Monday, August 29, 2011

"Believe Half Of What You Read, and Nothing ...

... that you hear."  My football coach used to tell me that.  I didn't like it much, as I was and am an information junkie.  It seemed like he was telling me to stop doing what I liked.  Turns out he was right.  Here's a prime example.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/high-fat-diet-linked-to-breast-cancer/

First off, all rate cancer studies are a challenge because rats don't live to 85, ever.  There tumors are different and obviously, their metabolism, while similar, is also different in key ways from a human's.  However, rat and mouse studies of cancer are possible, and most with humans are not.  So instead of hanging up their cleats and going home, scientists do rat/mouse cancer studies.  Having done them, they want to publish them.  Once published, their speculative musings become fodder for reporters - reporters who are as fallibly human as I am, but perhaps have a different agenda - like making money by attracting the attention of editors/publishers. 

It is very hard to get published as either a scientist or a reporter by saying "another nearly meaningless rat/mouse study was conducted today, and the results are very difficult to interpret and apply to humans." 

So that's not what you see and hear.  So, as Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple and Primal Blueprint fame points out, the animals on the "low fat" diet were fed a diet that was startlingly similar to rodent food -

"Ground corn, Dehulled soybean meal, Wheat middlings, Fish meal, Ground wheat, Wheat germ, Brewers dried yeast, Ground oats, Dehydrated alfalfa meal, Porcine animal fat, Ground soybean hulls, Soybean oil, Dried beet pulp, and a bunch of added vitamins and minerals."

What were the cancerous, "high fat and cholesterol" rodents fed? 
"Sucrose (31%), Milk fat (21%), Casein (19 %), Maltodextrin (10%), Powdered Cellulose (5%), Dextrin (5%), and the typical vitamin and mineral array."

So I ask you, do you think the rodents had cancer trouble from the fat, the casein (already well known to be associated with cancer in rats, thanks to T. Colin Cambell), the 31% of food as sucrose, the milk fat (not a rodent staple as I understand it), or the maltodextrin?  Heck, I doubt rodents can even spell "maltodextrin."  What you notice of course is there's really nothing in this list that equals "rodent food." 

"What you see depends upon where you stand."  From where I stand, what the study shows that is applicable to humankind is that you should not eat a bunch of processed crap that you were never made to eat (thank you modern science for that blinding flash of the obvious).  For a human, the top of that list is:
**wheat and corn (the highly modified varieties of which are available today were likely never consumed by a human before about 100 years ago)
**industrial agricultural products of corn and seeds (canola oil, "corn oil", cottonseed oil, peanut oil, etc)
**massive daily quantities of sugars
**animals that are fed these products to make them sick so they will bring in more money (because an animal fattened on feed corn isn't fat from over-consuming a healthy diet, it is fat as a result of eating a food that makes it sick and fat)

But I am not one to stand in the way of freedom, so if you would rather eat low fat and boatloads of "heart healthy whole grains", be my guest.  Your choices will help to keep the prices down for my friends who join me in grassfed beef and dairy, other meats, vegetables, some nuts and seeds, little fruit and starch, and no sugar/wheat.

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