Silly Adults... Even Kids Know it's Wrong to Eat Animals! (VIDEO)

As I was browsing Facebook the other night, just about to go to bed, I came across an interesting link that fired me up and kept my up far past my bedtime... an article called "Vegetarianism Demystified by a Toddler". It links to a YouTube video, which I'll just embed here for your convenience... voila!



The video has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from YouTube users. Nearly every comment praises this child for being an irresistible, sweet little boy with a big heart...  See?? He's only 3, even a TODDLER knows it's wrong to eat animals!! What an inspiration!!!

Okay. Fine. That's your opinion. I, on the other hand, saw it differently. Here is how I interpreted his message...

Little Luiz Antonio is just sitting down to eat his octopus gnocchi, when he begins to question the ethics of eating an animal. After a little back and forth with his mother, Luiz decides we shouldn't be eating animals because they're cute, and because every living thing deserves to be a winner in life... all of them all at the same time. If there's one thing Luiz is sure of, this is it. It would just be so great if we could all live forever and ever, and we could all live with the animals and pet each other and cuddle. Everyone could be friends. Everyone in the entire world. We'll be pen pals and Skype friends and tweet each other and eat grass and we'll never have any reason to fight. For ever and ever.

A Snarky Rant on Sodium and Blood Pressure

Quick rant today, related to my recent obsession with all things blood pressure (see here and here).  I just found this quote on the CDC website that really steamed my clams...

"Sodium intake from processed and restaurant foods contributes to increased rates of high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke. Decreasing sodium intake to within recommended limits could prevent thousands of deaths annually, because nearly 400,000 deaths each year are attributed to high blood pressure." (1)

To me this is short-sighted, oversimplified, and quite frankly ignorant. Sodium reduction can be a good thing because it often occurs simultaneously with elimination of processed junk, like said "processed and restaurant food". But being all narrow-minded and reducing sodium intake to the level they recommend can be dangerous (2, 3).

Why We're Obese: An Intro to Food Reward

Obesity is complex. I think we all know that at this point. There is no one reason why any of us become obese; it's a combination of several factors including genetics, physical activity, hormones, calories, fat, carbs, junk food, and much, much more. We can of course say that we get fat from eating more calories than we expend, that's a fact... but that doesn't tell us anything about why we're consuming more food than we need. Likewise, we don't truly know the best way to lose excess weight. We need to eat fewer calories than we expend, duh. But we have to worry about complicated things like hunger, willpower, and cravings... and why it feels like your body just wants to hold onto that extra fat.

Enter: Food Reward.  I've touched on this in the past but I haven't given it a proper explanation.  I first heard of the concept via Stephen Guyenet a couple years ago, as most people in the ancestral health community did.  It's taken me a while to fully warm up to it and truly understand it, but I'm now convinced that this is a major reason, perhaps the major reason, for the obesity epidemic.  Allow me to explain.

The Reward System
Our brains contain a "reward" system that is critical to our survival.  Actions that promote our survival are reinforced by the brain by making us feel good... this makes us want to do them again.  For example, running around in the sun playing frisbee makes us feel good; the sun is good for our health (in moderation), physical activity promotes fitness and survival in the most primal sense, and it gives us a sense of community and kinship with our friends.  Our brains tell us that playing frisbee in the sun is a good thing, and we're likely to do it again in the future.  But the reward system also works the other way, discouraging actions that harm us.  If we pick up a baking dish out of the oven with our bare hands, we'll burn our skin, and so our brains send a very strong signal for us to STOP (pain).  Addictive drugs essentially hijack this reward system.  Heroin, for example, will bypass the environmental sensory aspect of the reward system and latch on to the receptors in the brain.  Drugs like these provide a super strong stimulus, hence they are reinforced by happy feelings, and you'll want to do it again and again until you become addicted.

Why There's So Much Conflicting Info in Nutrition, A Snarky Rant on Conventional RDs

I really wanted to title this post "Moving Beyond Black and White: Real Life is Gray", or something to that effect.  I liked that title.  But in the interest of attracting more readers, I chose this one.  Yup I'm a sell out.

After a conversation with my friend Amanda the other day (Inspired.), I had a bit of a revelation... not everyone thinks the way I do.  It should be obvious, of course, but sometimes you just need a little kick in the pants.  We were talking about conventional registered dietitians and the trends we see as we work our way into the profession.  Unfortunately, we've noticed that many RDs are closed-minded and resistant to hearing anything that challenges their beliefs... the precious "facts" they learned in school, the gospel that comes out of the USDA dietary guidelines... when in fact they haven't put any real thought into it themselves.

I guess I just tend to have faith in people.  I assume that someone who went through the 4-5 years of school and 1200 hours of supervised practice to become a nutrition professional would have learned, somewhere along the way, to think for themselves, instead of taking every word of what someone else says to be the absolute truth.  Isn't that what we go to school for??  To learn how to think for our fucking selves?  To become adults with conviction who actually stand for something, instead of being sheep and following the pack???  Is that not what education is all about?

It just absolutely kills me when I meet someone who is a grown adult and still thinks in such a naive manner.  If you disagree with something I say that's fine.  There's room for disagreement in nutrition.  Just don't be a fucking moron about it and come back with "that's not what we learned in school".  Nutrition isn't as clear as black and white, it's mostly gray... everything exists on a spectrum. 

Prop 37, Labeling GMO Foods, and the Evilness of Monsanto

Okay that's it.  I've had it up to HERE with Monsanto and their shenanigans.  Who is Monsanto, you may ask?  The giant biotech company producing most of the genetically modified foods here in this country (and probably the world).  Yes, genetically modified foods, or GM foods, or GMOs.  Any of those.  Those franken-foods created in a lab and fed to the United States citizens without their knowledge.  If you're slightly confused and need a basic education on GMOs, look through my previous blog post here.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the state of California had the opportunity this past week to vote to have genetically modified foods labeled.  Seems like common sense, don't the people have a right to know what they're eating?  Shouldn't you and I have the right to know if what we're eating came from nature, or if that tomato was created from DNA found in a maggot eating the feces of a retarded sloth?  I'd like to know.  But they voted NO!  They voted to allow Monsanto, Dow, and the big food producers to feed YOU genetically modified foods, and NOT tell you about it.  This makes me very angry.  Which makes my writing significantly more interesting to read.  So read on.

Why on earth, you may ask, would anyone be opposed to labeling GM foods?  It seems like an obvious right-to-know case.  And quite frankly, it is.  Unless... somebody has a shit ton of money lying around to change that.  Somebody who would lose a great deal of that money if Californians happened to vote yes on that ballot.

Meatloaf Enhancer and the Tragedy of Nursing Home Food

Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of doing some internship hours at a local nursing home.  Or "long-term care facility"; it seems like the term nursing home is frowned upon and/or avoided.  Not sure when that changed.  But anyway, I’ve been learning the ins and outs of nursing home food service.  As you know, elderly adults living in these long-term care facilities get nearly all of their food from the kitchen there.  And now that I've spent a few weeks in the dietary department, I can safely say that I'd rather be dead than subsisting on this non-food garbage for my last remaining years.

Exaggeration?  Absolutely not.  This shit isn't even food.  Example #1...  My first day in the nursing home.  I'm watching the cook prepare some meatloaf for that night's dinner.  He opens a 10 pound package of ground beef and dumps it into the big mixer.  Next, I'm expecting to see some chopped onions, garlic, bread crumbs, eggs, carrots, butter, etc.  You know, the stuff you put in meatloaf.  But NO.  Nothing could have prepared me for the abomination that came next.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Meatloaf Enhancer...

26 oz. of powder, ready to enhance meatloaf on your command.  Just add one packet to 10 pounds of ground beef, put it in the oven, and you're done!  Why use fresh vegetables and real food ingredients when you can get everything you need in a convenient shelf-stable pouch?  Oh god where do I even fucking begin... 

Crossfit, Bodybuilding, and Getting Girls to Sleep With You

As many of you know, I've been crossfitting for a good while now, and I love it.  It's given me a completely new outlook on fitness; I have a much more performance-based mentality than I used to.  Whereas I used to care mostly about having nice pecs and biceps (curls for the girls), I now concern myself with more worthwhile goals, like lifting heavy shit over my head, doing lots of pullups, and training my body to move the way it's designed to move.  Sure, looking good naked is a nice side effect, but that's not why I do it.  For simplicity, here's a short summary of the differences between crossfit and what everyone else is doing...

Crossfit approach:  Performance oriented.  Get faster and stronger.  Do fundamental exercises like squats, deadlifts, and presses, which will produce strength that translates into real life activities.  Do more work in less time, use proper form, and train your body to be an athletic machine.  Build strength, power, endurance, and athleticism. 

Bodybuilding/general gym approach:  Work out to look good.  Do silly things like bicep curls and leg extensions.  Use the elliptical machine for cardio.  Work your muscles groups individually, in isolation from the body as a whole.  Whack off to yourself in the mirror.  

And now that I have this new crossfit mentality, I have to admit... I'm a little embarrassed.  I'm embarrassed because for so long, my only motive for working out was to look good; I can't believe I was ever so vain.  And this is, in my now older and wiser mind, not the way to look at fitness.  It gives me and everyone else in the performance realm a bad name... including crossfitters, power lifters, track athletes, endurance athletes, and anyone else who has real, substantial goals that aren't rooted in narcissism.  Unfortunately, most avid gym-goers are still stuck in this bodybuilding mentality, only working out for aesthetic purposes, to look good for others.  In other words, they're not doing it for themselves... they're doing it for other people.  And here's what's wrong with it.

Bacon Ice Cream, Counting Fat, and Shut the F Up

A couple of things have been irritating me on this Thursday morning.  First, the clouds.  Today was supposed to be sunny, at least according to my iPhone.  I was planning on spending the morning outside and soaking up some vitamin D.  Thank you iPhone for lying to me, and thank you clouds for being sons of bitches.  Secondly though, is Burger King's new Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Who in holy hell came up with this thing?  Bacon on ice cream?  That's retarded.  But do you want to know what's even more retarded?  The author of that article's concern about the fat content of the Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Oh my god, 510 calories and 18 grams of fat!  That's even more than a bacon cheeseburger! (Her claim, not mine, that's a little hard to believe honestly.)  Sure, she mentions the 61 grams of sugar, but she stressed the fat.  They always stress over the fat.  And I'm sick and tired of it.  There's no reason for it.  Just shut the F up. 

You see, everyone's got this phobia of fat making them fat.  They think that if they eat the fat on that pork chop, or put butter on their potato, or drink whole milk, that they'll get fat.  That's not how it works.  Fat in the diet doesn't make you fat any more than other calories do.  In fact, natural fats are very satiating, and would probably even help you eat less and lose a couple pounds.  There are a lot of reasons someone might gain weight.  Eating fat isn't one of them.  Neither is eating carbohydrates or protein.  Eating too many total calories on the other hand... will get you nice and fat.  Focusing on one particular nutrient completely misses the bigger point.  What makes us fat is not carbs or fat per se...  but if I had to design a food to make you fat, I would design exactly this Bacon Ice Cream Thingy.  Are you confused yet?  I think I may have confused myself there.  The Bacon Ice Cream Thingy WILL make you fat.  But it's not because it has 18 grams of fat, or because it has 61 grams of sugar.  It's because it's loaded up with so much hyperpalatable goodness that you'll eat the whole frickin' thing even if you're not hungry.

5 Reasons I Don't Like Veganism

What do I want for dinner... lamb or anemia?

Let me first say this.  I have nothing against vegans or vegetarians; I respect everyone's dietary choices.  I have a lot of friends who are vegan/vegetarian, and, aside from the occasional accusation that I murder animals (kidding), we get along just fine.  They eat their veggie burgers, I eat my grass-fed beef burgers; they run their marathons, I do my Crossfit; they poke fun at Dr. Oz, and I, well, poke fun at Dr. Oz.  See... we're not so different after all.  Having said that though, based on my research I can't imagine a situation where I would recommend a vegan diet to anyone.  That's vegan, not vegetarian.  Vegetarians typically eat dairy and eggs, vegans don't eat any animal products.  It's the vegans I'm talking about here (although some of this applies to both) .  So without further ado, here are 5 reasons why I don't like veganism.


1.  Humans are not herbivores.
This myth just won't go away.  Every once in a while I get this argument from some fool trying to justify a vegan diet as the best diet on the planet.  It typically sounds like this... "You know some people think humans are carnivores, but they're not.  They're herbivores."  There's so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin.  Okay first of all, nobody thinks humans are carnivores.  We're clearly not.  But we're not herbivores either.  This argument completely neglects the fact there is another option:  an omnivore, which eats both plants and animal foods.  Humans are most definitely biological omnivores.  Just look at our teeth... mostly flat like herbivores (think about a cow's teeth) but with a few canines like carnivores (think of a cat).  Then there's our digestive system... it's definitely nothing like that of an herbivore.  Here's a picture of a cow's digestive tract:

Why You Don't Need Grains

Alright folks, it's time for another rant.  Something's gotten me really fired up lately.  Now I don't want to mention any names... but let's just say that there are a lot of people out there who are really attached to grains.  I mean, grains do make up over 1/4 of My Plate.  They're a major part of nearly everyone's diet: pasta, rice, bread, corn... there's no question that these foods make up the bulk of the American diet.  But does that mean they're good for us?  No.  Just because everyone eats them doesn't make them healthy.  If you look at the history of the human diet, and read this Jared Diamond article, you'll learn that adopting agriculture and grains as a major part of the human diet may have been "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."  That's a pretty grand statement, but there's no debating the huge decline in human health that followed the agricultural revolution.  It's very clear that when we as a species decided to adopt agriculture and make grains a part of our diet, we traded health for the ability to support a larger population.  So I ask you again... just because everyone eats grains, does that make them good for us?  NO!

The Ridiculousness of the Diabetes Diet

Well, now that the spring semester at UConn is in full swing, and I'm frequently busy spreading the word that skim milk is the dietary solution to everything, I haven't had time to blog much.  And I definitely haven't had time to put together any type of science-intensive post.  But I've had this one on the brain for a while now, and I think it's time to put it to paper.  Or virtual paper.  And this one really fires me up.  Begin rant...

So last semester in my Medical Nutrition Therapy class, we discussed type 2 diabetes extensively.  That's the type that's acquired later in life because of a shitty diet, not the type that you get when you're younger and require insulin injections.  Type 2 diabetes used to be called "Adult-Onset Diabetes", until it started showing up in younger people, and that name sort of went out the window.  I'd rather they kept the name though; it'd be pretty embarrassing to be a 12-year-old and have adult-onset diabetes wouldn't it?  Maybe that would have helped stress to those kids just how god-awful it is that they have diabetes at such a young age.  But that's neither here nor there.

What I want to talk about today is the standard diabetes diet the conventional wisdom folks recommend.  In case you didn't know, diabetes is a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism.  When you're diabetic, your body stops responding to insulin, the hormone that normally gets those carbs into your cells so they can be used for energy.  Well diabetics can't process those carbs so well.  As a result, the glucose just hangs out in the bloodstream, and high blood glucose is extremely toxic.  Given the fact that diabetics have to deal with this carbohydrate metabolism issue, it would seem to follow that they should reduce their carbohydrate consumption, right?  Nope.  Not according to the conventional wisdom.  In fact, the standard diabetes diet doesn't reduce carb consumption at all, and in some cases it may even suggest more carbs; they simply recommend that you spread your carb intake evenly throughout the day.  Doesn't make any sense does it??  But why on earth would any sane person not recommend a low-carb diet for diabetics?  Answer:  because if you eat fewer carbs, you have to eat more fat and protein.  And increasing your fat would give you heart disease, something that diabetics are at much higher risk for.

The Diabetes Diet:  eat more bread