night.  I downloaded that sucker and read until 3 AM when I finally forced myself to put it down and try to sleep.

(Despite my wallowing in euphoria at having found the latest Lawton book, I couldn’t help but reflect on the technology advances that had made it possible.  Here I was, propped up in bed in the middle of the night in pitch darkness (except for the glow of my iPad), my beloved wife sacked out next to me, and I was able to search the entirety of books available, select the one I wanted, and had it sent to me wirelessly, and in just a few seconds I was reading away. Couldn’t have happened just a few years ago.  Ain’t technology grand?)

If you want a great mystery series set circa WWII, you can’t do any better than John Lawton’s books.  Start with his first in the Inspector Troy series, Black Out.  You won’t be disappointed.

I can’t end this book discussion without giving you a couple more recommendations of books I’ve finished that I’ve found to be excellent.  Michael Lewis’s The Big Short provides a look at some of the people who were smart enough to make fortunes during the recent financial crash by betting against the supposed ‘smart’ guys.   They were able to see through the government obfuscation and the PR of those who ran the big investment banks and come out the other end many millions of dollars richer.   I love real life David verses Goliath stories where the small, smart people conquer the big, bluff idiots.  As always, Michael Lewis knows how to tell a tale and keep it funny and engaging.  His description at the end of the book of his lunch with John Gutfreud, Lewis’s former boss at Salomon Brothers, whom Lewis wrote about in his first giant bestseller Liar’s Poker, is alone worth the price of the book.  A brief sample:

Hard as it was for him to enjoy my company, it was harder for me not to enjoy his:  He was still tough, straight, and blunt as a butcher.  He’d helped to create a monster but he still had in him a lot of the old Wall Street, where people said things like “a man’s word is his bond.” On that Wall Street people didn’t walk out of their firms and cause trouble for their former bosses by writing a book about them.  “No,” he said, “I think we can agree about this: Your fucking book destroyed my career and made yours.”  With that, the former king of a former Wall Street lifted the plate that held his appetizer and asked, sweetly, “Would you like a deviled egg?”

The most profound book I’ve read in a long while is Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich.  This book has answered a question I’ve been wrestling with for ages, which is why other countries that don’t have the same economic engine we do are doing so much better.  If you wonder why the vastly more socialistic Brits, Germans and French have stronger currencies than do we Americans despite their having inferior economic systems and massive government intervention, taxation and regulation, the author of this book provides the answer.  This is an unusual book in that all the people I’ve recommended it to love it.  That includes liberals, Tea Party members, true libertarians and fiscal conservatives.  I haven’t given it to any hardcore, social conservatives yet simply because I don’t really know any. (Or if I do know them, they’re keeping their views secret.) The message of the author – who is a West Point graduate and retired army colonel with 23 years service – appeals across ideological lines because it is so obviously on point.  Here is the introduction to Washington Rules, a chapter titled “The Unmaking of a Company Man,” which has been online in a number of places, gives the real flavor of the book and tells why the author wrote it.  Read it and become hooked as I was, then get the book.  You won’t regret it.

So, there you have it: lubricants, shipping, comments, our government, and books all in one post.  I’ll be back to more traditional nutritional posting next time out.

The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare.  At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn’t really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day.  Doctors didn’t routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn’t pay much attention to it.  In fact, at that time – as I recall, anyway – the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl.  I was in medical school back then, and I don’t really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids.  I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It’s hard to believe in today’s world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public’s awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat.  Both – the article explained – were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it’s amazing how it drips with misinformation.  At the time, however, most people – physicians included – accepted it as gospel.  Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

I could write a blog longer than the article (and it’s a long article) describing and dissecting all the many errors, but I’m going to go over just one.  And that one just briefly.  But before I get to that, let me show you just a few of interesting small parts of the article beginning with the very first sentence:

Cholesterol is proved deadly, and our diet may never be the same.

Hmm.  Dietary cholesterol has been proved pretty benign.  But the writers are correct about our diet being changed.

And take a look at this:

For decades, researchers have been trying to prove conclusively that cholesterol is a major villain in this epidemic [heart disease].  It has not been easy.

Have you ever seen a better example of the confirmation bias at work.  We know cholesterol is a problem, and we’re going to prove it no matter what it takes.  So what if the evidence keeps blowing up in our faces, if we work hard enough, we can by God prove what we know to be true.

Although most cholesterol found in the body is produced in the liver, 20% to 30% generally comes from the food we eat.

Actually, the figure is about 15 percent that comes from the food we eat.  Most cholesterol is made in the liver, but not all.  Virtually every cell in the body has the ability to make cholesterol, because it is so important to survival.

The main thrust of the article is about a study demonstrating that lowering cholesterol levels brought about a decrease in cardiac death rate.  Here it is presented in the breathless prose of the Time writers:

That was the reason for the N.H.L.B.I, study. The elaborate, ten-year program recruited 3,806 men between the ages of 35 and 59, all of whom had cholesterol levels above 265 mg per deciliter of blood (the average for U.S. adults is 215 to 220). Half the men were put on daily doses of cholestyramine, an unpleasant, cholesterol-lowering drug that was mixed with orange juice and taken six times a day. One participant likened taking it to swallowing “orange-flavored sand.” Among its side effects: constipation, bloating, nausea and gas. The other half received a similarly gritty placebo. Researchers had decided to use a drug rather than diet to lower cholesterol, because it would have been virtually impossible to control or measure the diet of so many men over so long a period. By the end of the study, the cholestyramine group had achieved an average cholesterol level 8.5% lower than that of the control group and had suffered 19% fewer heart attacks. Their cardiac death rate was a remarkable 24% lower than that of the placebo group.

The lesson is plain, says Dr. Charles Glueck, director of the University of Cincinnati Lipid Research Center, one of twelve centers that participated in the project: “For every 1% reduction in total cholesterol level, there is a 2% reduction of heart-disease risk.” This, says Project Director Basil Rifkind, is the evidence scientists have been waiting for. “It is a turning point in cholesterol-heart-disease research.”

Pretty powerful stuff, you might think.  Which is just what the authors of this article must have wanted you to think.  After all, a failed study doesn’t produce cover stories.

There are more than a few flies in this anti-cholesterol ointment, however.  Let’s take a look at what Gary Taubes writes about this study in Good Calories, Bad Calories:

In January 1984, the results of the trial were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.  Cholesterol levels dropped by an average of 4 percent in the control group – those men taking a placebo.  The levels dropped by 13 percent in the men taking cholestryramine.  In the control group, 158 men suffered non-fatal heart attacks during the study and 38 men died from heart attacks.  In the treatment group, 130 men suffered non-fatal heart attacks and only 30 died from them.  All in all, 71 men had died in the control group and 68 in the treatment group.  In other words, cholestryramine had improved by less than .2 percent the chance that any one of the men who took it would live through the next decade.  To call these results “conclusive,” as the University of Chicago biostatistician Paul Meier remarked, would constitute “a substantial misuse of the term.”  Nonetheless, these results were taken as sufficient by Rifkind, Steinberg and their colleagues [those who had been searching for ‘proof’ for decades that cholesterol causes heart disease] so they could state unconditionally that [Ancel] Keys had been right and that lowering cholesterol would save lives.

Aside from the lack of any real meaningful data, the authors tried to palm off what they had found from a drug study as being applicable to diet.  Again, from Good Calories, Bad Calories:

Pete Ahrens [a cholesterol researcher at Rockefeller University] called this extrapolation from a drug study to a diet “unwarranted, unscientific and wishful thinking.”  Thomas Chalmers, an expert on clinical trials who would later become president of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, described it to Science as an “unconscionable exaggeration of the data.”  In fact, the LRC investigators acknowledged in their JAMA article that their attempt to ascertain a benefit from diet alone had failed.

But that certainly didn’t keep them from trying.

Although there were several people mentioned in the Time article who were examples of the benefits of healthful, low-fat living, the star of the piece had to be Fred Shragai.

Fred Shragai, 59, of Encino, Calif., is a good example. Fourteen years ago, the prosperous real estate developer had a cholesterol level above 300 mg. At the time, he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, was overweight (202 lbs. on a 5-ft. 5-in. frame) and routinely put in five or six 14-hour, pressure-packed days a week at the office. Rich sauces and fatty meat were his standard fare for both lunch and dinner, and exercise meant reaching under the bed to grab from his stash of pretzels and potato chips. Shragai was a classic candidate for a heart attack, and at the age of 45, he had one. Nine years later he was hospitalized for an operation to bypass five seriously blocked coronary arteries. In desperation, Shragai enrolled himself in U.C.L.A.’s Center for Health Enhancement. By changing the way he lived, he was told, he could lower his cholesterol level and reduce his risk of another heart attack.

There was much to learn. Cholesterol, as Shragai found out, is packaged by the body in envelopes of protein, and only some of these packages are potentially harmful. The main culprit, LDL (for low-density lipoprotein), is the body’s oil truck, circulating in the blood, delivering fat and cholesterol to the cells. Studies have shown that the higher the level of LDL, the greater the risk of atherosclerosis. Another type of cholesterol package is called HDL (for high-density lipoprotein). It appears to play a salutary role, helping remove cholesterol from circulation and reducing the risk of heart disease. Shragai’s goal was to lower his level of LDL and raise his HDL.

Diet was a first step. To begin with, such cholesterol-rich foods as eggs and organ meats and most cheeses can directly add to the level of potentially harmful LDL. Fat has an even bigger impact, although the reasons are not well understood. Saturated fat tends to raise LDL levels. Butter, bacon, beef, whole milk, virtually any food of animal origin is high in saturated fat; so are two vegetable oils: coconut and palm.

Polyunsaturated fats, which are typically of vegetable origin, have the opposite effect; thus corn, safflower, soybean and sesame oils tend to lower the level of potentially dangerous LDL. Fish oils do the same. In the middle are the mono-unsaturated fats such as olive and peanut oils. These may lower LDL slightly, but tend to be neutral.

The amount of fiber in the diet also seems to influence cholesterol levels. “LDL cholesterol can be reduced 20% in people with high levels just by consuming a cup of oat bran a day,” says Dr. Jon Story of Purdue University. However, Story adds, “that does not mean you can go and eat whatever else you want.”

For reasons that are still under study, cholesterol levels are influenced by a number of life-style factors. For instance, regular exercise can significantly raise the level of protective HDL. Alas, a couple of push-ups a day will not do the trick, says Dr. Josef Patsch of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine: “You need sustained aerobic exercise for 20 minutes at least four times a week to really benefit.” A less strenuous way to raise HDL levels may be to have a daily shot or two of alcohol. “The evidence is indirect,” reports Epidemiologist Stephen Hulley of the University of California at San Francisco, “but social drinkers have HDL levels as much as 33% higher than those found in teetotalers.” On a more sober note, U.C.S.F.’s Dr. Richard Havel warns: “Anyone who recommends raising HDL by drinking is playing with fire.” Stress too has a detrimental effect. Studies have shown that the cholesterol levels of medical students peak at exam time, while accountants hit their high point around April 15.

By applying these lessons, says Shragai, “my life was totally changed.” Today the man who used to love steak says, “I won’t touch it.” At a restaurant, “if I choose fish, I ask the chef to skip the butter or please to sauté it in wine.” Every morning, regardless of weather, the man who once spurned exercise goes for an eight mile, two-hour hike through the wooded mountain trails near his home. He no longer smokes. His workdays average between eight and ten hours, but he insists, “I can absolutely stay away from the tension now. If I feel the pressure, I take off. Business associates get used to it; I set my own pace.” Shragai no longer lives in fear of a sudden heart attack: his blood pressure and pulse rate are down, and most remarkable, his cholesterol level has dropped to an exemplary 195.

Do a little Googling on Fred Shragai and a few things turn up.  Apparently, Mr. Shragai, a Holocaust survivor, was quite an interesting character.  In addition to being a successful businessman, he donned a Santa suit and entertained children around Christmastime.  As described in a December 1990 article in Orange Coast Magazine,

Shragai, in his late 60s, stands 5 feet 5 inches and weighs 165 pounds, down from his former rotund 200-plus since the doctor put Santa on a diet.  His beard and twinkling blue eyes are his own, he says proudly.

The article describes Mr. Shragai’s joy in his long-term job as Santa to many of his area’s poor residents.  He would visit houses, tell stories and bring presents.

“I’ll do this as long as I possibly can,” Shragai says, his eyes twinkling behind his Santa glasses. “After all, Santa can’t just quit.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that long.  Mr. Shragai died of a heart attack about two months later on Feb 8, 1991 at age 66.

You can read about his life in an article in the Guardian written by his daughter as she came to grips with his death.

Many people who were in Mr. Shragai’s condition – overweight, overworked and overfed – bet their lives that the promise made by the Time article would be fulfilled.  If they quit smoking, cut the fat from their diets, took up exercise and dropped their cholesterol levels, they would avoid an early death from heart disease.  As the Time article said about Mr. Shragai:

[he] no longer lives in fear of a sudden heart attack: his blood pressure and pulse rate are down, and most remarkable, his cholesterol level has dropped to an exemplary 195.

As if these changes undo the risk of heart attack.  We can see from Mr. Shragai’s unfortunate case that they don’t.

Basically, he bet his life – literally – on the recommendations of doctors who were responsible for most of the hype in the Time article.  It’s hard to say whether he won, lost or broke even on the bet, because we don’t know what the outcome would have been had Mr. Shragai continued on his previous path.  Or what would have happened had he gone on a low-carb diet instead.  Based on my years of experience, I would bet that he would have done better on the low-carb approach, but, as I say, there is no way to know for sure.

There are a couple of take-home messages from Mr. Shragai’s case.  The first is that we don’t really know what constitutes true risk for heart disease.  Reduction of blood pressure, weight and cholesterol levels – measures of risk in the estimation of most physicians – didn’t prevent a disastrous outcome.  The second, and, in my view, the most important is that when we make nutritional and lifestyle decisions, we are betting our lives that we’ve made the correct decision.  Even those maintaining their course are making the decision not to change.  Decisions precede actions, and actions definitely have consequences, which means decisions have consequences.

I’m betting my life that saturated fat is good for me and that carbs are bad.  I eat a ton of saturated fat and very few carbs (unless I’m being a very bad boy as I was last night when I indulged in some of my granddaughter’s birthday cake).  So, if Dean Ornish is right and I’m wrong, I could be in deep trouble and maybe live a dramatically shortened life.  But I don’t think so.  Why?  Because the indications that the low-carbohydrate diet is the correct diet for humans comes from so many different sources. (And that’s not even counting my years of hands-on care of many thousands of patients on such diets.)

If you look at the scientific literature, you find that the low-carbohydrate diet is, at worst, the equal of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet and at best triumphs over it in spectacular fashion.  If you look at the anthropological evidence, the health of early humans took a turn for the worse when agriculture (read: high-carbohydrate diet) came along.  Pasta, even whole-grain pasta, was the fast food of antiquity.  If you look at the evolutionary evidence, it’s pretty clear that the forces of natural selection molded us to function optimally on a higher-fat, higher-protein diet.  And, finally, if you just look at the human physiology and biochemistry involved, it is clear that a diet high in carbohydrates is not good for us.  Looking at all this graphically from one of my slides below, we can see that all the evidence vectors point to a low-carb diet as being the one most optimal for human health.  Can a low-fat, high-carb diet make this claim?  I don’t think so.  Though many misguided vegans try to make such a claim, their arguments are risible.

You can find a few studies that show a low-fat, high-carb diet performs OK, but where is the anthropological, evolutionary and biochemical data to confirm?  When deciding what diet to follow, remember: you’re betting you’re life.  Consequently, you should view the diet through the various lenses as laid out in the graphic above.  If a new diet looks acceptable through one or two lenses, but not the others, just stick with your low-carb diet and be done with it.

Had Mr. Shragai performed the above analysis, he probably would not have followed the diet he did.  As I wrote earlier, we have no idea as to what his outcome would have been had he gone on a low-carb diet instead of a low-fat one, but I can’t help but believe it would have been better.  Although Mr. Shragai’s case is that of but one individual, since this vapid 1984 Time article came out launching the jihad against fat and cholesterol, the entire country became unwitting subjects in a long-term experiment testing the hypothesis that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet is healthful.  And in the intervening 26 years, obesity has skyrocketed and type II diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, leading me and many others to say that the low-fat diet has failed.  At least as applied to large groups of subjects.

Let me sum up the take home message with an unrelated story that oddly illustrates the point.  When I was taking flying lessons years ago, the tower once told me to cross one runway we were stopped short of and proceed to the next one.  I goosed the engine and started across.  My instructor pushed on the brakes and stopped us and asked me what I was doing.  I said, “The tower told me to proceed to runway 15L.”  My instructor said, “Yes, but you didn’t look for traffic coming in on runway 15R (the runway we had to cross) before proceeding.  Here’s what you’ve got to learn.  If the pilot make a mistake, the pilot dies; if the control tower makes a mistake, the pilot dies.  Always check for yourself.”

Sobering words, but ones I remember.  The same applies to diet.  Don’t let Time magazine or anyone else tell you what to do.  It’s your life.  Don’t bet it heedlessly.

As anyone who regularly reads this blog can tell, I’ve been a bit hit and miss in posting lately.  The bride and I have been swamped with work on the Sous Vide Supreme project.  MD has been working with chefs to develop recipes along with creating a bunch herself; she has been editing a book on sous vide for the home cook written by yet another sous vide expert; she’s been posting on the Sous Vide Supreme blog (eggs the sous vide way); and, as you can see at the left, she’s been talking sous vide to anyone who will listen.  All this while she prepares for performing the Messiah in about two weeks.  I’ve been heavily involved in the business end of things, which is a never-ending task.  Plus, I’m the taster-in-chief.  Neither of us dreamed that this would turn into such a time-gobbling project after the development of the machine.  But it has.  It seems that we are spending twice as much time now working in some capacity on  Sous Vide Supreme than we ever did before – even when we were at our busiest.  I’m going to have to work harder on my time management if I expect to keep up with all the other projects – including this blog – that I have going.

Twitter

The sous vide time commitments have put a real hickey on my reading.  I’ve probably read less over the past four months than in any four month period of my life.  Instead of five or six books per week, I’m down to about two or three max.  I hate it.  I’m trying to keep up with my daily medical/scientific journal trawl, but that has even slacked off a bit.  When I do find something of interest, instead of blogging on it as I used to, I stick it up on my Twitter page.  I probably post 10-15 times per day on Twitter, so if you want to keep up on a moment-by-moment basis, follow me on Twitter.  If you have a problem thinking of yourself as a Twitter person, give it a try.  I dipped my toes in the Twitter waters with great hesitation, and now I love it.  I’ve found it extremely valuable because I find all kinds of new stuff daily.  You’ve got to be careful who you follow, however, or you can waste a ton of time.  If you get started, start following people who provide you with information you can use.  I avoid following people who do nothing but tell me what they ate for breakfast that day or what movie they’re going to see that night.  Sign up an give it a go. You don’t have to write anything (or tweet, as it’s called) if you don’t want to.  You can simply lurk and be the beneficiary of a ton of good info.   The Twitter people take you by the hand and get you squared away.  It takes all of about two minutes – if even that.  Literally.

Comments

I have fallen way, way behind on dealing with comments.  As I wrote a while back, I had to stop answering individual comments, and I’ve pretty much stuck to my guns on that.  Problem is, I had about three hundred comments stacked up before I started doing that.

When comments come in and I post them, they go up in by date.  So back when I was spending half my day dealing with them, I would often come across a comment that required some thought and a detailed answer.  If I didn’t have time to deal with it right then, I put it off until later.  Often when later came, I had 20 or 30 more that came in after the one requiring the time.  I didn’t want to answer those and put them up ahead of the one I hadn’t answered, so I simply didn’t deal with any of them.  Now I’ve got about 340 of them stacked up and it gives me heartburn whenever I even get on my blog administration screen.  The sad thing is that some of these comments go back months and months.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do with them, and I’ve finally come to a decision.  I’m simply going to post them as they are.  I’m going to post about 30 of them per day until they’re all up.  Why not all at once?  Because I know many of you are set up to get comments emailed to you when I post them.  I don’t want to clot email accounts with 340 emailed comments all at once, especially since some of these comments are lengthy.  So, I dole them out over the next 10 days or so while keeping up with the new comments as they come in. I won’t start this process for a few days to get those of you who don’t want even 30 of them a day coming in to unsubscribe.

Since many of these hoarded comments contain very good questions, they are a trove of subjects for future blog posts.  As I post them, I’m going to reread them and clip those that would make for good posts into Evernote or my new favorite plaything DEVONthink that I’m just starting to feel my way along with. (See this great Steven Johnson (whom I follow on Twitter) article about the virtues of DEVONthink.)  After I’ve got these blogworthy comments in a format in which I can find them instantly, I’ll start working through them and posting.

Bloggers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

I don’t know how closely blog readers attended to the recent announcement by the FTC that they were going to start riding herd on bloggers, but the bloggers went ballistic.

Among its other duties, the FTC patrols the universe of advertising in this country looking for anyone or any company engaging in, as they term it, deceptive practices.  In other words, the FTC is on the prowl seeking out advertisers who make false claims in order to stop them and punish them.  Which all sounds good in the abstract, but in reality is a whole other story.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, it’s a valuable exercise to read Kevin Trudeau’s first book to see how the FTC operates.  The nutritional and health information he presents is total garbage, but his description of the practices of the FTC is right on the money. (I’ve got to admit that some of the nutritional and health information presented in Trudeau’s first book (the only one I’ve read) is accurate, but I write that off to the law of averages.  He presents so much information that odds are some of it just happens to be true.  So, if you read the book and come across something that is nutritionally accurate, don’t write me about it.  I know a few things are there, but not enough to justify reading the book other than the first part, which is an excellent treatise on the FTC.)

The FTC has the power to absolutely ruin anyone and/or any company it chooses to go after.  If you read the first part of Trudeau’s book, you’ll see how.

So, the FTC opined that they planned on monitoring bloggers to see if they disclosed the fact that they were paid to do reviews on products.  Apparently, many bloggers make money by doing paid reviews on products without disclosing such, and the FTC doesn’t like it.

I’ve never reviewed products for pay, but I have read enough about it to know how it works.  Companies provide bloggers products, then pay these bloggers for reviews of the products.  I guess the fact that bloggers are given the products and possibly paid for the reviews as well might induce them to write positive reviews of products that they thought sucked.  And I assume that’s what the FTC is concerned about.

The FTC’s actions certainly got the blogosphere in an uproar.  So much so, in fact, that the FTC started to crawdad, which I never thought would happen.  Just goes to show that if you turn the spotlight of public awareness on even the most aggressive and powerful of all government agencies, you can get results.

Not that I fear the FTC on this (at least not at this point), I’ll go ahead and disclose where I get dinero from this blog.  Virtually all of the money that comes to me through the blog comes from readers buying products through Amazon.com.  When they buy a book I recommend or go through one of the book thumbnails of Protein Power or the 6-Week Cure up at the top right or any of our other books I have up on the site, I get a little bit of lucre for it.  And I get a little more if they buy anything else after entering Amazon through one of the portals in this blog.  In a good month, it’s enough to cover my hosting and web guy expenses; in a bad month (as this one is turning out to be), it’s about enough to cover the hosting of the site and maybe an hour or so of the web guy time.

Google ads

I get a little income from Google ads, but I’m trying to get them off the site.  I’ve had several web guys working on the site over the years, and I guess code for these Google ads is stuck all over the place.  I get rid of them in once place, it seems they pop up somewhere else.  When I had Google ads everywhere, I made about $150 per month, which, in my opinion, isn’t enough to justify tacky-ing up the site with a zillion ads.  Plus, I don’t have time to go through and spend time trying to figure out which ads to block.  Many people, I’ve learned, don’t realize that these ads aren’t part of the site, and they wonder why, when I’ve just spent 2000 words bashing statins, an ad for a statin pops up.

A while back I was having lunch with Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple when he asked me what kind of a deal I had going with Atkins Nutritionals.  I told him I didn’t have any kind of deal going with them whatsoever.  I asked him why he asked.  He told me that he gets my blog posts by email, and that at the bottom of each one is a banner ad from Atkins.  I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know you could get the posts by email and that I didn’t have a clue why the Atkins ads were there.  I went home and pulled up the blog (I usually never look at the actual blog – only the admin page), and sure enough, there was a way I could get the posts by email.  I signed up to get my own posts, wrote one, and sure enough, here it came with an Atkins ad at the bottom of it.  I thought I had it all taken care of, but I just looked moments ago and there is still a banner ad at the bottom of the emailed post.  I’ve added it once more to the list of things to have my guy deal with when I get with him on Monday.

Book recommendation

While on the subject of Amazon.com, books and book recommendations, I might as well recommend one.
I finished a terrific book not long ago called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers. As the title implies, this is a treatise about the fall of the House of Lehman, one of the country’s oldest investment banks, and is written by one of the vice presidents who names names and points the finger.

Not only is this book chock full of great information about how Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and others operate, it is extremely well written.  The ‘author’ realized he didn’t have the skills to tell his own story in a readable manner, so he hired a writer.  But he didn’t just go out and hire one of the non-fiction write-for-hire folks that are swarming around out there, he hired Patrick Robinson, a best-selling thriller writer.  As a consequence, the book is absolutely gripping. Not only do you learn a ton about how the financial crisis developed, you learn it in a gripping, racing-through-the-pages fashion.  You’ve heard people say about certain books that they read like a novel.  Well, this one does.  I had real trouble putting it down.

After reading this book, you will know exactly why we’re in the boat we’re in now and will be stupified at the mismanagement at the top.  As I read through and learned about the perfidy of Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and the other financial rating outfits that gave the most worthless financial instruments triple A ratings, I was stunned that these companies hadn’t been prosecuted.  Without their complicity, the whole house of cards couldn’t have been erected because no one would have purchased the products.  I was interested to read in today’s Financial Times that at least  Ohio is going after them.  I suspect Ohio won’t be the last.  According to the author, these companies made billions while failing to do their due diligence before passing out AAA ratings like they were candy at Halloween.

Not long after I read the book, I came upon a piece by Calvin Trillin in the editorial section of the New York Times that summed up the situation nicely.  The problem was the enormity of the amounts of money waiting to be made drew smart people to Wall Street.  A funny but insightful short essay.

After you read the book and Trillin’s piece, take a look at this video I posted about a year ago.  It will make it all that much more funny.  And sad.

The 6-Week Cure blog

All I can say is that it’s about up.  And apologies for not having it up sooner.  I hope we’ll have it operational this week and populated with a few posts.

Another vegetarian myth

I wrote in a bookish post (or maybe in answer to a comment on a bookish post – I can’t remember) a while back that I had read most of the mystery novels out there and was looking for a new series to sink my teeth into.  Someone suggested the DI Charlie Priest mysteries by Stuart Pawson.  I got one and liked it, so I’ve been motoring through those as time allows.

The last one I read was Deadly Friends about a murdered doctor, a serial rapist and a host of other minor villains. At a point about midway through, DI Priest and one of his underlings are walking around scoping out a pharmacy prior to entering to get info about the dead doctor.  All these books – at least the four or five I’ve read so far – are written in the first person, so everything is from Priest’s perspective.  Here’s what he says:

We completed our circuit of the block.  Passing the back of the butcher’s I tried not to inhale and wished I had the willpower to go vegetarian.  Trouble is, I like my steaks.

AAARRRGGGHHHH!  Even in mystery novels I’m being reminded of how deep the vegetarian mantra has wormed its way into our collective brains.  How many times have we all heard variations on this theme?  One of the ideas the vegetarian movement has managed to get firmly implanted in the minds of many is that vegetarianism is a more healthful way to eat.  I’ve heard numerous people wistfully say they really would like to be able to follow a vegetarian diet because it’s so much more healthful, but they just like meat too much to do it.

The truth is, as we all know, that vegetarian diets are decidedly less healthful than diets containing animal protein. But the great unwashed masses don’t seem to have figured this out.

But I’ve got to hand it to the vegetarian brigade: they’ve managed to successfully propagandize most of the population.  And they’ve done so without any real science behind them.  The most they can point to is a sheaf of observational studies that don’t prove squat.

The low-carb/Paleo movement, on the other hand, is producing more data almost daily that a lower-carb, higher-fat, higher-protein diet is infinitely better for a majority of the population.  But, we don’t get the message out as well as the other side does, I suppose.  I went to a Borders Books the other day and found an entire collection of free booklets written for children telling of the horrors of factory farming and encouraging them to go vegetarian.

We are starting to make some inroads into this nonsense, however, with the help of some former vegetarians who have seen the error of their ways.  If you haven’t read Lierre Kieth’s book yet, add it to your Christmas list.

I’m girding my loins for all the hostile comments I’m sure to get from angry vegetarians.  These comments will be from vegans telling me how healthy they are and how many miles they can run and how they could kick my butt in any endeavor I might wish to engage them in.  And they’ll reference the idiotic China Study and a host of other meaningless observational junk.  But wait.  I don’t have to gird my loins.  I’m not dealing with these comments any more.  I’m just posting them as they come in.  Give it your best shot.

To see under what conditions our genome developed, read on.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle

Just to wrap this long, meandering post up, I want to end with a link to a great article in the December 2009 National Geographic.  And to bring this post full circle, I’ve got to let you know that I found this article on Twitter.  I wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise. At least not as quickly as I did.

The long article is about the Hadza who follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in remote Tanzania.  The area the Hadza roam is being encroached upon by all kinds of agricultural and tourist businesses, and the author doubts these indigenous people can maintain their lifestyle for much longer.
The men hunt and the women gather.  The Hadza went on a nighttime baboon hunt and took the author along.  His account of the hunt makes for a riveting read.  Once killed, the Hadza haul the baboon back to what serves as a camp and prepare to serve it up.  I’ll leave you with the author’s description of the meal.

Ngaola skins the baboon and stakes out the pelt with sharpened twigs. The skin will be dry in a few days and will make a fine sleeping mat. A couple of men butcher the animal, and cuts of meat are distributed. Onwas, as camp elder, is handed the greatest delicacy: the head.

The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan. Hadza mealtime is not an occasion for politeness. Personal space is generally not recognized; no matter how packed it is around a fire, there’s always room for one more, even if you end up on someone’s lap. Once a cut of meat has finished cooking, anyone can grab a bite.

And I mean grab. When the meat is ready, knives are unsheathed and the frenzy begins. There is grasping and slicing and chewing and pulling. The idea is to tug at a hunk of meat with your teeth, then use your knife to slice away your share. Elbowing and shoving is standard behavior. Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

I’m ravenous, so I dive into the scrum and snatch up some meat. Baboon steak, I have to say, isn’t terrible—a touch gamy, but it’s been a few days since I’ve eaten protein, and I can feel my body perking up with every bite. Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave, though most coveted are the baboon’s paw pads. I snag a bit of one and pop it in my mouth, but it’s like trying to swallow a pencil eraser. When I spit the gob of paw pad out, a young boy instantly picks it up and swallows it.

Onwas, with the baboon’s head, is comfortably above the fray. He sits cross-legged at his fire and eats the cheeks, the eyeballs, the neck meat, and the forehead skin, using the soles of his sandals as a cutting board. He gnaws the skull clean to the bone, then plunges it into the fire and calls me and the hunters over for a smoke.

Before I get into a discussion of the absolutely phenomenal book you see pictured at the right, I’ve got a few disclosures to make.  First, I’m not much of a believer in the notion of man-made global warming or climate change (as they now call it since temperatures have been constantly falling instead of rising).  I’m a denier, in the pejorative term used by those who are believers.

Second, I’m not particularly pro-feminist.  And I certainly don’t hang around with any self-proclaimed radical feminists.  I have a wife who is smarter than I am, who is more talented than I am, and who, pound for pound, is probably a better athlete than I am, and I’m not bad. (In my defense, I can read much, much faster than she, but, she has better comprehension.) I long ago gave up the idea (if I ever really considered it seriously) that men are superior to women in any ways other than brute strength.  Having said that, however, I do believe that men are better suited to certain endeavors than woman and vice verse, but that doesn’t mean either men or women should be denied the opportunity to give whatever it is they want to do a whirl just because of their sex.  I guess I consider myself an egalitarian.  But from what I’ve seen of radical feminists, I’m not sure that I would count myself a big fan.

Given the above, you wouldn’t think I would enjoy and recommend a book written by a self-proclaimed radical feminist who is obviously a believer in global warming and the impending end of the earth as we know it.  I wouldn’t think so, either. Not my cup of tea even when it is sort of preaching to the choir.

But I can tell you that Lierre Keith’s book is beyond fantastic.  It is easily the best book I’ve read since Mistakes Were Made, maybe even better.  Everyone should read this book, vegetarian and non-vegetarian alike.  If you’re a radical feminist, you should read this book; if you’re a male chauvinist, you should read this book; if you have children, especially female children, you should read this book; if you are a young woman (or man) you should read this book; if you love animals, you should read this book; if you hate vegetarians, you should read this book; if you are contemplating the vegetarian way of life, you should definitely read this book; if you have a vegetarian friend or family member, you should this book and so should your friend.  As MD said after she read it, “everyone who eats should read this book.”

Anyone who has ever read a book on writing has come across the hackneyed piece of advice to cut open a vein and bleed on the page.  Lierre Keith, the author of this book, has come closer to literally doing that than almost any writer I’ve ever read.  Not only does her passion for her subject bleed through in almost every sentence, she is a superb lyrical prose stylist.  My book is dog eared, underlined and annotated from front to back – I can’t remember anything I’ve read that has contained so many terrific lines.

In fact The Vegetarian Myth is filled with so many good quotes (most by the author but some from other authors) that I was reminded of the old joke about the redneck who went to see a performance of Hamlet.  When the show let out, someone asked him what he thought of it.  Replied he:  It wasn’t nothin’ but a whole bunch of quotes all strung together.  As you’ll see when I ‘quote’ them below, The Vegetarian Myth contains quotable lines and paragraphs at about the same rate Hamlet does.

Ms. Keith was a practicing vegetarian (vegan) for twenty years, driven by her passion for kindness and justice for all creatures.  She couldn’t bear the thought of even killing a garden slug, or, for that matter, even removing a garden slug from her garden to a place where something or someone else might kill it.  Her years of compassionate avoidance of any foods of animal origin cost her her health.  Her story of coming to grips with the realization that whatever she ate came as a consequence of some living being’s having to die form the matrix onto which her narrative hangs.

You can read the first 14 manuscript pages of the book on the author’s website.  I have quoted from these 14 pages liberally below.

The introduction to The Vegetarian Myth explores Ms. Keith’s rationale for writing such a book, a book that, given her years of walking the vegetarian walk, must have been incredibly difficult to write.  She says as much with her first sentence.

She ponders the idea of factory farming, which she loathes, and the misbegotten idea that most people hold (not most readers of this blog, but most of the people in the world) that grains are good, not only for people, but for many animals as well.  And the common misconception that agriculture, the growing of annual grains and plants, is a wonderful, kind, sustainable activity.

This misunderstanding is born of ignorance, an ignorance that runs the length and breadth of the vegetarian myth, through the nature of agriculture and ending in the nature of life. We are urban industrialists, and we don’t know the origins of our food. This includes vegetarians, despite their claims to the truth. It included me, too, for twenty years. Anyone who ate meat was in denial; only I had faced the facts. Certainly, most people who consume factory-farmed meat have never asked what died and how it died. But frankly, neither have most vegetarians.

The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.

I want a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what’s dead on your plate. I’m asking about everything that died in the process, everything that was killed to get that food onto your plate. That’s the more radical question, and it’s the only question that will produce the truth. How many rivers were dammed and drained, how many prairies plowed and forests pulled down, how much topsoil turned to dust and blown into ghosts? I want to know about all the species—not just the individuals, but the entire species—the chinook, the bison, the grasshopper sparrows, the grey wolves. And I want more than just the number of dead and gone. I want them back.

After she had seen the error of her ways as a vegan and had been eating meat for two years, for reasons unknown to her, the author continued to surf the same vegan websites and message boards she had for years.  Until she read one post that was so bizarre that she finally realized the large intellectual gap that had widened between her rationale thinking and the cult like thinking of, well, a cult.  It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

But one post marked a turning point. A vegan flushed out his idea to keep animals from being killed—not by humans, but by other animals. Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey. Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die, so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other. He knew the carnivores would be okay because they didn’t need to be carnivores. That was a lie the meat industry told. He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass.

No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else posted. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death.

Note well that the site for this liberatory project was Africa. No one mentioned the North American prairie, where carnivores and ruminants alike have been extirpated for the  annual grains that vegetarians embrace. But I’ll return to that in Chapter 3.

I knew enough to know that this was insane. But no one else on the message board could see anything wrong with the scheme. So, on the theory that many readers lack the knowledge to judge this plan, I’m going to walk you through this.

Carnivores cannot survive on cellulose. They may on occasion eat grass, but they use it medicinally, usually as a purgative to clear their digestive tracts of parasites. Ruminants, on the other hand, have evolved to eat grass. They have a rumen (hence, ruminant), the first in a series of multiple stomachs that acts as a fermentative vat. What’s actually happening inside a cow or a zebra is that bacteria eat the grass, and the animals eat the bacteria.

Lions and hyenas and humans don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system. Literally from our teeth to our rectums we are designed for meat. We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.

So on the carnivore side of the fence, starvation will take every animal. Some will last longer than others, and those some will end their days as cannibals. The scavengers will have a Fat Tuesday party, but when the bones are picked clean, they’ll starve as well. The graveyard won’t end there. Without grazers to eat the grass, the land will eventually turn to desert.

Why? Because without grazers to literally level the playing field, the perennial plants mature, and shade out the basal growth point at the plant’s base. In a brittle environment like the Serengeti, decay is mostly physical (weathering) and chemical (oxidative), not bacterial and biological as in a moist environment. In fact, the ruminants take over most of the biological functions of soil by digesting the cellulose and returning the nutrients, once again available, in the form of urine and feces.

But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leech away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we’ve killed everything.

On the ruminant side of the fence, the wildebeests and friends will reproduce as effectively as ever. But without the check of predators, there will quickly be more grazers than grass. The animals will outstrip their food source, eat the plants down to the ground, and then starve to death, leaving behind a seriously degraded landscape.

The lesson here is obvious, though it is profound enough to inspire a religion: we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat. The grazers need their daily cellulose, but the grass also needs the animals. It needs the manure, with its nitrogen, minerals, and bacteria; it needs the mechanical check of grazing activity; and it needs the resources stored in animal bodies and freed up by degraders when animals die.

The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predators and prey. These are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns.

That was my last visit to the vegan message boards. I realized then that people so deeply ignorant of the nature of life, with its mineral cycle and carbon trade, its balance points around an ancient circle of producers, consumers, and degraders, weren’t going to be able to guide me or, indeed, make any useful decisions about sustainable human culture. By turning from adult knowledge, the knowledge that death is embedded in every creature’s sustenance, from bacteria to grizzly bears, they would never be able to feed the emotional and spiritual hunger that ached in me from accepting that knowledge. Maybe in the end this book is an attempt to soothe that ache myself.

How anyone who can read these 14 pages and not purchase and read this book is beyond me.

After the introduction which deals with why the author wrote the book, The Vegetarian Myth is divided into four sections: Moral Vegetarians, Political Vegetarians, Nutritional Vegetarians, and To Save the World.

The first three of these sections are the author’s in-depth refutations of the moral, political and nutritional arguments that vegetarians are constantly putting forth.  She does a masterful job.

In the Moral Vegetarians chapter, the author addresses the moral issue of killing animals for our own food.  She beautifully makes her case by cutting to the heart of the matter:

What separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics or commitment.  It’s information.

And while she was in her 20-year trek in the vegetarian wilderness, she shielded herself from information as most cultists do:

I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.

She finally realized the truth about agriculture; she figured out that the amber waves of grain are as death dealing as any slaughterhouse.

And agriculture isn’t quite a war because the forests and wetlands and prairies, the rain, the soil, the air, can’t fight back.  Agriculture is really more like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land.  It’s biotic cleansing, biocide. … It is not non-violent.  It is not sustainable.  And every bite of food is laden with death.

There is no place left for the buffalo to roam.  There’s only corn, wheat, and soy.  About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year.  Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal.  They count, and they died for your dinner…

Soil, species, rivers.  That’s the death in your food.  Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole.

In Political Vegetarians she refutes the politics (predominantly liberal) of the vegetarian movement and describes the dark side of political meddling in our ecosystem approved of in the main by PETA and other vegetarian groups.  She follows the money.

Rice, wheat, corn – the annual grains that vegetarians want the world to eat – are thirsty enough to drink whole rivers.

The result has been an unending river of corn, drowning our arteries and our insulin receptors, our rural communities, and poor subsistence economies the world over.  The corn comes at a huge environmental toll: there’s a half gallon of oil in every bushel.  And it’s essentially a massive transfer of money from the US taxpayer to the giant grain cartels, who are able to command the price of grain to be lower than the cost of production, with all of us making up the difference – five billion dollars in subsidies for corn alone, straight into the pockets of Cargill and Monsanto.

Nutritional Vegetarians is about the nutritional inadequacies of a vegetarian and especially a vegan diet.  And she does an absolute bang up job of laying out the rationale for following a no-grain, low-carb diet.

I have a disclosure to make here.  Much of the information in this chapter is based on Protein Power and The Protein Power LifePlan.  MD and I are listed in the acknowledgments, but I swear I didn’t know this until I bought the book.  We aren’t the only ones, but there are plenty of quotes from us in this chapter.  Gary Taubes, Malcolm Kendrick and (dare I say it) Anthony Colpo are quoted liberally as well.  I would have loved this book just as much if we had never been quoted.

Ms Keith has made a few minor innocuous errors in this chapter, but, all in all, she has done a tremendous job of synthesizing the scientific information into an easy to read, informative format.

The Nutritional Vegetarians section isn’t just about the science of why vegetarianism is bad and meat eating is good, it gets into the nutritional politics (as opposed to the vegetarian politics in the previous section) as well.  Ms Keith shows how we got to where we are by the nutritional strong arming by the McGovern committee back in the late 1970s.  George McGovern (a senator from a grain-producing state) and his cronies basically set the nutritional standards under which we are still oppressed.  They have been a disaster, as some scientists at the time predicted they would be.

And some scientists knew ahead of time that they would be.  Phil Handler, the president of hte National Academy of Scientists asked Congress, “What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?”  Dr. Pete Ahrens, an expert on cholesterol metabolism, told the McGovern committee that the effects of a low-fat diet weren’t a scientific matter but “a betting matter.”

It’s twenty-five years later and we aren’t winning this bet.  Each US American now eats sixty pounds more grain per annum and thirty pounds more cheap sugars, mostly from corn.  [Is it any wonder we're all fat?]

The result, Dietary Goals for Americans, set in motion a cast sea change in the public’s beliefs and behaviors. … Dietary Goals was a predictable victory in a war that started ten thousand years ago.  What really won were those annual grasses that had long since turned humans into mercenaries against the rest of the planet.  We would now enshrine them like demi-gods, those whole grains and their sweet, opiate seductions, believing in their power to bestow health and long life, even while they slowly ate us alive.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book review that was positive from beginning to end, and this one is no exception.  Based on the many comments I’ve gotten on this blog and my response to them, I’m sure many of you will find my main objection surprising.  There is too much politics in the book.  Not nutritional politics, but feminist politics.

I know, I know, I let my libertarian leanings come through in all kinds of blog posts and comment answers, but there is a difference.  My blog is just that – a weblog of things I find interesting or informative.  And it’s free.  I don’t particularly like to pay for a book (and I paid full price for this one plus shipping) on a given subject then be beaten over the head with a political viewpoint.  I guarantee you that our new book has zero politics in it.  And if people bought our book expecting to learn about getting rid of their middle-aged middles and were fed a generous dose of my politics mixed in with the information, I would expect them to be flamed.

To give the author her due in this matter, the vegetarian ideology that had her in its grasp for 20 years was intertwined with her feminist politics, so a bit of said politics are necessary to describe how she was so taken in for so long.  But I think she went a little overboard with it.

And, I think the last section of the book – To Save the World – is the weakest part of the book.  The author makes several recommendations, all of which (save one) are, in my opinion totally unrealistic.  But I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions after you’ve read the book.

I’ve read that when people are asked to recall what they remember of something they read, they tend to remember the first thing in the piece and the last thing.  Most of the middle melds into a vague memory of what the article was about.  I certainly don’t want people to remember this last negative part I wrote and let it dissuade them from reading this book.  The good parts of the book so far outweigh the not-so-good parts that there is really no contest.

At a time when PETA and other vegetarian groups are mobilizing and ramping up their activity levels, a book such as this one bringing sanity to the debate is more important than ever.  And don’t think these groups aren’t becoming more active.  In the past, PETA and PETAphiles pretty much devoted their educational efforts toward the idea that eating animals was cruel.  Now they are starting to make the case that a vegetarian diet will solve the obesity epidemic.  Take a look at this billboard in Jacksonville, Florida.

If you find this sign annoying, buy The Vegetarian Myth and do your part to fight back. And if you have or know anyone with a daughter who is contemplating going vegetarian (young females are the most common victims), please make this book available.  It could be the most important thing you ever do for the long-term mental and physical health of a young woman.

If you’ve made it this far in this long review, take a couple of minutes and watch this YouTube of Lierre Keith at a book event; she’s as fascinating to listen to as she is to read.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I figure it’s about time for another grab bag of a post updating everyone on what’s going on at Casa Eades and throwing up a few interesting articles and websites.

The Verdi Requiem

The Santa Barbara Choral Society’s Verdi Requiem was a triumph last weekend.  As you can see from the photo above, MD was pretty whipped when it was over.  Apparently, it’s pretty demanding on soloists, orchestra and chorus.  And, as you can see from the photo above, the listeners don’t have the same burden.  Other photos here.  A recent review of the concert here.

The concert was pretty well attended, although not as well attended as it would have been had the entire city not been consumed with worry about the fire from the week before.  Santa Barbara is just now returning to normalcy.  The receipts from the door covered a little over 40 percent of what it cost to put on the production.  When I heard that figure, I thought the whole thing was a financial disaster, but I learned that that figure is typical for non-profit arts productions.  Around 40 percent of the cost comes from the people who buy tickets – the other 60 percent comes from patrons who sponsor the event.  In other words, the ticket prices are subsidized by the nobless oblige of the wealthy, a large number of whom consider it their obligation to support the arts.  So, next time you go to a great performance that costs you $25 to see, thank a rich person that you didn’t have to pay $60.

Twitter adventures

As anyone who has followed me on Twitter knows, I spend a lot of time reading and posting to Twitter since I first posted about it.  It’s a great way to do mini posts because users of Twitter are limited to 140 characters, so it’s tough to get too verbose.

I was pretty clueless about Twitter until I started using it, so I assume others are clueless as well.  If you are not in the know about this social networking tool and would like to keep up with these mini posts, there are a couple of ways you can do it.  You can sign up for Twitter and follow me (and anyone else you would like to follow).  It takes maybe one minute to sign up for Twitter.  All you need is a working email address and a username and you’re in.  Once you are a Twitteree (or whatever they’re called), and sign up to follow me, you can read these mini posts as I put them up.  If you want to sign up, click here and get started.  If you do start, you will probably find that a bunch of your own friends are using Twitter, so you can keep up with them as well.

The other way you can access these mini posts is by clicking on the little blue bird logo that says FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER.  If you click there, you will go to a page that gives you all the latest mini posts, but you’ll have to keep going back to get the updates as they come in.  Here is a link to the page you will find.

I occasionally Tweet (a Twitter mini post is called a Tweet, a loathsome word if there ever was one, at least when applied to activities of grown humans) on personal stuff, but mainly the Tweets are mini posts on medical articles or other news articles that I think are of interest along with anything else I find that strikes my fancy.

For those of you who do follow me on Twitter, I apologize for any Twitter faux paux I may have committed.  One of the things that most appealed to me about Twitter was the notion that I could put up these mini posts without anyone responding.  But, alas, I was wrong.  I discovered a few days ago that people can respond and several hundred have.  I was taking time from feverishly mini posting by looking around my Twitter home page when I found a highlighted link that said: @DrEades.  When I clicked there, I was appalled to find several hundred responses to Tweets I had made.  I learned that when people respond to Tweets, it ends up in that section.  So, I wasn’t off the hook.  But I couldn’t possibly respond to several hundred people – even at 140 characters a response.  So, if you replied to something I wrote and I didn’t respond, you now know what happened.

I did have a couple of interesting experiences in responding however.  When I discovered the @DrEades section and found the zillion responses to my Tweets waiting there, the most recent one was from a lady who took me to task for one (or several) of my political Tweets.  She wrote that she had always liked my nutritional writing but that my political postings had alienated her.  I decided to reply to her just to see how the whole reply thing worked.  I sent her one of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quotes:

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Then I watched her site and found that she had deleted the Tweet to me, which is how I learned that one could delete these things once they are up.  They can’t be changed, so if you make a grammatical error (which, sadly, I have done a few times) it can’t be fixed, only deleted.  Then she deleted me from her list of people she follows.  I guess the Thomas Jefferson quote alienated her even more.

People are really strange.  I posted a Tweet about an email that I had received a dozen times about how George Bush has a state of the art, energy-efficient ranch house in Crawford, TX while Al Gore has a giant, energy-gobbling house in Nashville.  I always ignored the email because I thought it probably was an urban legend kind of thing.  Then someone sent me a link to the Snopes report on it, which said that the email was true.  I posted the Snopes report on Twitter.  Then I started to wonder what makes Snopes the last word authority on everything, so I started looking into that.  I discovered that Snopes is a husband – wife team, who live in a double-wide house trailer on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  They do all the checking themselves.  I was stunned.  I always figured that Snopes was some kind of outfit with a staff of hundreds that checked out all these things.  The notion that the ultimate authority on everything was just a mom and pop operation who make their living by ads on their snopes.com website.  Now that I know the situation, I’ll be more careful when I accept snopes as the last word on everything.

I put up a Tweet that said basically Who would’ve thought Snopes was a mom and pop operation?  Some guy signed up to follow me on Twitter, and immediately sent a nastygram to @DrEades that said If Snopes is a mom and pop outfit, what does that make the Protein Power blog? A ‘Pop’ outfit?  I replied that the Protein Power blog is a ‘Pop’ operation, but isn’t considered by anyone to be the last word on everything.  He then deleted me from his list of people he followed. As I say, a lot of bizarre people in the weeds out there.

The whole experience has been very strange indeed.  But I’m still working my way through it, probably alienating people right and left.  So join up, follow me, and watch the fun.

Upcoming travel plans

MD and I are leaving late Sunday night for Hong Kong, then to Guangzhou, back to Hong Kong, then to London.  Sadly, the entire trip will be a working trip.  We’re hard at it in our efforts to change the world, and this trip is all about that.  By the time we get back, I should be able to write about what we’ve been working on.

I will take a lot of photos and continue to blog during the trip.  And Tweet.

Comments on the blog

I continue to be mired in comment woes.  I just checked, and I have 78 comments in moderation, some of which have been there for weeks.  It has kind of become a comments graveyard.

I’ve whined about the comment situation for that last two years. I’ve said that I wasn’t going to continue to answer questions and was just going to post the comments as they came in.  My resolve would last for about two days, then I was right back answering all the questions.  Now, I’ve gone into a funk over the whole thing, and have devolved into just ignoring the comments that require answering and letting them stack up, which I hate doing.  But, I’ve been so busy lately that there isn’t much else I can do.

I was reading a book titled Economic Sophisms by one of my heroes, Frederic Bastiat, when I came across the following paragraph that, in a way, applies to the comment situation.

We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us.  They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.

It’s easy to pen a comment that says, Hi Doc, what are your thoughts on this article? and attach a link.  I have to read the article, pull the actual study, read it, think about it, then write an answer that is considerably longer than the original comment.  What takes a commenter 20 seconds to write ends up costing me an hour or two to come up with an intelligent answer or even an ‘arid dissertation.’

I’m also getting a lot of comments asking for my ideas and recommendations on personal health issues.  People send me lab results and want to know what I think.  Without treating a given individual as a patient, medico-legal restrictions prevent me from answering these kinds of questions.

I never read the comments on blogs that I read, so I must assume that many people don’t read the comments on this blog.  But I end up spending way more time dealing with the comments than I do writing posts.  If I didn’t have to deal with the comments, I would write more posts.

I noticed that Mark Sisson, whom MD and I had lunch with yesterday, has started making posts out of some of his comments in a Dear Readers section of his blog.  He takes several comments that he thinks may be of interest to all his readers, posts them, and throws them out for the combined wisdom of all his readers to deal with. I may start doing this myself and weighing in along with the readers.  If anyone out there has any advice for me on this issue, I’m all ears.

Soda tax in New York

I just read this article this morning.  Was going to make a mini post out of it, but thought it would be better here.

A New York state senator (I’ll leave it to you guess from which party) says that by adding a measly one cent tax to each can of non-diet soda sold, the state of New York can add $100 million per year to its coffers.  If this is true, it means that citizens of and visitors to the state consume 10 billion cans of non-diet soda annually!  The population of New York state is a little over 19 million.  Dividing 10 billion by 19 million calculates out to about 525 cans of non-diet soda per man, woman and child in the state.  That’s almost 90 six-packs per person per year.  Wow!  There have got to be some low-carbers who live there who drink zero six-packs per year, which means that some other poor slob is drinking 180 six-packs per year.  That’s a lot of high-fructose corn syrup.

To my way of thinking, this is an onerous tax.  It moves $100 million from the pockets of the citizenry and puts it in the coffers of the bureaucrats to spend.  And, despite the fact that it sucks off 100 million bucks, the tax isn’t high enough to discourage consumption, so it really has no societal advantage except for transferring funds from the citizens to the government.

Where does your beef come from?

I don’t mean what part of the country.  I mean what part of the cow.  Here is a great site created by the University of Nebraska and the University of Florida showing way more than I (and probably you) need or want to know about beef anatomy.  But if you really do wonder where a flank steak or some other piece of beef comes from on the cow, click here to find out.  A lot of work went into this site.

Gradient gel electrophoresis

For those who hate to pay big bucks to have a lab tell you how much small, dense LDL you have, here’s how you can do it yourself.  That’s right.  With a drinking straw and a few other simple ingredients, you can make your own electrophoresis equipment and test your blood anytime you want for minimal expense.  Warning.  This is a real geek site.  I doubt that many will want to put together their own equipment, but at least it shows what’s involved in making a primitive version and how complex the testing process is.  May make you not feel so bad dropping the money to get the test done professionally.

Feel better immediately

And, finally, here is your feel-good YouTube of the day.  Watch this huge prank (if that’s what you would call it) played on the people in the train station at Antwerp one morning.  Really delightful.  Watch the faces of those watching.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Remember, don’t forget to help me out on this comment issue.  All suggestions will be appreciated.

Just a bunch of odds and ends, none of which is worth an entire post.

Low-carb gains a foothold.

First, I’ll start off with the good news, then I’ll finish with the bad.

I took the photo above yesterday at Raley’s, a giant supermarket (and I mean giant) in Incline Village, NV.  There were no signs promoting low-fat foods anywhere in the store.  I took this to be a sign that enough customers were looking for low-carb foods and had asked for help that management decided to make the low-carb section (there really is one) easier to find.  I take this as a positive sign.

Tahoe skiing

We’ve been skiing with the kids and grandkids, all of whom have come to town for spring break.  We’ve had a blast, but family commitments have kept me from attending to this blog as much as I usually do.  Family commitments along with a few snafus, more about which later.  The picture below is from the top of a foggy ski run overlooking Lake Tahoe.  It was taken Monday when the weather was less than optimal.  Fortunately, it has improved since.

Airline/Expedia cautionary tale

One set of kids and grandkids flew in from Dallas and had a disastrous experience, which I want to relate in the hope of perhaps preventing it for some of you readers.  The tickets for this trip were purchased long ago through Expedia and were on US Air from Dallas through Phoenix to Reno.  When purchased, the confirmation had seat assignments for all four of the passengers.  Our son and fam arrived at the airport about an hour and a half early and went through the automated boarding pass machines.  The boarding passes that were issued them had no seats listed.  When my son went to the counter to speak with an actual human, he was told there were no seat assignments because his entire family had been bumped from the flight.  When he showed her the Expedia confirmation complete with seat assignments, she told him that Expedia travelers got bumped first.  She also told him that it was the airlines policy to overbook by about 20 percent, which almost never caused a problem because of cancellations and no shows.  She said that the only two times this didn’t hold was over Christmas and Spring break weeks, the only time, she said, that she really hated her job.  It would seem to me that the airlines would realize this and maybe not oversell the flights during these periods, but that’s just me.  I’m not an airline decision maker, but it seems pretty obvious.  Especially since they had to fork over four free flights on US Air and a bunch of meal vouchers.

The fam was booked on a later flight, and, of course, had no seats together.  So they had to fight that fight in order for a parent to be able to sit with each kid.  Same thing on the flight to Reno.  The kids got to the airport early in the day, waited around, and finally got to Reno at about 10:30 PM (midnight thirty for them and a long, long day for two little boys).  The other part of the fam came into the Reno airport as well, and we had it timed so that everyone got in at about the same time.  This airline fiasco caused a huge logistics problem for the family Eades, but we made it through it.

Two tired little boys late at night at the Reno airport

The moral of the story is to not book through Expedia and expect all to go smoothly, especially during busy times.  The son involved called the airline and made sure they had confirmed seats on the way home.  If you book with Expedia, I would recommend you do the same.

I use Expedia or Travelocity to find the least expensive flights and best routes between destinations, then I go directly to the airline site to reserve.  It’s usually a little less expensive than Expedia or Travelocity, and I am confirmed with the airline directly.

Blog info and snafus

There are a few blog issues I need to deal with.  First, I performed the much-loathed task of going through the stacked up spam caught by the spam filter and found about a dozen comments lodged therein.  I don’t know why they got caught – they didn’t have a bunch of links embedded, which is usually what trips them up.  I don’t know why the spam filter got them, but it did.  If you have had a comment over the past week or so that has remained unposted, you’re probably one of the victims.  I’ll get to them all soon.

Another thing I discovered, to my great chagrin, is that I have about 500 emails in my Gmail account from readers of this blog.  A couple of years ago I hired a blog consultant to help make my blog better.  The installed Feedburner to allow readers to sign up for the blog in their Google or other readers.  It also allowed people to sign up to receive the blog via email.  What I didn’t realize is that the blog came to those who signed up under my Gmail address.  Many people simply hit reply and sent me a comment or a question about the blog – much as others do in the comment section.  Problem is I never read my Gmail mail.  I have it as a repository for all my emails, which I have forwarded from my regular email address.  I keep all the emails in the Gmail account so that I will have them all in one place since I use so many computers.  I want to have them in case I ever need them.  But I never read them in Gmail.  When I heard from someone that he had been trying to contact me numerous times and hadn’t gotten a response, I asked how he had been trying.  He said through Gmail.  When I went to the account and searched, I found hundreds of people who had done the same.  I fixed the situation so that readers can’t simply hit reply.  I can’t possibly deal with all those emails that are already there, so if you have been waiting for an answer, you had better resubmit through the comments section.  Sorry for all the hassle.

Out of control taxation and regulation

The above sign affixed to the restroom door of the Squeeze In, my favorite breakfast restaurant in Truckee, CA is a symptom of the disease of a government run by Democrats allowed to go wild.  If you are interested in seeing what the country would look like after many years of an unopposed Democratic government, you have to go no further than California.  Due to a bipartisan gerrymandering over the past few years making basically all state legislative offices non-competitive, the Democrats have controlled the state government.  And they’ve never come across a regulation or tax they didn’t like.  (I’m sure that in Republican-dominated states there would be problems, too, but as far as I know, there isn’t a Republican-dominated state.)  Not only does California tax and regulate the bejesus out of anything it can, it aggressively enforces all these taxes and regulations.  Which brings me to the sign on the door at the Squeeze In.  If a California regulator were to walk in to the restroom at this restaurant and find writing on the wall, there would be a fine.  Which isn’t really a fine, but is a shakedown.  When the state needs money, the regulators are on the prowl.  Let me explain what I mean.

I have a friend who works as a consultant for many different industries.  He recently had a gig working for a financial institution with offices all over California.  One of the California regulations is that the lettering on the signs in these facilities giving the interest rates must be two inches high.  Regulators recently did a savage burn on all these facilities throughout the state, descending upon them with rulers in hand.  They measured the height of the letters and found in multiple instances that the letters were from 1/16 to 1/32 of an inch short.  They then levied fines of almost two million dollars.  These institutions then had to hire a legal team to do battle with the state, which ultimately reduced the fines to about $150,000.  This was a shakedown for money pure and simple.  It may as well have been Tony Soprano.

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States and has no (none, zero) Fortune 50 companies headquartered there.  Why?  Because of the outrageous tax situation.  Why do business there and deal with all the tax and regulatory nonsense California slings out when you could headquarter your offices in Texas, where the population is growing by about 1,000 people per day?  And those people ain’t going there for the weather, let me tell you.  I’ve spent a lot of time in one other high-tax state, that being Massachusetts.  But there, people have learned to deal with it by creating and underground cash-based economy.  I can’t tell you how many businesses we ran into in Cambridge that took cash only.  No checks, no credit cards, cash only.  Anyone who came to work at your house demanded to be paid in cash.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on there.

In California people are inured to it, I guess, because they simply pony up and keep on electing the same people again and again.  Now the residents of the state have been saddled with a huge tax increase that all share in.  Increased gas taxes, sales taxes, car fees, and income taxes – all went up.  It should be no surprise that a state as burdened by taxes and regulations as California should be the one in the most trouble due to the recent downturn.  People are out of work, houses are being foreclosed on right and left, the economy is in the tank, and, as a consequence, the state government is short of funds.  So instead of working to help business, which is the machine that drives the economy, the state did the only thing it knew how to do: raise taxes on those workers and businesses still standing.  Makes a lot of sense. At least to California legislators.

Underhanded internet sales technique

Some of the comments on the recent post about Pentabosol reminded me about how some sleazy operators do business online.  If you’ve never been involved in a direct response (selling directly to customers) business, you probably don’t have any idea what kinds of shenanigans people pull to try to sell products.  Let’s look at how it works with weight loss supplements.  You want to make some money selling a weight loss supplement, but you don’t have the funds to mount a normal direct response campaign, so you decide to let others do the work for you.  You start your company to sell your supplement.  Let’s call it Weight Be Gone.  You create a website extolling the virtues of Weight Be Gone and set up a shopping cart so that people can buy it.  Then you create another website called something like Webscamsreview.com or weightlossscamreporter.com or something similar.  Then you write reviews of all the other legitimate supplements out there – Pentabosol, for example – and you find them all wanting.  You then say that the only supplement that you have tested that passes the stringent requirements for your Webscamsreview company is Weight Be Gone.  And, of course, you provide a link to your own website.  Then you go out and buy Google placement for other supplements, such as Pentabosol, and when people look up Pentabosol on Google, they find the Pentabosol site listed first but right below is a site supposedly providing an unbiased review of Pentabosol.  Who can resist taking a look?  Often the people who do take a look end up purchasing Weight Be Gone because they believe the fake reviews (both positive for Weight Be Gone and negative for all the other supplements) on the allegedly ‘independent review’ site, which is actually an ad and portal for their own supplement.

Sugar, the new health food

Finally, some bad news.  It looks like sugar is making a comeback.  And not just a comeback, but a comeback as a health food.  Expect to start seeing more sugar and less high-fructose corn syrup HFCS).  It’s easy to see why.  HFCS has a real image problem.  After all, would you feel better about eating something containing organic pure cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup?

Both are about the same.  HFCS contains a little more fructose, but not a lot.  And the little difference that it contains probably doesn’t make much of a difference unless intakes are huge, in which case it doesn’t much matter anyway.

The problem I see with HFCS is that it works much better than sugar as a food additive.  It has properties that sugar doesn’t have, making it perfect for many processed foods that otherwise wouldn’t contain sugar.  As a consequence we now have a lot of foods with sweetener in them that we didn’t have when sugar was the only sweetener available.   Problem is that the battle between sugar and HFCS isn’t fought on the field of these small amounts of additives, but on the field of products such as soft drinks that contain a ton of one or the other.  People will still get the additional sugar from HFCS in all the small portions added to processed foods and will get sugar instead in drinks and other highly sweetened foods.  And they’ll think they’re eating a health food because it is pure cane sugar and not that nasty HFCS.  I suspect that all this will do nothing but bring about an increase in sugar intake.  Why?

Because HFCS is sweeter than sugar.  And since people have become accustomed to this level of sweetness, when HFCS is replaced by sugar, more sugar will be required to give the same degree of sweetness.  And so sugar intake will increase.  All in the name of health.  A sorry situation indeed.

I’ve got about a hundred (93 to be exact) tabs up on my Firefox browser, many of which are filled with articles about which I would like to post.  But these articles either keep getting displaced by something more timely or more blogworthy or even more substantive.  Many are interesting, but not worth an entire long post.  So, I decided to do one of those sort of potpourri linkfest things like so many bloggers do and be able to close a bunch of these tabs.  Plus it gives me a chance to indulge in my interest in the political situation without having to devote an entire post to it.

First and foremost, I want to link to the latest post in MD’s blog.  When I posted earlier about our meals in Mexico, I mentioned this great Andalusian gazpacho recipe she had.  A bunch of people asked for it, so she put it up.

Richard Feinman sent me a link to an annoying Mayo Clinic nutrition blog by a couple of ignorant dietitians.  Reading stuff like this that is written with such certainty always makes me think of a couple of lines from Shakespeare’s’ Measure for Measure:

Man, proud man!
Dress’d in a little brief authority:
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d.

These women are oblivious to the fact that the studies upon which they base their idiotic ramblings are worthless as proof of the nonsense they spout.  The first considers a diet with 45 percent of calories as a low-carb diet.  Oh, really?  The second is an observational study, and, as such, totally useless for proving causality.  Yet, in their words, these studies

caused a couple of “aha” moments

for them.  I suppose they could have meant, “aha, we’re really clueless.”

I read a nice little summary in the journal Hepatology of a study published in Nature Medicine.  The study looked at chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) and aging.  As we age, we tend to accumulate protein debris in our cells.  Over time this accumulation interfers with the proper functioning of the cell and is thought to be one of the components of aging and cellular sensescence.  Organelles within the cell called lysosomes are charged with the responsibility of basically chewing up (auto-phagy: self eating) these junk proteins to keep the cell free of garbage, allowing it to do its job.  Chaperones are proteins that bind to junk proteins and move them into the lysosomes for degradation.  Researchers developed transgenic mice that had the ability to make more of the chaperone proteins than normal mice, giving them the ability to increase the degradation of junk protein.  Their study showed that increasing the CMA in these mice resulted in lower accumulation of junk protein, better ability to deal with protein damage, and improved organ function.  The reason I like this paper so much is that it confirms what I wrote in one of my favorite posts from the past about ketosis doing the same thing.  Maybe you don’t have to be a transgenic mouse to get the benefits of cleaner cells; maybe just staying in ketosis more of the time will do the job, too.

Politics alert! POLITICS ALERT! POLITICS ALERT! For those of you who chastise me for daring to bring politics into what is at heart a nutritional blog, beware: politics to follow.  If you want to avoid reading about anything to do with politics and get back to the nutrition stuff, skip on down until the politics alert has been removed.

Here is one from the Karma-is-wonderful department.  By now everyone knows that Tom Daschle got the rug pulled out from beneath him in his attempt to become the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration because of his failure to pay over $100,000 in taxes.  And everyone knows that former Senator Daschle didn’t pay taxes on the car and driver he was provided as part of one of his lobbying efforts. (One wonders what kind of car would run up enough imputed income to result in over $100,000 in taxes.) But what many people might not know is that Mr. Daschle, in his days as a Senator from South Dakota, ran ads showing that he drove an old car while working in Washington for the folks back home.  The irony is so sweet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While we’re at it, you might enjoy this cartoonist’s ideas on how we can afford the stimulus package being argued in Congress. Now we can add one more with Solis.  We really can begin to refill the coffers if this keeps up.

An insightful article in the Economist from a few weeks ago got me thinking.  This piece was talking about the government in the UK, but it could be applied to any government anywhere when faced with a crisis.  Governments all follow these two rules:

First, eschew all blame.
Second, do something.

I’ve never seen our own government here in the US not follow these rules.  For example, let’s look at the subprime mortgage situation that has gotten us into our current bad way.  When the house of cards began to fall, what did the government do?  Pointed fingers at everyone but itself.  It eschewed all blame.  It was the fault of all the independent mortgage lenders making shaky loans; it was greed on Wall Street; it was Bernard Madoff.  And on and on and on.

And what did our government then do, after all the finger pointing?  It did something.  It passed an emergency stimulus bill to the tune of $700 billion to keep all of these people from losing their homes and to keep the economy from cratering as a result.  As near as I can tell, I have about 5,000 people who read this blog every day.  And those 5,000 people know a lot of other people.  In fact, I would imagine that, on average, each of these 5,000 people probably knows or knows of at least 50 people, which means that all of us together know around 250,000 people.  Of all these people, some are bound to be in financial trouble and are behind on their mortgages.  So I ask you this, has anyone reading this blog learned of anyone he/she personally knows getting mortgage help from this $700 billion?  I didn’t think so.

So the government pointed fingers and did something.  We know that whatever it did, didn’t really help the individual people who were hurting during this mess.  It helped Wall Street guys get their bonuses, and it helped management of troubled banks get their health insurance premiums covered, and it redecorated a few offices, so maybe the do-something part of the equation actually helped some individuals (though not the ones it was sold to us to help).  But what about the blame?  Wasn’t it Wall Street greed and independent mortgage brokers?  As Will Rogers used to say, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.”  I’m kind of the same way, but I like to think I’m a little bit of a critical reader.  The single best and most comprehensive piece I’ve read yet on the current financial debacle was written several months ago in The Spectator, published in London, and my favorite weekly magazine.  The author of this article musters the data to show that it is the government itself that is at fault.  And if you don’t believe the author, here is a piece written in the New York Times on September 30, 1999 when the seeds for this subprime meltdown were sown, discussing the potential problems that could come to pass.  Sadly, they did.

On the global warming front, here is part of an email I received today from an outraged friend of mine in the UK.  This friend is a famous author who hobnobs with everyone who is anyone in the UK.  Name withheld mainly because it’s too late at night there for me to be asking for permission.

Tonight I sat watching television which I don`t do a huge amount of. We have been snowed in for 4 days and tonight it is minus 8. I watched a hapless man from a council lamenting that they had run out of salt and grit so the county`s roads would be death traps. Asked why their stocks were so low, he said because they had all been led to believe we would never have winters like this again because of GW. so they spent the money on recycling and ‘Climate Change initiatives’ instead. ‘And I have to say,’ this brave man ended ‘I think we`ve all been badly conned.’   Ten minutes later the US Vice President Biden appeared on my screen – what a pleased-with-himself guy he is. In Munich, and he said to me that the USA was now wanting dialogue with Iran and Pakistan and Russian and…. and that this will be an initiative that will work … well I am glad he is so cocky about it. He then said ‘we have far more to fear from global warming than we have from international terrorism.’    What the hell planet is this guy ON?   It`ll take a 9/ll and the entire mad middle east to explode in their faces for the truth to dawn….. meanwhile, does it not occur to them that most of Western Europe has been trying to engage these countries in dialogue for the last 10 years – and that meanwhile, weekly, a terrorist plot is detected and defused by our counter-intelligence and  anti-terrorist police … He looked so smug I wanted to throw something at him.

Okay.  Politics over.  The all clear whistle has sounded.  It’s safe to go back into the water.

One of my readers sent me this great link to an article in the journal Archeology about the diet of the Roman gladiators.

It appears that far from being the cut and shredded specimens of masculinity that we see portrayed in films, the real gladiators were fat.  Why?  Because body fat protected them from injury.  It provided a kind of a built-in shield.  And how did the gladiators make themselves fat?  According to researchers on the subject, gladiators ate a lot of simple carbohydrates and not much animal protein.  I can already see Dean Ornish’s next book: The Gladiator Diet.

You’ve all read my whines and rants about the sorry press coverage of scientific studies.  Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way.  Here is a writer from the prestigious British Medical Journal bitching about the same thing.

Says he:

Every day one of our national newspapers publishes a piece reporting on “scientific research” and nearly every day the report is misleading, inaccurate, shows poor understanding of science and scientific research methods, and irritates the hell out of many a hardworking researcher. Often the original research is crap too. Millions of innocent people are misdirected and confused as new and often harmful myths are started.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Last week an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times about intermittent fasting.  I’ve gone through quite an evolution myself on this subject, going from pro to not so pro back to pro with some reservations.  I’m planning a post within the next couple of weeks on the subject, specifically about one of the papers mention in this LA Times article.

A pretty good review article on the treatment of obesity appeared in Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology & Hepatology (free full text and pdf) last December. (See, my tabs have been up for a long time)  This article provides an overview of all the different diets available for the treatment of obesity.  And, what makes it nice, is that not only does it not ridicule or give the low-carb diet short shrift as most mainstream journals do, it actually seems to imply that the low-carb diet works the best.  Slowly but surely we’re making progress.

Last but not least, lets end with a death-defying bit of daredevilry.  Watch this guy jump this motorcycle both ways.  I like to push the envelope risk-wise sometimes, but you couldn’t get me to do this for all the money in the world.  Bravo!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I received the following email from Dr. Richard Feinman today asking for help on behalf of the Metabolism Society and low-carbers everywhere.

Greetings!

Here’s a good topic for your blog.

The question bears on recommendations along the lines of the USDA meeting that is coming up.  It arises from a seminar that Eric Westman gave at Downstate. The group at Downstate is not particularly doctrinaire and the talk was well received but Dr. Sheldon Landesman of the School of Public Health raised a good question: “the major focus of diets based on carbohydrate restriction are fundamentally therapeutic. How could the benefits that you presented be utilized in making recommendations to the population at large?”  So while 20 g a day might be very beneficial for somebody with diabetes or somebody trying to make a big impact on weight loss, even the maintenance phase of people on low carbohydrate diets may be different than what would be recommended for everybody.

Also whereas the population at large has significant amount of overweight and obesity, a large part of the population is not overweight and even those who are, may not want to lose weight at the moment. The question is quite pressing in that the USDA has convened a panel to make new recommendations for 2010. Many of us are upset that there is no representation of the panel of people who have experience with carbohydrate restriction and some who are on the panel are probably actively antagonistic to such an approach.   On the other hand, Brian Wansink [who is involved with] the committee is aware of the problem and open to suggestions on carbohydrate restriction.

So, the question is:  how can the benefits of carbohydrate restriction that you have experienced personally or in your immediate environment be translated into reasonable recommendations that the USDA could put out? In other words, if you actually had your way what kind of recommendations would you like to see the USDA make? Recommendations should be short and to the point.

If you can encourage your readers to send their suggestions to your blog and also copy to Lauri Cagnassola (info@nmsociety.org) the Metabolism Society will organize them. We will publish the results in the scientific and popular literature and also communicate some of the main points to Brian.

I think they are right to call our bluff on what we would actually do if we had access to policy.
Best Regards,

Richard Feinman, PhD
Metabolism Society

I draw your attention to the question that inspired Dr. Feinman’s email:

The major focus of diets based on carbohydrate restriction are fundamentally therapeutic. How could the benefits that you presented be utilized in making recommendations to the population at large?

I think this question is breathtaking in its inanity.

As you can see from the graph at the top of this post, obesity is galloping along and shows no signs of slowing down.  According to the latest figures from the National Center for Health Statistics (from which the above graph was taken), almost 70 percent of Americans (between the ages of 20 and 74) are either overweight or obese.  Despite the growing rates of childhood obesity, there is a much lower rate of childhood obesity than there is adult obesity.  Since childhood precedes adulthood, one can only assume that most of the children who are not overweight now will ultimately become overweight or obese as they enter and progress through the ranks of adulthood.

Now we all know that the consensus of many studies published in the medical/scientific literature indicate that single best treatment for obesity is a low-carb diet.  We also know that there are no diseases of carbohydrate deficiency while there are diseases of both fat and protein deficiency.  Therefore a low-carb diet that provides plenty of good quality protein and fat should never lead to any diseases of nutritional insufficiency.

Finally, since a good quality low-carb diet reverses obesity and a host of other medical problems associated with obesity, doesn’t it make sense that this same diet would prevent these disorders?  Dr. Feinman was himself a co-author of a brilliant paper positing that the Metabolic Syndrome can be defined as a constellation of symptoms that respond positively to carbohydrate restriction.  If carb restriction improves these symptoms, then why wouldn’t carb restriction prevent them?

I find it extremely difficult to believe that if the entire population of the United States were to follow carbohydrate-restricted diets that the graph at the top of this post would look the way it does.  Which is why I think the question asked at Dr. Westman’s presentation was inane.  Especially if the questioner had just sat through a talk about the health benefits of low-carbohydrate dieting.

We’ve got a therapeutic modality – the carbohydrate-restricted diet – that causes no health problems in non-overweight people who follow it, reverses obesity in overweight people who do follow it, and improves every single defined component of the Metabolic Syndrome in those who have the syndrome and apply the diet.  And someone wants to know the rationale for making these recommendations to the population at large?

It’s kind of like saying that since stopping smoking improves chronic bronchitis in only those people with smoking-induced chronic bronchitis, how can we make the recommendation not to smoke to the population at large, most of whom don’t have smoking-induced chronic bronchitis?

The annoying thing to me is that the people who ask these kinds of questions are probably the very ones who would vote to add statins to the drinking water if they could.

Now that my rant is over, let me encourage you to send in your answer to the question

how can the benefits of carbohydrate restriction that you have experienced personally or in your immediate environment be translated into reasonable recommendations that the USDA could put out? In other words, if you actually had your way what kind of recommendations would you like to see the USDA make? Recommendations should be short and to the point.

You can either send them as comments to this post, and I’ll pass them along.  Or you can email them directly to Lauri Cagnassola (info@nmsociety.org), who will get them to the appropriate people to submit those who have some influence over the committee to set the nutritional guidelines for 2010.  Or do both.  If you send them through the comments section of this post, maybe you will inspire others to tell their story.  A story of success in overcoming health problems from one of you will do more than a long letter from me, whom everyone will think is simply trying to sell a diet book.

And remember, where government committees are concerned, more is better.  If you’re trying to get your point across, bombarding them always helps.  As was confirmed by my interview with Bill O’Reilly most people don’t give a flip about however the nutritional guidelines turn out because they – just like Bill – figure these guidelines are just another bunch of government propaganda that doesn’t really mean squat to them.  But with the nutritional guidelines it does mean something because the law mandates that all the people the government feeds must be fed according to these guidelines.  And since many millions are fed, the food manufacturers take note.  If we can get some low-carb influence into the nutritional guidelines, it will mean that many more products will begin showing up on grocer’s shelves carrying labels saying ‘low-carb’ or carb-restricted’ just like the multitude that say ‘low-fat.’  The low-fat mania was basically launched by the nutritional guidelines.  There is no reason that low-carb can’t get its fair market share.  If it does, it will make all of our lives a little easier, not to mention healthier.

So, write, write, write.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for any significant changes in the government’s nutritional guidelines due to come out in 2010.  The members of the ‘scientific’ committee have just been announced, and it is stacked with all the usual suspects.

Here is a copy of the press release:nutritional-guidelines-press-release

Take a look at the names and resumes of those on the committee, and you’ll see that they are all lipophobes and carbophiles of the deepest dye.  Based on this cast of characters, it doesn’t look like much will change over the next five years. God help us all.

Let’s take a quick look at just one member of this illustrious panel that will decide how over 50 million people per day will be fed between 2010 and 2015.

Joanne L. Slavin, PhD, RD, a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition and the University of Minnesota, is an expert in carbohydrates and dietary fiber. Her research expertise focuses on the impact of whole grain consumption in chronic diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, as well as the role of dietary fiber in satiety.

Before we even get to Dr. Slavin herself, you should be aware that this department at the University of Minnesota is a hotbed of high carbery. In fact, this is where the dietitians came from who piled on the Atkins’ diet in the commentary to the bogus Lancet article I posted about a couple of years ago. (If you haven’t read it already, this is a post well worth reading just to see how screwed up the nutritional establishment really is.)

What do you think Dr. Slavin’s take is on whole grain consumption in chronic disease?  Do you think she believes that whole grains are bad?  How about fiber?  Do you think she is aware that the idea of fiber as a protective factor against cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases has never been proven?  Or do you think she blindly promotes fiber despite the lack of evidence that it’s good for anything?

Let’s take a look at one of her presentations and see. slavin-handout

From her material, it’s easy to see what her fixation is.  I’m glad I’m not her child, I can tell you that.

Other than the fact that they’re incorrect, I have a couple of real problems with the nutritional guidelines.

First, they are presented as if they are the latest in scientific thought on the subject of nutrition.  They aren’t.  They start out as guidelines put together by the most mainstream of the mainstream, which is a strike against them in the first place.  Then the lobbying starts.  That’s right.  The food industry gets into the act.  The officials in the Department of Agriculture ultimately referee the fight between the scientists (such as they are) and Big Sugar, Big Corn, Big Wheat and the rest of them.  What emerges is a sort of compromise between science and industry.  But it is foisted off as pure science.

After the scientific committee started pushing for a reduction in sugar in the 2000 guidelines, Senator Trent Lott presented the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture (the agency that sets the guidelines) with a letter signed by himself and multiple other senators from sugar-producing states asking that the recommendations to cut sugar from the diet be lightened.  Which, of course, they were.

My second problem is in how powerful these guidelines are in reality.  Most people think, hey, who cares what the guidelines are?  I eat the way I eat.  I don’t pay any attention to the guidelines.  Problem is the government is required by law to abide by these guidelines in feeding all the people the government feeds.  And the government feeds a lot of people.  Over 50 million per day, in fact.  Schools, the military and prisons are just a few of the institutions the government feeds daily.  Given these numbers, it’s easy to see why the food industry is so keen on how these guidelines end up being written.

In the YouTube below, you can see yours truly trying to explain all this to Bill O’Reilly.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I read this horrible article in the New York Times a few days ago and haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.

The gist of the article is that two men were convicted of murder by arson many years ago. Subsequent inquiries into both cases determined that the methods used by the investigators of both ‘crimes’ were faulty, and that the very evidence used to exonerate one man on death row was the same used to condemn the other.

The report [complied by a panel of private arson investigators and released in Austin, TX] says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading.

One man on death row was recently exonerated and pardoned based on this faulty evidence and was paid $430,000 by the state as compensation for wrongful imprisonment. The other condemned man didn’t fare as well. He was put to death by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004 after appeals to everyone imaginable had failed.

In what has to be one of the great understatements of all time, on learning of the report of his innocence, the executed man’s stepmother said:

“I’ve known it all along. I wish it could have happened before he was executed.”

Because the time from condemnation until the actual execution takes so many years, I don’t believe the death penalty has much deterrent value. And, just as I know there are innocent people in prison, I know there have got to be innocent people on death row. Some of these innocent people have been executed as will be innocent people in the future. If it is determined that an innocent person has been imprisoned, then that person can be released and compensated in some small measure by the state for his years of incarceration. There is no compensation for the executed, no matter how unjustly they were condemned.

I guess it’s all a part of my libertarian bent.