Food Facts:

Here is a fact: the medical and nutritional establishment in the United States since late in the previous century has instructed Americans to avoid saturated fats and minimize fats altogether, because these caused heart disease and, as a source of calories, contributed to obesity and its consequent, type 2 diabetes. Basically we were told to eat carbs, not fat.

That was backwards, exactly wrong.

That is a fact, too. If the realization of this error were fully digested, the fact would be clear: They told us wrong. Sorry. In reality, the misconceptions linger and occupy well trodden paths of thought and influence, which is to say, we are in a rut. The ideas are changing, but the body public is addicted to sweets and to profits, and thus to the ideas that excuse the eating and the selling. So no clear message comes from the top. The experts mainly support what appetite has already decreed.

An effective counter-message to the fats-are-bad thesis is easy to find and widely followed by those who seeking understanding of our health needs. Most fats are not bad, but sugar and other refined carbohydrates are causing both heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Those who think this way eat fats and minimize carbohydrates, especially sugar. We do not have heart disease.

I say that with trepidation. Heart disease is all over, and I have no proof that the foodies of this era who relish their coconut oil are coming up healthy. The lipid numbers of my blood work please my doctor, who has himself been preaching low-carb (“insulin modification”) since long before this turnaround hit the news. My numbers got better as I got more liberal with oils and careful about carbs. But still I say this with trepidation, because I have just now, 2.5 hours ago, submitted myself to a cath scan that is going to look right at the arteries of my heart. I’m scared: thinking I am probably doing well is one thing, but seeing pictures of the insides of my arteries? This means whatever I did wrong for most of these 72 years, or the effect of 72 years on anyone’s body, is going to show itself. But at least I know that sugar and carbs are the villain . . .

But I say that with reservation, recognizing that if I have bad stuff in there and I blame the carbs of my past, someone will speak up and say maybe I should blame the coconut oil of today. Maybe I just interpret facts through my theory, and someone with opposite theory will respond differently. If your theory determines what you blame, or who you blame, how do you pick the right theory? 

These are real problems for reasoning about what is good and bad. But I believe there is good theory and bad theory, on objective grounds. Good theory explains what we observe, and it also explains the bad theory. When you see them both, you can tell the difference. But this can be a big job, and most of the world will not be listening.  I won’t prove much of this here, but read any one of Gary Taubes’s three books, and the picture will become clear. (Why we Get Fat, Good Calories Bad Calories, The Case against Sugar.)

Here is another fact: If the medical establishment of a whole civilization can be wrong in such a fundamental way, one ought to look closely at what else might be coming down the wobbly track of scientific authority. It wobbles because forces are acting upon it: the sincere intent to improve  health, the love of coherent theory, the ego trips of scientists, and then the fear of certain outcomes, which might require change in one’s lifestyle or modify one’s business. These last two, personal bias and the profit motive, are corruptions of the process by which we all hope to find out what is important to a healthy life. So this other fact is that the authority structure in the health sciences does not have Mother Theresa’s loving heart, but in certain times and places it is  a rogue animal, needing to be faced down.
(“rogue”)

 
While I’m waiting the two days to see the insides of the arteries that keep my heart beating, I’m also perched at scary places in the middle of three books. Gary Taubes’s The Case Against Sugar proves everything our nutritional culture was unwilling to believe, but as he draws near the end I wonder how he will fix this mess: epidemics raging and no one up there giving clear instructions. How does he propose that we situate ourselves in a world full of bad food and bad advice, where effective science is pinned up against the wall of official disapproval? 

Then, Jordan Peterson in 12 Rules for Life is shouting his fatherly insight and advice, telling everyone to shape up and start living the real life that is there to be lived. He’s a clinical psychologist who asks new patients their breakfast menu: Wheaties and sugar with fruit juice? Fix that and maybe you won’t need psychotherapy. But he goes far beyond that issue and rages across the landscape and historic time addressing our vicissitudes and foolishness. So he has me wondering, How will this John-the-Baptist figure survive in a world where “merit” is now being put under the knife of extreme suspicion?

And then, worst of all, what will I do with the devastating stare of ?? into the shallow souls of wealthy, white evangelical Christians?  She promises to bring back a resurrected new love of scripture, but will this be a position I can stand in? If she turns out to be a nice, friendly, well-intentioned heretic—well, I can live with that and just urge my loved ones to be alert. But if she is even half right . . .

So right now there is much that remains to be seen.

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up,
Strengthen the things that remain?  (Bob Dylan)





The Good News Food and Health Research Team
a few brothers and sisters discussing how to feel better . . .

This material is linked from The Sherman Weather Report, as further support for the claim that our nutritional establishment has it backwards about carbs and fats, and about saturated and polyunsaturated fats. 

DETAILS:
For a detailed explanation of how metabolism is affected by too much sugar, in particular the fructose part of it, see:   http://www.indiana.edu/~oso/Fructose/Fructose.html

I had an epiphany about food and weight a few months ago, not my own idea, but glimpsed as I came out of the fog of previous assumptions.  It is now well confirmed by further reading.  In 25 words or less, WE GET FAT BECAUSE WE TAKE IN CALORIES OF THE WRONG KIND, AND THEY CAUSE OUR METABOLISM TO STORE FAT RATHER THAN BURN IT.  Genetics determines that some of us fall to this and others do not, but in our food culture almost everyone disposed this way will be overweight with blood sugar problems. 

Our guilty food culture is full of sugar and starch, the “white stuff,” the simple or “refined” carbohydrates.  In a nutshell—no, in a candy wrapper: these flood the blood with glucose; insulin comes to the rescue, pulling glucose into fat cells and inhibiting the burning of these fats as fuel; the eaters are not satiated and lack energy; they eat more and exercise less, to the same unfortunate effect.  Add to this that all the fructose (half of table sugar and high fructose corn syrup) overwhelms the liver, leading to fatty liver disease and more undesirables in the blood.  Over time, the recurring high level of insulin produces insulin resistance, and eventually the pancreas cannot produce enough, so you have type 2 diabetes. 

The best source I know on this is Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes, who also wrote the larger book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  David Perlmutter’s The Grain Brain adds to these problems that wheat is now so laden with gluten that it is bad for us, including long-term neurological effects.  These two authors alone make it plain that we could cut our medical costs in half if we ate more wisely.

 Taubes explains that the Calories-In/Calories-Out theory is a true but tells us nothing about what to do.  It is a biological truism: Yes, if you gain weight you are taking in more than you are expending, but Why?  He says we eat too much because we are getting fat, rather than getting fat because we eat too much.  You can force yourself to not eat and/or exercise, causing some weight loss, but you probably cannot keep it up, because you are both hungry and weak.  You could even be sacrificing muscle (thus losing weight), while retaining fat.  The real question is, what are the hormones causing your body to do with its nutrients?  If you are young and growing, you will take in more than you put out, because the growth hormone determines that the calories go to new body mass (and you may be both tired and hungry).  But in overweight people the hormone that regulates blood sugar is doing this in a perverse way, storing fat, leaving us hungry and weak, effectively forcing us to take in more than we put out.  This is because simple carbohydrates are flooding our bloodstreams with glucose and making the insulin work overtime.

Taubes gives many convincing examples.  A Native American tribe in Arizona was trim and active until economic changes got them eating U.S. government rations, with lots of sugar and flour.  In about a generation they became fat and sedentary.   Taubes says we like to blame obesity on sloth and gluttony, but saying they SHOULD eat less or exercise more is fruitless.  The weight and activity level are EFFECTS of the KIND of food, rather than the AMOUNT of food and inactivity being the CAUSE of the weight.

 Female rats have had their ovaries removed, and they became fat.  Without estrogen they could not regulate the insulin.  We might think that without estrogen they had increased appetite, but when they were kept from overeating they still got fat but became inactive.  Picture fat female rats, lying around their cages. 

Calories-in/Calories-out is a biological truism: if hormones cause the calories to be stored as fat, energy is missing, and the animal will eat more or do less.  If he can’t do less, he will harvest his own muscle tissue.  Animals can be starved and still remain fat.  Possibly we could learn to not do that to ourselves.   


Here is more detail from page 295, Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes

An obvious example of this reverse causation would be pregnant women, who are driven to fatten by hormonal changes. This hormonal drive induces hunger and lethargy as a result. In the context of evolution, these expanded fat stores would assure the availability of the necessary calories to nurse the infants after birth and assure the viability of the offspring. The mother's weight loss after birth may also be regulated by hormonal changes, just as it appears to be in animals.

What may be the single most incomprehensible aspect of the last half-century of obesity research is the failure of those -involved to grasp the fact that both hunger and sedentary behavior can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to grow fat, just as a lack of hunger and-the impulse to engage in physical activity can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to burn calories rather than store them. Obesity researchers will immediately acknowledge that height, and thus the growth of skeletal bones and muscle tissue, is determined by genetic inheritance and driven by hormonal regulation, and that this growth will induce the necessary positive caloric balance to fuel it. But they see no reason to believe that a similar process drives the growth of fat tissue. What they believe is what they were taught in medical school, which was and is the conventional wisdom: the growth of skeletal muscle and bones, and thus our height, is driven by the secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland; the growth of fat tissue, and thus our girth, is driven by eating too much or physical inactivity.

This notion that fattening is the cause and overeating the effect, and not vice versa, also explains why a century of researchers have made so little progress, and why they keep repeating the same experiments over and over again. By this logic, those who become obese have a constitutional tendency to fatten, whereas those who remain lean have a constitutional tendency to resist the accumulation of fat. This tendency is the manifestation of very subtle deviations in metabolism and hormonal state. The obese have a constitutional predisposition to accumulate slight excesses of fat in their adipose tissue, which in turn induces compensatory tendencies to consume slightly more calories than the lean or expend slightly less. Obese individuals will put on fat until they have counterbalanced the influence of this underlying disorder. Eventually, these individuals achieve energy balance—everyone does—but only at an excessive weight and with an excessive amount of body fat.

The essential question, then, is: what are the metabolic and hormonal deviation that drives this fattening process? When we have that answer, we will know what causes obesity.