Saturated fat is a marker for disease in the body, not because we eat saturated fat, but because the liver converts excess carbohydrates to saturated fats. The error logic is to assume that eating the same is harmful.

Here are a bunch of snippets from the Weston Price Foundation. They have abbreviated citations, but it should give you a start if you are inclined.

Myth: Heart disease in America is caused by consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat from animal products.

Truth: During the period of rapid increase in heart disease (1920-1960), American consumption of animal fats declined but consumption of hydrogenated and industrially processed vegetable fats increased dramatically. (USDA-HNI)

Myth: Saturated fat clogs arteries.

Truth: The fatty acids found in artery clogs are mostly unsaturated (74%) of which 41% are polyunsaturated. (Lancet 1994 344:1195)

Myth: Vegetarianism is healthy.

Truth: The annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian men is slightly more than that of non-vegetarian men (.93% vs .89%); the annual death rate of vegetarian women is significantly more than that of non-vegetarian women (.86% vs .54%) (Am J Clin Nutr 1982 36:873)

Myth: Vitamin B12 can be obtained from certain plant sources such as blue-green algae and soy products.

Truth: Vitamin B12 is not absorbed from plant sources. Modern soy products increase the body's need for B12. (Soybeans: Chemistry & Technology Vol 1 1972)

Myth: For good health, serum cholesterol should be less than 180 mg/dl.

Truth: The all-cause death rate is higher in individuals with cholesterol levels lower than 180 mg/dl. (Circulation 1992 86:3:1026-1029)

Myth: Animal fats cause cancer and heart disease.

Truth: Animal fats contain many nutrients that protect against cancer and heart disease; elevated rates of cancer and heart disease are associated with consumption of large amounts of vegetable oils. (Fed Proc July 1978 37:2215)

Myth: Children benefit from a low-fat diet.

Truth: Children on low-fat diets suffer from growth problems, failure to thrive & learning disabilities. (Food Chem News 10/3/94)

Myth: A low-fat diet will make you "feel better . . . and increase your joy of living."

Truth: Low-fat diets are associated with increased rates of depression, psychological problems, fatigue, violence and suicide. (Lancet 3/21/92 v339)

Myth: To avoid heart disease, we should use margarine instead of butter.

Truth: Margarine eaters have twice the rate of heart disease as butter eaters. (Nutrition Week 3/22/91 21:12)

Myth: Americans do not consume enough essential fatty acids.

Truth: Americans consume far too much of one kind of EFA (omega-6 EFAs found in most polyunsaturated vegetable oils) but not enough of another kind of EFA (omega-3 EFAs found in fish, fish oils, eggs from properly fed chickens, dark green vegetables and herbs, and oils from certain seeds such as flax and chia, nuts such as walnuts and in small amounts in all whole grains.) (Am J Clin Nutr 1991 54:438-63)

Myth: A vegetarian diet will protect you against atherosclerosis.

Truth: The International Atherosclerosis Project found that vegetarians had just as much atherosclerosis as meat eaters. (Lab Invest 1968 18:498)

Myth: Low-fat diets prevent breast cancer.

Truth: A recent study found that women on very low-fat diets (less than 20%) had the same rate of breast cancer as women who consumed large amounts of fat. (NEJM 2/8/96)

Myth: The "cave man diet" was low in fat.

Truth: Throughout the world, primitive peoples sought out and consumed fat from fish and shellfish, water fowl, sea mammals, land birds, insects, reptiles, rodents, bears, dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, game, eggs, nuts and milk products. (Abrams, Food & Evolution 1987)

Myth: Coconut oil causes heart disease.

Truth: When coconut oil was fed as 7% of energy to patients recovering from heart attacks, the patients had greater improvement compared to untreated controls, and no difference compared to patents treated with corn or safflower oils. Populations that consume coconut oil have low rates of heart disease. Coconut oil may also be one of the most useful oils to prevent heart disease because of its antiviral and antimicrobial characteristics. (JAMA 1967 202:1119-1123; Am J Clin Nutr 1981 34:1552)

Myth: Saturated fats inhibit production of anti-inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Saturated fats actually improve the production of all prostaglandins by facilitating the conversion of essential fatty acids. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Arachidonic acid in foods like liver, butter and egg yolks causes production of "bad" inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Series 2 prostaglandins that the body makes from arachidonic acid both encourage and inhibit inflammation under appropriate circumstances. Arachidonic acid is vital for the function of the brain and nervous system. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Beef causes colon cancer

Truth: Argentina, with higher beef consumption, has lower rates of colon cancer than the US. Mormons have lower rates of colon cancer than vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists (Cancer Res 35:3513 1975)

© 1999 Weston A. Price Foundation All Rights Reserved.

The ancient Chinese acupuncturists say, "Eat breakfast like a Queen, lunch like a princess, and dinner like a pauper." Most people have heard a variation of this advice and know that breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal of the day, but they ask me, "I'm just not hungry in the morning. What should I do?" What I'm going to teach you today is why lack of hunger in the morning is a symptom of too little sleep and why you want to fix that.

Does your alarm clock wake you from the dead?
The problem with lack of sleep is that your body does not have enough time manage your hormones, especially melatonin. Among it's other jobs, melatonin is a master hormone that coordinates other hormones. When you go to bed too late, your melatonin levels peak right when they should be fading away, right about when the hated alarm goes off.

When your melatonin peak is shifted into the morning hours, the hormone controlling your appetite, leptin, is also high. (High levels of leptin at night keep you from waking up and raiding the fridge.) The elevated melatonin and leptin prevent hunger in the morning and explain why that lack of hunger is a serious sign that you are sleep deprived. Elevated morning melatonin also changes the timing of your natural cortisol spike which is your body's natural alarm clock. We are forced to replace our natural alarm clock with the much hated clock radio. Ugh!

Its all downhill from there!
So you drag yourself out of bed, forcing your body to wake up when it is just should be getting into deep sleep. You skip breakfast and sleep walk through the first part of the day. Because your cortisol levels are low, you cannot effectively deal with the stress of the day and your time perception gets warped and before you know it, the day has passed and you have accomplished little. Sound familiar?

The 5-element acupuncture body clock
The ancient Chinese understood the effects of these hormone waves. Even though they could not measure the hormones with blood tests, they could see the effects when normal sleep patterns were disturbed. They called this the Law of Midday/Midnight. If your internal body clock is off, not only do you have no hunger in the morning, but acupuncturists go on to say if your energy is not balanced, at 3:00 p.m. (bladder meridian time) you will crave sweets, get sleepy, irritable and stupid, not exactly a recipe for success.

This Atlantic Wire headline made me spit my coffee all over my laptop.

Harvard Researchers Want Fat Kids Taken from Their Homes

”Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," said Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health. The study's co-author, David Ludwig, says taking away peoples' children "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible.”

Let’s put aside whether this idea is practical or not and let’s also put aside the long-term psychological impact of removing a child from his or her home, because there is a deeper issue here that is more troubling. The low-fat, high-carb dietary advice that these very same Harvard “experts” have been force feeding America since the science got “settled” by political consensus in a committee hearing on Capital Hill, is why THESE KIDS ARE FAT IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Dr. Briffa does a better job (calmer, no all-caps) commenting on the continuing fascination with the failed hypothesis that fat must be avoided for good health.

“Conventional dietary advice regarding fat consumption has been proven to have no effect on risk of heart attack or stroke or cardiovascular mortality or total mortality – they don’t prevent disease nor save lives. We should abandon them.”

Can you see what’s going on? Harvard experts tell Americans to cut fat out of their diet. Americans comply and cut fat and eat more carbs, which as Dr. Briffa points out, has no effect on heart disease. Now there is an obesity epidemic caused by eating too many carbs. (Start your education by reading Gary Taube’s Why We Get Fat.) And what is the so called experts’ solution? Everybody say it with me, “Cut fat out of your diet!”

The problem with these experts is they cannot conceive that they are wrong. They are the best and the brightest. They work at Harvard! They know what’s best for you! It couldn’t possibly be that a low-fat high-carb American Medical Association approved diet is making people sick, it must be you little people aren’t following our recommendations properly.

Therefore, since you are obviously incapable of following the shining path we have laid out for you, we are going to save your child from you. Don’t worry, we will give her (or him) back to you, sometime.

I think I’ll go home tonight and have a giant steak and a side of veggies, without bread, potatoes, bread or rice and congratulate my daughter Aurora, who is loosing weight without government intervention and turning the food pyramid upside down by eating more fat and less grains.

0 Comments

The milk you buy in the store is no longer milk. It’s a highly processed and manufactured food. I didn’t know this until my father-in-law started milking his American Milking Devon cows and I got to drink real raw milk. The difference is not just the taste, but the nutrient, microbial, and enzyme content.

The stuff you get in the store is basically powdered milk. Yuck, right?

What got me thinking about raw milk again was a post by Jimmy Moore about what happens to his blood sugar after drinking various things. (Jimmy Moore is one of the most important sources for health information of the web. If you are not familiar with him I highly recommend you spend a few minutes checking out his blog.)

Two of the drinks he tested were 2% “milk” and raw milk. Look at the difference and how unstable his blood sugar become when he drinks what most of us consider milk. I’ll tell what that means after you look at the graphs.





You can see that the 2% “milk causes a dip in the blood sugar and then a fairly steep rise. While you can’t draw any broad conclusions based on just one person’s results, you can see that drinking 2% could actually cause you to get hungry because your blood sugar drops.

By comparison, the raw milk barely budges the blood sugar at all. Now theoretically, the only difference between raw milk and 2% is that the 2% has some of the fat taken out. Clearly, there is more to the story than that. Bottom line, raw milk is food. 2% “milk” is, well, I’m not sure what it is.

My internet podcast debut is happening Monday at Jimmy Moore's. Check it out here at Livin' Low-carb Show.

Jimmy has an amazing story of perseverance and weight loss. He has turned his own pain into a mission to help people be heathy first and loose weight second. He is an amazing resource both for health related issues, wellness and of course weight loss. Be sure to check out his site and my interview.