The Problem With Fiber

Do you know what fiber is? If not, boy do I have some crazy shit to tell you.

First off, I should confess that I am a fiber nut... which sounds like a cereal. After researching the digestive tracts of all of our closest genetic relatives, it is obvious that our tracts have evolved to handle vastly higher amounts of fiber than the average American is getting. The USDA recommends between twenty and thirty grams of fiber daily for an adult. The average American is getting less than ten. TEN. It is truly amazing that anyone is able to poop.

Chimpanzees, by comparison, eat hundreds of grams of fiber in a day. Granted, they spend, no exaggeration, 90% of their waking hours chewing, so it is equally obvious that we should not be trying to eat the same diet as our chimpy cousins. But while our digestive systems may be structurally different for this reason, they are mechanically nearly identical. Our guts all operate on the same principles, as it were. Fiber is a critical element in our diets. It is far more important than we initially thought and its importance grows with each passing scientific study. We absolutely need to be eating more fiber. A lot more.

But what is fiber? Likewise, as we discover how important fiber is, we discover how different kinds of fiber do different things. Insoluble fiber is the kind of fiber that Grandma referred to as "ruffage" and aside from differences in water absorbtion, they all do pretty much the same thing. This is the fiber that you can get bananas, whole grains, and nuts and seeds. How insoluble fiber works is being researched, but a likely-accurate guess is that it literally tears through your digestive tract, creating tiny cuts that elicits fluid production and peristalsis. This mechanical nature means that all insoluble fiber is pretty much the same.

Soluble fiber, on the other hand, has better-understood mechanisms. It's also here where the kind of fiber that you are getting is important. Soluble fiber, while initially not digestible by the human tract, is digestible by other little things living in our tract. These helpful little bacteria, which I imagine to be as cute as Water Bears, eat the fiber and produce biologically active byproducts. These byproducts have far-reaching benefits for our physiology. But as you would imagine, slight differences in fiber structure will result in different end-products after the bacteria eat it. It is simple chemistry.

It is this simply chemistry that flummoxed me after I discovered FiberSure and was confident in my high fiber intake. FiberSure, now called Metamucil Clear & Natural, is great. It mixes cleanly into nearly everything. Sadly, it's not nearly as good as I thought, and my earlier confidence affirms the danger of nutritionism when it stands unanalyzed.

FiberSure is made from inulin, a plant fiber that is actually a carbohydrate. In most cases, the type that you see on store shelves has been derived from chicory root. Inulin mixes so easily because it breaks down easily into the superfine powder that is Clear & Natural. Its taste in slightly sweet, but it is otherwise neutral. You can, and I do, mix it into almost anything.

So if inulin is so amazing, why did it suddenly explode on to the market? Because until recently, it wasn't classified as a fiber. After it got that label, food companies were free to exploit it. Unfortunately, as is infuriatingly the frequent case, they are increasingly exploiting this to your detriment.

Have you ever tried a FiberOne or Fiber Plus granola bar? Taste great, don't they? That's because they are candy.

NINE GRAMS OF FIBER?! That's amazing! How do they do it?!

With inulin, that's how. Take a butchers at the first ingredient: chicory root extract. As in, inulin. What is the second ingredient? Chocolate chips. Beyond that, and the sugar contained therein, let's count the sugars: Corn syrup, sugar, HM corn syrup, and fructose; four. That is candy with near-zero nutritional benefit aside from the added inulin which you could get more easily and cheaply by simply stirring it into a glass of milk.

Moreover, the damned thing has the same calorie count as two large eggs. You could make an entire omelette for only slightly more calories and a whole butt-load more nutrients. You could buy the 90-Calorie versions, but they achieve that energy reduction by simply reducing the size of the bars: 23g instead of 40g.

Kellog's Fiber Plus bars are an even bigger lie. Let's break it down...

Sizes

pouch, 5 ct, 6 ct (Limited Availability), 10 ct, 5 ct

Ingredients

CHICORY ROOT FIBER, ROLLED OATS, CRISP RICE (RICE FLOUR, SUGAR, MALT EXTRACT, SALT, MIXED TOCOPHEROLS FOR FRESHNESS), SUGAR, SEMISWEET CHOCOLATE DROPS (SUGAR, CHOCOLATE, COCOA BUTTER, DEXTROSE, MILK FAT, SOY LECITHIN, CONFECTIONER'S GLAZE [SHELLAC, HYDROGENATED COCONUT OIL]), INULIN FROM CHICORY ROOT, VEGETABLE OIL (HYDROGENATED AND/OR PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED PALM KERNEL, COCONUT AND PALM OIL)†, CANOLA OIL, FRUCTOSE, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF HONEY, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), GLYCERIN, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, WHEY, CHOCOLATE, SALT, GUM ARABIC, BAKING SODA, SOY LECITHIN, SORBITAN MONOSTEARATE, POLYSORBATE 60, VITAMIN E ACETATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, ZINC OXIDE, ALMOND FLOUR, NONFAT DRY MILK, WHEAT STARCH, PARTIALLY DEFATTED PEANUT FLOUR, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, BHT (FOR FRESHNESS).
†LESS THAN 0.5g TRANS FAT PER SERVING

First ingredient? Inulin. Then we have more inulin later on. Combined with that are six instances of sugar, and two examples of hydrogenated oil. Not only is there too much sugar, they are also making sure that you get your daily dose of trans fats. Because, remember, they can legally claim zero grams of trans fat per serving as long as it is below 0.5g... which means that they shoot for 0.49g.

In general, if you are buying anything with either Kellogg's, Post, or General Mills logo on the box, it is likely one step above eating garbage. Obviously, even these kings of crap produce a few good things. Both Fiber Plus and Fiber One cereals are actually quite healthy, being loaded with every kind of fiber there is. The gold standard is obvious original Fiber One, which is nearly equivalent to going into the woods and grazing. The downside is that it hasn't been blended with various soluble fibers. Likewise, standouts like All Bran, Grape Nuts, and the iconic Cheerios all make good decisions for part of  your morning routine.

I stress the part of element to that statement because you are insane if you are eating solely cereal in the morning instead of yogurt, eggs, chicken, bacon, granola, fruit, and vegetables. Not only are those options vastly superior to nearly ever cereal as regards nutrition, they also taste better. Make French toast with high-fiber bread. Make an omelet with cheese and a single-serving box of mixed veggies. Pour yogurt and some granola over berries. There is nothing saying that all of these options can't also be paired with some cereal. These simple meals take only slightly more time and you will charge out to greet the day filled with energy.

But back to fiber.

As the focus on national health has increased, all of the cereal companies are trying their level best to market cereal that is healthy, but still tastes like cereal. That means sugar. Frequently tons of it. Kellogg's Smart Start, most types of granola, Raisin Bran, Special K, Honey Bunches of Oats: all of them are masquerading as healthy when, in fact, they are far from it. They are only healthy as "part of this complete breakfast," which is one of the greatest lines of bullshit in the history of advertising; the breakfast would still be complete without the cereal.

That is the final point of this rant: marketing. It was marketing that confused me. I was taken in with dietary pick-up lines about easy fiber, high fiber, more fiber, digestive health, and other such statements that have not been evaluated by the FDA. Knowing what you know about a healthy diet, look at the borderline-criminal advertisements for Frosted Flakes, where they stress sports, and health, and an active lifestyle. Frosted Flakes Gold is packaged like it's some kind of exercise supplement. Which I guess is good, because you had better exercise like crazy just to burn off all of the calories that you are taking in from their sugar-bombed fat flakes.

If you can't tell, I have nothing but respect for the cereal companies, and very little of that.

I do not blame the companies, though. A company does what it does, that is, make money. It is legally obligated to the share-holders and only makes what it thinks people will buy. People have a habit of buying foods that are loaded with sugar and are shockingly unhealthy for them, so any smart company is going to make those products. We can't, nor should we, force companies to make foods that won't sell, but we need to make a system that doesn't facilitate disinformation and lies. It is from here where the problem springs, and with those who created this system where the blame truly lies.

I do not blame the cereal companies, I blame the politicians that accept their bribes. Oh right, I forgot. It is not bribes. It is campaign contributions. I expect companies to earn money and do whatever is legally allowed to do that. I expect our representatives to actually do what is best for us.

We have a simple task: make a rule set that is internally coherent, provides information to consumers, gives freedom to companies, does this based on the best science available, and is instituted to specifically be updated based on that science on a set schedule.

This is not hard.

I hope that this short introduction has shown you why it is critical that fiber gets classified as an essential macronutrient, and that the various kinds of fiber get separate classification. That we have no daily recommendations for it nor rigorously defined separation between those various kinds is a serious problem, one that is far greater than the busted Food Pyramid ever was. The nebulousness must be eliminated. Doing so would immediately remove the ability of food companies to trick us with nonsense like high-fiber grape juice. As it stands, we have crap-loads of products filling the shelves touting HIGH IN FIBER, and what they should actually say is "High in Inulin!".

While that may not sound quite as catchy for the marketing department, I don't care. The marketing is lying, and we don't have the regulations to hold them accountable. That needs to change, because I read everything ever, and even I was fooled. What chance does a harried parent have?

Funny Corn Syrup Video

I have a tolerate/hate relationship with the corn syrup ads that ran on television over the past few years. I can respect the corn industry's desire to protect public opinion of their product, but at the same time, they have to know that what they are selling is bad.

Bad because it tastes inferior to sugar,¹ bad because it's the final step in a massive government subsidy clusterfuck, and bad because the body might process HFCS differently from ordinary corn syrup and sugar.² That is something that they happily ignored in those television ads, in their twisted Socratic dialogue, with an interlocutor character who is plainly retarded.



I had to opt to embed a low-quality version that a YouTube user uploaded since the official versions forbid embedding and moderate the comments. You can find the second official video here. Some inventive spoofs on these ads were created that deserve posting.





High-fructose corn syrup should always be avoided. If a product has it in it, don't buy it. It is that simple. Do. Not. Buy. It. Not because it may be bad for you in some physiologically obscure way. Not because you only want to buy organic crap. But because it is indicative of a company that is cutting culinary corners. This eliminates basically the entire cookie aisle, I'll admit, and pretty much everything that your children want, but that's a good thing. HFCS is the Boy Scout badge of a bad dietary life.





At the same time, I do not like to treat HFCS as some bugbear that is the cause of our obesity problem. It is absolutely not. If that were the case, countries without significant HFCS consumption like those in Europe or Asia, would not be seeing large weight increases. They are. Everyone in the Western world is getting fatter, the problem is just more apparent in the US. This is most likely because we were the only Western Nation not obliterated by World War II. Thus, we were able to get down to the important business of consumption directly after the war ended.

No, it is our overall lifestyle that is causing obesity. And while the emergence of HFCS might have encouraged our increasing desire for sweetness in the food that we buy, it is not the cause. That does not mean that we all should not be aware of how our food is made and from whence elements of our diet come. Truly, the more aware we are, the more likely we are to make overall better decisions. Not because we are terrified of HFCS or some other dietary boogeyman, but because we recognize that good diet has as little sugar in it as possible.

There is some evidence to indicate that this happening. According to the USDA, from a peak in the year 1999, overall sugar consumption in the US is on a downward trend. It may even get back to pre-1980 levels within the next five years.

This is obviously not the only piece in the puzzle as US obesity rates are continuing the rise. The reasons for this may be very bad, indeed.

I fear that the reduction in sugar with a corresponding continued rise in obesity evinces the growing divide between the dietary haves and have-nots. Sugar consumption is going down, but only among those in the middle and upper areas of the Socioeconomic Status scale. As this chart shows, overweight levels have remained flat since the late 1980's, and saw a downward trend in 2005/2006.

 This next chart shows that overweight levels have actually remained flat for the past four decades. This indicates that the bulk of weight gain has happened in those genetically susceptible to weight gain and those too poor to buy better food. As the quality of cheap food has taken a nose-dive, as has the diet of those who will be attracted to ever-cheaper products.

Is HFCS worse for you than sugar? Maybe, but if there is a difference, it is likely small. But that doesn't mean that those inane corn syrup advertisements are correct. They ignore the fact that as HFCS consumption has gone up, obesity levels have gone up. They ignore the fact that the cheapest food is the only food loaded with HFCS. That does not indicate a causal connection, but it does indicate that they are likely somehow linked. If you care about your diet, you should avoid HFCS as much as possible. And as I have discovered, as much as possible means never eating it at all. Well, except for the occasional Milano.
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1: In multiple semi-scientific studies, people are frequently able to tell the difference, but many actually prefer the flavor of HFCS-sweetened drinks to the sugar-sweetened varieties. I think that it is because the HFCS versions are sweeter. Just look at the Pepsi Challenge, where Pepsi was preferred by a majority of people. This was explicitly because Pepsi is sweeter than Coke.

2: This is a problematic aspect of the debate. A few studies have shown some connection, with one very strong study done at Princeton University being widely criticized. Other studies have shown no unique link between HFCS and health issues. I think that the debate is something of a canard. Sugar is bad in excess. HFCS is indicative of cheap, poorly-made products. So why would you want to eat sugar in excess in cheap, poorly-made products?

Some Random Good Diet Tips

I have been slowly performing a complete overhaul of my diet over the course of the last year. I've been actively increasing my vegetable intake, I've been carefully crafting more meals at home, and all along the way I have been choosing options that take up as little time as possible.

That is one of the biggest issues for people who have become acclimated to the high-speed lifestyle allowed by eating out. You never have to worry your pretty little head about timing, or preparation, or cleanup, NO! You simply walk in, receive food, consume food, walk out.

Eventually, one's social life grows adapted to this. It ultimately becomes a chore to eat. You don't want to eat, you want to do other things. The timing calculations that we perform to determine trips to and from work, whether we say yes or no to an impromptu night at the movies, or whether we consider hanging out to even be an option in any setting, all of them become dependent on the assumption that food will take very little time.

The state of our economy makes the 1950's Golden Age ideal of dinner on the table every night nearly an impossibility. Very few households have a single income anymore, meaning that very few households have their own, private chef in the form of a stay-at-home parent. At-home gourmet food is basically impossible except for those who treat cooking as a hobby or passion. This state of affairs might help to explain the rise of food porn, celebrity chefs, and FoodNetwork.

So we are left with at-home meals that impinge upon our lives, an imposition toward which business society is becoming increasingly antagonistic, or restaurant meals that cost a lot and absolutely destroy our waistlines. This is not a tenable situation. We must either, as a nation, accept radically different dietary standards, or change the direction of our economy.

Faced with this reality, I have spent the last year trying to find a happy medium. I want healthy foods that I can prepare in under thirty minutes. I don't really consider money since simply shooting for health and speed results in reduced cost. That is unless you frequent pre-made meals from the store or fast food joints. But as I discovered, even the oft-cited bastions of poor diet like Wal-Mart can be treasure troves of healthy food, just so long as you know where to look.

Tip #1: Buy frozen vegetables.

Target especially has an enormous selection of store-brand vegetable mixes that are surprisingly tasty. The vegetables used are of good quality, and if you prepare them carefully, they end up being fantastic. It is unfortunate that nearly all of the pre-made mixes use either palm oil or hydrogenated oils of some type or another, but the amounts used are small, and I think that the benefits of increased vegetables in the diet outweigh any amount of trans-fats ingested.

That criticism only applies to the mixes, of course. The raw vegetables are just that, raw. They are the very embodiment of health in an easy-use package. They microwave in minutes, go well in groups, and can be kicked up a notch with herbs and spices.

Canned vegetables are useful if you don't have the freezer space, and a great option for canned beans of all shapes and sizes. The only problem with canned veggies is the salt content. They, and by they I mean the secret alien overlords, frequently can veggies in salt as both a flavor enhancer and also a preservative. Give canned vegetables a wash under cold water before cooking or serving them to get rid of most of the salt.

Other than that, you should be storing enough frozen vegetables to require a small chest freezer in your basement. They are cheap, can be prepared lightning-quick, and provide a panoply of flavors for your enjoyment. The final great thing is that frozen vegetables are available at Wal-Marts and Targets across the country.

Tip #2: Buy meat and freeze it.

Meat is fantastically healthy for you, just so long as you take it easy. A solid pound of ground beef every day is not the best course towards full-body health. But used in moderation, it is protein-dense, filling, and lower-calorie than a large serving of bread or pasta. For example, a 6oz steak contains about 300 calories. A flour burrito tortilla, just the tortilla, is 220 calories.

There are huge advantages not just associated with price or health. Restaurants will frequently use lower-quality meat with a higher fat content. When buying for the home, you can seek out the highest quality beef, pork, and chicken. Remember, always shoot for the leanest ground beef that you find; look for light, evenly distributed marbling of fat in steaks; and always buy chicken that has a deep, golden color to it. Avoid the pale chicken because it has a wildly higher fat content than the high-quality stuff. A good starting point is Purdue. It's not the best, but it's far from the worst. If you have a Trader Joe's nearby, they have excellent chicken. Buy your Purdue at Wal-Mart to get it for hilariously cheap. I'm talking $3 per pound.

Target maintains a great selection of pre-frozen fish steaks: tilapia, salmon, cod, and others are all available under their Market Pantry and Archer Farms brands. With these, you can maintain a constant selection of over a dozen meats, all ready to be cooked in under 30 minutes.

If you choose to buy in bulk and freeze like I do, you can regain much of the good texture from using unfrozen meat by thawing and cooking slowly. But since the goal of this is to be fast, a boneless chicken breast thaws in five minutes or less in a microwave, then cooks on a cast iron pan in about 15 minutes. You can always cover it in herbs and spices, olive oil, throw in some fresh veggies, and broil it in that same pan for about 25 minutes. That will result in better texture. If cooking meat quickly on a hot iron skillet, set the temperature high and flip the meat frequently; every 2-4 minutes or so.

Maintaining a collection of various meats and frozen veggies, when combined, results in a nearly limitless variety of meals. Meat is your friend.

Tip #3: Maintain a massive spice cabinet.

Herbs and spices are essentially zero-calorie. They are free flavor. Use them on your veggies. Use them on your meat. You will discover that when using actual flavor, you become much more sensitive to salt levels in your food. Salt is fantastic as a flavor enhancer, meaning that it is best in extreme moderation.

Tip #4: Learn to love sandwiches.

I do not snack very much. If I am feeling a little peckish, I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or I have a deli sandwich. They are utterly fantastic little meals that you can easily get under 400 calories and come loaded with flavor. The complex mix of ingredients is also more likely to fill you up and provide better fuel for a longer time. Finally, make your sandwiches with high-fiber bread to get 50% or more of your daily value for fiber. Just remember to avoid mayo or any form of liquid calories like dressing. These can push a sandwich into gut-busting calorie territory very quickly and it's hard to measure and regulate the amount applied.

Tip #5: Add Metamucil to everything.

It was previously called FiberSure, but it is now called Metamucil Clear & Natural. It is a powder, it contains 50/50 soluble and insoluble fiber, and it dissolves in anything. You could dissolve half-a-cup of this into a glass of milk and barely notice it.

Tip #6: Don't worry about calories from the stuff that Grandma would like.

By this, I mean the things that frequently get hated on for being high calorie but have been staples of the American diet for a hundred years. Whole milk? There is no evidence that it causes weight gain, and there is a small amount of evidence to indicate that it's better for you than 1% or skim.


I think the focus on these things come from dieticians desperately trying to find anything and everything in the environment that could be causing the weight gain that we see in the population. As such, they say to avoid juice, milk, and even fruit! Ignore this advice. If you are fat, you are not fat from orange juice, milk, and eggs. You are fat from snacking, pre-packaged foods, and eating out too often.

There is an extensive proviso to this tip, though.

<history-lesson style="entertainment: low;">

After World War II, the biggest problems that we as a society had weren't nutrition or weight, but calories. Many people simply were not getting enough. Hunger remained an extensive problem in Europe into the 1960's.

The response to this was to get calorie counts up as quickly as possible, and that meant cheap food and processed food. Remember, at this point, the idea of being deficient in specific nutrients was a relatively new idea, since up until that point, people either had enough food or they didn't. Those were the only states in which people found themselves. As such, the medical literature was primarily knowledgeable about the effects of a total lack of food.

Thus, we saw the rise of brands like Wonder Bread and such childhood staples as Twinkies, Fritos, and Eggo waffles. It's tasty. It's cheap. And it's loaded with calories. Just what a growing population needs!

Unfortunately, it wasn't. We actually needed much more. Before that, our diets of farm-grown produce, mom-made bread and dough, and whatever meat we could raise made for a rather complete meal. After that, the things we weren't even thinking about started making their absence known.

Fiber was one of the biggest issues. Afflictions like IBS, diverticulitis, and constipation were nearly unheard of before the end of World War II. After the war, calories went up, fiber took a dive, and these new illnesses suddenly rose in prominence.

So while Grandma generally had good judgment, the post WWII era, which will forever be the Grandma generation, also had underlying values that are incompatible with today's dietary environment. It's not hard to find out which bits of Grandma's wisdom are no longer up to snuff. All you have to do is hit up Wikipedia.

</history-lesson>

Tip #7: Avoid eating out.

And when you do, count calories. The calorie count in foods from restaurants is almost always stratospheric. Sometimes, this is simply because they know that people like large servings and thus happily oblige. Other times, it is because they do not want to use high-quality ingredients and instead use lots of salt, sugar, and high-fat meats to make the food taste good.

Funny enough, the foods that you get at the oft-maligned fast food joints are usually not terrible as regards calories. They are not great fuel, in that the nutrient make-up of anything that you buy is going to be rather simple, but it's hard to get a fast food meal above 1,000 calories without chugging soda. For example, a Double Cheeseburger and large fries from McDonald's is only 940 calories.

You will also be amazed by how much money that you save doing this. As an exercise to provide further motivation to continue, while you are preparing your food, think about where you would have gone or what food you would have ordered, price it out, and tally it all up. If you eat out frequently, your monthly savings could be in the hundreds of dollars, while the food you are eating is undoubtedly superior fuel.

For example, McDonald's meals usually ring-up at about $5. For an at-home power meal, 2/3 lb of Wal-Mart Purdue chicken is $2. Two packs of Green Giant frozen vegetable mixes is $2.60. Add in $0.20 worth of herbs and spices and the at-home meal costs less than even McDonald's. The price difference is only amplified when you consider that most states tax prepared foods but not raw materials.

Tip #8: Find tasty drinks.

Water can get so boring. Zero-calorie sweetened drinks all taste like ass, and they can apparently make things worse. And while I consider milk to be an amazing drink, I think I would start to hate it if I had to drink more than a glass or two per day.

There are lots of flavored drinks out there that you can safely drink. I positively guzzle V8. I have no history of heart issues, so the salt doesn't concern me. Moreover, an entire bottle only equals about 100% my daily value. Orange juice is somewhat high in calories, so you may not want to drink it all day, every day. Also, the acid would just start to hurt. But again, OJ is something that Grandma would love.

Tea and coffee are wonderful, wonderful, drinks. Caffeine is being shown to have a broad array of positive physiological benefits, and both coffee and tea have unique benefits with yet-unknown mechanisms. A little sugar, honey, or milk and you have a delicious drink that's low in calories and big in benefits.

Drinks that you cannot safely drink are the non-refrigerated juices. They are almost always juice "cocktails," of super-sweetened water and a smattering of actual juice. These are little better than soda.

Tip #9: Force yourself to eat things that you don't like.

Your body is an incredible machine. It does much more than simply digest your food, it actually "decides" which foods taste good.

Have you ever found yourself craving a particular food? It happens to everyone. One day, for seemingly no reason, you can't get enough oranges. This is because something inside of oranges is needed by your body and your body "remembers" that those nutrients were paired with that particular taste. As such, from somewhere deep inside the unconscious parts of your brain, a signal is sent up to the conscious part of your brain to find 1000 CC's of oranges, stat.

This is why the recent discoveries that artificial sweeteners make people gain weight makes perfect sense. Your body tastes sweet and gears up in anticipation of sugar, because some mechanism in your body associated the two things. When it doesn't get that, the whole system is thrown out of whack.

You can use this mechanism to your advantage. By taking foods that you know are loaded with nutrients but you do not usually like, and forcing yourself to eat them will allow your body to associate that flavor with the burst of good stuff. As a result, you will begin to like these foods and can integrate them into your diet.

This does have a few limits. For example, some people are able to taste a level of bitterness in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli that others cannot. No matter how much you eat these vegetables, for some people, children especially, they will always taste bad.

Tip #10: Explore and expand your diet.

Studies show that people who like many types of food are thinner. This seems obvious. If all you like are hamburgers and chicken wings, losing weight isn't going to be an easy endeavor for you. Explore, for Pete's sake!

Tip #11: Find healthy snacks.

Assuming that you do not have access to a Super Wal-Mart, your Wally World will likely have an enormous snack section. Use it. The snacks are always cheapest there and they have identical selections of crackers, nuts, jerky,

For example, Planter's Nut*rition line of nut mixes are excellent snacks that are filling and loaded with good stuff. Nowhere else on Earth are they as cheap as at Wal-Mart.

Tip #12: Don't let yourself get hungry.

Being hungry is the hiiiiighwaaaaay tooo the danger zone. It's an oft-repeated humorous story, when someone who is hungry walks into a store and leaves with $297 worth of crap that they never intended on buying because everything looked so good.

This same story applies to your kitchen. If you wait long enough that you are very hungry, making sure to not snack or wait until a good meal is prepared will require willpower, which we cannot abide. The goal is to want this food. Time your meals. All of the above tips make preparing a real meal quick and simple. You can walk into the kitchen and have good food, good fuel, nearly as quickly as opening up some prepackaged bar. Only if you wait until you are hungry will the risk of failure arise.

Conclusion:

I hope that this has been of some use. Changing your diet for the better is shockingly easy. It requires little self control or "willpower," it doesn't cost more to eat healthy, and you provide your body the fuel that it needs to do stuff. Your energy levels will rise, you'll feel better, truly, all of life will be better because the machine that carries you through it is running more efficiently.

What you need is the desire. After I tell you all of this, you may decide that the pleasure of eating cheesecake twice a day is greater than the pleasure of having a lean, mean, machine as your body. I derive pleasure from the latter, you from the former, and that is entirely alright. I am absolutely not applying a value judgment to either lifestyle. I am saying that I have found pleasure in my dietary life. I do not completely restrict myself from snacks, but I desire to rarely eat them because I would rather consume better fuel. If you do not desire the same thing, this is not for you, and you will fail if you attempt it.

That is the only kink in my plan. If you do not desire it, then you simply don't desire it. I could show you all of the evidence in the world; one cannot choose to want something. He or she simply does. If the idea of viewing your body as a machine, and thus providing it the best fuel possible, is appealing to you, I think that you should try this.

Dietary Medicine And Other Nonsense

I strongly dislike vegans. True vegans. I dislike them because of the inherent morality to their lifestyle and the irrevocable flipside of that coin: doing otherwise is bad. This of course means that what I, you, truly everyone else is doing, is wrong. They try to couch their arguments in terms that are scientific, or dietary, or physiological, but the initial motivation is always morality. Obviously, not all vegans are true vegans, some of them simply follow a vegan diet for other reasons, of which there are a few.

The second reason for disliking the moral motivation is that it is absolute. Regardless of evidence to the contrary, a vegan diet is always "best." This means that most advocates of these diets will use terms like toxins and wellness in attempts at supporting their diet as something other than morally feeling right. These are non-technical terms and prevent advocates from being sued. If they said that these diets will improve blood chemistry or otherwise quantifiably increase health, they would be lying and could be sued. The diet does do things, but not the same thing for all people.

Underlying much of this health/wellness marketing angle is the idea that food can be medicine. You can see these perspectives in "detox" diets, cleanses, purges, and foods that "do" this or that. Foods increase your sex drive, let you run longer distances, increase your strength, clean up your skin, grow hair, foster world peace, and any number of other quack claims. Again, the flipside of this coin is that we need medicine to cure something, and that something is inevitably the result of whatever the vegan hates. What they hate is more often than not corporations and anything that they produce. This brings me to my first bulleted point:

1: Food does things.

Absolutely untrue and a bad way of looking at food. Food is not medicine, food is fuel. Your body is an amazing, wonderful, efficient machine. It has been honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution and does what it does with any food that you give it. Medicine works through the usage of chemicals that were not widely available to the evolving physiology of our bodies and as such have the ability to hijack certain physiological mechanisms. Some drugs hijack the pain pathway, such as Advil, preventing the sensation of pain. Other drugs hijack pleasure pathways and can become addictive, like Heroin. If Advil had been a common occurrence in our ancient diet, pain, which is evolutionarily good, would have grown to be produced by a different internal pathway. The goal of pharmaceutical research is to find chemicals that dance around our bodies' natural mechanisms and produce effects which it has not evolved to handle.

One of the most infuriating examples of an absolute moron believing this was Bob Marley. He had cancer of the toe and was advised to amputate the toe. He refused, citing some wacky religious beliefs. Then, as he was dying he finally sought treatment, before abandoning it in favor of holistic treatments that involved, you guessed it, dietary changes. We continue to see this absurd belief in people like Jenny McCarthy, who claims that food fixed her son's autism. This shows a shocking ignorance of both how food works and what autism is. I'll give you two guesses as to whether McCarthy is a vegan, too, but you'll only need one.

There is nothing magical in vegetables or fruits. Our bodies evolved to eat these things. Our body expects protein, and it gets protein. It then does what it does with protein. No hijacking takes place. Our body does many great things when we eat steak, cake, and Reese's Pieces. Just the same as our body does great things when it eats tofu, whole foods, and multivitamins.

There are many foods that can cause bad things when eaten over time: increased weight, triglycerides, bad breath; but what fixes that is not the addition of "curative" food, but by simply stopping consumption of the problem foods. Eating a hamburger every now and then is perfectly healthy, but eating two per day for a decade can kill you.

But even then, that doesn't always hold true. All dietary things exist on bell curves because everyone has different physiology. Some people can, in fact, eat two burgers per day for a decade and be fine. They don't gain weight and their blood chemistry remains within acceptable boundaries. This is because some bodies can do different things with the same food. To liken it to the way that different engines perform differently with the same gasoline isn't totally inaccurate.

There are a few chemicals that are found in food that may have medicine-like effects. They might lower cholesterol or decrease irritable bowel syndrome symptoms in non-dietary ways, but these connections are always slight. Drinking red wine might help with blood chemistry, but Advil will practically always cure headaches.

The perspective that food can act as medicine is the most culturally problematic nugget of pseudo-knowledge generated by the vegan/vegetarian movement. They give people the impression that eating a "detox" diet for a period of time will help flush out the residue of their ordinary life. There are no toxins. There is no residue. There is nothing wrong with you that food will cure.

2: A Vegan/Vegetarian Diet Is The Healthiest Diet.

Unfortunately for those who follow specific diets, all diets, if otherwise balanced and with good exercise levels, are more or less equal. The only diet that showed scientifically significant differences was a diet where a large chunk of animal protein came in the form of red meat. Namely, following said diet increased the likelihood of heart disease.

There is small evidence to support that the healthiest diet is one of an ovo-vegetarian, or someone who's animal protein comes in the form of eggs and no other meat. But this is thin evidence. The dietary benefits of fish are enormous, chicken is a lean, mean, protein-packing machine, and even the much-maligned red meat, when eaten in moderation, will cause little-to-no increase in health concerns. Again, the body is a wonderful thing and it will do wonderful things: building muscle, removing toxins, pooping; all of which will happen regardless of your diet.

Again, vegan/vegetarian supporters will jump on this and declare that meat is optional. That is true. But there are lots of things in our diets that are optional. The only reason for picking out meat is for, you guessed it, moral reasons.

That's not to say there are not specific physiological benefits to vegan diets. Truly, there are many people who find that for sporting events, vegan and vegetarian diets help them a great deal. Many distance and endurance runners are vegans and vegetarians. But as with everything I've mentioned, not all of them are. Many of them find an endless stream of hamburgers to be the best fuel for them.

That is the reason why when talking about this proponents have to use nebulous, non-technical terms like "wellness" and "toxins." They can't legally make any claims that this food or lifestyle will result in X. Are there many people out there for whom a vegan or vegetarian diet would be the healthiest choice? Yes, certainly. But there are just as many people who would do best eating grilled chicken all day.

With all that said, veg/veg diets can do some wonderful things. As I mentioned, there are some good reasons for going vegetarian and vegan. If you are having a hard time losing weight, a vegan or vegetarian diet can help you lose it. The "if" in this situation is a big one, though. You will lose weight if you maintain that diet. This is, again, true for all diets. There are many diets that will help you lose weight, but only if you maintain them for the rest of your life. Veganism and vegetarianism are no different.

In essence, that is the reason why I hate the staunchly pro-veg/veg movement: they claim amazing properties to the diet. This has effects on people who have no interest in the actual diet, but take bits and pieces of the claims and can thus be taken in by snake-oil cleanses and detox diets. The supposedly rational consumer is shockingly stupid sometimes. For example, the exploding market for gluten-free foods. Why? Because people think these foods are healthier than ordinary foods. Why? Because special gluten free foods are, in the grocery store, usually placed next to health bars and whatnot. This one isn't even up for debate. Gluten free is not in the slightest bit healthier than other types of foods, but people are vacuuming it up.

What's important is having a good, well-rounded diet that tastes good. If that happens to be vegetarianism, more power to you! But it can just as easily be a diet that involves all forms of meat. To espouse a veg/veg diet for purely moral reasons is ridiculous. For one thing, most people won't listen, and for another, advocating an ethical theory that includes all living things is impossible to support philosophically. Leave the morals at home and eat what you want.

P.S.

There are some tenable reasons for being a vegetarian based on environmental concerns. I find these arguments valid, if not entirely persuasive. I guess the ultimate point is that, if you decide to go veg/veg for environmental reasons, there is little with which I can argue.

Also, I did not discuss the Atkins diet, which while not endorsing anything moral, is just as silly as a vegan or vegetarian diet. What it does do wonderfully, though, is illustrate how diets on either end of the spectrum can show positive results in studies. All food is optional, because our bodies are wonderful things.

Eat More Fiber

And I mean A LOT more. If statistics are to be believed, you, the reader, are almost undoubtedly not meeting the USDA's recommendation. Worse still, I have concluded that the USDA daily fiber recommendation is inadequate.



I will attempt to be brief and not boring, but I'm not promising anything. Our digestive tract is much smaller, as a function of body size, than the tracts of our primate cousins. Chimps, gorillas, orangutans, all of them have massive digestive tracts. Truly, we have one of the smallest digestive tracts in the entire animal kingdom. Look at snakes; they're a giant, mobile intestine with a mouth!



No one has ever found this odd since animals eat a very rough diet. Snakes spend their time digesting whole, unchewed rats, and chimps spend the bulk of their time eating leaves, branches, some fruit, and the occasional piece of meat. For a long time, everyone assumed that our digestive tracts changed over evolutionary time by virtue of our ability to find higher quality foods, and eventually nutrient-dense meat which we were able to masticate and more quickly process in comparison to other meat eaters.



This perspective was supported with the analysis of primates that either carefully choose high-quality foods, like Baboons, or consume a huge amount of animal matter, such as monkeys that eat bugs. The digestive tracts of these animals, both in structure and size, are very similar to human digestive tracts.



This perspective changed slightly when researchers started finding that a raw diet doesn't provide enough nutrients for a proto-human duking it out with other animals on the plains of Africa. Even with meat included in the hypothetical diet, there simply wasn't enough energy to support significant populations of large, upright omnivores. While it's still somewhat controversial, an increasing number of researchers are accepting that the real change, the change that pushed us beyond anything that the Earth had yet seen, was cooking.



Heating food breaks down all of the chemical bonds that our digestive tracts would have otherwise needed to break, making the extraction of nutrients much easier. This results in a higher "net" gain, where your body must expend less energy to do the digesting. Cooking unlocked massive untapped reserves of calories that no other animal had ever had.



A few generations later, and bam, we had a more-or-less modern human digestive tract. From this point on, it was always assumed that the digestive tracts of humans and higher primates were functionally different, but no one ever did any real research until the late 80's and early 90's. It was then that they found that, on a functional level, the tracts of chimpanzees and humans were nearly identical. We digest food the same way, our tracts are simply smaller.



Now here's a fun fact about the chimp diet: they eat a ridiculous amount of fiber. Hundreds of grams per day. They can do this because they spend damn-near every waking hour eating. All of the dietary benefits that one can expect from this are probably accounted for in chimp physiology, and it gives us insight into our own functioning.



Fast-forward to 6:45 for the part where humans try to eat a chimp diet.



The question, of course, is whether imitating chimp diets vis-a-vis fiber intake is a good idea. I think that it is. The USDA recommends 25-30 grams of fiber per day. This doesn't include a breakdown of soluble and insoluble, which I will discuss in just a moment.



If the chimp digestive tract evolved to process buckets of fiber, so did ours. Chimps eat hundreds of grams of fiber per day. The average American eats less than eighteen. Obviously, humans cannot process the amount of fiber that chimps can, but no matter how far our digestive tract have moved from chimps, these numbers cannot be reconciled.



Fiber works in two ways. The soluble fiber breaks down, it ferments, in the body and binds with a wide array of chemicals in the the digestive tract and in the blood stream. It attenuates blood sugar spikes, drops cholesterol levels, and normalizes lipids. Truly, soluble fiber has so many benefits, researchers are finding new ones every year.



Insoluble fiber is the fiber that simply passes through the digestive tract. It's mode of function isn't completely understood, but it's assumed that it physically scratches the interior of the digestive tract, increasing fluid production and digestive action. The more fiber you eat, the faster you digest.



This has an equivalent in the chimp world, where chimps' digestive systems respond to varying fiber levels as an indicator of the outside world. Low fiber levels indicate nutrient dense, fresh foods at the beginning of the growth season. The digestive tract slows down to extract more nutrients from these foods. As the foods mature and become harder to digest, the fiber levels rise. The digestive tract responds by speeding food through the system more quickly to allow the chimp to eat more.



Not only are humans eating the most nutrient-dense food in the history of the world, but our fiber content is so low that our digestive systems are taking their sweet damn time about it. We are getting every calorie possible from those Pop-Tarts and this is undoubtedly contributing to our increasing weights.



You may have heard that high fiber intake can have a negative effect on nutrient absorption. Not only is this true to a degree, it's absolutely expected. If high fiber causes our bodies to push foods through our system more quickly, not absorbing all of the food is the point. We live in a world of such extreme plenty, getting the required nutrients is easy. The problem is getting too many of them.



I think that a person's dietary life should revolve around fiber intake. Everyone should get at least 100% of their fiber via food, and this is easy! Two slices of Double Fiber bread from Arnold provides half of your daily requirement. Two tablespoons of peanut butter provides 20%. A single PB&J sandwich and you're three-quarters of the way there. One sandwich!



Integrate beans into your diet at some point during the day and you've easily met your 25-30 gram target. Once you have done this, exceed your target with supplements and special foods. For example, Fiber One cereal gives you 28g of fiber in one cup. Mix it with strawberries and blueberries and you have a fiber-rich super meal.



Add Metamucil to everything that you cook or make. Add it to sauces, add it to drinks, add it to water. Metamucil has a distinct advantage over other forms of fiber in that it is easy to use and 50/50 soluble and insoluble fiber. The startling list of benefits from soluble fiber will likely only grow, so you might as well get on that bandwagon now.



I need to address the claim posited by many vegetarians, most vegans, and essentially all raw food consumers: the human digestive tract is so similar to other primates that we should be eating their diet. This is stupid.



Functionally, our systems are very similar, but structurally they are very different. It is not just the length of our tracts that is different, but the ratio of large to small intestine. Moreover, these vegetarian claims also seem to ignore that chimps will eat as much meat as they can manage, usually unlucky monkeys and bush babies.



Every bit of research done indicates that we have been eating meat for millions of years and that our diet must be different from other primates for us to thrive. I am not talking about the removal of meats, cheeses, and Pop Tarts from the diet, I'm simply saying that our digestive tracts evolved to handle much larger amounts of fiber than we are currently giving them. Along with all of the other things that we want, increased fiber intake is critical.



P.S.



I forgot to add that with increased fiber comes increased water. If you don't ensure that you are drinking 8oz of water every two hours, not only will the fiber be less effective, you might actually increase your chances for constipation.

Fake Fats Makes us Real Fat

A study has been released showing the same hypothesized effects of fake fat that have been speculated to exist for fake sugars. Namely, our bodies taste fat and sugar, and thus prepare for an influx of calories. When no influx comes, it throws our metabolisms out of whack, our energy levels drop, and our bodies amp up the drive for more food.

Christopher Wanjek has a good article on it over at Live Science, but there are a few things that I want to add. Primarily, even if we didn't suffer negative effects from fake fats and sugars, they would still be a bad thing.

The emotional awakening that is required to not only start a healthy life, but stick with it, requires abandoning old eating habits and behavioral patterns. When I ditched pre-packaged food and soda years ago (and lost nearly fifty pounds in the process) I went back some time later and tried to eat the foods that once constituted so much of diet and I couldn't! Doritos tasted like cheese-flavored slime, Snickers burned going down, Coca-Cola caused a near-instantaneous diabetic coma; this food tasted like shit!

It was my emotional, physiological epiphany. So much of the food that we start eating as kids remains tasty simply because we keep eating it. If we break the pattern of sugary consumption that started when young, we lose our taste for the foods.

Fake sugars and fats does not do this. We try to maintain our old, unhealthy patterns with fake food and are surprised when our diets fail?! Of course they fail! The behavioral patterns that foster poor eating are only encouraged with fake junk food. We need to eliminate the sensation of junk food altogether. We need to replace it with healthy foods until we stop craving the junk. Then, the emotional and cognitive changes necessary to lead a healthy life have taken place.

Admittedly, for some people, this is easier said that done. The only junk food that I crave anymore is ice cream and the occasional root beer float, but for others, the cravings may persist. But no matter how strong your desires, the only way to win is to eliminate the cravings. If your dietary life is defined by resisting temptation, you've already lost. You have to find a way to eliminate the temptation, or reduce it to a point where it rarely enters your mind. Using fake fats and sweets does not encourage behavioral changes and only serves to make you weak in the face of junk.

They're After Me, Dad! They're After Me!

I had a dream last night where I was being pursued by a demon that looked a lot like the ghost from The Grudge crossed with the girl from The Ring. Weird thing was, she was a corn demon. Somehow I knew this, and I remember an image of corn in the dream, so yeah. And to fend her off, I was throwing Pepperidge Farm cookies at her to defend myself. I kicked myself awake when the demon tried to bite my feet.

Now be Freud for a second and analyze my dream.

I'm DREAMING about high fructose corn syrup! I can't escape it!

All that's left now is to dream about hydrogen atoms trying to steal my vegetable oil, and the ghosts of murdered orangutans hanging from the palm trees that are, for some reason, in my back yard.

USDA Launches MyPlate Pyramid Replacement

I briefly mentioned my hope that the USDA wouldn't totally bork the new food pyramid. Well, they borked it. Not totally, though. It's better than the current Food Pyramid, but that's not hard, and I think that it's still fundamentally worse than the old food pyramid. WTF USDA?

First off, I actually very much like the pyramid structure. The plate structure is also rather good. I think that, correctly used, both designs would communicate what needs to be communicated. The issue is that they're completely failing to communicate these things.

Like, for example, the recent (and in some cases, not so recent) revelations that shortening is the equivalent of eating poison. You're as well off eating sticks of butter dipped in Frosted Flakes. It's obvious that many people don't know this. This is CRITICAL INFORMATION that should be communicated in the recommendation graphic.

Or how about the fact that they're recommending low-fat or fat-free milk, while there is no evidence to support it being better for you. In fact, some evidence supports whole milk being possibly better for you then fat-reduced varieties, but that's splitting hairs. The important fact is that there is no evidence supporting the low-fat assertion.

Their recommendation of whole grains is extremely problematic. Look in your local cereal aisle. The number of sugary cereals that advertise "Rich in Whole Grains!" is sickening. The plate should have said "Fiber," because that's what's actually important. Soluble and non-soluble fiber is what you actually want from that stuff, and lots of it So even though it's RICH IN WHOLE GRAINS (smiley face!) it's still low in fiber and unhealthy. Simply saying whole grains just gives our loving food companies another buzz word to obfuscate into oblivion.

I am happy to see that there appears, appears, to be no politicization of the recommendations. The "whole grains" part of the plate is questionable, as is the usage of the term "protein," instead of meat. The meat industry has spent lots of time trying to convince the public to see meat as something other than, well, meat. The USDA is saying that their market research shows that people know that "protein" means a diverse group of foods, such as tofu or beans, but I'm not so sure. And as any dietician worth their salt knows full well, people might say one thing while thinking and doing another.

The plate is only one issue with the American diet, though. Truly, the largest issue are our absurd agriculture policies. It brings to mind the 2007 documentary King Corn, which discussed the ridiculous state of farm subsidies. Namely, our farm subsidies are SO fucked up, we are paying people tax payer dollars since their lawn once had corn grown on it. Corn is far cheaper than it should be, and because of that, our diet is predominantly corn. Extruded corn, puffed corn, baked corn, corn meal, corn syrup, HFCS, well, you get the idea. And what isn't corn is soy, because it is also horribly over-subsidized.



And which companies are benefitting from this subsidization? The biggest ones, and ONLY the biggest ones. The little guys invariably get pushed out. So, shocker, the big guys are very averse to having the subsidies changed. As are the American junk food producers, since their shitty food is made of almost nothing but cheap corn. They bribe, oh, I forgot, they don't bribe, they make campaign contributions, to various politicians, who then keep these subsidies alive.

This isn't conspiracy theory nonsense. Remember, I'm always talking about how I'm not anti-corporation. I am, in fact, very pro-corporation. Corporations should not have morals. Their goal is to make money. Sometimes, this can manifest itself in moral behavior.

For example, it is in a corporation's best interest to keep its customers happy and healthy, so it might encourage exercise and sell healthy foods. But it also might not care, since its market is so huge, like McDonald's. It is not McDonald's job to worry about your waist line. It's yours. But it is also our government's. And the fact that our representatives, that supposedly care about us, are encouraging a broken system that gives countless billions of taxpayer dollars to rich, evil companies, while at the same time encouraging the American populous to get fatter and sicker, is a travesty of the highest order. We should hang these politicians from trees, bury them, and salt the earth where doth their bodies lay.

So, yes. The new MyPlate is better than the old MyPyramid, but the real progress, the real change, is yet to be made.

A New Not Food Pyramid

The USDA's redesigned food pyramid, produced in 2005, was widely panned as somehow worse than the original one, which was itself widely criticized. Don't worry, the government is on the job. These guys know how to do shit right.

And by that, they are going to release a completely new food pyramid. So new, in fact, that it won't be a pyramid at all. It's going to be some "plate" design. I'm sure it will make complete sense.

Forgive me for being skeptical, but the government spent years on the 2005 pyramid, and it was ridiculous. It made no sense, provided no help whatsoever, and managed to ignore almost all of the developments in dietary science from the previous two decades. It was an absolute clusterfuck.

I really, truly, deeply hope that they don't make the situation worse. People NEED guidance. There is so much contradictory evidence out there, and so much of it is wrapped up in ideological baggage, it eventually just drives people away. They throw their arms up, stop their inquiry, and keep doing whatever it is that they're doing. And as we've moved further away from Grandma's "everything in moderation" motto, what people are doing is getting increasingly worse.

Please, please, pleeeeaaaase, government people. Do right by the populace. Don't bend to lobbyists from whatever-the-fuck industry has its finger up your butt. Produce a simple graphic that gets it right. It can't be that hard.

McDonald's Goes Upmarket. Analysts Get It Wrong.

McDonald's is at it again, with a multi-billion dollar renovation of locations, with new furniture, colors, and amenities. Analysts see this as McDonald's trying to move into Starbucks' territory, or differentiate themselves from the other fast food stand-by's. Both of these perspectives are only partly true. The underlying motivation is much grander and has been on McDonald's mind for two decades.

In my review of Five Guys Burger and Fries, I discussed something that I've been mulling for time. Namely, the stratification of dietary classes in America. As time goes on, and scale drives the price and quality of certain foods ever lower, we'll have the lower class eating total garbage that costs almost nothing, and anyone who can afford it will be eating better and better.



As with the Arch Deluxe so many years ago, this is McDonald's trying to prevent that future from becoming reality. Because in this economic mechanism, anyone who competes on price will be actively pushed downmarket, resulting in ever-thinner profits, and lower-SES customers. When fast food was simply fast food, something everyone ate now and then, this future wasn't a threat. But now, with fast food being further segmented into high and low-quality, it's a game of musical chairs to see who can get away from the low-end more quickly.

Diet Advice From The Watery Gourmet

The manifestation of your genetic form is your choice. If you are really fat, you can choose to not be fat. If you are scrawny, you can choose to increase your muscle mass. It might be much harder for you than someone else who is "blessed" with genetics that predispose them to whatever figure that you want. If you want to lose weight, your genetics might necessitate a diet of beans, chicken, and carrots for the rest of your life. Is that fair? No. It's not fair. It sucks. But just because the choice is more difficult for you doesn't mean that the choice doesn't exist.

Previously, I put the word "blessed" in marks because it's not necessarily a blessing. Lots of medical research shows that people who are super-skinny regardless of diet are prone to dying of every malady imaginably, aside from diabetes, than those who are predisposed to weight gain. Being predisposed to extensive muscle growth burns more calories Having a healthy pile of fat on your body makes you more likely to survive extended medical problems. Being fatter keeps you warmer than someone with a BMI of 4. These are legitimate advantages and only get glossed over in our image-conscious popular world.

But back to the concept of choice. Much of how you look is determined by your genes. The extent to which certain aspects of your genes are represented is a choice, though. Again, in our image-conscious world, helped along by a healthy dose of religious moralizing, the opposite of the ascetic existence, one in which we indulge pleasure and taste, is seen as necessarily bad. Think about that. When you eat a slice of cake instead of doing sit-ups, you are making a choice. You are choosing that the pleasure of eating that cake is of higher value to you than not eating the cake and conserving caloric intake.

This is not an inherently bad choice. It is our society that tells you that it's a bad choice. You are being a bad person for indulging your desire for pleasure. It's one of the sins, and was written explicitly by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something to be avoided. We eat to live, we don't live to eat. But why? Why shouldn't we live to eat? It's great! We don't do it because abstinence in all things is the Christian ideal, which gets us closer to God. If you don't happen to believe in the Christian god, then you're hosed, because you're still subject to the social expectations that this ingrained value programming has injected into the zeitgeist.

Problems for people arise when they choose cake and then feel bad about it. They then get sucked into diet scams. I went to Amazon and searched for diet products in the Health and Beauty section. I found over 4,000 items. Certainly not the largest section on Amazon, but remember, NONE of these products have been shown in a reputable study to be any better than simply eating a better diet. That's why they all, I'd wager 100% of them, if they make a claim about weight loss on the packaging, print in absurdly small print a disclaimer saying that this must be combined with an exercise routine. It's a scam. Plain and simple. You might very well have lost weight with these products, but I say with nearly complete certainty that the product had nothing to do with it, it was you and your dedication to a healthier lifestyle. On a funny note, I found the pictured Atkins mix to so resemble a bag of "Atkins Chow" as to warrant a new package design firm.

If you want to be thin, and you can't seem to manage it, you have to move even further towards the ascetic lifestyle of 24/7 salads. You might NEVER be able to eat cake. Cheese, cookies, pastries; they're all right out. But no matter what you tell yourself, you can be thin. Jogging five miles, every day, salads with grilled chicken every day. That doesn't sound like something that I'd like to do, frankly, and if that's what you would need to get thin, then that's unfortunate, but still your choice. You are making the choice to continue eating cake, cheese, and cookies. And that's not bad! If I had to make that choice, I'd pick cake on any day of the week. But I am making the choice explicit and do not regret my choice. I embrace it.

That being said, very few people need to make that choice. Do you have a glandular or hormone problem? No you don't. You're lying to me and to yourself. Alright, yes, some of you certainly do have medical problems that result in your body turning even carrots into fat. People with severe glandular problems make up less than 1% of the population. People with moderate glandular problems and depression included only bring that number up to 1%. That means you are fat because you are making the choice to be fat.

Weight loss is a simple equation of fewer/better calories and more exercise. Every day. You need to integrate it into your life. Going to the gym once or twice a week will DO NOTHING. You need to go every day and make a fundamental shift in your diet. If you can't find anything that is acceptable on a daily basis, then you either need to change your expectations or accept the fact that you are choosing to not lose weight. I've lost nearly 50 pounds from my greatest weight of 260 pounds. I woke up early to make sure I was able to eat a high-fiber breakfast. I made sure to walk or jog multiple miles every day. I stopped drinking sweetened drinks of any kind. I do pushups and pullups randomly throughout the day. I integrated all of this behavior into my day. It stopped being exercise and diet and simply became part of my life. If you can't do that, stop fooling yourself. You'll fail, and then you'll go back to complaining about how you can't keep the weight off.

I have been discussing fat at this point, but many of the same criticisms also apply to those who wish for greater muscular definition but find it hard to achieve. Some people can lift a weight once per day and look like Hercules. Others can lift weights all day long and still only see middling results. These people have it easier than those who are overweight because of our focus on an ascetic ideal, but it can still be difficult for them.

These poor saps are taken for a ride in ways that dieters aren't. Magic pills and powders intended to make you FREAKIN' 'UGE sell for silly amounts of money and usually don't do anything. At least lots of the diet foods out there are still food. It might be terrible food, but it's at least a meal. Pills, powders, shakes, creams, bars, and all of the other things promising you an Arnold-like physique only work with extreme work-outs, and then you don't need them. The difficult part is already done. Just eat chicken and rice.

Our world is an Eden of excess. Our primordial drives don't know what to do with what we've wrought. Food and pleasure is everywhere, so we indulge it. We then feel bad about it. The problem is not the desire, or even the indulging, it's the regret that we as a society feel afterward. We eat like crazy and lie about, then we say that we simply can't avoid it! We say that we'd have those six-pack abs, only if this or that was different. We'd be thin, only if. We'd run every day, only if. All excuses for a choice that you are making but then pretending like you didn't. No. You made the choice, and it's time to stop whining that you did so.

My father has given me a few choice pieces of wisdom. I'd say the one that has had the greatest effect on me is that a loser is not defined by what they have achieved in life, but whether they whine. If you spend all day long complaining, it doesn't matter whether you live under a bridge or in a palace, you're a loser. By rendering the choices we make explicit and taking responsibility for them, we lose the ability to whine and complain, because it was our choice. It is our power. And they are our bodies.

Yet Another Poor Study Shows Benefits For Organic

There are many studies that show benefits to organic foods over traditional foods, with an equal number showing no difference at all. The only difference is that the ones showing no difference are usually of a greater scale, both in sample size and time. This new study is of decent size, twenty-two brands in all, done over two years. They sampled milk during the winter and during the summer and it's that bit of info that I find interesting, which I'll get to in a bit.

The study was measuring levels of various fatty compounds in the milk and it found that organic milks had higher levels of good fats and lower levels of bad fats. Ohh, but the story isn't nearly that simple. As I mentioned, measurements were taken during the summer and winter, which produced wild fluctuations in fat levels for both conventional and organic. This indicates, as they mention in the article, that diet likely has a large part to play, since both milk and meat from grass-fed cows is lower in fat than cows fed with feed products. But one then has to ask, why bother advocating organic foods and not simply say we should feed our cows grass? Easy! You can't get self-righteous about grass.

Moreover, there are areas where conventional milk did better than organic, namely one C12 and all four measures of C14 fats. It is too much of a stretch to advocate organic from this study, or any of the other studies measuring similar things, even from a purely healthful perspective.

One interesting aspect of the data that they briefly mention in the article is that bad fats appear to be trending up in both types of milk as time goes on and good fats are trending down. Obviously, within ten years, cows will be producing 100% butter directly from their udders.

Yes, Do End Farm Subsidies

Mark Bittman has a good post over at the NY Times, titled "Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them." His thesis is right there in the headline. He argues that our ridiculous farm subsidies, manifested in comical situations like houses with subsidized lawns because the land once grew corn, should not be simply ended, but diverted to medium-sized farms and other crops. I think that this is a wonderful idea. Doing this would, in an instant, transform the American dietary landscape for the better. It is such a good idea, in fact, that it will undoubtedly never happen.

What Bittman is asking of our government is subtly, logic, common sense, and leadership. Our government is incapable of that. Whether it was ever capable of that is academic, but it's certainly not capable of it now. In the past, I could simply point to the Republicans and say that they're the problem, because they usually are, but here, I can't say that. Just as many Democrats as Republicans are in the pockets of big agribusiness. And yes, I do mean to imply that they are taking bribes. I think most level-headed people can agree that lobbyists are borderline bribes, so I'll just go ahead and call them outright bribes. According to Opensecrets.org, agribusiness is the number six lobbying industry in the country. With that much money being spent by evil empires like Monsanto and ConAgra, change is an impossibility.

We have to move in bold, neanderthal-like steps for our government to get anything done. We either keep the farm subsidies as-is, or we get rid of them. To argue that there is an achievable middle ground is the perspective of a political Pollyanna.

America, Diets, And The Expensive Lunch

Christopher Wanjek, one of my favorite medical writers on the internet, has posted an article about the recent research linking diet soda consumption and an increased risk for strokes. He repeats a sentiment from various food and diet writers who are complaining that "the health police" are telling the world that they can't drink diet sodas. Obviously, this is delivered in a derisive way, implying that the health police, whoever they are, are telling us that we can't eat or drink anything.

First off, if any of the health police had been previously saying that diet soda was alright, they were idiots. I can't think of a single doctor or dietitian who would say that drinking any kind of soda is recommended. As a treat, yes, but nothing more. Just because diet soda doesn't have any calories in it doesn't mean that it doesn't have other stuff in it, as Wanjek points out in his article.

I find this typically symptomatic of the American perspective on, well, life. We are on a constant quest for fun, while trying to avoid paying for it. We are, in essence, on a quest for a free lunch. This philosophy manifests itself no stronger than in diet. We consume diet gimmicks and exercise equipment in amounts unseen anywhere else in the Western world.

For example, there is something distinctly American about the Atkins diet; just the idea that we can be thin by eating lots of meat! Don't pay any mind to all of the other countries that can't even afford meat. Or the fact that most dietary scientists say that eating the meat-rich diet of an American would be impossible for the entire planet.

No, we want to eat candy for dinner. We want to exercise without actually doing any exercise. That exercise one really blows my mind. What do you think exercise is? It's moving your body! You can't move your body without moving!

The absolute pinnacle of that quest were those batshit crazy electric belts that supposedly jolted your muscles into moving. Don't prefer some insane exercise gimmick? Don't worry! There are diet products that will make it seem like you're exercising all the time, even when you're sitting in front of the TV, which is apparently the American dream.

Even I, super genius, fell for one of these gimmicks about ten years ago. I was young and stupid, and ever since high school had ended, I was starting to put on pounds. So I tried a product called, subtly, Ripped Fuel. It's still available now, but at the time it was using ephedra, which has famously since been taken off of the shelves. Probably a good thing, since I took one-sixth the dose, pegged a temp of over 103, had a racing heart, and didn't sleep for two days.

Um... healthy.

The ephedra actually did something, though! But eating something that simply burns fat is inherently unhealthy, so it got banned! Shocker, it worked by the only mechanism that a pill could possibly burn fat, by raising your body temperature. Which can prove lethal, as it did for many sports stars.

But the banning of ephedra didn't stop the diet companies from producing billions of pills of other total nonsense. They are the very definition of snake oil. And all of the commercials say, somewhere, in very small text, that the results seen are rare and can only be achieved with changes to diet and exercise. But the rest of the commercial makes damn sure to make it seem like you'll see those results with the pill alone. You will NEVER BE THIN BY SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR TV AND SWILLING BACK SODA!

I'm not saying that a life of leisure and food is immoral or bad, I'm saying that only a moron could possibly think that they will ever achieve results with these stupid products, sold on TV, at one in the morning. And America is fucking filled to overflowing with morons (See P.T. Barnum, even though he apparently never said it). You can choose either a lean, muscular body, and exercise regularly and eat well; or you can have a soft body and small muscles but enjoy leisure and fatty food. You cannot have both.

Even with the wildest advances in science, you will likely never be able to have both. Genetic science would have to develop a human that stores no fat, and has muscles that grow regardless of exercise levels. That simply cannot be a stable organism. I can only assume that a person like that would grow and look great, until they literally explode at age thirty-five.

Regardless of what advertising tells you, there is no free lunch. You wanna' know how I lost fifty pounds? I'll tell you for free. I started eating more fruit and vegetables and exercised every day. It was easy. So easy, in fact, it's apparently really hard.

Penn & Teller did an excellent episode of Bullshit! about food around the world, and the disconnection between America, where we're all fat, and Africa, where they're all starving to death.

Organic Milk Better For You?

I'm not convinced. Generally, I'm skeptical of anything having to do with organic-this, or artisan-that. That's not to say that some studies haven't shown differences, but more studies have shown benefits in the other direction. Generally, no difference is found, but especially regarding produce, those nasty, industrial, chemically grown fruits and veggies are more frequently better for you than their organic counterparts.

I'm often proven right because organic food has little to do with actual health and everything to do with damning the man. Just because a hypothesis seems right in your head doesn't mean that it's going to be borne out in experiments. And when your primary motivation is moral and social, your scientific sense is going to be clouded.

As it is with this study. I can think of one big thing and that is that organic milks are almost always pasteurized by the ultra-high-temperature process. Anyone who's done a taste test between milks knows that UHTP changes the flavor of the milk significantly, and anyone who's ever tried to steam milk for espresso knows that the chemical changes are significant enough to make it annoyingly difficult. That means that major chemical changes are happening in UHTP milks in comparison to standard milks. Was this controlled for? I don't know, but I'd like to know. Did they include control milks? Those that are produced on gigantic scales but are not organic, like Parmalat?

Again, without details, I won't say this is bunk, but I'm suspicious. I find it especially laughable that the lead researcher recommends that everyone switch to organic. For one thing, has she noticed that organic costs TWICE AS MUCH as excellent non-organic, and three times as much as standard Wal-Mart milk. To say that people should just triple their spending on one of the Western life's staples is ridiculous. And what about milk-steaming, espresso fiends like me, huh? What of us?!

Organic milk is better for you, say scientists

Industry Renames HFCS

Apparently, instead of, ohhh I dunno', NOT using high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) anymore, they're going to take a page from the American automakers playbook and simply rename the offending ingredient! The new name? Corn sugar.

You can practically smell the Calvin Klein aftershave coming off the MBA that thought up this brilliant plan. Everything about it is retarded. First, technically, it's correct. But they'd still have to call it high fructose corn sugar, because HFCS is not simply corn sugar. That would be corn syrup, which no one has an issue with.

First off, saying that there is no evidence that HFCS is linked with health problems is a total lie. There is conflicting evidence, but that is far from no evidence. We have a variety of studies showing that there may be a link between HFCS consumption and lower-quality blood chemistry and weight gain. The fact that there may be any link at all shows that, if alternatives exist, we shouldn't eat it.

Just stop using it! Use ordinary corn syrup. Use sugar. Use molasses. As a manufacturer, I understand that you have to think about your bottom line. I also understand that government subsidies, tariffs, and other regulatory muckings-about have made sugar more expensive than it should be (GO-GO Gadget government intervention!). But think about your demographic groups.

People who are very concerned about HFCS will appreciate, and also be willing to pay the small premium for, your use sugar. For example, if you have to raise the price of Chips Ahoy by $0.50, that is a significant percentage increase, but it's not large in practical terms. The people who cannot afford that increase or are unwilling to pay are very unlikely to be the demographic that cares or is even aware of the controversy.

Split your demographics. Make Chips Ahoy Natural for the markets that care and continue to make the ordinary Chips Ahoy for other markets. Don't try this semantic dodge, it will just piss people off.

Goodbye High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hello Corn Sugar (Signed, Corn Industry) (Huffington Post)

More About Raw Milk

I've been gearing up to buy some raw milk, I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I'm lazy. Truth be told, though, I also have a little bit of lingering fear about all of the nasty little pathogens inside of raw milk that are just eagerly waiting to kill me, because almost every other living thing on Earth is in some way eager to kill me.

Scientific American has a work-up of the current debate over raw milk, discussing as much as space allows from both perspectives. They have an utterly (udderly?)amazing reference to a form of microbe purification that is apparently used on things like canned hams, where the food isn't actually heated, instead it's subjected to intense pressure, which, I assume, literally crushes the bacteria. Cool, very cool. But not nearly as cool as killing all the bad stuff with sound waves? Sound waves?! I would totally kill my bacteria with The Beastie Boys.



I still feel that if someone wants to buy raw milk, they should be allowed to. I have an internal debate going on if raw milk should be labeled as dangerous, like cigarettes, by law or not. Still, even though the chances of getting sick are higher from raw milk than from pasteurized, they're still rather low. I also have the immune system of a shark (look it up). It's too bad that Rhode Island has laws against raw milk, since that means I have to make a trek to some farms in Massachusetts. That also means that, in the hot, hot days of summer, my trip home, and to the waiting deep chill, is going to be longer than I would like. So either I can bring an ice-filled cooler or wait till fall.

Got E. coli? Raw Milk's Appeal Grows Despite Health Risks (Scientific American)