"Daft to Build a Castle on a Swamp"

From the King of the Swamp, Monte Python and the Holy Grail:

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp.

"So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.

"So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

"But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England."

Well, my daft reader, keep on building.  It took me from 1996 until 2007 to get the right combination of habits, information, support, and old habits (finally) kicked to eat in the way that makes me feel my best.

First, take a 30 day challenge of nothing but meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch.  Eat all you want of the meat and veggies, eggs and bacon, sour cream, hard cheeses, coconut oil, butter, MCT oil, avocado (with salt and either champagne vinegar, red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar, as you prefer), sunflower seeds and macadamia nuts.  Take magnesium, salt, and potassium liberally, sip water continuously.  What you'll notice is that even though there's no conscious restriction of intake, and that you have a green light to eat whenever hungry, you'll eat less than your prior approach.  After you get through the pain of putting a foundation in the swamp (teaching your body to use fat for fuel most of the time), you will feel incredible!  You'll think that building castles in the swamp is the best idea ever. 

After the 30 days, make your best effort to sustain your wheat and sugar free life; zero is good, but many people do well by limiting these foods to one day per week.  So can slam down all you want of the nasty food on Sunday, but no other day, for example.  If this keeps you off of the junk Mon-Sat, it's a good trade.

Booze - try the same approach as above.  Use vodka, gin, or tequila at first.  The famed NORCAL margarita:  shot of vodka, gin or tequila, an entire lemon or lime, and carbonated water to taste.

After you get this up and running, your castle will sink into the swamp.  It will happen slowly, but surely, and you'll notice one day that your "I'm doing great, I can eat this bite of cake" has turned into "I'm doing great, I'll eat another whole cake for lunch.  That breakfast cake was great."  Or the "Yay, beer and shitty carb foods on Saturday!" becomes "Hey, I only drink a half case of Sam Adams six days a week, why am I bloated and dehydrated all the time? Why can't I fit into my new clothes I had to buy?"  Well, the reason is your paleo lifestyle castle sank into the swamp, my friend.

And when you feel bad enough, mentally and physically, and you can no longer see your toes, or tie your shoes without groaning about how damned hard it is to reach the laces with that huge belly in the way, you'll start to rebuild your swamp castle, even though everyone will say you're daft, there's no use trying.  But you'll do it anyway, just to show 'em.  And that one will sink into the swamp too.

When I was in Iraq in 2006, and hit 225 pounds (PR!) with a girth of 39 inches around my belly, I knew my castle had burned down, fell over and was sinking into the swamp.  So I built the fourth one, and after 11 years, that 2007 swamp has lasted.  You can have one too. 

PS: you don't have to make it this hard. If you build just one castle on dry land and it's good from the start and your castle never falls over, that's fine too.

Vitamin D - You Need More Until Proven Otherwise By Testing

This Mercola article is a great summary of the vitamin D link to cancer.

An optimal vitamin D level is critically important in minimizing your cancer risk; a study of menopausal women showed that maintaining vitamin D serum levels of 40ng/ml cut overall cancer risk by 77 percent.

GrassrootsHealth founder Carole Baggerly believes 90 percent of ordinary breast cancer is related to vitamin D deficiency; in fact, breast cancer has been described as a “vitamin D deficiency syndrome”.

Vitamin D can stop breast cancer cells from spreading by replenishing E-cadherin, one of the glue-like components giving structure to those cells.

In addition to being a strong cancer preventative, vitamin D is crucial for pregnant women and their babies, lowering risk for preterm birth, low birth weight, and C-section; 80 percent of pregnant women have inadequate vitamin D levels.

The most important factor is having your vitamin D serum level tested every 6 months, as people vary widely in their response to ultraviolet exposure or oral supplementation; your serum level should be kept between 50 and 70 ng/ml for optimal health.

Studies Show That Studies Show 0% Accuracy

"Back in 2007 when I first published Good Calories, Bad Calories I also wrote a cover story in the New York Times Magazine on the problems with observational epidemiology. The article was called "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?" and I made the argument that even the better epidemiologists in the world consider this stuff closer to a pseudoscience than a real science. I used as a case study the researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Walter Willett, who runs the Nurses' Health Study. In doing so, I wanted to point out one of the main reasons why nutritionists and public health authorities have gone off the rails in their advice about what constitutes a healthy diet. The article itself pointed out that every time in the past that these researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship, and that causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation - i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time. No exception. Their batting average circa 2007, at least, was .000."
http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/

We used to say, because we like alliteration, "How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"

Well, how about "How much truth could an epidemiological nutritionist find if an epidemiological nutritionist could find truth?"

Yes, I know, mega dork.  C'est la vie.

Bulletproof Coffee

I have come to enjoy intermittent fasting very much - independence from eating, feeling good, and the ability to go for long periods without eating or discomfort are a few of the benefits.

A new tool I've grown to really like in the diet wars is bulletproof coffee!
http://www.bulletproofexec.com/bulletproof-coffee-recipe/

In general, I'm interested in reducing my coffee consumption.  I've run hard for years on as many cups per day as I could stand (two pots/day was a "good start"), but I finally burned out some receptors or something and found myself with negative symptoms as a consequence.

One way to break a very strong pattern of behavior is to simply never do "the thing" unless it is very, very good.  Chocolate?  Sure I eat it but I only eat very good chocolate (enough to equal 10-20g of sugar every work day for lunch, during the spring/summer), never that mass produced shite that you can get for a dollar anywhere/everywhere you go.  After a while of only eating good chocolate, the low grade shite tastes like .... well, not too good.

Ditto with beer.  I never drink the swill I used to drink in college.  I have become a beer snob, much to my own benefit.  If it's not expensive, very interesting beer, I just leave it be.  This is also much to my benefit.

So with coffee, the first rule was "no shite".  The second rule was to avoid coffee when I habitually want it the most - first thing in the AM.  To do that I substituted decaf.  To enjoy decaf more, I added Kerry Gold salt free butter and MCT oil a la "bulletproof" coffee (salt free because salt doesn't go with good coffee, I eat plenty of that in my other meals).  That's a good move for daily energy levels (low that slow burn from short and medium chain triglycerides in butter and MCT), and it pushes back my start time for coffee without fighting any sense of deprivation.  

I'm drinking about 3 cups per day now of caffeinated coffee.  Achieving independence from habit/addiction always feels good!

Since I'm downing all this fuel first thing in the AM, I don't know if I'm really doing intermittent fasting any longer - but I still don't have a meal most days until 1100 (unless I want one earlier).

All this means to you is, first, there are experiments you can try to start you off on the path to a good food day, and good food days are the goal.  Second, the same tips that work to reduce coffee consumption can work to change any habit.  First, just try to eat the "food" you need to get rid of less frequently, and only when it's not your favorite time to eat that food.  Then, find a substitute that doesn't do as much damage.  Try to avoid thinking "I can't have that" and think "I can wait another hour to have that", or, "I can have that if I do something I need to get done, and then I get the "junk" as reward." IOW - use a dose of the "junk" to inspire you to complete a task, and use the task as a delay tactic so you interrupt the "craving-satisfaction of craving" cycle.

Each of these tactics has been helpful as I reduced my diet cola consumption from several per day (40-60 ounces), to one per day (20 ounces), to perhaps 2-3 per week.  That experiment, by the way, hasn't made any noticeable impact, but I don't like the stuff as much any more, so the bottom line is - I have more money to spend on good coffee, good butter, and good chocolate.

The Only Thing You Need To Know About Saturated Fat

What about saturated fat? It’s true that some studies show that saturated fat intake raises blood cholesterol levels. But these studies are almost always short-term, lasting only a few weeks. (5) Longer-term studies have not shown an association between saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol levels. In fact, of all of the long-term studies examining this issue, only one of them showed a clear association between saturated fat intake and cholesterol levels, and even that association was weak. (6)

Moreover, studies on low-carbohydrate diets (which tend to be high in saturated fat) suggest that they not only don’t raise blood cholesterol, they have several beneficial impacts on cardiovascular disease risk markers. For example, a meta-analysis of 17 low-carb diet trials covering 1,140 obese patients published in the journal Obesity Reviews found that low-carb diets neither increased nor decreased LDL cholesterol. However, they did find that low-carb diets were associated with significant decreases is body weight as well as improvements in several CV risk factors, including decreases in triglycerides, fasting glucose, blood pressure, body mass index, abdominal circumference, plasma insulin and c-reactive protein, as well as an increase in HDL cholesterol. (7) 

If you’re wondering whether saturated fat may contribute to heart disease in some way that isn’t related to cholesterol, a large meta-analysis of prospective studies involving close to 350,000 participants found no association between saturated fat and heart disease. (8) A Japanese prospective study that followed 58,000 men for an average of 14 years found no association between saturated fat intake and heart disease, and an inverse association between saturated fat and stroke (i.e. those who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke). (9)

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

Grab the steak, eggs and bacon - bon appetite! And don't forget the heavy cream for your coffee ...

Bacon Avocado "Sammies"

"Some of y'all may or may not know this (and if you don't you're either new or haven't been paying attention) but I have been on a bit of a health kick for the past 4-5 years. So, two things you must know..

"#1 - Carbs are evil and are subsequently responsible for every terrible thing that has ever happened

"#2- I hate oatmeal, seriously.

"Don't believe me? Well, before the 2011 season, I sacrificed my health to the football gods to secure a 'Bama natty title and they rewarded us handsomely...YOU'RE WELCOME"

Wisdom from the blog www.rollbamaroll.com:

• "Stop believing the lie that fat is bad for you. Eating healthy fats is good; eating processed carbs is bad.
• "Organic veggies and protein > Processed crap.
• "Carbs should only make up about < 15-20% of your daily calories, Protein 35-40% and Healthy Fat 45-50%
• "For something to taste good, it doesn't HAVE to be deep fried and does not necessarily HAVE to be swimming in BBQ sauce. I know, shocker, right?"

The recipe that follows is a marvel - bacon and avocado sandwiches!  Read and enjoy.

http://www.rollbamaroll.com/2013/5/20/4347950/tailgating-food-for-thought-avocado-bacon-sammies

Cholesterol Eaten, Cholesterol Made, Cholesterol in Arteries

On any given day, we have between 1,100 and 1,700 milligrams of cholesterol in our body. 25% of that comes from our diet, and 75% is produced inside of our bodies by the liver. Much of the cholesterol that’s found in food can’t be absorbed by our bodies, and most of the cholesterol in our gut was first synthesized in body cells and ended up in the gut via the liver and gall bladder. The body tightly regulates the amount of cholesterol in the blood by controlling internal production; when cholesterol intake in the diet goes down, the body makes more. When cholesterol intake in the diet goes up, the body makes less.

This explains why well-designed cholesterol feeding studies (where they feed volunteers 2-4 eggs a day and measure their cholesterol) show that dietary cholesterol has very little impact on blood cholesterol levels in about 75% of the population. The remaining 25% of the population are referred to as “hyper-responders”. In this group, dietary cholesterol does modestly increase both LDL (“bad cholesterol” and HDL (“good cholesterol”), but it does not affect the ratio of LDL to HDL or increase the risk of heart disease. (2)

In other words, eating cholesterol isn’t going to give you a heart attack. You can ditch the egg-white omelettes and start eating yolks again. That’s a good thing, since all of the 13 essential nutrients eggs contain are found in the yolk. Egg yolks are an especially good source of choline, a B-vitamin that plays important roles in everything from neurotransmitter production to detoxification to maintenance of healthy cells. (3) Studies show that up to 90% of Americans don’t get enough choline, which can lead to fatigue, insomnia, poor kidney function, memory problems and nerve-muscle imbalances. (4)

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

Grab the eggs, bon appetite!

However, eggs every day may not be great if you have any egg sensitivity.  Paleo man probably ate all the eggs he/she could find, but he/she could only find them seasonally, and there's some evidence that every day consumption may create issues.

For men: Tim Ferriss recommends an egg or two every night before bed, as cholesterol is the raw material for testosterone production, and you make T at night when sleeping. 

Hero WOD: Omar

TUESDAY 130521

"Omar"

For time:


95 pound barbell Thrusters

10
15 Bar-facing burpees


95 pound barbell Thrusters

20
25 Bar-facing burpees


95 pound barbell Thrusters

30
35 Bar-facing burpees

U.S. Army First Lieutenant Omar Vazquez, 25, of Hamilton, New Jersey, assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based in Fort Hood, Texas, died of wounds suffered April 22, 2011, when insurgents in Numaniyah, Iraq, attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. He is survived by his parents Maria and Pablo, sister Marisel, and brothers Pablo and Javier.

Fair winds and following seas on your journey, warrior!

When "Smart" Isn't

Between man made, industrially produced #%&$ and butter, who in the heck would choose #%&$?

Just say no.

Kresser On Statins

"To summarize:

• The only population that statins extend life in are men under 80 years of age with pre-existing heart disease.
• In men under 80 without pre-existing heart disease, men over 80 with or without heart disease, and women of any age with or without heart disease, statins have not been shown to extend lifespan.
• Statins do reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in all populations. A heart attack or stroke can have a significant, negative impact on quality of life—particularly in the elderly—so this benefit should not be discounted.
• However, the reductions in cardiovascular events are often more modest than most assume; 60 people with high cholesterol but no heart disease would need to be treated for 5 years to prevent a single heart attack, and 268 people would need to be treated for 5 years to prevent a single stroke.
• Statins have been shown to cause a number of side effects, such as muscle pain and cognitive problems, and they are probably more common than currently estimated due to under-reporting."

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

The article is a remarkably readable review of a tough topic. Biggest takeaway - statins are the best evidence available that "cholesterol" is the agent of heart disease. If statins don't actually reduce heart disease, the case that "high cholesterol" is the cause of arterial disease has next to no evidence as support.

Even if statins were proof of the cholesterol = causation issue, there's still no proof, and nearly no evidence, that reducing consumption of saturated fat (and replacing it with other fats or carbs) will result in less heart disease or "lower cholesterol".  The opposite is more likely for most of us.  

Classic CrossFit Quote

But I'm not sure it is true. We do what others will not because it feels good.

Why it feels good to some and not others, I do not know.

Hero WOD: Brehm

TUESDAY 130514

"Brehm"

For time:
15 foot Rope climb, 10 ascents
225 pound Back squat, 20 reps
30 Handstand push-ups
Row 40 calories

U.S. Army Sergeant Dale G. Brehm, 23, of Turlock, California, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based in Fort Lewis, Washington, died on March 18, 2006, when he came under small arms fire from enemy forces during combat operations in Ar Ramadi, Iraq. He is survived by his wife Raini, father William, stepmother Linda, and mother Laura Williams.

Fair winds and following seas on your journey warrior!

Fake Health Food

I have eaten this product before, and like it.  It makes a great snack, and I loved the idea that I was enjoying something that was providing nutrients I wanted.  Then I read the label (mistake?!).

The label revealed I was oogling farm raised atlantic salmon, with the pink color added. 

That means it is fed the same corn or soy based "food" that most cattle are fed, and thus, it doesn't have the awesome omega-3s that wild caught fish accumulate from a natural diet/life cycle. 

It claims to have omega-3s, but chances are that is only added, perhaps via flax seeds or some other short chain omega 3 product.  In other words, it's nothing I need.

This is how it goes - if one is just starting a carb restriction voyage, this food would be a great choice.  But as I move towards better choices over time, it's just OK to eat food like this; it adds little but it doesn't hurt anything, either.

The industrial food chain delivers high quanities of food with marginal nutritional value at a ridiculously low cost (measured against time spent to obtain it) - and high quantities of so called food that is unsafe in almost any dosage.  Moving from one end of that spectrum to the other is significant.

Men's Health or Not, Part 3

You see an order of wings, but your endothelium sees an enemy. "Saturated fatty acids are perceived as abnormal, so the immune cells try to clean them up," says Mansoor Amiji, Ph.D., chairman of the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University in Boston and a researcher of treatments for endothelial dysfunction. "Instead, the cells cause more inflammation and wind up doing damage." Before you grab any packaged food off the supermarket shelf, check the label and then do a little math. Multiply the number of saturated fat grams by 9 to determine the number of calories the fat contributes. Now divide that by total calories. If saturated fat accounts for more than 10 percent of the food's calories, put the package back on the shelf.
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat/page/2

Another head scratcher, scientifically speaking, but one that allows for some elaboration of one of the counter intuitive points about fat in the blood vice fat in the diet.  To get more of one, you need less of the other, but not in the way you might think.

As the authors point out in the "Art and Science of Low Carb Living", it appears that fat in the blood (triglycerides and chylomicrons) are a much better predictor of disease than is fat in the diet. Counter intuitively, the best way to keep fat levels in the blood low is to avoid over-consumption of carbohydrates. Which is to say, getting more calories as fat and less as carbs can results in less fat in your blood.

"Well, Paul, please tell me how that's possible?!?!" I thought you'd never ask!

When you OD on carbs, your body gets busy stuffing the resulting blood glucose anywhere it can - it's like when company catches you by surprise and you have to find a closet for all of the crap you left lying around; think EMERGENCY!  With the help of insulin, some sugar goes to muscles with room for glycogen, some goes to top off your liver's glucose battery, but most has to be converted to fat in the liver.  This process results in production of a saturated fat which is produced as a triglyceride (three fatty acid strings bound by a sugar molecule).  The triglyceride is moved around in the blood in a VLDL boat launched from the liver.  The VLDL will dump the trigs as soon as possible and become a small, dense LDL (some folks say lots of small, dense LDL is a "high risk marker" for arterial disease, but since high levels of small dense LDL correlates with high triglycerides and low HDL, it would seem to be just another correlate with carbohydrate overdose), but since the liver is working hard to make them, the relative levels stay high.  In a high insulin environment, the body will not allow fat back out of cells and cannot make ketones from fat (thus a person eating this way chronically becomes dependent on eating carbs to make enough sugar for the brain).  It is likely that this high insulin, high fat condition in the blood is an element of leptin resistance, meaning many of the satiety loops of the body will be dis-regulated towards increased hunger.

If on the other hand you are chomping down pork rinds, salad with MCT/olive oil/vinegar dressing, veggies with butter and sirloin all day, your liver will not make any additional fat.  Instead, since your are keeping your carb intake to a tolerable amount, your body will run itself quite nicely on fat.  Some fats you eat will convert to storage (monounsaturates will, for example, as will long chain saturates), while others will go up in smoke as fuel quickly (short and medium chain saturated fats, for example, butter, coconut oil, and MCT oil).  But the body can easily store and burn fats in this kind of environment, and much of the fat is oxidized to CO2 and water very quickly.  As a result, those on a low carb, high fat diet have the lowest triglycerides - the least amount of fats in their blood - and should have the least risk of the awful sounding fate described by the Men's Health author above.

Low carb is not for everyone, and not everyone will thrive on a high animal fat diet - but MOST do and nearly all will do better in the short term than those on the SAD.  Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

"Lowering" Cholesterol and "Wishing on the Moon" - Which Is More Effective?

The answer to that question is - we don't know.  Perhaps neither!
After over 40 years of telling you that lowering cholesterol is good for you, your government - NIH, surgeon general or USDA - has yet to prove it. Folks die every day with "low" cholesterol, and many with "high" cholesterol live for a long time and with good health.  If you are counting on this very poor health correlate, you should probably rethink your strategy.

However, the foods in this article are good choices - beef, pistachios, almonds, and small amounts of tomato juice - aside from their so called cholesterol lowering properties.  They are blood sugar neutral and nutrient dense.  Hunt and gather yourself some of this soon!
http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/cholesterol-fighting-foods

Kresser on Wheat

The BLUF:  if you have real celiac disease, you know how destructive wheat consumption is for your health.  For the rest of us, the impact still be significant and negative.
"Celiac disease (CD) was initially described in the first century A.D. by a Greek physician named Aretaeus of Cappadocia. (1) But neither Aretaeus nor anyone else knew that CD is caused by an autoimmune reaction to gluten, a protein in wheat. That didn't become clear until 1950 - several centuries later - when Dr. Willem Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, conclusively proved that gluten was the culprit. (2) Dicke's discovery saved millions of children and adults from the perils of untreated celiac disease, including malnutrition, stunted growth, cancer, severe neurological and psychiatric illness and even death.

"Since then, the mainstream view of gluten intolerance has been relatively black or white: Either you have celiac disease, in which case even a small amount of gluten will send you running to the bathroom in three seconds flat, or you don't, and you can chug down beer and bagels without fear. This "all-or-nothing" view has led to some doctors telling patients that suspect they're sensitive to gluten but test negative for CD that they're simply imagining an affliction that doesn't exist."

"It turns out those doctors are wrong."

Chris continues:
"Here's the crucial thing to understand: Celiac disease is characterized by an immune response to a specific epitope of gliadin (alpha-gliadin) and a specific type of transglutaminase (tTG-2). But we now know that people can (and do) react to several other components of wheat and gluten - including other epitopes of gliadin (beta, gamma, omega), glutenin, WGA and deamidated gliadin - as well as other types of transglutaminase, including type 3 (primarily found in the skin) and type 6 (primarily found in the brain). (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)"

This article is a must read if you have any mysterious health issues. Read on to learn why you might benefit from a gluten free challenge, and how to complete one.

"Men's Health" Or Not, Pt 2

In a wandering and not particularly useful article about endothelial disease (aka, damage to the one cell thin but very important lining of arteries), MH gives one bit of usable advice - get a test.
"The test for endothelial dysfunction isn't as simple as having your cholesterol checked, but it's no colonoscopy either. It requires a device called the EndoPAT. First, sensors attached to your fingertips monitor your normal bloodflow; then the main artery of your upper arm is restricted with a blood pressure cuff for 5 minutes. When the cuff is removed, the sensors measure the change in the amount of blood pumped with each heartbeat, an indicator of your vessels' ability to dilate. Because a computer controls the test, the technician's level of expertise doesn't affect the outcome, making the measurement exceptionally reliable, say Penn State researchers. To find a provider in your area offering the EndoPAT, visit itamar-medical.com/EndoPAT."
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat

Interesting side bits, the context for which the author seems not to understand -
- "the fatter your belly, the skinnier your arteries." In other words, abdominal girth is the best predictor for poor health for a number of reasons, including endothelial disfunction.  And the best way to reduce abdominal girth is carb restriction.
- mercury is bad for arteries, and omega 3 fatty acids are good.  How to get one with out the other can be a problem.  USDA recommends tilapia, sardines, catfish, salmon, and anchovies.  However, if you feed tilapia or catfish or salmon in big ponds or pens with the same rotgut you feed grain finished cattle, you won't be getting much in the way of omega 3s.  That leaves sardines, anchovies, wild caught salmon, the catfish you catch from lakes and rivers, and supplements as you means to get the omega 3s that will help balance the inevitable doses of omega 6s you get.
- lots of trans fats are left in processed foods that say "no trans fats".  Which is why you don't want to eat that crap they wrap in commercial wrappers and call "food" anyway.

Finally, MH tries to hammer on the saturated fat boogeyman - just don't fall for it.  They say there's a magic threshold of 10% of total calories which is the safe limit for sat fat consumption.  Before they should pretend to know that's true, don't you think they should first prove there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat?  And if it surprises you to know that no one's ever proved there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat, you should have been reading this blog for a longer time!  Fat is high in nutrition, provides a stable, long burning source of energy, is hormonally neutral, does not trigger blood sugar spikes, and is probably the perfect food - because it has 9 kcal per gram.  If you are going to be able to break your sugar addiction, you'll have to get comfortable eating fat, primarily saturated fat.  For most of us, our health will benefit from the shift from mostly carb calories to mostly fat calories.

The Repercussions

You can see the repercussions of 35+ years of pseudo science in just this one little sign hanging in a burger joint.

First - the assumption that the best health measure has to do with cholesterol, specifically, that it be "reduced". Well, you can't live without the stuff, and "low" cholesterol is associated with early mortality just as high cholesterol is associated with early mortality.  But if you lower cholesterol, it does not mean you will live longer, and if you have low cholesterol, it does not mean you aren't going to die of heart disease.

Interestingly, peanut oil is a poly unsaturated fatty acid, or PUFA, and supposedly "healthy" because eating these oils reduces total cholesterol.  However, there's never been a study which proved that "lowering" cholesterol by dietary intervention reduces mortality.  It's all just a guess, and one that looks less useful by the day.

There are as many reasons to believe peanut oil is unhealthy as there are to believe it is "healthy."  Peanut oil is the best substance available to produce atherosclerosis in lab animals. Peanut oil, like all PUFAs, oxidizes easily, meaning it is rapidly degenerated in the body to a useless bit of garbage, or worse.  Peanut oils are part of the reason we are estimated to eat a 20:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids, which is another red flag for our health.  Lastly, it appears that cells which are over-built on PUFAs are also vulnerable to oxidation by reactive oxidation species (ROS).  ROSs are the reason everyone things we should be eating a bunch of anti-oxidants, which is to say, they are bad, and apparently high consumption of peanut oil and other omega 6 fatty acid laden foods (for example, industrial seeds oils and corn "oil") gives us defective and easily oxidized cell membranes.  

Paleo man ate many different things, but he never had a chance to eat a 20:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids - no one did until perhaps 50 years ago - and that alone might make it prudent to be very wary of peanut oil consumption until proven otherwise.

Sadly, pseudo science left us vulnerable to the belief that man-made industrial food chain products like peanut oils were safe and staples of the human diet like lard/tallow were not.  The repercussion - reverso world.