Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

Of course carnitas and tacos al pastor are different dishes. And they definitely do NOT involve sous vide techniques. But stay with me here and see what may be the best dish I have ever cooked.

The Extreme Cook – Carnitas Al Pastor Sous Vide

The first thing I ask Salatin when we sit down in his living room is whether he's ever considered becoming a vegetarian. It's not what I had planned to say, but we've been in the hoop houses with the nicely treated hens, all happily pecking and glossy-feathered, and I've held one in my arms. Suddenly it makes little sense that this animal, whose welfare has been of such great concern, will be killed in a matter of days.

Naive, I know, and Salatin seems surprised. "Never crossed my mind," he says. The problem that's leading the "animals-are-people movement", as he refers to it, is two-fold, in his view. First: "The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?' And the second thing of course is the urbanisation of the world, to the point where people are not now connected to their ecological umbilical, so that the only connection anyone has to an animal is a pet cat or a pet dog. And that really gives you a very jaundiced view of cycles of life – death, regeneration."

Gaby Wood – The Observer: Interview with Joel Salatin

See also: Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal

Round of applause for Tom. Tom contacted me to do this guest post PRECISELY because he knows that some of my research, theories, and therefore beliefs are not congruent with his and the rest of the low-carb crowd. That is the mark of a real researcher. It still amazes me how much the disease called “like-minded camaraderie” stifles the great health debate. Some low-carb gurus are more stubborn and set in their beliefs than frickin’ vegans. I won’t name any names.

So let’s take another look into insulin resistance, because one thing I can promise you is that it is more complicated than Glucose = Insulin = Obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and Cancer. If you get absolutely nothing out of this article, if I lose you along the way, don’t forget that. Everyone who demonizes ANY macronutrient group, especially one that can be found in the milk of every mammal on earth, is a hopeless intellectual cripple.

To begin with, let’s look at just how fragile the Carbs = Disease hypothesis is. You thought the Fat = Disease hypothesis was comical in its simplicity and oversimplification, wait ’til you get a load of this!

(Note: I’m not a fan of a low-fat diet, don’t think saturated fat is harmful, and am not a vegetarian, a food-combiner, calorie-counter, or any other kind of diet-dogma nutcase. I’m a researcher with an open mind who’s tried it all).

Matt Stone – guest posting on Fat Head, whose editor, Tom Naughton, exposed the rather dubious claims of the SuperSize Me documentary.

One of the striking features of the modern Western diet is its reliance on refined carbohydrate as the predominant energy source. Due to the “low-fat” admonition by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), American Medical Association and American Heart Association (AHA) in the early 1980’s, the percentage of fat in the Western diet has reduced from 40% to 30% over the past 25 years; which has resulted in the percentage of carbohydrate rising from 40% to 55%; coinciding with the obesity epidemic.

Of this, a sizeable and ever-increasing portion of the diet is attributable to monosaccharides and disaccharides used to sweeten foods and drinks. Furthermore, in response to the market for lower fat fare, food companies have chosen to substitute disaccharides to maintain palatability of processed foods. Until recently the most commonly used sugar in the U.S. diet was disaccharide sucrose (e.g. cane or beet sugar) which is composed of 50% fructose and 50% glucose. However, in North America and many other countries, due to its abundance, sweetness, and low price, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which contains between 42% and 55% of the monosaccharide fructose, has overtaken sucrose as the most ubiquitous caloric sweetener.

Robert Lustig – The Fructose Epidemic

The Politics of Obesity – Freedomain Radio Interviews Dr. Robert H. Lustig

And another point of view:

So, is fructose really the poison it’s painted to be? The answer is not an absolute yes or no; the evilness of fructose depends completely on dosage and context. A recurrent error in Lustig’s lecture is his omission of specifying the dosage and context of his claims. A point he hammers throughout his talk is that unlike glucose, fructose does not elicit an insulin (& leptin) response, and thus does not blunt appetite. This is why fructose supposedly leads to overeating and obesity.

Hold on a second…Lustig is forgetting that most fructose in both the commercial and natural domain has an equal amount of glucose attached to it. You’d have to go out of your way to obtain fructose without the accompanying glucose. Sucrose is half fructose and half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is nearly identical to sucrose in structure and function. Here’s the point I’m getting at: contrary to Lustig’s contentions, both of these compounds have substantial research showing not just their ability to elicit an insulin response, but also their suppressive effect on appetite [3-6].

Alan Aragon – The Bitter Truth About Fructose Alarmism

I mentioned it in my Winning The War On Good Food Series. One of the best things you can do is teach yourself how to read a study. It will save you from a lot of headache and crap that parades under the guise of food and medical science. Below is an introductory primer in learning how to handle a study.

Epidemiology For The Uninitiated – How To Read A Study

This is why "consensus" is such a key phrase for the AGW crowd. A true scientist knows that truth is found through verifiable, repeatable, falsifiable results — and that one lone scientist can be right in the face of a united opposition. (See, e.g., Copernicus, Wegener, Lavoisier, Semmelweis, and Finlay, to name just a few.) But a postmodern scientist finds truth through consensus: if enough agree, then it must be true.

Don't be deceived by the frequent chants of "peer review." Peer review is a method from classical science, and a valuable — though not infallible — first step in evaluating new research. But as we have seen repeatedly, the AGW crowd doesn't demand peer review for research supporting their conclusions. They use peer review only to block dissenting research — to be the gatekeepers of knowledge. Peer review is valued only to the extent that it lets them control the narrative.

This Is What Post-Modern Science Looks Like