Back to Quack Off

 Quack Off               

by Free Market Duck

Idaho leads world in "Fat Pill" production
(Aug 25, 2006)

Boise, ID – Shh, shut up, gather ‘round, listen up girl friends.  If the U.S. government applied the same rules to the potato industry that they do to the tobacco industry, the label on a sack of Idaho’s Russets would read, “Caution:  This product is hazardous to your health.  Known to cause huge insulin increases resulting in death from high cholesterol, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, and heart attack.”

   Of course, as a Libertarian, I am not suggesting the government add the above label to Idaho’s “Famous Potatoes.”  In fact, for individual rights, free market, and the Trophoblast Theory of Cancer reasons too lengthy to go into here, the government should remove their caution labels from tobacco.  (Note: For example, Superman (the actor’s) wife, who never smoked a day in her life, died of lung cancer last year.  If she, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer without smoking, how does one prove that smokers who died of lung cancer didn’t die of the same “mysterious” cancer trigger that she died from instead of from tobacco?  See Prof John Beard’s work in Embryology, Edinburgh University, circa 1900, which shows that unless a diploid totipotent cell already exists at the cancer site (some 28% miss their naturally-targeted gonads during fetus development), it is biologically impossible for tobacco (or ultraviolet light or asbestos) to “trigger” the meiotic meiosis cell reduction to the trophoblast level.  Read More...)

   I digress.  Back to the scene of the crime: heart attacks, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, and obesity caused by a high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diet.

   In the NY Times bestseller, Protein Power, by Drs. Michael and Mary Eades who have treated thousands of patients, they say in their chapter titled “Cholesterol Madness:”

“In America people have become accustomed to thinking of cholesterol as an evil destroyer of health.  The average American is not even sure what cholesterol is exactly; only that it’s “fat in your blood” and “it’s dangerous.”  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: cholesterol is absolutely essential for life, and falling levels of cholesterol are a grave sign, often a marker for cancer.

Cholesterol isn’t even really a fat; it’s a pearly white waxy alcohol with a soapy feel.  Every cell in your body requires cholesterol to maintain the structural integrity of its cell membrane, to control the flow of water and nutrients into the cell and waste products out.  Your nerves and your brain require cholesterol for normal electrical signal transmission.

Your body uses the cholesterol molecule as a building block for many important hormones: the sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone) and your body’s natural steroid, hydrocortisol.

Cholesterol in the bile your liver makes, aids in the digestion of fatty food and helps you absorb fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K from food.  Cholesterol gives your skin the ability to shed water.

Every cell in your body can make it.  In fact, only about 20 percent of the cholesterol in your blood comes from your diet.  Your body (primarily your liver) makes the vast majority (80 percent).  To ensure your cells always have plenty, if there’s not enough coming in, the cells pick up the slack and make more.  That’s why simply cutting back on dietary cholesterol often doesn’t cause much of an improvement in blood cholesterol levels.

The standard low-fat diet approach to treating cholesterol actually causes the cells of your body to have to make more cholesterol for vital functions.  Control over how much the cells make lies within the cells themselves.  When the supply in the cell runs low, the cell can either make more cholesterol or send messengers to the surface of the cell to collect some from the bloodstream.

Insulin plays a key role here: it revs up the cells’ cholesterol-manufacturing machinery, building up a surplus within the cell, making it unnecessary for the cell to retrieve any from the bloodstream, and thereby allowing excess cholesterol to build up in the blood.

By eating a diet that reduces insulin levels (high protein, low carbohydrate), you reduce the signal telling the cells to make cholesterol; they must harvest it from the blood to have enough, and your blood cholesterol levels – especially the “bad” LDL – fall rapidly.  Even while eating a diet that contains red meat, egg yolk, cheese, butter, and cream, as long as you control your insulin output, your cholesterol will remain in the healthy 180-200 mg/dl range with the LDL/HDL ratio under 3.  And the extra dietary fat will actually raise the HDL – “good” cholesterol – level in your blood.”

   For 700,000 years before the Egyptians, humans evolved eating a diet high in protein: meat, nuts, berries, and fat.  When farming was discovered and humans switched to an agricultural diet high in carbohydrates – wheat, barley, potatoes, carrots, corn, sugar, raisins, bread – our insulin sky-rocketed and our health plummeted.

   As Drs. Michael and Mary Eades state in their chapter, “Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies:”

“Modern nutritional wisdom would predict that the diet of the ancient Egyptians – high in complex carbohydrates, low in fat, no refined sugar, almost no red meat – should have brought health, fitness, and longevity to the Egyptians of old.  But it didn’t.

Translations of the ancient Egyptian papyrus writings and modern examination of their mummified remains by pathologists tell us quite a different tale.  The evidence speaks of a people afflicted with rotten teeth and severe atherosclerosis, suffering from elevated blood pressure and dying in their thirties with heart attacks.  And contrary to the paintings of the willowy svelte figures in pleated linen that adorned their tomb walls, the large skin folds of the mummies tell us that their ancient low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet left them obese as well.”

   If this indictment of today’s prevailing – and erroneous -- nutritional advice to eat a diet of low-fat and high-carbohydrate wasn’t bad enough, the medical and pharmaceutical industries are now pushing chemicals that interfere with the body’s natural and necessary production of cholesterol in the cell.  After failing to bring your insulin-induced high cholesterol level down with bad nutritional advice, many doctors then place their patients on drugs such as Lipitor that interfere with the statins, which participate in the cell’s normal production of cholesterol.  This does not solve the initial problem – which was eating too many carbohydrates -- and will cause other new problems.  But it sells a lot of pills.  Billions of dollars worth per year.

   The problem is:  excess carbohydrates increases blood sugar, which increases excess insulin, which triggers excess cholesterol and the storage cycle leading to fat accumulation and smooth muscle that hardens the linings of the arteries, and therein lies the problem.  The simple solution is:  stop eating a diet high in carbohydrates and low in fat and protein.  Beef:  it’s what’s for dinner.  And eggs, chicken, fish, nuts, berries, cheese, butter, and green leafy veggies and broccoli.  Cut the grains, white bread, carrots, potatoes, pizza, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, sugar, and Twinkies.  Watch your cholesterol drop in half within two weeks.

   How long have we known about this?  In 1825, the Frenchman Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published an essay entitled “Preventative or Curative Treatment of Obesity” in his book The Physiology of Taste in which he stated: “Now, an anti-fat Diet is based on the commonest and most active cause of obesity, since, as it has already been clearly shown, it is only because of grains and starches that fatty congestion can occur, as much in a man as in the animals:…”  Hey, what do we feed cattle to bring them to market?  Corn.  Grains.  In 1862, William Banting, a London undertaker, was so obese he couldn’t walk down the stairs or tie his shoestrings.  After going on his doctor-recommended diet of low carbs and high protein, he lost a pound a week until he reached his normal weight, was able to walk and easily bend over, and was so excited that he published 2,500 copies of his Letter on Corpulence, describing his diet.  He lived until age 81 and his diet plan was so widely read that dieting itself became known as “banting.”  In 1931, Vance Thompson published a low-carb book called Eat and Grow Thin, which went through 112 printings.

   Unfortunately, since 1988 when America’s Surgeon General pushed the U.S. program of low-fat and high-carb nutrition, the medical and food industry raced toward zero-fat everything.  The result: increased high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, diabetes and heart attacks, even in young children.  There is no excuse for doctors to not know this important information.  Hopefully, more medical nutritionists will read Drs. Michael and Mary Eades’ bibliographies in their book, Protein Power.

   This brings us to Idaho, which recently hosted the World Potato Congress.  Since Idaho is the leading producer of potatoes in the world (high carbohydrates), and the average American’s deadly diet consists of a high dose of carbohydrates relative to protein and fat, perhaps Idaho’s state motto should change from “Famous Potatoes” to “Famous Heart Attacks R Us.” – FM Duck

       back to top...