Okay, so when is this diet going to kill me?You’ve probably heard various “experts” tell you to “avoid saturated fat,” “cut down on your salt intake,” “replace sugar-rich foods with fiber-rich complex carbohydrates,” “be sure to consume the recommended amounts of essential fatty acids,” etc. But what if you do the exact opposite of all these suggestions? Shouldn’t something very bad happen to you fairly quickly? We all know that when a non-expert is correct if he or she tells you not to jump into an active volcano if you value your life. Certain undeniable things will happen to your body if you do. One could use lab rats and create a volcano like contraption to study the sequence of events, but most people are not interested in the molecular-level detail – they just want to be alive and in reasonably good physical condition. Thus, turning back to eating a supposedly terribly unhealthy diet, if one can eat a diet this is theoretically horrible (according to present nutritional dogma), what would the “experts” say to someone who decided to consume such foods? Obviously, nobody would be able to predict exactly how long one could live on this diet, but there would have to be general guidelines, or else their claims to be presenting “science” would not be valid. For example, with the “essential fatty acid” claim, one is supposed to experience “deficiency symptoms” within a month’s time, according to most nutrition books that talk about this subject in detail.
In my case, I decided to adopt this supposedly terribly unhealthy diet in 2001, and then continued to “waste away,” down to under 100 pounds (at 5’9” tall and usually around 130 pounds), before I discovered just how deficient I was in stomach acid. Then I began to “recover,” though it took me nearly another year to realize that my protein consumption was too low. After eat more good quality protein (along with some other “adjustments,” such as taking the citrate forms of calcium and magnesium instead of the oxide forms), my various “diseases” (such as severe osteoporosis) began to improve greatly. And here I am, six years later, still eating a diet “deficient” in “essential fatty acids,” yet rich in saturated fatty acids, cholesterol, salt, and whole milk dairy products. Moreover, I avoid “heart-healthy” oils, such as olive and canola, but eat coconut products (the fat in coconut is about 92% saturated), and my “fiber” intake is very limited. I don’t eat any food that has more than perhaps the tiniest trace amounts of omega 3 PUFAs. My fruit and vegetable consumption would be considered low, compared to what “experts” advise.
Thus, the obvious question is, how can these “experts” be correct if someone who is at death’s door adopts what appears to be the unhealthiest diet possible, and then recovers from all these terrible “diseases” and appears to be quite well 6 years later? It’s one thing to say something like, “well, our advice is based upon statistical correlations and we can only tell you if you are raising you risk for a certain disease,” but it’s another thing to expect people to believe that your claims are accurate when someone in terrible health adapts the “worst” diet possible, even for a healthy person, then recovers and appears fine, six years later. Either the diet is really “bad,” and the results speak for themselves, or else the “risk” must be so low (even if there is one, which I dispute, of course) as to be laughable. They may know how to ignore the scientific method and still keep their jobs, spewing out their dangerous advice as they go, but when this advice violates basic common sense, just about anyone can see that these Emperors are strutting nude fools.
On the other hand, I would like to see what happens to a person who consumes a typical amount of fat, but just about all in the form of canola oil (with some fish oil supplementation that is considered "optimal"). One researcher decided to go on a diet very rich in omega 3s from animal products and discovered that when markers for oxidative stress were measured, they were incredibly high (source: Sinclair, H., Prog. Lipid Res. 25: 667-72, "History of EFA & their prostanoids: some personal reminiscences."). This brings up an interesting point about many researchers today; they don't seem to care about previous research, even if on-point experim nts were conducted with conclusive results. Instead, they rely upon "markers" that are based upon assumptions, some of which have been refuted by older, on-point experiments! Perhaps they simply don't know about the older studies, though there seems to be an attitude that only recent research is worth considering, as if the universe that existed a few decades or so ago is different than the one we live in now. Obviously, this is a very unscientific view. The "essential fatty acid" experiements may be the best example of this problem. In 1948, rats fed a totally fat-free diet were fine, yet decades later, experiments were conducted that sought "markers" of "essential fatty acid deficiency," such as having Mead acid in one's cells. It didn't matter if these animals lived longer and healthier lives; the mere fact that they had Mead acid in their cells was enough for the researchers to pronounce that a serious "deficiency" in "essential fatty acids" existed, and that the animals were "diseased," making it seem as if the animals had serious medical problems, which could occur in something like vitamin C deficiency ("scurvy"). Again, this makes no sense on any level, and is clearly an unscientific attitude.
Here is another example of an unscientific attitude held by scientists (I like to call it a scientific "shell game"):
QUOTE: ...the researchers say women should not make too much of these results, which are based on reports of what women said they ate over many years -- not a rigorous, scientific experiment where specific dietary factors could be studied in isolation... UNQUOTE.
What they don't tell you is that most studies that they cite when giving the general public dietary advice are just like this one. The other kind of study that is very common involves getting some healthy college students and giving them two different diets for several weeks, measuring various "markers" at points considered most revealing. However, the diets are usually both unhealthy. For instance, one diet might be rich in safflower or corn oil, while the other has less of this oil, with a fish oil supplement added so that the overall fat intake is the same. I agree that over the course of a few weeks or so, the markers will appear "better" most of the time on the fish oil supplemented diet, due to the affect on AA metabolization. This does not mean that either diet is good for long-term health, however. Thus, these experiments start subjectively, that is, they choose which diets to give the volunteers, and in the example I mentioned, there is no reason to refrain from providing other diets, such as my current diet. There are other misleading points made by the researchers in this report, so I suggest you read it in its entirety. It can be found at: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-diet-ice-cream-pregnancy,0,367279.story
Biologist Ray Peat recently wrote an essay about how some scientists are basically deciding beforehand what they want their experiments to suggest:
QUOTE: ...The study's lead author, Eva Lee, quoted by a university publicist, said "We found that progesterone plays a role in the development of breast cancer by encouraging the proliferation of mammary cells that carry a breast cancer gene." But they didn't measure the amount of progesterone present in the animals. They didn't "find" anything at all about progesterone. The "anti-progesterone" drug they used has been used for many years to treat uterine, ovarian, and breast cancers, in some cases with progesterone, to intensify its effects, and its protective effects are very likely the result of its antiestrogenic and anti-cortisol effects, both of which are well established, and relevant. In some cases, it acts like progesterone, only more strongly.
"Other more specific progesterone blockers are under development," Lee notes. And the article in Science magazine looks like nothing more than the first advertisement for one that her husband, Wen-Hwa Lee, has designed.
According to publicists at the University of California, Irvine, "Lee plans to focus his research on developing new compounds that will disrupt end-stage cancer cells. The goal is a small molecule that, when injected into the blood stream, will act as something of a biological cruise missile to target, shock and awe the cancerous cells." "In this research, he will make valuable use of a breast cancer model developed by his wife." "She developed the model, and I will develop the molecule," Lee says. "We can use this model to test a new drug and how it works in combination with old drugs."
"Previously we blamed everything," Lee says of his eye cancer discovery. "We blamed electricity, we blamed too much sausage - but in this case it's clear: It's the gene's fault."
The things that these people know, demonstrated by previous publications, but that they don't say in the Science article, are very revealing. The retinoblastoma gene (and its protein product), a specialty of Wen-Hwa Lee, is widely known to be a factor in breast cancer, and to be responsive to progesterone, RU486, and p21. Its links to ubiquitin, the hormone receptors, proteasomes, and the BRCA gene are well known, but previously they were seen as linking estrogen to cell proliferation, and progesterone to the inhibition of cellular proliferation.
By organizing their claims around the idea that RU486 is acting as an antiprogesterone, rather than as a progesterone synergist in opposing estrogen, Eva Lee's team has misused words to argue that it is progesterone, rather than estrogen, that causes breast cancer. Of the many relevant issues that their publication ignores, the absence of measurements of the actual estrogen and progesterone in the animals' serum most strongly suggests that the project was not designed for proper scientific purposes... UNQUOTE.
Source: http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/ru486.shtml
Lastly, I'll mention that a close relative who is also male and a few years younger than I am. He eats a diet that is different than mine in the following ways: 1. High polyunsaturated to saturated fatty acid ratio, whereas my diet is high in SFAs relative to PUFAs. 2. He eats a lot of cooked meat, and most likely a lot more oxidized cholesterol. I do consume small amounts of gelatin (which is almost all protein, with a little calcium), and if I heat up dairy, it's on low temperature (though I usually don't heat it at all). When I eat eggs, I only boil them. Otherwise, I am "vegetarian." 3. He does not eat any nutritional yeast, whereas I eat very small amounts with each meal. 4. He most likely eats quite a bit more calories than I do. 5. He has no interest in supplementing his diet with minerals, whereas I take small amounts of certain ones each day.
How is his health different than mine?
1. He had his gallbladder removed several years ago, after a couple of years of terrible pain, whereas I never had this problem. 2. He has high blood pressure, whereas mine is on the low end of "normal." 3. On his blood tests, his triglycerides have been very high at times, whereas mine have always been in the normal range. 4. He is about 5'10" tall and 215 pounds (and looks "inflamed"), whereas I am 5'9" tall and about 135 pounds. 5. He had "walking pneumonia" for a couple of months, is often ill, and often takes antibiotics, whereas I haven't been ill for at least a couple of years now, and have only taken antibiotics a few times in my adult life (I'm in my early 40s now).
