[ale] OT: OT OT OT and very long! Anybody sick today?

[rhiannen]

Diets: The mini-rant. [Full rant reserved for more health related sites.]

First, I am no doctor, but I have had a lot of time and motivation to turn my
unemployed research skills towards health and health related data.

Ignore the airbrushed, retouched, professional "dieters" from TV and magazines.
Ignore the most recent "smart" information from the latest high profile doctor.
Forget "common knowledge" and focus instead on good basic biology and common
sense. 

Point: The far vast majority of doctors have less than 4 hours TOTAL of diet,
nutrition and any related courses. It simply just isn't taught in Western
medicine as a major factor. What research they do get is very, VERY narrow,
separated and compartmentalized ("B vitamins produce these chemical effects"
type stuff.) However, how well will your car run if you never change the oil or
other fluids and continually give it extremely poor quality fuel?

Point: Human bodies are highly complex systems, not laboratory beakers.

Point: Whether or not you believe in evolution, our closest living relations are
the primates. Their diet consists mainly of raw leaves, fruits, nuts, roots, and
grasses supplemented with small amounts of raw animal protein from termites and
scavenged carcases. They drink plain old water - a lot of it. Unchlorinated,
unfluorinated water. Hmmm...

Point: The modern American diet consists of fast and convenient "foods" (and I
use that term *very* loosely) which contain chemical additives and 'supplements'
our bodies have no concept of how to handle. It's taken us a million years or so
(give or take some eons) to evolve, with our diets, to where we are. Up until
about 100 years or so ago, almost all food additives were natural herbs and
spices (for flavor and preservation.) The human body has NOT evolved any way of
handling overly processed, nutrient stripped white sugar, white flour, white fat
(partially hydrogenated soybean oils, etc.) and it hasn't figured out what to do
with the man-made base chemicals we throw back on the over processed stuff. 

Point: A lot of "additives" are put back in as weak attemptes to replace much
needed nutrients stripped during processing. Without them, our body simply can't
adequately digest or utilize the gunk we like to pretend is food. However, the
additives are in bare chemical forms w/o the supportive naturally occuring
enzymes, etc. and therefore basically worthless.

Point: Additional man-made substances such as aspartame are known by the
manufacturers and the FDA to be highly toxic and very dangerous, but are not
only still in many "healthy" diet products, but are being added to more and more
each week. (Yes, I can dig up the articles and research to back that up. Easily
enough done via Google as well.) 

Point: Anything ingested that the body can't digest is either an irritant or a
toxin depending on if the body can remove it or not. This includes medications,
whether OTC or prescribed. (I'll spare you my pharmaceutical rant this time.)

Point: Over 100 years ago, cancer was so rare as to create great comment.
Physicians would come from miles around to see a case. It is now one of the top
five leading causes of death in the US. (Trivia tidbit: According to an article
in the July 2000 JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association,) doctors are
the third leading cause of death in the US.)

Point: The largest filter your body has is the liver. If you can't remember
highschool anatomy and biology, do some Googling on it - absolutely
mind-boggling everything the liver handles. As a bare minimum, consider it a
filter, like a water filter. If you keeping running mud through, eventually it
clogs up. In the human body, the mud is all the extra additives and man-made
'supplements.'  Want your water filter to last longer? Don't keep pouring mud
through it.

Point: Fat is the body's way of storing excess food for energy, but it is ALSO
the body's way of removing overloads of toxins that the liver and other filters
can no longer handle.

Point: THE best diet is one which closely follows our primate cousins'. No, you
don't have to go poke termite mounds for your protein, but the closer to fresh,
raw, organic you can eat, the healthier AND the easier for your system to
digest.  

Point: High protein is not as healthy for us as many Atkins types would like us
to believe. Our ancestory are mostly plant eating omnivores, not carnivores. We
are closer relatives to bears than the big cats, closest to the apes and chimps,
and our digestive systems are vastly different from the big cats. Basically, our
bodies have not evolved to handle large daily intakes of meat. (Yes, the
addition of protein to the diet has been related to the increase of brain
capacity and the probable formation of Homo Sapiens, but archeo-anthropological
research still indicates meat was used in moderation and supplementation to the
vegetation, not vice-versa.)

Point: ANY diet that severely limits grains, roots, vegetables, and/or fruits is
NOT a healthy diet - no matter how much weight is lost. Sit down with an
independent holistic nutritionist sometime.  [Nothing new-agey. Holistic:
relating to or concerned with integrated wholes or complete systems rather than
with analysis or treatment of separate parts.<~ medicine> <~ecology> || Any
network people should quickly understand the highly desirable holistic viewpoint
to complex systems.]

Point: Want to lose weight? Seen many films of fat wild monkeys? Would also help
tremendously to support your All American overloaded liver. Lots and lots of
good information out there on precisely how to do so.  A fully functioning liver
helps metabolize food correctly instead of packing away fat everywhere it can
stash it. (Think about it - what is one of the most well-known problems of heavy
drinkers (hint: liver), and also just what *is* a beer gut?)

Point: I will save for private discussion the research on food and other
allergies as well as numerous other diseases and syndromes in direct relation to
the build-up of exposed or ingested toxins and congested livers. However, a very
good article was just posted on that connection in the mainstream (read
allopathic, not alternative) health press. Another one on high pollution levels
found within the body was just released from AP.  [Again, Google is your friend.
;)]

Point: In good conscience I must mention that there exists a highly suspect self
proclaimed "consumer advocate" group that spends inordinate amounts of money
attempting to refute the above points. Some names for them include NCAHF and
Quackwatch.  I mention this because there are almost uncountably numerous
articles which can be traced back to them which 'sound' plausible enough, unless
you really do your own research and actually read a lot of what they quote from.
It appears a favorite tactic may be to quote out of context; another might be to
completely ignore all but the research done by the people who look to make the
most money selling a certain product or substance. (Hedging done 1/2 in jest -
it's left to the reader to determine which half and what jest.)

Interestingly, these people have been losing court case after case across the
country, some of their members have even lost their license to practice, most
have little or moderate discernible income, and the organizations have even been
undermined by the AMA (whose viewpoint they heavily insinuate they represent,
but don't.)  They've managed to spend millions advertising and suing (and
losing) against ANY alternative medicine, even the ones embraced and endorsed by
many allopathic doctors and research groups, and yet still have money to
continue on. I'll leave it as an intellectual exercise to question where all
that money could be coming from. 

Since this is a Linux user's list, and not a health or alt-med list, I'll stop
there. But it was too much to ask this geek to sit by and watch a conversation
on diet and the direct effect on health without piping up with at least some
mention of 1.5 years of dedicated research. ;)

[[If anyone is interested in learning more about anything I've mentioned, either
spend quite a bit of time Googling and wading through tons and tons of
information or just email me. I can provide lots and lots of very good starting
reference links so you can wade through tons and tons of information. (grin)
This last year and a half, I've spent recovering from back surgery and helping
my son heal from a very bad vehicle accident. No job and nothing but time and
lots of very good motivation to research health and healing and spend and hours
and hours in  conversations with and/or reading articles by certified holistic
nutritionists and highly respected alternative health professionals.]]

----- 
rhia
Excuse me, please.  What universe is this?


"ChangingLINKS.com" wrote:
> 
>  > > However, usually it greatly increases cholesterol.  If you go on the diet
> > > > be sure to get yours checked.  While I lost 20# on it, a subsequent Physical
> > > > caused my doctor to order me off of it permanently.
> > > >
> > > > Bob
> > > > ..heads off for yucky diet dinner food.
> >
> > > I call "myth."
> > My cholesterol was measured via standard scientific methods.  No myth
> > in the numbers.  Anyone at risk (almost everyone on this list) should
> > spend the few hundred dollars to get their cholesterol checked.  An
> > extra 10 years of life could be the result...now back to our regularly
> > scheduled geekdom.
> >
> > Bob
> 
> My reaction was to your use of the word "usually."
> I was not doubting that your cholesterol level was raised.
> The point is you seem to blame the diet, claiming it "usually" raises the level.
> Then, you tell us that your doctor blamed the diet as well, and told you to stay off it.
> And while respecting those facts, I posed two questions:
> 
> The logical question is "how can you raise your cholesterol if you are eating less of it?"
> The second question is "if you are eating more cholesterol on the diet . . . why?"
> And now: What would happen if you binged that "diet" food you are eating now?
> 
> -course you don't have to answer any of that, I was just clarifying-
>         -back to our regularly scheduled geekdom-