Americans are no longer chubby, portly, or overweight.
We are corpulent, obese, and rotund. We don’t move like humans are supposed to move.
We don’t eat like humans are supposed to eat. We are not just merely dying from this plight, we are suffering.
What would happen to a Cheetah if we fed it Cheetos and made it sit idle? It would get sick, it would get depressed It would develop pain, and die.
Why? Because Cheetos are not what Cheetahs are supposed to eat, and sitting idle is not what cheetahs are supposed to do.
As cruel as the above treatment may seem to an animal, many Americans live, embrace, and defend their “right” to this scenario. After all, there is a robust, nearly unchallenged industrial machine to support it. Unchallenged, until now.
This is a call to action.
A much higher calling than sculpting a six-pack, toning thighs, selling gym memberships or slinging miracle supplements.
It’s a call for our society to lift each other up off the couch and move.
It is a call to educate each other to eat food instead of chemicals.
It is a call to INSPIRE MILLIONS to stop suffering and live like humans are designed to live.
You don’t have to be a personal trainer, life coach, or physician to grab a loved one’s hand and say “let’s go for a walk”. How do you know if you are walking fast and far enough? When someone no longer needs to pull you off the couch to go for a walk. You don’t have to be a dietician, nutritionist, or chef to select food that is actually “food” and not merely a chemically-induced taste. How do you know what “real food” is? The ingredients list should be the food itself. For meat, well, if you know what the animal’s name was prior to being on your plate, it’s probably safe to eat.
We don’t have to be hot, ripped, toned, shredded, sculpted, or beautiful. We need men, women, and children to get off the couch, stop eating poison, and get out of pain. Everyone can contribute. Do something today, right now to change the way you live or INSPIRE someone else to do the same. It may not happen overnight, it may take time. Person by person, household by household, city by city, state by state.
Working together, we can stand up and INSPIRE MILLIONS to be happy, healthy and pain free. After all, that’s how humans are supposed to live.
Our government is recommending “people over age 51, African-Americans (that would include me), and people with a history of hypertension, diabetes, or kidney problems limit their daily salt intake to a little over half a teaspoon”.
Thanks for looking out for me, but I’m not giving up my unrefined Celtic sea salt. My body likes those minerals. Never mind the fact that cutting refined salt consumption does little, if anything, for blood pressure.
“Systematic reviews of the evidence, whether published by those who believe that salt is responsible for hypertension or by those who don’t, have inevitably concluded that significant reductions in salt consumption – cutting our salt intake in half, for instance, which is difficult to accomplish in the real world – will drop blood pressure by perhaps 4 to 5 mm Hg in hypertensives and 2mm Hg in the rest of us.” – Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories
Just 4 to 5 mm Hg?
How motivating…
Okay, let’s say I did decide to follow Uncle Sam’s recommendations and lowered my salt intake to almost nothing. Yeah, my blood pressure would drop a bit (4 to 5 mm Hg) at first. But I’d eventually become weak and develop digestive challenges. It’s like trading one problem for two! Salt contains chloride, which is essential for the production of hydrochloric acid (HCl). HCl is produced in the stomach and is responsible for the breakdown of proteins. When HCL is low (also known as hypochlorhydria), it can throw off the entire digestive process, as it is the acidity of the food leaving the stomach that initiates the proper function of the gallbladder and pancreas in the small intestine.
Is refined table salt bad for you? Absolutely. However, what you can do is replace it with unrefined Celtic sea salt (my fave brand is Flower of the Ocean). Since the sea salt has not had all of its minerals processed out of it, it provides plenty of magnesium, which helps to reduce blood pressure! I use mine several times a day and my blood pressure is awesome!
And don’t even get me started with these fat-phobic imbeciles!
The new guidelines recommend that we consume less than 10 percent of our calories from saturated fat.
My goodness.
Personally, I can’t understand how an old food (animals) or nutrient (saturated fat) can cause a new disease (heart disease).
If it were not for saturated fat, we wouldn’t be here. Our ancestors consumed tons of the stuff. And they didn’t have a heart disease epidemic!
“The commonly held belief that the best diet for prevention of coronary heart disease is a low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet is not supported by the available evidence from clinical trials.” – European Heart Journal, Volume 18, January 1997
The link between saturated fat and heart disease has NEVER been proven! And dietary cholesterol has little, if anything, to do with blood cholesterol. This has been known since the 1960s.
Saturated fats are critical to human health. They make up our cell membranes. They are resistant to oxidation. They are the preferred fuel for the human heart, liver, and kidneys. They raise HDL, the “good” cholesterol.
Cholesterol is an antioxidant. It builds your hormones. It repairs damage to the arteries. It is found in the nerve sheaths, the white matter of the brain, and the adrenal glands. It helps regulate the body’s electrolyte balance. It boosts mood by way of stabilizing neurotransmitters.
You want cholesterol!
The government would like us to replace our saturated fats with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Well, I kinda like the monounsaturated fat recommendation. Olive oil is good for you. Just don’t cook with it at high heat. This will make it go rancid and not so good for you.
Telling us to consume more polyunsaturated fats really chaps my hide. In the last 100 years, saturated fat consumption has gone down while polyunsaturated fat consumption (mostly processed, rancid vegetable oils) has more than tripled. Meanwhile, heart disease is still the number one cause of death!
Replacing butter, bacon fat, chicken skin, coconut oil and the like with oils made from soybean, corn, and cottonseed is NOT a good idea. The latter are loaded with Omega-6 fats, which in excess (it doesn’t take much) will cause oxidative stress, inflammation, and eventually heart disease!
Then again, we’ve gotta do something with all that subsidized soy and corn.
Thanks, Mr. Vilsack (Head of the Department of Agriculture)!
Before I move on from this topic, I should point out that not all polyunsaturated fats are bad for us. The essential fats EPA and DHA are polyunsaturated. They are found in properly raised animals and wild fish, as well as fish and cod liver oils.
The CNN article ends with a quote from noted NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle,
“The new guidelines recognize that obesity is the No. 1 public health nutrition problem in America and actually gives good advice about what to do about it: eat less and eat better. For the first time, the guidelines make it clear that eating less is a priority”
At least she didn’t say “eat less and exercise more”. I may have puked.
The problem is that the USDA would like us to eat less of what is good for us (saturated fats) and more of what is not (polyunsaturated fats). And if their intention is to address obesity, it may be a good idea to consider WHY people overeat in the first place. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our dietary guidelines vilify the very foods that keep us satiated (animal fats).
It’s kinda hard to eat less when we’re hungry all day.
The USDA guidelines are updated every 5 years. Let’s not wait until 2015 to turn the pyramid upside down. Start making noise now! Start up a blog. Spread the word. Write your representative.
“99.99% of our genes were formed before the development of agriculture.” – Dr. S. Boyd Eaton, MD, Medical Anthropologist
Grains suck.
It’s really that simple. There is zero human dietary requirement for grains. Most (if not all) people would be better off without them. It was their introduction into the human diet by way of the Agricultural Revolution that shifted us away from the healthful animal-based diet that we survived and thrived on for 99.99% of our history. With this change came reductions in stature and brain size, chronic degenerative diseases, and much longer work days. Many anthropologists agree that the advent of agriculture was one of the worst events in human history. Despite the evidence of such agriculturally-induced human decline, we continue to perpetuate this event with our USDA dietary recommendations and our errant fears of animal fats.
Let’s set aside the whole “are grains fit for human consumption?” debate and just focus on the nuts and bolts of what they do within the human body. First of all, grains are living organisms. And like all living organisms, they have defense mechanisms to discourage predators from eating them. One such mechanism is called phytic acid, which binds to the important minerals in the grain such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc. So even though the label on the loaf of bread says that it is loaded with these minerals, you’re not really absorbing them. In addition, phytic acid can leach minerals from your body, causing mineral deficiencies. Not good.
You can eliminate or significantly reduce the phytic acid by way of soaking, sprouting, or fermenting the grain. This is cool and all, but it doesn’t take care of the fact that grains are 70-80% starch, which eventually converts to sugar and cranks up your blood glucose and insulin. Last night, I read in Primal Body-Primal Mind that one bagel or two slices of bread contain 5 times more sugar than your bloodstream requires. Any sugar that your bloodstream does not need gets stored away as either glycogen or fat. Imagine how much fat you store when you’re eating multiple servings of the stuff because the USDA told you to. You can’t burn fat when your pancreas is always cranking out insulin to counter your almost hourly grain binges!
Next up, we have goitrogens. These guys are also in grains. They work by suppressing thyroid function. Definitely a no-no. You don’t wanna eff with your metabolism!
If you follow my radio shows, you’re familiar with the damage that gluten can do. Most grains contain gluten, which can not only be damaging to the intestinal tract, but also to almost every other organ, tissue, or gland in your body. According to Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, by next year, autoimmunity will be the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world. One of the predominant triggers for autoimmunity is gluten. Ouch!
But what about the gluten-free grains like corn, rice, or quinoa (not really a grain, but close enough)? Well, they have their own problems. All grains contain lectins, which are proteins that are extremely hard to digest. These lectins like to stick to your intestinal lining and sneak their way into your bloodstream. This causes inflammation and destruction to the intestinal wall. This destruction can lead to a hyper-permeable gut that literally can no longer tell the difference between the good and bad guys. In other words, the gate is wide open for all kinds of bacteria, fungus, toxins, undigested food particles, and poop to cross over into the bloodstream, the last place they should be. The immune system sees lectins (and all of the other crap I just mentioned) as invaders and mounts a response against them. This can lead to multiple food sensitivities and allergies. To make matters worse, the immune system can get a little paranoid and start to have problems with mistaken identity. Since the lectins or undigested food particles can look very similar to your organs, tissues, or glands, it can start to attack them as well. This is how autoimmunity works. Your body is attacking itself. The breakdown of the intestinal wall is a huge player in this process. Don’t you think you’d be better off getting rid of the foods that cause this breakdown in the first place? Adios, grains!
I mentioned quinoa above. Now, I haven’t done as much research on this non-grain as I would like to. But according to Robb Wolf in his book The Paleo Solution, quinoa contains soap-like molecules called saponins. These guys punch holes in your microvillii, which are critical for proper breakdown of peptide and saccharide chains. Believe me, you don’t want to punch holes in your microvilli. Definitely not a good idea. But again, this deserves more research.
So there you have it, the case against grains in a nutshell. I can go on and on, but I’m trying to keep these blogs pretty short. Be sure to listen to UW Radio TONIGHT at 5pm PT/8pm ET. Nora Gedgaudas, CNS, CNT, author of Primal Body-Primal Mind, will be digging deeper into this topic, including why she differs with the Weston A. Price Foundation’s stance on the healthfulness of grains. Gonna be a good one!
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by Brett Klika
