Food for Thought Friday: Pay the Farmer Now, or Pay the Doctor ... When, Exactly?

When well-meaning acquaintances mock us for spending more money than they do for food, those of us who take pride in buying, cooking, and eating whole, unprocessed, real foods are fond of saying, “Pay the farmer now, or pay the doctor later.” Meaning, if people don’t pony up a little extra cash for better quality food now, they’ll end up paying even more in the future, in the form of medical bills. But is this actually true? If people spend decades putting garbage down their pieholes and end up with some of the “diseases of civilization,” do they really end up all that much worse off, financially?

For the sake of keeping this post to a somewhat reasonable length, let’s stick solely to the financial burden of diet- and lifestyle-induced illness, and we’ll table the “cost” of missed work time, fatigue, illness, chronic pain, and overall reduced quality of life for another time. (But let’s go ahead and acknowledge that these other issues are arguably more important than one’s bank account balance.)

Food for Thought Friday: Food Prudes & the Low Carb Backlash

You know the phrase, folks:  Everything old is new again.

Dr. Robert Atkins was practically driven out of professional medicine by an angry mob wielding knives and pitchforks. How dare he suggest that obese people might have success in losing weight by reducing the amount of carbohydrate they consume? And worse—far worse!—how dare he tell people it was okay to eat butter, cheese, and red meat? Sure, people could lose weight by cutting back on starch, but didn’t Atkins know that the high-fat foods he recommended (especially the ones from—gasp!—animals!) would clog people’s arteries? (Um, no, he did not know that, because it’s not true. Also, by the way, Dr. Atkins was a cardiologist, so one would assume he would not have put thousands of his patients on a diet that could have had him indicted for malpractice, but I digress.)

From the publishing of Dr. Atkins’ first diet book in 1972, through its newer editions during the 1990s, it seemed like the more people that were successful on the Atkins diet, the louder, more strident, and more vitriolic the backlash became.

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we are smack-dab in the middle of another round of low carb hatred. I suspect it’s due to the wild popularity not just of the low-carb approach, but also to the exponential increase in interest in Paleo, Primal, and low-allergen diets. (None of these is low carb by definition, but they tend to be significantly lowER in carbs than the standard American diet.) Moreover, even mainstream nutrition and medical organizations have basically rescinded the last 3-4 decades’ worth of recommendations to avoid every single molecule of saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol.

The powers that be can see the writing on the wall, and they do not like it.

Food for Thought Friday: Sandwiches are Stupid

It’s true. They are.

But let’s not even address this from the perspective of low carb eating. Grain flour that’s been baked into some sort of spongy, edible “thing” is a completely unnecessary element in the human diet. Bread, rolls, buns, pita, naan, bagels, panini – carbohydrate, insulin, blah, blah, blah. Old news. It’s Friday, and since I like to have a little more fun with these posts than I tend to let slip in things like the cancer series or the fuel partitioning series, let’s look at the ridiculousness of sandwiches from a perspective that has nothing to do with aspects of carbohydrate that we’ve all heard about a million times over.

How about we tackle the sandwich from a functional and socio-cultural perspective?  

Food for Thought Friday: Low-Carb Logical Fallacies

Time for another round of things that make us go hmmm.

Last time in Food for Thought Friday, I addressed the issue of ketosis, carbs, and alcohol. I’m pleasantly surprised at the number of page hits it’s gotten. Here, I thought it was kind of a throwaway post, a quick one-off just to get something up on the blog before people forget I exist. But it seems the topic struck a chord, or maybe people just like reading about ketosis & alcohol. (And who can blame them? Either together or separately, they’re great topics!)

Since I pointed out the problems with the keto-haters suggesting ketones are “dangerous” or “unnatural” because the body stops producing elevated levels of them as soon as it has any appreciable amount of glucose in the bloodstream, today I thought I’d point out a logical fallacy that low-carbers are prone to using—myself included. It goes a little something like this:

Food for Thought Friday: Ketosis, Carbs, and Alcohol

I have tried to make it clear on this blog that I am not what anyone could call a “low carb zealot.” If anything, I’d like to think I offer a level-headed perspective that is sometimes missing when nutritionally-minded folks draw their lines in the sand and refuse to entertain the mere thought that their way might not be the best way or the only way for absolutely everyone else on planet Earth to be healthy and have a body that feels and looks the way they’re happy with. So let this little intro serve as a reminder that I don’t think very low-carb diets are appropriate for everyone. I don’t think half a stick of butter should be used as a condiment, and I don’t think adding 3-5 tablespoons of coconut oil and ghee to a cup of coffee is the best way for everyone to rise & shine first thing in the morning. In fact, if you were to look in my fridge and pantry right now, you might even be convinced that—shocker!—I eat plenty of vegetables along with all the yummy animal fat and protein I think are so good for us. (Also: there might or might not be a pint of ice cream in the freezer. I will neither confirm nor deny.)

That being said, I am a loyal low-carber for my own health and weight management, and I find myself bothered by an argument that pops up here and there about ketosis. It goes something like this: Ketosis is an unnatural and/or dangerous state, because it is so fragile and temporary. The minute the body has enough glucose available to do so, it shuts down ramped-up ketone production and goes back to more glycolytic metabolism.

This is true; I can’t argue with this. (The part about ketosis being fragile, not about it being dangerous.) The people who point this out use it to imply that the body genuinely prefers to run more on glucose than on fatty acids and ketones, because as soon as it can stop running on ketones, it does.

But here’s why this bothers me:

Food for Thought Friday: Individuality

As this guy would say, “Holy cats!” It’s been a looong time since I posted a Food for Thought Friday. (Nine months!) If this reminds you of Fat Tuesday or What I Think Wednesday, and you’re wondering if I have a series in mind for every day of the week, the answer is yes. For now, though, I’ll spare you the dorkfest and just post them as they come to mind. (Never mind that I don’t have the time to post seven days a week. Probably for the best, considering you probably have neither the time nor the desire to read my mindless ramblings on a daily basis  my posts are so helpful and dense with information that a new one every day would be too much for you to process.) Still, the titles are a good outlet for my alliteration skills, and the former creative writing major and not-terrible poet in me is a little sad that they’re atrophying.

Okay. Enough blathering. On with the show…I mean, post!

FTF: Food With No Brakes

Hmmm...

Food for Thought Friday:  Concepts and quotations to make you think.

“Foods with no brakes.”

Four little words for such a powerful concept.

What are foods with no brakes? According to Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, authors of It Starts With Food and the forces behind the popular “Whole 9” and “Whole 30” concepts, they’re exactly what they sound like:  foods that you can’t stop eating. Once you start, once you take that first bite, you’re like an out-of-control bullet train barreling down the track while some innocent little creature is taking its time crossing those tracks. There is no stopping you. The end result? Total disaster.

You + family-size bag of M&Ms = speeding car + tree?

Call them what you want—trigger foods; gateway drugs…er, foods—we all have them, and they all translate to the same thing:  foods that we are physically and/or psychologically incapable of eating in moderation. (Never mind that no one seems to be able to tell us what, exactly, moderation is.)

Food For Thought Friday

Food for Thought Friday!

Welcome to Food for Thought Friday—a handy-dandy way for me to share thought-provoking quotations about food, nutrition, and health. (If the alliteration reminds you of What I Thought Wednesday, what can I say…I was a creative writing major in another life. And I’m clearly still a dork in this one.)

So on Fridays (maybe not every Friday…let’s not get too ambitious here, hehheh), I’ll post a quote from a book, news article, movie, or maybe even something overheard at the supermarket or farmer’s market. Something that makes me think about the larger issues surrounding all this stuff, and will maybe get you thinking, too.

Here goes:

“Of course, using food as medicine is ancient. The pharmacopeia of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and China as well as those of the Middle Ages was based on food. Only in this century has society become almost exclusively dependent on manufactured pills to cure our miseries. But now that pharmaceutical model is breaking down as a panacea for today’s plague of chronic diseases, such as cancer, arthritis, and heart disease and the ancient wisdom about food’s medicinal powers, newly confirmed by twentieth century scientific research, is increasingly infiltrating mainstream medicine.”

--Jean Carper, The Food Pharmacy Guide to Good Eating, as quoted in Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. (Quite possibly one of the world’s best—but most intimidating—cookbooks.)

Powerful stuff, huh? Yeah, I think so, too. I didn’t get into the nutrition industry because I think modern medicine has nothing to offer, or because I think allopathic (conventional-type) doctors serve no purpose. They have their place, and they provide a vital service. If you get hit by a bus or break your leg in a skiing accident, I’m the first person to tell you you do not want a nutritionist with you in the ER. You want the best trauma medicine modern technology can offer. And thank goodness for the people trained to provide it.

BUT…when it comes to chronic conditions that build slowly and insidiously over time, unfortunately, the best modern medicine can offer us is pharmaceutical drugs that often have a laundry list of side effects that are worse than the conditions you take them for. (We should probably call it a dirty laundry list!) And if that wasn’t bad enough, these drugs are often prescribed with the rest of your life in mind. You never stop taking them. What does that tell us? I don’t know about you, but it tells me that those drugs don’t actually cure or heal anything. They manage your condition. They address individual symptoms instead of getting at the underlying causes. Have heartburn? Take an antacid; don’t worry about figuring out why you have heartburn and correcting that. Wake up with a headache every morning? Pop a few aspirin and go about your day; never mind what’s causing those headaches and trying to improve that.

This is where food comes in. The right nutrients—or the lack thereof—have such incredible power over our physical and psychological health. Think about powerful, robust, ancient warriors. They didn’t start the morning of a big battle with Cap’n Crunch cereal and skim milk, or Pop-Tarts. Somehow I don’t think those things (if they had existed back then) would have given those guys the fortitude they needed to charge in and fight for their lives.

The thing with nutrition is, we don’t develop deficiencies and imbalances overnight. They accumulate slowly, over time, so it can be difficult to connect our headaches, indigestion, joint pain, infertility, depression, fatigue, or heart disease to our diet. It’s not as if you eat a couple of Twinkies for dessert and wake up diabetic the next day. If only it were that black and white! People would know without a doubt what to eat and what to avoid. (But then I’d be out of a job...)

What did our ancestors do before they could pop in at the corner drugstore and walk out with a bag of pills? They used food as medicine. They knew that certain types of pain, certain types of chronic health problems, and certain types of behavioral abnormalities were often the result of nutrient imbalances—sometimes too much of some things, but usually not enough of others. Even if you know nothing about nutrition, you probably at least heard about the biggies in a junior-high health class a zillion years ago:  things like scurvy (lack of vitamin C), pellagra (vitamin B₃ deficiency), beriberi (B₁), and rickets (vitamin D). But those deficiency diseases are actually the last stage of severe, long-term depletion. You don’t end up bow-legged after a couple days without enough vitamin D, and your gums don’t start bleeding if you go a week without orange juice. But after a couple years without enough animal fats in your diet, you might end up depressed, anxious, or infertile. A couple years with too much wheat, too many omega-6 fats, and not enough omega-3s and other anti-inflammatory nutrients and you might end up with arthritis or multiple sclerosis.

I’m not trying to be alarmist here. I’m only sharing with you some of what I’ve learned over the last few years of having my face in books about this stuff. If anything, I’m offering up some hope, optimism and encouragement. (Although maybe doing a piss-poor job of it.) If too many harmful and too few helpful foods are what often cause the modern illnesses taking over our lives (and economies) today, then it stands to reason that more of the helpful and less of the harmful could help improve those illnesses. (The legal beagles tell me I’m not allowed to say “cure,” so I’m not saying that, even though I want to. Capiche?)    

Like today’s quotation says, the modern pharmaceutical model is breaking down. Big time. People are seeking nutritionists, chiropractors, osteopaths, acupuncturists, and other “alternative” practitioners in record numbers. Why? Because they’re not getting relief from conventional drugs and treatments. When you do something over and over and it doesn’t work, the only sensible thing is to try something else.

Had a car accident? Call 911! Want to control your blood sugar better? Call me.

So that’s what I think. What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments!