What Is Our Perfect Diet?
I’m sure you’ve all heard people say, “Who knows
what’s good for us? One day eggs are fine, the next day they’re not,
and now I hear they’re the perfect food.”
And my own person stories consist of people
telling me (screaming at me) that the human animal is an herbivore,
that we weren’t meant to eat meat, or the fellow with the heart
trouble telling me he can’t eat shrimp because of the cholesterol,
or milk, he has to eat skim because it has less fat.
Finally there’s that character over there
ordering an egg white omelet.
One problem is that we are drowning in a flood of
information. Everywhere you look you’ll find someone telling you
something about the food you eat. The second problem is that 90% of
our beliefs about food are just that: beliefs that have no
grounding in science. And lastly, the keepers of the dietary rules
are politicians, not nutritionists. Food is political.
“If you control food, you
control the population." Henry
Kissinger
The man who has taught the world the most
about what foods we should eat was a dentist,
Then, suddenly, in the fifties and sixties came
this unprecedented dietary proclamation:
FAT IS BAD FOR YOU!
Editor's Note: Two weeks after
writing this, I actually found the man who is responsible for this
low fat craze. He is responsible for the
Cholesterol Theory of Heart Disease.
His name is
Ancel Keys.
This came, literally out of nowhere. It had
NO science behind it. The original Framingham
report did state, incorrectly, in its early years, that dietary
cholesterol caused a rise in our cholesterol, but they later
recanted. Their original numbers were off.
But the low fat craze suddenly meant that carbs
were what we were supposed to eat. This went against a hundred years
of experience, but people believed it. Low Fat was the key. Food
companies highlighted their packaging with LOW FAT printed in
big bold letters. And the race was on to see how fat we could really
get.
On the heals of the low fat craze came the
cholesterol frenzy. Someone in a pharmaceutical company had created
a drug that lowered cholesterol. So they had to go out and create a
new disease and suddenly hypercholesterolemia
was born. And the
drugs really worked. They lowered cholesterol. One side effect was
they lowered life expectancy too. So they had to find newer
cholesterol drugs that didn’t kill the patients, and Viola! they
came up with Statins. These won’t kill you, buty they will make you
tired, injure your muscles, pull CoQ10 from your body, and give you
diabetes.
Butter was replaced with margarine, sugar was
replaced with high fructose corn syrup, and the greatest flavor
enhancer ever created, which, by the way, never went rancid,
extending shelf life suddenly showed up in virtually
everything: partially hydrogenated oils, or "trans fats."
And to top it off, the government designed and
produced the most expensive piece of
“commissioned” artwork in the history of the planet: The Food
Pyramid. (Click the thumbnail to enlarge.)
Costing over $450 million (I seem to recall 480
million, but I can no longer find my source on this), the food
pyramid did everything it could to put fat on the American public.
And how could something like this cost so much?
For one thing, the food industry kept going to
court to halt its publication. The beef industry wanted more beef.
The fish industry wanted a prettier fish. The dairy industry wanted
theirs lowered on the pyramid. And the grain industry, the one at
the bottom (thus we were being instructed to eat more grains) wanted
theirs higher up on the pyramid because most of the grain in the US
goes to feed our beef. They too wanted more beef, poultry, and pork
lower on the pyramid.
If you are wondering why butter’s bad for you one
year and good the next ─ or eggs? Are they good for us this year? The
debacle that led to our food pyramid costing over $450 million
should tell you that the confusion is all caused by food industry
lobbyists being in bed with Congress, the FDA, the AMA, and the FCC.
And again, there is no science behind any of it.
When money is involved, don't expect the truth.
Oh, and that egg white omelet: yes, science has
discovered that if you fry the yolk of an egg you oxidize the fats.
You do not want to consume oxidized fats. Egg yolks should be
undercooked; hard boiled is the most damage you would ever want to do
them.
By the way, you might not know this, but the food
pyramid has been replaced by MyPl
ate.
Again, MyPlate is just another overpriced representation of the same
unscientific, but politically generated, food guidelines.
So for now, to answer the question at the top:
What is our perfect diet?
I will say this: it is not what you are
told it is.
However, you can learn a little more by following
the further reading links.
Further Reading
Why Is Gluten Such A Problem Today?
Is
Whole Wheat Damaging Your Body? This is written by Mike Geary.
He's usually pretty good, but he will sell out to make a profit. He
was one of the first to jump on the AztecSeaSalt bandwagon selling a
very expensive product, not as good as Celtic Sea Salt, but
generating 50% commissions.
Canola Oil
Again from Mike Geary, but very important. In my food co-op, all the
salad dressings have canola oil in them. They've been passed off as
healthy for far too long. You will not find any in my kitchen.