I’m a spanish lowcarb girl and i’m following your book and method since two months ago (so happy with the results!). Now that you’re writting about cla, i’d like to know what you think about the pills of cla. May the pills help with the weight loss? Thanks a lot for all your help and for telling us the truth about nutrition

Hi Pilar–

Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you’ve been so successful on the program.

You must be careful with the CLA because CLA isn’t one single substance, but a mixture of many.  I don’t take it myself because all the data isn’t sorted out to my satisfaction yet.  The best way to get CLA is from the meat and dairy products of grass-fed animals.

I hope this helps.

Best–

MRE 

Yet, the standard dietary advice for diabetics (and to prevent atherosclerosis) is to limit saturated (animal) fat and consume only low fat or fat free dairy. That dietary advice is depriving diabetics of a nutrient that may help them. Oh well, the pharmaceutical industry can manufacture it’s own CLA apart from animal fat and make $$$$$ off a product that may not be as effective as the natural version.

Hi Dan–

You’re right.  Grass-fed and/or organically-raised animals have the most CLA, but you don’t get it if you only eat the low-fat or fat-free dairy products from them.

Not only is manufactured CLA not as good as natural, some of the factory-made stuff is in an isomeric form that has been shown to be detrimental to health.  The many isomers of CLA is what has prevented CLA as a supplement from gaining traction.  For every study showing a benefit of one or a group of isomers there was one showing negative effects using other isomers or groups of isomers.   Since CLA is the all-encompassing term for a bunch of isomers, no one knew where it was all leading.

Cheers–

MRE 

The person I was talking about was talking, if I recall, about sciences, not philosophy. So, if every currently unanswered question has an answer developed for it, and the only unanswered questions are things like String Theory and the Landscape, or multiple dimensions and alternate universes with differing physics. Things that are pretty much unknowable and inherently unobservable.

I suspect that there is a limit to the sum total of knowable things. But, I don’t think we’re really near it. Of course, if you look at the exponential rate of growth in knowledge, century by century, what we know in 2107 will make us look less informed than people in 1907 look to us. Maybe even less informed than the people of 1807.

Last thought: philosophy is to open the mind to broader possibilities, including the end of new discoveries. Relax a little, be open to ideas, and you’ll probably live long enough to see some pretty strange days indeed.

I was talking about the more recent spinach problem from California just a few months ago. 

Uh, am I missing something here?  I can’t see how this post would inspire a philosophical debate.  Did you post this comment to the wrong post?

Cheers–

MRE 

Hi Hellistile–

I guess I just can’t resist.

Cheers–

MRE 

Hi Paul–

Probably a good progression.

Cheers–

MRE 

Essentially, you’re weighing a “we don’t know” versus a known risk. That spinach outbreak last year was from an organic farm, and against that we only have a “what if someday this changes your odds of getting cancer”.

Note, too, that Fear Equals Funding bureaucrats like the NiH and CDC assume, irrationally, that if N exposure causes 100% death, then a N*.01 exposure causes one percent of all people exposed to die. This is utterly crazy…water is toxic, in sufficient amounts, as is oxygen, but obviously a smaller percentage is actually healthful.

Why, in fact, would we worry more about synthetic chemicals than anything else? Perhaps the latest cultivar of tomatoes causes cancer. Or the purple carrots I’m growing this year.

Take genetic engineering, for example. When you genetically splice a gene into corn, you are actually doing precisely the same thing that would happen if you hybrid the corn, except more efficiently. Every new corn hybrid has a chance of somehow being harmful, whether gene-spliced or made by some little old granny with a fondness for horticulture. But people focus on the geneered corn as an unknown risk, as if it were somehow more dangerous.

Similarly, I wonder if anyone’s ever bothered to thoroughly test worm casting tea for carcinogenic qualites.

When tending my own garden, I use companion plants as an alternative to pesticides, as I’ve mentioned before. I actually believe that I get superior results because of it, as well as not having to risk all the funky chemicals.

But it’s worth noting that, on an industrial scale, you get less than half the yield using “organic” techniquest than conventional ones, with the conventional yields also increasing every year as technology advances.

YOU may be willing to pay extra for organic foods, but it would be a disaster if all American agriculture went that way, or even a sizable percentage. We’d have to double the amount of land used for farming, plus massively increase the amount of workers involved, which would be an economic disaster. The fewer workers required to produce a given thing, the more prosperous the society.

I do, by the way, use artificial fertilizer. I’m far less concerned with that than actual pesticides…but more importantly, if my plants start suffering a nutrient deficiency, and I treat half of them with Miracle Gro, the other half with fish emulsion and worm tea, the half getting the miracle gro will recover faster, be healthier, and produce larger, better-tasting fruit. This is because organic techniques are very slow to amend soil and meet needs. You have to anticipate and build up, constantly.

So there is, in fact, some chance even in home gardening that conventional techniques will produce healthier food. Similarly, imagine a pest outbreak that brutalizes some crop…you still get some produce, but it’s less healthy, perhaps therefore less nutritious. What if the pesticides they could have used WOULD have washed off? Isn’t one better off, then, with the healthier fruit?

If a real crisis occurs, where my companion plants don’t do the trick, I will fall back on pesticides, albeit with great care to use what I think is least risky to myself.

Hi Kaz–

A couple of things…

First, I didn’t go back and look it up, but I don’t believe the spinach outbreak came from an organic farm.  I think it was conventionally grown spinach.  The thinking was that the O157:H7 E. coli was tracked into the spinach by wild pigs that roam in the area.

Second, I agree with you about chemical fertilizers in one’s own food.  I wouldn’t mind using them myself and eating the results because I would know precisely what I was eating.  What I’m not so sure is eating something that I’m not sure about.

Cheers–

MRE 

Interesting story. As an avid consumer of factory tours, I am always wondering at the differences between making something in a factory and making something in nature’s factory. It would seem, for something like CLA (and other vitamins, minerals and supplements) the useful way to manufacture them would be to replicate inorganically nature’s factory. So, if CLA comes from rumens with bacteria X, can we make an artificial one, and use it to crank CLA that is just right, and takeable in supplement form? I dunno.

Recently read “What’s Your Dangerous Idea?” which presents a number (108 I think) leading thinkers from various sciences, arts, and other realms (they should get you in on the next Edge Question, if you ask me). At least one of the 108 respondents dangerous idea was that we are approaching a time in the next 5-20 years, where we will be at the end of knowledge. We will know everything there is to know about everything on the planet. It’s been a month or so since I read it, but it turns out this might be a dangerous idea from the “what happens when we don’t have to ask questions anymore” frame of things. On the flip side, if the secret to everything were open, imagine the commercial possibilities for putting pieces together. Like artificial robot cows to produce CLA and whatever else we get out of natural cow meat. Me, I don’t think curiosity would die. But considering how every question we answer raises two new questions (in addition to the million questions about our methodology in answering the question), I don’t think we will ever know EVERYTHING. There’s always a deeper mystery, no? Like why faith over reason.

I ramble. Thanks for the post. Hope you are able to post more frequently. I blame the mac (which is probably not a popular pov around here and is a religious war waiting to open equal to at least Yankees-Red Sox or Ohio State – Michigan).

Hi Max–

Many of these ‘products’ can be made in regular factories.  Factory-produced vitamin C, for example, is no different than naturally produced vitamin C: they are identical.  The problem isn’t so much in the making of them as it is in the identifying whether or not the specific chemical in question is actually healthful.  Green leafy and colorful vegetables contain a lot of flavenoids and carotenoids.  If we isolate a few of them, make them in a factory, and take them, do we get the same benefit as eating the same amount in vegetable form?  The answer is pretty much a big NO.  So, either we’re not isolating and synthesizing all of them, or we haven’t discovered all of them, or there is some synergy with other components of the actual plants that we don’t get in the factory versions.

Right around the turn of the century one of the Gods of physics (Rutherford, I think) made the pronouncement that the study of physics had been taken as far as it was likely to go.  There was nothing new to learn.  Then in 1905 Einstein published his five papers turning the world of physics upside down.  I always remember this lesson when I hear that we are nearing the limits of knowledge.

I haven’t taken a break from posting due to the Mac.  In fact, I’m answering this comment on a PC, which I still use as my desktop computer.  I’ve been involved in a business project that right after I wrote the ‘Back in the saddle’ post suddenly and without warning had occasion to occupy almost all of my time.  I wasn’t shed of it until last night.

Cheers–

MRE