If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
There must be some sanity on this planet, someplace. For heaven's sake, when has there been a crisis in the history of any species where it is literally being driven stark raving mad by having to decide what to eat, what it can and cannot eat, what it dare eat? Now, this is real terrorism, and who is doing it to us? Figure it out. The only defense against the foodnazis or healthnazis is knowledge and thought.
[Enter chump, and "accredited expert"; they speak alternately.] I'm not pleasingly plump; I'm fat. My cholesterol level is too high. Ooops scratch that: that's a good kind of cholesterol, but I have high bad cholesterol too! Yikes! There's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol fighting it out to a final battle of epic Zoroastrian proportions. It's all going on in my body. What can I do?!! Eat only food that's good for you, of course. Eat your crucifers! Eat carbohydrates - the government says. Potatoes? Hey Moron! What, you want solanum poisoning? What if some of them are green? Rice?! You've *got* to be kidding. The stuff all comes from I don't know where now; nothing is grown in any place with a name I can pronounce. They pee on the stuff. No - eat proteins! Um - meat? Yeah, meat - but for heaven's sake not *red* meat. (*DON'T* pull the Red switch!) Fish, fowl - yes, yes, I'll eat fish and fowl, No red meat - no wire coat hangers! Red meat is full of hormones - and fat. Don't forget the fat! It's a killer. Fat will give you cancer and clog your arteries. It has to be *lean* meat - or whatever. None of this saturated fat anyhow. You need *polyunsaturated* fat, like corn oil or soy oil. But - but - doesn't that make more free radicals? I'll age faster. I'll get all wrinkley like, and nobody will love me. I'll get cancer. How about monosaturated fats? My aren't we the the smart ass! ARE YOU PLAYING GAMES WITH ME BOY?!! Can I at least put a little salt on whatever it is I might be able to eat? SALT???!! You must be the stupidest thing on earth! Don't you *know* - turnipbrain - that it will raise your blood pressure and give you a stroke?! OK - no meat. No salt. No fat. Meat is bad for me. Fat is bad for me. Salt is bad for me. Ooops - so is chicken: they put not only hormones, but antibiotics in chicken feed, and the damn fish is saturated with mercury. Shrimp has cholesterol. Besides, I can't afford fish, let alone shrimp; it's become so expensive. Wow - so has everything else. Carbs! Those are cheap. I can live on spaghetti. I like spaghetti. The carbs are ok, but don't eat refined flours: they're addicting and knock your razzamafratz out of whack something fierce. Sugar! Nope dumbdumb - that's poison. Why don't you just drink a quart of Southern Comfort or something? Same thing. At least then you won't know your brain is getting rotted. Eggs? I really like omelettes. EGGS?!! What kind of ninny are you? Eggs are loaded with cholesterol. Remember those cholesterol levels? Have you got a serious death wish or something? Only eat eggs once a week. That's all? Ok ok - I can make a diet of pork. It's not red meat, and not chicken and not fish. PORK?!! Are you out of your mind? That's poison! A study was done that shows pork fat causes cancer, rots your brain and - and - gives your children and grandmother gallstones and nightmares! OKAAAY - OKAAAY - I'll become a vegetarian! Stupid sap! You'll die from the completely inappropriate protein spectrum. You *are* what you eat! Ya wanna turn into a kohlrabi?! What's that? Something ya can't have anymore. Nevermind! So I'll do a lacto-ovo thing. Eggs again?!! What are you thinking? What kind of suicidal idiot are you?! Can't you remember anything? Cholesterol! Remember the cholesterol! It will clog your arteries and your death will be excruciatingly painful. Besides, remember the rice and all that peeing on it?! Well - there you are. Think about those vegetables. Do you want to *eat* them? You're driving me crazy! I'm getting hysterical! I feel like Bloom in "The Producers". I'm going to start screaming! I'm going to starve. I'm going to starve! There's nothing I can eat! Nothing! NOTHING!! Everything is going to kill me, or give me cancer, rot my brain, clog my arteries .... Everything causes cancer! There's nothing I can eat! You need fiber, nutso! Wood chips? They'll cause intestinal bleeding. Iceberg lettuce? What's that?! That's nothing. Even the fiber is not good; you might as well just drink water. But, watch the copper level in the water. I'm getting a headache, and now I'm going start screaming! [Exit left, screaming chump] [End of Scene]
Nutritionists, by and large are seventh rate technocrats: they been handed the "techno" part as literally interpreted bible, but otherwise are the Ignoranti, to whom thought, knowledge and science are anathema; and, the "crat" part makes them attempt to pawn themselves as knowledgeable and authoritative - especially authoritative.
If you were to ask them simple questions like the differences between covalent, ionic and hydrogen bonds, you could expect to get blank stares or gibberish snot jobs.
That little play, not exactly worthy of Ionesco, seems like a fair and balanced review of the current state of what might be laughingly called the "reality" of food. It is actually a classical laboratory scene based on standard procedures for driving rats into a psychotic state.
Your corporate government ("corpagov" for short) calls it "social engineering", though some call it by the euphemistic "social psychology" (amazing to say that some social psychologists are completely ignorant of their obviously designed functions of their "discipline", and how utterly sick it is.) and it has been an intense area of bumbling and slightly, or completely, depending on your point of view, psychotic enterprise of corpagov, and in particular, the US corpagov for almost 150 years now. It's really psychological engineering, and its object to render you more pliable to anything that the corpgov might want to do to garner the products of your slave labor with jokes masquerading as truth (government science) in return. The corpagov has a great sense of humor, but the joke is almost always on you.
Pay no attention to the horde of persons behind the curtain pulling all the levers, they are only acting in your best interest because they care so very much. The question is, just what do they care so very much about?
Now - there really is a way out of your induced psychosis, but that way requires a few things:
1. Calm reflection. 2. Knowledge of some well known and rudimentary biochemistry that certain people who know better should be telling you. 3. Paying attention to your very own body - yours, not someone elses. 4. The ability to think.
There is absolutely nothing I can do about items 1, 3 and 4, those are your problems, after you deal with #2, which is something I can do something about, which is the point of this little dissertation.
From what I've seen of a mess, and I do mean mess, of webpages on the subject of diet, somebody really needs to say something reasonable, who doesn't have some magical elixir, life saving program, magic bullet or snake oil for all diseases to sell.
Please understand, this is *not* medical advice. If you want medical advice, go see your MD, and talk; if they can't talk reasonably and knowledgeably, get another physician. Yes, Virginia, there are idiot physicians, dishonest physicians - and worse; those are extremely dangerous. Caveat emptor. They police themselves, just like the corpagov and lawyers do, with all too similar results. The watchers are never watched, merely winked at.
This is all simply scientific fact here, together with appropriate qualifications. What you do with it depends on your conquering item 4 in the list of requirements. I know: it is a real pain to have to become knowledgeable in all things simply to protect yourself from the marauding of your own corpagov. There are various ways of dealing with it, and I give the least violent, and probably the most burdensome way.
The object here is to debunk much of what you hear or read from a variety of sources, and give you the straight poop upon which you can base your own personal conclusions. There is no point in being terrorized by dust under your bed simply because this is your corpagov's desire; it lies as a matter of course because that suits its purposes. There is also no point in accepting the patient crooning or authoritarian insistence that you cram poisons into your body.
Whose life is this anyhow? I know mine is my own, and insist on that. Have it as you will.
So, let's begin with a begining. I'm not particularly interested in the psychotic ravings of biblical wackos, so I begin with the relevant parts of the evolutionary story as it is so far understood, to see what we can discover of reality that is helpful in this matter of choosing edibles.
[All fundamentalists should exit here, and remain your profoundly and purely sick, ignorant and pristinely ovine selves. I would rather not increase your health or pernicious life spans anyhow. Personally, I am so fed up with such psychotic bullshit that I refuse to ignore it any more, and call it for the profound sickness that it is.]
Although hominids begin to appear in the archeological record about 6 Million years ago, it is really only about 200,000-100,000 years ago that the genome for modern man appears, and began to eat what we might recognize as food; whether fundamentalists of any sort are of this species is another matter. They just don't seem at all mentally capable of abstraction, or much else of any interest or value.
The currently agreed upon time period seems to be about 170,000 years ago for appearance of the human genome. A rule of thumb is that things are often older than you might think. Another rule of thumb is people tend to like bigger numbers, so you have a trade off here. It really could just as easily be 200,000 years. Tentatively, however, let us accept something like this as a reasonable approximation.
About 170,000 BCE - enter modern man. This is the begining of the modern human genome. These were humans, seemingly of Blood type O, according to the well known ABO typing that was begun by Landsteiner in 1900. They are hunter-gatherers, whose primary diet consisted of meat, grubs, nuts, berries, probably insects (Chimps like to snack on termites, as some of us do on popcorn.) and a smattering of random fruits and raw vegetables. They know nothing of potatoes (an Americas thing), rice, pasta or twinkies - though later, polynesians discover cassava and taro root. Original human immune systems seemed to have worked very well against fluke and worm infestations (infestations of animals) and they are basically carnivores.
The emergence of the modern genome from Africa, with a fair amount of latitude seems to be around 60,000 BCE to 100,000 BCE. During this time there were migrations to Europe, South Asia and near South Asian islands. A nice, but complicated read on the subject is the classic text of Cavalli-Sforza.
Around 40,000 BCE, the record shows a first spike in artifacts in general, including art, and this is sometimes called the Cognitive Explosion.
Specific hunter-gatherer artefacts have been found back to 35,000 BCE.
30,000 BCE - The Agricultural Diet Mutation.
Unsurprisingly, this mutation takes place someplace in the fertile crescent, but agriculture is also found in many other isolated places about this time as well.
This is the time of the so called "agricultural revolution", much lauded by some historians as an advance, a leap forward for civilization. People settled down and started building cute little mud huts or tents with white picket fences, and grew grains. Of course, you wonder why on earth they would do that, and it has at least one possible answer that sounds fairly simple: they had multiplied so greatly and killed off the population of hunted game that there was not enough food left. How smart is that? Homo sapiens sapiens indeed. But, it that really true? We don't really know, any more than we know what some anonymous governmental source really said yesterday.
If we did kill off our food supply (I doubt it), don't look now, but we're doing it again. It could also be that the animal food of hunter gatherers were diminished by climatic changes that are part of the complicated evolution of this planet we call Earth. The only constant is change.
Things are never as simple as we would like them to be, and few things have simple, single causations; generally, no one thing causes another, for all alleged things and processes have contexts.
Another nice story is that at least in the fertile crescent wheat underwent a biological mutation that increased its usefulness and so became a cultivar of the region. The grains of ancient China were not wheat, but mostly millet - and rice which seems to have come originally from the region we now call Thailand.
Overall, humans are not really all as smart as they would like to congratulate themselves as being. Some people had invented langauge, and then some other people developed the ability to write it, and that made all the difference in the formal propagation of knowledge to those who bothered to be able to read. Unfortunately, the hangers on, the majority, then got the idea that language was some sort of replacement for reality, instead of being an execrable and manipulable model for it.
So, humans after this, grow grains and stay put to some extent. Historians' applause over some giant leap for mankind notwithstanding, this is a period of vast and lethal malnutrition for humans. Simply put: the meat seems to have gone or has become greatly diminished, for whatever reason; it has been hunted to death (or died off from climatic changes) and meat was what sustained them.
Understand that these humans, being hunter-gatherers who depended on hunting and gathering for their existence were pretty active people, and it's not unreasonable to assume that they were supported in that by their biochemistry. There was no especial leisure class; but where food is naturally plentiful, a nice outing with the wife and kids would allow for fairly leisurely gathering and eating on the way: fruits, roots, leaves and the occasional small animal.
That does happen to be the way of our surviving cousin species, chimps, great apes, et al. It has been easiest for bonomos whose leisure time is used for social intmacies, mutual grooming - and more varieties of enjoyable sexual activity that you can possibly imagine. Dr. Ruth would be proud. As a search exercise, find the website of Dr. Susan Black; besides having some wonderful insights into things human, she has a great sense of humor abot it all.
Of course, mother nature does make mistakes, devolved fundamentlists, e.g., but, mistakes are always followed with mutative corrections or annihilation. Alas, mother nature has all the time in the world and takes her own sweet time, ignoring our impatience for corrections.
Often, however, she has more swiftness than we have bothered to pay attention to: the lactase gene is now said to be only approximately 5,000 years old; personally I think this a mistake, and the dating is more like 10,000 to 15,000 years old. This gene is what enables the encoding of the enzyme lactase which cleaves the milk sugar lactose in adults. Some people still do not have this gene, and the result is what is commonly called "lactose intolerance" which causes gastric distress when they ingest dairy products.
As it turned out, for better or for worse, in these agricultural situations, a mutation with a much better survival rate developed. This seems to be reflected in our blood type A that adapted fairly nicely to a significant substitution of calorie intake from grain type foods instead of the then seemingly unavailable or scarce meat protein. The meat eating digestive abilities were not diminished, but the capacity to digest grains was to some extent rather enhanced.
Concommittantly, the A type is loosely correlated to our immune systems; remember that this blood typing, and other blood typing is about primary antigens that exist not only in humans, but most animal species as well. We share a wealth of small scale characteristics with all living species. Even fundamentalists share a wealth of DNA characteristics with bacteria, whether or not they like the idea. Find reputable websites on "molecular evolution".
Digestively speaking, these grains are a different kind of food altogether, as a general understanding of the chemistry and anatomy of digestion will show. The mechanism for digesting carbohydrates (acid environment) is almost antithetical to the mechanism for the ultimate digesting meat (base environment) in humans. Stomach is acid; small intestines have base environment. Food mass passing from the stomach to the small intestine has its Ph changed rather greatly.
The ph of modern blood is slightly alkaline, approximately (7.35-7.45), perhaps indicating that our earliest homonid ancenstors were indeed herbivors; on the other hand perhaps that is just speculative nonsense.
In the stomach, some of the meat connective tissues are digested rather crudely with acids, so are small bones (put egg shells or very small bones in vinegar for a week: you will have a weaker acid in which is dissolved calcium acetate). Again, note the acid environment of the stomach. When this first stage is complete, the food mush is passed to the small intestine, where the chemical environment becomes a base.
Various enzymes produced by the pancreas then cleave the proteins down into their amino acid constituents, and these are then small enough to be absorbed into the blood to be distributed for a dual purpose. The amino acids are first and foremost the very building blocks of all proteins and therefore of the core of our very physical substance; they are most importantly used to to create and repair cells. [We are composed more generally of proteins, bound and ionic metals, as well as sugars (e.g. pentose backbone of DNA/RNA), various compressed carbohydrates (e.g. glycogen) and a good deal of water.]
Proteins can also be used as a source of energy that lets things happen like a heart muscle beating, a diaphragm contracting for breathing. Overall, it's a complicated business, even though there are a few simple things that can be said.
But, now, during the agricultural revolution, to introduce substantial amounts of complex carbohydrates into the diet, an entirely different digestive chemistry is needed, and it should come as no suprise that the new system is a set of chemical pathways that is cleverly superimposed on the the system for dealing with meats and their always present and associated fats.
An entire body part, the gall bladder deals with the digestion and use of fats, so I am not exactly attentive to or patient with those who insist on parroting "Oh, but meats were all so lean then". Stuff it, fool. They make this crap up.
The matters of blood typing intermixed with human migrations correlated with archeology, paleontology, linguistics and the geophysics of ice ages is a life consuming interlocked study, and one that we trepidatiously pass up here, in order to move on to the next event that has to do with food - glorious food. Overall, it really is good for you!
15,000 BCE - The Nomadic Mutation
This gives us Blood type B. Intrestingly, both blood type B and a putative Uraloaltaic language seem to have simultaneous origins in the Altay mountains North of modern Afghanistan; even more interestingly, their distributional patterns match so that one can build a theoretical pattern of a people spreading from this area east and west, carrying with them their language and their blood types.
Patterns are largely human fictions, a product of a nervous sytem that coaches itself to "make sense" of its perceptions through organizations. Real patterns, if they have any existence at all, are always more complicated and asymmetrical than the simpleminded would suppose. E.g., the Nomadic Mutation.
You might get the idea that since this discourse is ultimately about diet and food, since the first blood type was one induced by a necessary diet change that the second would also be due to the same factors. You would be wrong.
The Altay Mountains are high, and provide an inordinately harsh climate for humans to live. It is very far from the savannahs of our origins, and not even remotely as climatically hospitable. The temperatures are much colder. The food is exceptionally scarce, growing season short, agriculture limited. The altitude is sufficiently high that the amount of oxygen is severely reduced.
It is pretty much of a minor Hell on Earth and certainly not any fictional "the grass was greener" Garden of Eden, except perhaps in the deep isolated valleys of the area that have been iconized by Shangri-la. You have to be pretty tough and able to accomodate such severe deprivation even to survive, much less prosper. Those difficulties and their transcendence are what the nomadic mutation is all about.
Type B blood is often called an Asian type, and some people have claimed that it is associated with a dairy diet. Yes, certain nomadic shepherds of Asia have a naturally large dairy component in their diet; the bring their food producers with them. But, then also note that dairy products are absent from the traditional Chinese diet. Part of that may be the same reason that beef, lamb and goat (the usual sources of milk) do not appear in the traditional Chinese diet either: China, being rather mountainous, is not rich in the grazing lands required.
Lactose intolerance, definitely a dietary consideration does not appear to be associated with ABO blood typing. It has a significantly high incidence in Native Americans, Afro Americans, Arabs, Asians and Sephardic Jews (African). You might look to the Asians having a high incidence of type B, and notice that there is a low incidence of lactose intolerance in Western Europeans who are mostly types O and A. But then, Native Americans are also mostly types O and A; B type is almost nonexistent among them, and they have a high incidence of lactose intolerance. To call type B a "dairy type" is nonsense, nor is there any particular correlation of lactose intolerance and blood type; it is a distinct genetic matter.
This blood typing story is not a flight of biblical fancy, but the result of painstaking biological measurements of present day type B people in that very Altaic area, and general world wide blood typing. It is as scientifically real as it gets; the facts, however, and that science have limitations. I'll get to what one can infer from that later in dealing with statistics.
Two things to note about this story. First, the ABO blood typing developed by Landsteiner in the 1920s is neither unique nor magical; there are about 25 other blood typing systems.
The importance of the ABO system is that it correctly classifies blood relative to the giving and recieving of blood transfusions. Second, there seems to be a theory running around that claims a causal link between between ABO type and just about anything else about a human body; there is simply no convincing evidence for this. You are more than your blood type, and your digestive abilities are also functions of time and what you routinely require of them.
Relationships of blood type with allergies are slightly ridiculous as anyone who has had allergy problems will know. Allergies come and go at odd times, and nobody really understands why; it has little to do with your fixed blood type in any obvious way.
The food and blood type story is exactly that. ABO Blood type distributions have been used to understand early migrational patterns, and even some relationships between languages and language families. We also have a fair idea of what various peoples ate, including what the old hunter-gatherer diet was. The widespread malnutrition that accompanied the emergence of agriculture is well known, and again, we make inferences from such suggestions to concoct a relatively simple explanatory story. Reality always seems to be more complicated than our stories about it, and our models of parts and aspects of it. Things change, and humans have considerable variability in their genetics, in their beings and in their living cicumstances that amplify or deny their genetic differences. It is just a complicated universe.
Humanoid digestive systems distinguish three kinds of foods by different pathways of digestion, and these pathways parse these three kinds of foods by their fundamental chemical structures that we now call proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Digestion of proteins and fats is more chemically complicated than digestion of carbohydrates.
Much more body space is given to the digestion of proteins and fats than to the digestion of carbohydrates, and more chemical energy is required for the digestion of proteins and fats than for carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are ultimately transformed in the body through the digestive process into glucose which then enters into the process of "fueling cells". Carbohydrates' purpose is primarily that of providing such fuel. Proteins, on the other hand, provide the raw materials for the constant cellular repair and replacement going on in the body. The body does not, and cannot convert carbohydrates to proteins. But, protein can also be used as a source of fuel for the body; it requires more energy to get that protein based energy than is required for carbohydrates.
All this alone makes the following evolutionarily obvious.
All known living things are generally composed of molecules we call proteins, fats, certain metallic ions, and water. (But don't forget the pentose backbone of RNA/DNA.) Some of the proteins contain certain of the essential metallic ions, e.g., hemoglobin and myoglobin; both chelate an iron ion. Some metallic ions run around more freely on their own, e.g., calcium ions are the active components of the calcium gates that define neural conduction, and also become the substance of bone structures.
Proteins are molecules composed of the list of 20 amino acids drawn up by Crick (given with single and triple letter standard codes, and a few of their important chemical attributes):
A (ala) alanine, L R (arg) arginine, B (charged +) N (asn) asparagine, H D (asp) aspartic acid, A (charged -) C (cys) cysteine, H (with sulfur ion) Q (gln) glutamine, H E (glu) glutamic acid, A (charged -) G (gly) glycine, H (the smallest) H (his) histimine, B I (ile) isoleucine, L (branched) L (leu) leucine, L (branched) K (lys) lysine, B (charged +) M (met) methionine, L (with sulfur ion) F (phe) phenylalanine, L (the largest) (R with benzene ring) P (pro) proline, L (the bender of chains) S (ser) serine, H T (thr) threonine, H W (trp) trytophan, L (R with benzene ring) Y (tyr) tyrosine, H (R with benzene ring) V (val) valine, L (branched) L = Lipophilic = hydrophobic H = Hydrophilic = lipophobic A = acid B = Base R = a radical that defines the amino acid (see below) There are nine classical amino acids declared to be essential in standard nutritionist literature: histidine (essential only in infants) isoleucine leucine lysine methionine phenylalanine threonine tryptophan valineand effecively one should also add arginine to the list, for the same biochemical reasons.
The idea is that while the body can play transformational games of synthesizing some amino acids from others, that these particular amino acids cannot generally be so synthesized, and so must be provided by diet.
There is an esential need in human diet for protein that is biochemically dictated; there is no such biochemically dictated need for carbohydrates. However, there is also a biochemically dictated need for fats, and that is that fats make the matrix within which necessary fat soluble vitamins are delivered. It is also true that cell walls are bilipid membranes.
The too seldom mentioned fact of the matter is that the pathways for synthesizing amino acids, while they exist, will only be called into play when there is a life threateningly severe drop in availability. Those pathways are safety nets for conditions of extreme privation. In practice, this cute distinction of "essential" amino acids is useless, and reasonably idiotic concerning a healthy diet. All twenty amino acids are in fact essential. These are the amino acids from which the body constructs proteins, whose production your DNA encodes. A "codon" exists in DNA for each of these amino acids. The sequence of DNA codons determines a peptide chain of amino acids.
Amino acids can exist in both Right (Dextro-) handed and Left (Levo-) handed forms called stereoisomers. Those of biological systems seem to have adopted the L forms; though stories can be made to explain that, nobody really knows why that should be, i.e., why all life systems happen work specifically with Left handed amino acids. That there should be a consistency through all life forms is a logical result of an evolutionary hypothesis of life chemistry; but, why or how this choice, or even that any choice had to be made is another of life's mysteries.
Complementarily, bioactive carbohydrates, which also exhibit stereoisomerism seem to have selected the D form. We understand this about as well as how the selection of the L form of proteins came about. We don't, and can only make reasonable guesses, all of which are still merely cute stories. There are actually many merely cute stories in what we call science.
Bioactive proteins are Left handed, and bioactive carbohydrates are Right handed.
Introducing the wrong stereoisomer, of either protein or carbohydrate, into a biological system can frequently cause undersireable effects: the wrong stereoisomer will not, and cannot engage in biochemical pathways because it does not fit the lock and key geometries that are required of it. Such a failure generically leaves biological pollutants in the system with which the system cannot deal or with it deals in rather different ways.
All amino acids have a common part that can be diagrammed in standard chemical symbolic graphs by H | H - N+ - C - C = O | | | H R O- where R is the side group or radical that distinguishes the various amino acids. The geometry of proteins is constrained by the invariant peptide linking structure H | - N = C = O | The '-' are "single bonds" and allow for free rotation. The '=' are "double bonds", are stronger and not so amenable to rotation. The double bonds, thinking simplistically already provide for a fixing of geometry of polypeptides and proteins. There are also triple carbon bonds as in acetylene C2H2 _ H - C = C - H the strongest of normal carbon-carbon molecular bonds that give no real internal geometric freedom to the molecule.
and the fact that proteins form their predominant chain structures by by polymerizing their peptides creating a "backbone" for the chain; and the geometry of that linking structure is determined by the typical absence of rotational freedom in double bonds, in this case, the double bonding (N=C). The ammonia (NH4) structure in the backbone is fairly obvious, and is what gives the class name amine and the more specific "amino acid" designation. The implication of single bonds left open in the diagram is a minor lie; the language of diagrammatics cannot express the subtleties of the slightly more complicated reality of quantum chemistry.
Deoxyribonucleaic acid, DNA, the core of the reproductive strategy for almost all living things is, as all kindergarten children know by now, a double helix with a backbone of a polymerized sugar pentose, which contains within it a ladder of base pairs, where each base is composed of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine - A, C, G, T for short.
It might be considered the kabbalistic tetragrammaton of molecular biology but for the fact that triplets of base pairs act as the "words" or codons that encode the amino acids.
Cytosine and thymine are pyrimadines; adenine and guanine are purines. The pairing of bases provides the geometric structure used for its molecular reproduction. The base sequencing provides for the encoding of an organism's protein structures in terms of their amino acid sequencing. With (4)(4)(4)=64 possible codons for 20 amino acids, the encoding is redundant; moreover there is also a "stop codon" to separate protein encodings.
It has been recently discovered that while the base-pair sequencing is a matter of inheritence, the existing multiplicities of the sequences is *not* inherited, creating a hitherto unknown channel for evolutionary mutation.
Proteins, by their chemical structure tend to form peptide chains. What distinguishes a peptide from a protein is a reasonably confused matter of arbitrary and often fuzzy definition.
[Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Protein Structure]
But in addition, the way in which they are actually assembled, combined with the actual amino acid sequence of a given protein and also given that this is taking place in an aqueous environment with dipolar water molecules, the chains tend to take on rather specific geometric configurations that are at least partially determined by the configuration being that of a "lowest energy state" in the same way that water tends to run down hills to valleys. The important part of all this it that a protein's geometric configuration has everything to do with that protein's biological activity.
To be able to predict the geometric configuration from the amino acid sequence is a fundamental, and as yet still unsolved problem of molecular biology called The Protein Folding Problem. The converse problem of determining the amino acid sequences from the geometry is actually an impossible problem, since amino substitutions can be performed which will leave the geometry unchanged.
The geometric configurations can be remarkably complex, but simplistically one can isolate helical substructures and sheet substructures. The helical structures, usually called alpha-helicies have nothing to do with the double helix structure of DNA, and are single helicies. I suspect that Watson and Crick got the DNA structure wrong at first because they knew about alpha-helical structures of proteins where the radicals point exterior to the helix.
Without becoming too technical, an alpha-helix is mostly held in its shape by relatively weak hydrogen bonds between the amide groups of the backbone in successive windings of the helix. That's not the end of chain selfinteractions of course. There are also possible hydrogen bonds between the side groups, salt (ionic) bridges and disulfide bonds within chains and among chains, ultimately to determine the final geometric, bioactive form of a protein, its so called Tertiary/Quaternary Structure.
The layered beta sheets of proteins are most often held together by disulfide bonds nicely provided by a pairing of the amino acid, cysteine.
Natured and Denatured Proteins
A natural or "natured protein" is one in its bioactive geometric form.
A denatured protein has lost some of the bindings that hold
its form and then has an altered geometry.
The tertiary bindings are sufficiently weak that they can be
temperature, concentration and Ph dependent.
Some denaturing-naturing actually has a biological function, and the denaturing is reversible. Many denaturings are irreversible: cook an egg.
A good example of irreversible denaturing is the "cooking" of an egg white, which can be done by supplying heat, mechanical force (making a merangue) or by chemical reactions that break the hydrogen bonds that hold the mucoproteins of egg white in compact isolated helical structures. This done, the almost transparent liquid egg white becomes a tangle of stretched out peptide polymers, like any plastic substance. Its optical properties even change in the process, going from transparent to opaque. The tangled up environment prevents the proteins from ever being natured again. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics in operation, with a decided increase in entropy.
The understanding of reversible and irreversible nature of denaturing makes it clear that the Protein Folding Problem is in reality not near so simple as it might at first appear. What becomes clear is that there can be more than one stable geometrical configuration for a given primary and secondary structure: the folding is not unique. Although the biologically active configuration lives at the bottom of some energy well, that is not the only well that exists.
The most important metallic ions in mammalian biological systems are: Iron, Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Sodium, Potassium, Copper, Zinc, Selenium, Cobalt. The most important nonmetallics are Sulfur, Chlorine and Iodine.
The only two that serve essentially fairly simple single functions are Iron and Cobalt. Iron is essential for the structures of hemoglobin and myoglobin, which are the core of the system for distributing oxygen collected by the lungs. Cobalt is the peculiar core of vitamin B-12 which is produced in the *large* intestines by various flora there and absorbed back into the body. [Chickens have to get their B-12 by eating their own excrement; you don't have to do that, so have a little evolutionary gratitude.] B-12, as one might expect is water soluble. The endgame of digestion is the body's reclamation of water necessary to the process, and this takes place in the large intestine. However, ingesting large quantities of either iron or (especially) cobalt is quite lunatic and insalubrious.
Copper, Magnesium and Zinc are included in a number of proteins, and are associated with the specifics of their bioactivity. Copper also acts as a catalyst for the body's ongoing synthesis of Hemoglobin.
A notable protein containing selenium is glutathione peroxidase, which is part of the chemistry of elimination of Free Radicals.
Superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalyzes the reduction of a superoxide radical (likely damaging by oxidation if left running around) to oxygen and hydrogen peroxide. Glutathione peroxidase (of which there are several forms) further reduces the oxidizing hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to water. The production in the body of glutathione peroxidase has a few possible forms with the same function which is genetically determined and variable among humans. By the way, SOD is sold as a supplement, but I seriously think, (SOD is ridiculously expensive, and so is glucosamine/chondroitin sulfate) that the molecule is sufficiently large that it will never be absorbed as a unit and will only be broken down into its constituent part for absorbtion. Hence, as a supplement, it's a waste of money. That, of course, is only my informed opinion, since I don't know it to be a confirmable and empirical fact.
What fits what, in biochemistry, can be a difficult matter; it is ultimately not a matter of classical stick and ball models, but rather a matter of complex quantum chemistry. What looks like it will not fit in a classical picture may very well work due to effects of quantum tunneling.
Sulphur XYZZY
Phosphorus is a bone matrix component and more importantly part of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) that is the core of cell respiration. The chemistry is pretty much known, clever and complicated.
Chlorine XYZZY
Iodine is a component of the important hormone thyroxin, manufactured and secreted by the thyroid gland, and which acts as a master metabolic hormone.
First a little structural terminology. Lipids include fats and oils. One of their essential biological properties turns out to be that they are insoluble in water, and therefore perfectly suitable materials for constructing things that should not disolve - like cell walls. Actually, cell walls are bilayers of phospholipids, with the phosphoric ends sticking into the space between the layers.
The layman's language difference is simply that oils tend to be liquid at room temperatures, while fats tend to be solid. Both are polymeric "chains", possibly with branches, and their distinguishing characteristics correlate with the chemical structure as, fats have longer chains than oils.
A fat is a triester, also called a triglyceride, (An ester, as one of my subtly witty chem profs once said, is a half acid alcohol.) of glycerol and usually a fatty acid. A fatty acid is an aliphatic acid, a long chain hydrocarbon with a carboxylic acid group (-COOH) at an end.
Carbohydrates are constructed from Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and so seem to be fats (Their Primary Structure of chemical formula is the same), but fats happen to have different kinds of Secondary Structure; they are generally linear, and do not have ring structures in them.
Fats can be classed as saturated and unsaturated. Saturated fats all have single C-H bonds; the number of H bonded to the C molecules is maximal - hence the "saturation". Unsaturated fats can be classed as monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Note that double bonds require more energy to break than single bonds - and often release more energy when they are broken; moreso for triple bond, which is why acetylene gives so much heat in its burning (oxidation). This distinction between saturated and unsaturated does have to do with diet, so stay with me.
Animal fats tend to be saturated fats, while vegetable fats tend to be unsaturated, requiring the existence of double C=C bonds in the chain. If there is only one double bond, the fat/oil is called monounsaturated (e.g., olive oil), and polyunsturated (e.g., safflower oil) if there is more than one such double bond.
There are saturated vegetable oils, e.g., coconut oil, avocado oil and palm kernel oil.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids XYZZY
You will hear or read statements like the following, made by careful people:
A: "The ingestion of polyunsaturated fatty acids tends to raise the general level of powerfully oxidative radicals." "Higher levels of these oxidants (usually superoxides and hydrogen peroxide) may cause premature aging and the development of cancers." and B: "The ingestion of saturated fatty acids tend to raise the serum level of LDL (low density lipids) and lower the levels of HDLs (high density lipids." "These particular changes in serum lipids may increase the risk of of heart disease, i.e., artherosclerosis."
Read the words very carefully.
These are almost accurate and reponsible statements, if they are understood in their proper context. The phrases "tend to" and "may increase the risk" mean very specifically and *only* that correlation coefficients have been calculated regarding the parameters of a a statistical population that is some subpopulation of humans. There is no statement of causality, and more accurate and clear statements would be of the form that within the statistical population, a positive correlation has been calculated between two well defined parameters of that population. A more proper statement of the alleged truth would include a standard measure of significance and how it was defined and arrived at, along with the variance of the correlation coefficient. Lots of luck even finding the proper statements in anything written by a journalist. They will simply attempt to make you feel (you haven't enough knowledge to think) what they have been told to make you feel.
Completely hidden and masked in obfuscatory qualifying language is that these statements refer only to statistical populations and not to individuals even of that population, much less people who are not members of that population. Any such inferences, though they are emotionally implied, are statistically and scientifically invalid, i.e., utterly meaningless. Read this paragraph again, and again until you understand it exactly. It is very important.
Furthermore, because this mumbojumbo purports itself to be science, you are invited to suspend all skepticism regarding the integrity of the researchers, their data and their methods, regardless of who paid them to come to such conclusions. Such worries are far from needless as any delving into reality will demonstrate in short order. Agribiz and pharmaceuticals are not in business for your health, any more than insurers or governments are. Get over that mythology fast. That it is in fact a mythology is exactly what "free trade" now means. They do what they do, i.e., engage in every criminality and immorality imaginable, and you get screwed. That's a "free market" in the current ubiquitous Orwellian "newspeak".
Regardless of the bogus science and utterly perverse uses of statistics, the strategy of dominating by monounsaturated fats is a choice of lesser of all possible evils, of which there are many beyond food itself.
Why do you actually need fats and oils to begin with? For starters there are fat soluble vitamins without which you would be dead that need to be absorbed after ingestion, and it is the fats that make that possible. [Pardon the repetition: it is an important point.]
A second reason is that fats (lipids) are what your body's cell walls are composed of - and to reverse the usual statement, you must eat what you are. It is why we must also drink water.
Cholesterol, which is injected into the blood stream by the liver, and manufactured in the liver is a major constituent of cell walls; it is not some extraneous substance that is somehow poisonous, and what you eat in fats does not transfer to the blood stream as is. Fats are digested.
Regarding a modern protein diet, it is often said, that way back when humanoids were almost strict carnivores, the meat that they ate was much leaner then. This is said in support of the artificially created "LOW FAT" and "NO FAT" food industries which are spinoffs of the "LOW CHOLESTEROL" "NO CHOLESTEROL" food industries. The statement is not a fact as it is presented; it is a vaguely supported guess that can, even if it were essentially right, be completely irrelevant, and not at all supportive of any prescription or proscription for proper diet - not to mention supportive of any adjunctive medication.
The core of the specialized chemistry of fat digestion (in the small intestine) is bile which dissolves the fat, and it can be noted that there is an entire body part, the gall bladder devoted to this process. People who have had this removed experience an increase in difficulty in digesting fats.
Consider that the gall bladder and bile chemsitry, the pancreas associated with it evolved for a purpose and in response to a need; also consider or imagine how long it takes for an organ of the body to evolve. The chemistry of digestion and glucose maintenance is contained in one organ called the pancreas. The one item that sticks out about the complex pancreas is that the beta cells, statistically, are weak, and in the course of life can become worn out, resulting in senile diabetes. The long course of biological history preceding our rather recent change in diet has selected for not any great use of these beta cells.
Ingestion of carbohydrates, whether sugar or starch, places considerable demand on the beta cells, and clearly one for which they were not engineered in the evolutionary forge. We were not and are not designed for ingesting high levels of carbohydrates, irrespective of other dietary factors.
The clear inference is that our biological ancestors did indeed consume fat, and enough of it to provide and evolutionary pressure to select for the evolution of both bile chemistry and the gall bladder. Since people can actually live without a gall bladder, the suggestion is that we now actually consume far less fat than did our ancestors.
Vertebrate digestive systems come in remarkable variety, the structure being rather geared to diet. The structure of the human digestiove system, despite the biochemical complexity, is actually rather simple and completely typical of carnivorous predators. That, of course, is a statement diametrically opposed to those of various mystical gurus casting their lying or ignorant third eyes into someones pocketbook. Sorry people we're nasty mean carnivores, not pure and virtuous vegetarians. The biochemistry and the anatomy doesn't lie. The stomach puts out a good quantity of acid. We are born with gall bladders that are not rinkydinky affairs. Horses which are decidedly herbivores have no gall bladders, neither do rats. Rats eat seeds and grains. Eating fruits, and leafy vegetables is quite different from eating the grain foods introduced by the agricultural revolution. Your "appendix", anatomically called a cecum is a nice example of devolution, a vestigial body part that is a remnant of an herbivoral existence very very long gone. The rat has one, and his is used as a fermentation chamber not unlike those extra ruminant stomachs, to digest cellulose (something we can't digest) and other tough protein structures. Some people will lie through their teeth and say the stupidist things to try to alter the obvious biological realities.
Despite being fundamental carnivores, we've also developed a varied repetoir in digestion, and can get along with less than an optimal diet; we can subsist in privation. Whatever may be dietarily optimal, we are indeed flexible - to a point.
All this biological evidence is in direct opposition to what is often said. One might profitably wonder why this obvious evidence is routinely replaced by an opposing statement that is a "guess" that has no evidence. One almost ancient rule in such quandries is, follow the money, from your pocket to where?
There are more utterly useless special foods on the market than you can shake a stick at. LOW FAT, NO FAT, LOW CHOLESTEROL, NO CHLESTEROL. LOW SALT, SUGAR FREE, soon NO CARB pound cake, LO CARB spaghetti. [Update: Yes, we do have low carb spaghetti, and from what I gather it might not be bad since it cleverly substitutes protein, even more so than a pasta made with good durum wheat does. The carbohydrates are gotten low by having a good percentage of them be roughage fiber that is not digested. However, I have not managed to get enough information, and that in itself causes one eybrow to raise circumspectly.]
[Further update:
I have eaten the low carb pasta by Dreamfields many times now,
and am astounded that its taste and texture is no less than
a fine Italian pasta, so this was not such a ridiculous idea
after all. I can't say anything about any other similar
products because I have not tried them.]
Every one of the other disgusting tasting items (The worst, I think, was No Fat Mayonnaise) is the result of some campaign of groundless fear that even the medical profession has been being roped into. So what is the advantage? Agribiz gets to remove something from your food, sell the diminished food at a higher price, and then one way or another sell also what they removed in some other way. You don't think they're going to throw out that which has been removed do you?
For 50 years, your beneficent government, agribiz conglomerates, schools and the medical profession has been telling people not to eat meat, but to eat carbohdrates, especially if you want to lose weight, and course, Americans have simply gotten fatter and fatter the more they "dieted". This advice was sold over and over again, over decades, despite the well known anatomy, comparitive anatomy and biochemistry that says quite clearly and exactly the opposite. By the way, don't be too hard on your physician; they rarely get to read fundamental biochemistry beyond med school and have also been conned into, or legally forced into advising as they are told to advise through the politicized American Medical Association (AMA). They read instead, medical journals, and as most professionals trust to professional integrity while all along the medical journal articles have been increasingly written by pharmaceutical stooges. Nevertheless, an increasing number of them are trying to learn about all of that (no easy task); the smart and real ones, of course, who have figured out that they have been conned. This is no easy task as scientific truth becomes more a matter of politicized fiat than science.
Sixty years ago, US people lived more and better, ate better food, and not surprisingly were bigger and stronger than their European counterparts of the very same genetic lines. There are still many magical aspects of genetics that we don't know. To think that we have it down exactly is just plain stupid: that's religion, not science. Yes, Virginia, they are diametrically opposed. Science is an aspect of true spirituality; religion, being nothing more than a politically useful and variable lie, is not. It is about social, political and economic control, period.
You might also consider the matter of "nutritional supplements", which happen, for the moment, not to be officially regulated and manufactured by the pharmaceutical cartel, and so are not recommended. The pharmas have been salivating for this to change for decades. You get less, and they use age old knowledge to charge more. It's called licensed theft, extortion and fraud - in short, racketeering.
The biochemistry of the past 50 years contravenes that notion also, but few biochemists would open their mouths on the subject for fear of punishment, and accusations of dispensing medical advice, or some being "biased" and unfair to those who lie and thieve: they, after all, also have to have a say, and "make a living". I'm not giving medical advice, just known science and verifiable fact and history - ok?
The point here is not so much to advise as to what to do, but what nonsense not to believe, and why. Science does not "prove things", as any proper scientist knows, it "disproves things" by showing counterexamples to them.
Very Real and Very Scary Things You Never Heard Of:
A google search on "Codex Alimentarius".
It is death supported and created by "free trade" corporate looting of everything in sight, encoded in babbling garbage with pretensions of sanity. Its existence is not about to appear on Fox News.
Carbohydrates are either sugars or starches, molecules that as their class name indicates are composed of carbon and hydrate radicals (-OH), and have a standard chemical formula CnH2nOn; they are however, structurally, more than hydrated carbon atoms, and there are important carbohydrates that deviate from this formual, e.g., deoxyribose and chitin of insect exoskeletons.
Carbohydrates are either monosaccharides (simple sugars) or polysaccharides (complex sugars) which are formed by covalent bonds from two or more monosaccharides. Monosaccharides are classified by the number of carbons in their ring structure. Glucose is a hexose, a monosaccharide having 6 carbons. Deoxyribose from the DNA backbone is a pentose, having 5 carbons. Arabinose and xylose (C5H10O5), are pentoses.
Even monosaccharides, centered around effectively small carbon ring structures, are sufficiently complex that for any simple formula there are several isomeric structures. E.g., glucose, galactose, mannose and fructose have the same emprical formula (C6H12O6), (Primary Structure) but different attachment (Secondary) structures. [Tertiary Structure is the final geometric form.] Sucrose, the standard table sugar, is a disaccharide consisting of one glucose unit and one fructose unit. Maltose is a disaccharide of two glucose units (monomers). Lactose is a disaccharide of one glucose unit and one galactose unit.
Starches are essentially polymerized saccharides; polymerized glucose, glycogen, e.g, is polymerized glucose. They can also form helical structures (Amylose), and fibril structures. Cellulose is a collection of long polymers of glucose bound across their lengths by hydrogen bonds; both cellophane and rayon are made from cellulose extracted from wood chips. Humans cannot digest cellulose, but cows, rabbits and termites can. We lack the enzyme cellulase (it's a protein, an enzyme, that is not encoded in human DNA); cellulose is that wonderful "insoluble fiber" that we are all urged to eat, pretty much on the basis of someone's divine inspiration, based on monkeys calculating correlation coefficients on the basis of ridiculously collected "statistics". Voodoo pseudoscience. Once such nonsense is promulgated, a market is created to be exploited by the sales arm of the corpagov. Ditto for just about any such "specialty food" you can think of.
Polymerization is a general biostrategy for making storage efficient for a fundamental fuel source, for us, glucose stored as glycogen in muscle tissue.
Excess glucose running around the body, most often the result of eating too much carbohydrates is stored in the form of glycogen in the liver and muscles, which is a polymerized form of glucose that is easily and rapidly converted back to glucose, or in adipose (fat) cells; almost any cell can be switched into being an adipose cell. Unswitching that cell function appears to be a problem. Unfortunately, just about every one of those antidepressants, antipsychotics, antiseizure meds that USians scarf down by thousands of tons each year cause weightgain, turning harmless cells into adipose cells which are damn near impossible to get rid of ever after.
In principle, energy can then be reclaimed from these adipose storage cells by converting back into glucose. Of course, there is an nonnegligeable amount of chemical energy required to make these transformations from and back to directly usable glucose, so it is less efficient to provide energy for the body with this little from-to chemical dance. Mobilizing the energy from adipose cells is more costly than mobilizing glycogen, and requires a great need to open up or activate this pathway.
--------------------------------------------------------Cholesterol is a kind of lipid, which is a kind of fat. Lipids are a major component of cell walls, and so their presence is absolutely essential in the body for continued cell repair and replacement. Cell walls are bilipid membranes which contain various kinds of channels formed by embedded proteins that convey various ions between inside and outside.
The body is so concerned with maintaining an appropriate level of cholesterol in the body that the ancient and completely necessary liver actually produces that needed cholesterol and is involved with the homeostatic regulation of that level by chemical agonist-antagonist structure that it is a ubiquitous feature of all life processes: the oppositions of muscles, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, etc., etc. etc. Functions of life are all regulated by opposing structures and processes. These can be disrupted through injury, disease, deprivations of various sorts, and the entire integrated system will adjust to compensate and rectify in order to maintain homeostasis. The design of the interrelated systems, however, is not only not perfect, it often does things that are sufficiently perverse that we must do things ourselves consciously to help things along, assuming we know what to do in the first place. E.g., applying ice for headaches, burns and sprains, so to compensate for some of the body's inapproriate inflammatory reactions, one being to produce histamines for the affected area which causes swelling which compresses sensitive nerve endings - and that spells pain. The ice will reduce the swelling.
The eating of foods with cholesterol has precious little to do with anything, a sad and embarrassing fact that has not quite been recognized by the drooling economic rulers of western society because the continuing lie still serves its original function of concentrating wealth and keeping the population confused and afraid. Remember when butter was poison, and hydrogenated corn oil was the great thing, when eggs were bad for you, when animal fats, especially bacon fat were poison? Remember when vitamins (which pharmaceuticals do not control) were useless and waste of money? The wise substitutes are the poison; they were then, and they are now. It's all popycock, and these evil genius ripoff artists know no more now then they did then. Lying morons - more lying than moron. Alas, the ripees, it seems, know even less after all these decades of disinformation and corpagov pseudoscience. See Statins below.
From the Greek "lekithos" for egg yolk, and which should be properly spelled and pronounced Lekithin (some fool got the English spelling wrong and it stuck) is an interesting substance that demonstrates nicely how cleverly biochemistry has evolved where a single substance has several uses, thus allowing for crossings and mixings of different chemical pathways.
Lecithin is not only a precursor of the omnipresent neurotransmitter acetylcholine, but it is also a kind of serum cholesterol solvent. As a supplement, it may be a good thing, and has no known toxicity in any amount. Fortunately, it's not all that expensive. As you might guess from the name, the cholesterol in eggs comes with its own solvent, if indeed that is of any interest. Egg yolks also provide ergosterol a precursor to vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) by ultra violet irradiation. Death by eating eggs is possible, of course, but so is death by drinking water.
People have artherosclerosis (plaque that narrows blood vessels) because their blood lipids, notably certain forms of cholesterol precipitate from the serum solution into plaques on arterial walls. That the plaque was mostly cholesterol was the cause of the initial and continuing Great Cholesterol Scare that became the Great Cholesterol Scam.
It is a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous (or useful!) thing. The question is who is it that has the little knowledge?
The purported thinking was that precipitation is often the consequence of high concentration - but that is not always the case, and it is not an established causative factor anyhow. To say that it is, appeals to voodoo nonscience, where statistical correlation implies causality, which it does not. Cholesterol running around in your blood is *supposed* to be running around in your blood; the question is how much? Overall, that is different question (or is it the wrong question). The answer has much to do with what the body is demanding in the way of cholesterol for cell repair and replacement that going on feverishly in everybody's body all the time.
The appropriate question is what really does cause the precipitation into plaque?
A slightly more informed answer than the concentration hypothesis is that serum homocysteine levels have more to do with cholesterol precipitation than just about anything else. There is a critical point of its concentration where significant precipitation is induced by it, and one would therefore like to keep the levels of homocystein appropriately below that. Unfortunately, it seems rather likely that homocysteine levels are like many other things, genetically programmed. Yet, there are still strategies that can compensate for inappropriate genetic expression. Those are changing, and depend very much on the particulars of your person. All the alleged medical statistics in the world are not able to predict a single thing about you and you person. Think of them only as possible suggestions of the possible, for that is all they can ever be. Anyone who claims otherwise is clearly ignorant of the very nature of statistics, and about science generally, about which more later.
Do your research and then consult with your physician if you think this may be a problem. B-12, Folic acid and B-6 together are a common strategy. Does it really work? Current basic studies suggest a strong maybe. :-) So much for the long held uselessness of vitamin supplements. By the way, the homocysteine factor has been well known among scientists now for going on two decades, but has been mostly ignored until recently. It took the same period of time with vitamin E to get to be understood by the medical people.
Do be advised that a genuine genetic disorder called homocysteinemia (an excess of homocysteine in the blood) does exist, but don not go getting all hypochondriacal about it; it's rather rare, and will very probably have shown up in your family before you. If you've lived long enough to be able to read this, it is more than likely that you do not have it.
What is homocysteine? Unsuprisingly, it is a protein, and a very simple one very closely related to the amino acid methionine. Methylation (a ubiquitous operation in in vitro chemistry) converts homocysteine to (harmless) methionine, one of the coded for amino acids that construct proteins. The genetic question that arises is, how efficient is your body at methylating homocysteine? It varies genetically.
There is a certain critical level of serum homocysteine below which it just swims around and does nothing. Above this critical level, cholesterol precipitaton is initiated. The last I saw the critical level is about 16 μmol/L.
With regard to the serum cholesterol level, see also the insulin-glucogon axis below.
It is important to keep the concentration of glucose in blood within a certain range that depends on the activity level of the body; the base line of concentration is very much connected to the draw of glucose to fuel the brain, which is overall the greatest consumer of glucose. That importance is reflected in the body having several strategies and pathwys for maintaining a proper glucose level and for changing the delivery rates.
The Islets of Langerhans (making up 1-2% of the mass of the pancreas) contain the pancreatic hormone producing cells; the rest of the pancreas is devoted to the production of digestive enzymes.
alpha cells: glucogon beta cells: insulin The beta cells store a good amount of zinc, as do the male testicles and the retinas of eyes. The beta cells also maintain stores of their insulin production for rapid release. PP cells: Polypeptide Producing cells delta cells: somatostatin, a generally inhibitory hormone Redundantly, somatostatin is secreted by the hypothalamus as well as delta cells of the stomach, intestine and pancreas. It has two peptide chains, one with 14 amino acids and another with 28.
The pancreas produces both insulin and glucogon. While insulin moderates serum glucose levels, glucogon moderates serum fat levels. Superficially, it appears that the beta cells are weaker than the the alpha cells, and that humans often outlive the useful lifetime of the beta cells resulting in the condition called senile diabetes. The wearing out of the alpha cells is so unlikely that there is not even such a known disease. How might that situation have come about?
Eating a steady diet of sugar, which is very rapidly converted to pure glucose and absorbed raising the serum glucose level places a heavy demand on the beta cells, and yes, such continuous taxing of the cells does seem to wear them out. In our long evolution then, we did not develop to handle any high amount of sugar in our diets. Starches are not much different. People seem to have been taught that starches are good because they are converted to sugars very slowly and so do not place that much demand on the beta cells. The conversion is far more rapid than you may think, and yes a meal of pasta is going to place a good drain on the beta cells. Early man was not having ziti or mostociolli for dinner.
One reason the alpha cells do not get so heavily taxed is that it takes a long time for the digestive system to process proteins and fats, and any peaking of the concentration in time is severely damped relative to the peaking of glucose. Another reason is that proteins and fats were the diet our digestive systems were evolved for, and indeed what early man ate, along with fruits, nuts and some root vegetables.
INSULIN
A protein (polypeptide), more specificaly a hormone, with formula
C257H383N65O77S6
produced by the beta cells of the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. It has two peptide chains, of 21 and 30 amino acids secured together by two disulfide bonds (A7-B7, A20-B19), the third disulfide bond (A6-A11) links the shorter A chain to itself.
The peptide chains are A: gly-ile-val-glu-gln-cys-cys-thr-ser-ile -cys-ser-leu-tyr-gln-asn-glu-val-tyr-cys -asn B: phe-val-asn-gln-his-leu-cys-gly-ser-his -leu-val-glu-ala-gln-tyr-leu-val-cys-gly -glu-arg-gly-phe-phe-tyr-thr-pro-lys-alaDefined functionally, the exact structure of insulin in terms of peptide sequences is species dependent. Pig insulin is close enough to human insulin that it is used as the agent to counter diabetes mellitus.
In its bioactive form insulin chelates ions of zinc.
Insulin tends to dimer and hexamer (in storage) forms. In its hexamer for its geometry is toroidal, which form apparently protects against proteolysis as well as being an efficient storage form.
GLUCOGON
A polypeptide chain (actually a complex amino acid) with 29 fundamental
amino acids:
NH2 -His-Ser-Gln-Gly-Thr-Phe-Thr-Ser-Asp-Tyr -Ser-Lys-Tyr-Leu-Asp-Ser-Arg-Arg-Ala-Gln -Asp-Phe-Val-Gln-Trp-Leu-Met-Asn-Thr -COOH
produced by the alpha cells of the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.
The blood pressure farce
The mythology of "sea salt" as if it were somehow "cooler", more "gourmet", and better for you.
Statins, HMG-CoA (3-hydroxy 3-methyl glutaryl Coenzyme A) reductase inhibitors, are commonly used to treat the nondisease of elevated serum lipids, based on a pseudoscience that is not even wrong.
What do they do? They effectively interfere actively in the liver with the body's idea of proper cholesterolemic homeostasis, i.e., how much cholesterol should be in the blood.
To greater or lesser degree, varying with, among other things, the dosage, statins cause rhabdomyolysis. The warnings of possible musculoskelatal pains are symptoms of rhabdomyolysis, which is a dissolving of striated muscle tissue. That connection is almost never explained to the public, though it is well known to biological cogniscenti. It has been known for years, and it has also been deliberately hidden by pharmaceuticals, as a number of trial documents show. That rhabdomyolysis can perfectly well exist and be asymptomatic: significantly discernable pains may be absent. Severe rhbdomyolysis is often accompanied by symptomatic myoglobinuria showing as reddish urine. Other possible symptoms are weakness, tenderness, fever, nausea or vomiting. Any elevation of creatine kinase (CK) serum levels is a fair indicator. Giving dangerous drugs routinely to treat a nonexistent disease might be called what?
Niacin, costicosteroids, Cyclosporine, Colchicine, Erythromycin, alcohol, CNS depressants all dispose to rhadomyolysis, statistically at least, by correlation coefficients. Statins combined with any of these compounds enhance the effect of the more potent statins.
It now [January 21, 2007] appears that statins in general are "linked" (i.e., correlated, to the development of Parkinsin's disease, in addition. Does this mean that statins cause Parkinsin's disease? No, it merely means that Parkinson's has been found statistically within the population that that uses statins to be significantly greater than in the population that does not use statins. What does that mean? It means that medical researchers should be looking more closely at this alleged correlation, and if it is real, try to discover how that correlation comes about.
Nevertheless, these are still, expensive and generally dangerous drugs that are be used in an unreasonable and unscientific medical protocol to treat a nondisease (lipid levels) again merely correlated with an allegedly controlable development of what is loosely called "heart disease".
------------------------------------------------------------------------Absolutely anything can be toxic if ingested, and lethally so: ingesting too much water will kill you in no uncertain terms. I am speaking of ingesting, not drowning by trying to beathe it. So, the idea of branding any particular substance as toxic, paying no attention to concentration and the explicity mode of contact with a human body is not only ignorant and stupid; it is utter idiocy. There's a lot of that going around since decades ago, our less than beneficent corpagov decided that thinking, like the arts was some sort of frivolous luxury that was no longer affordable if all the great corporations of the US (that no longer pay taxes) are to make their holy and maximal profit in order to enrich the rich.
As you may have noticed, I am rather fond of pulling various bodies of knowledge together to see how they support each other, and how they complement or contradict each other. This procedure seems to be helpful in eliminating from consideration the whores and abusers of various disciplines whose numbers and toxicity are clearly on the increase.
This is not to say that there are no substances that have not useful function for humans except to be toxic, because there are; heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium are good examples.
Governments and families can also be toxic - and we won't even mention toxic religions dedicated to nonthought also for purposes of control.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Unfortunately, the world is awash in statistical perversions giving rise to garbage science, "government science", or "corporate science" which is not at all science, but rather a collection of toxic technology, whose sole puporse is death and destruction, a toxic technology put in the hands of equally toxic infantile brats with not a single thought as to the consequences of their actions. They don't "do" thought; they do manipulations. The power hungry morons have gained ascendency and we all face a crisis, whether or not the human genome and possibly every other genome on this planet is to be annihilated by the ruling stupidity that has been allowed.
When I was a very young lad, which was quite a while ago, my dad told me all about a book entitled "How to Lie with Statistics". Apparently not too many people but liars read that. A very good mathematician, Raymond Smuliyan has written several books concerning ignorance and attendant abuses of mathematics and of statistics in particular. The key word is "innumeracy", paralleling "illiteracy". You can find them with a little searching.
Apparently few people have bothered to read any of those. It is not a sexy subject, only a vital one. The teaching of mathematics in secondary schools is execrable, and the general teaching and understanding of the basics of probability and statistics, at this point necessary for survival, is nonexistent. The education to be able to do something with probability and statistics is beyond what I can write here, so I give a minimal description of some fundamental concepts in their applications.
Before going into any details on how most all alleged research in any field that touches either environment or human health, I simply state three monumentally important statistical principles that are routinely and deliberately violated millions of times every day.
1) Correlation does NOT imply causality. 2) The statistics of any population imply absolutely NOTHING concerning any randomly chosen individual in that population. 3) Statistics of a population imply NOTHING whatsoever about some individual not of that statistical population, nor even *of* that statistical population.
These should be engraved on some international monument, and that is about the only reason I can see for any concept of "globalism" as is it now being actively instituted. These three principles are true, and absolutely inviolable. They express a structure of what cannot be known, and cannot be reasonably done. While they are true, the rest of globalism is a two bit scam. ("Two bits" used to mean 25 cents; times have changed, as they do; now it means 1/4 of a byte, or 1/2 a nybble, or the value of some function whose range is a pair of two dichotomic variables.)
Quite some time before I had the discussion with my dad on statistics, around the age of seven years old I saw an advertisement on tv (yes, I was a tv child, but I recovered from that peculiar addiction twenty years ago, and have had no interaction with it since.) that claimed some new orange juice has "one quarter more", and remarked that the answer to the question "One quarter more than what?" was not answered, and that without that, the statement was meaningless. I smelled a rat - and I've been smelling, seeing, hearing and even feeling rats ever since. Once in a while I get caught, but not too often, and recently, especially recently, I've lots of practice and tests regarding insurers, banks and governments.
As a fairly pernicious example of the routine perversion of statistics, I will use, nominally, the idea of IQ tests. It carries over into the hundreds of daily examples, virtually unchanged.
Using IQ testing to measure or predict the future of any individual is just nonsense, and a standard statistical perversity. The sense of that without the mindnumbing math goes like this: Take a large population of things even as simple as particles so that each of them has a number glued to them. You now the have numbers, and that's all you know. Say, the population is so manageable that you can sample the entire population; that just eliminates any sampling problems. Look at each member of the population and write down their number. Gallup, eat your heart out. Now compute the mean in the usual way, even compute the standard deviation while you are at it. We have at least two numbers that give the *exact* mean and standard deviation of the exact statistical distribution of the population. No estimating parameters necessary. Throw out all the initial data; your population is now statistically determined by two numbers, or even any number more moments if you computed them. With a finite population you can only have a finite number of independent moments.
Now, pick a random member from the population, and use the computed statistics to give an estimate of the number on your random choice. :-) Of course, that's a trick directive, because you cannot do it. You can give an estimate, of course, but the estimate has nothing to do with any randomly chosen member of the population specifically. The statistical parameters of an exact distribution of any population can say absolutely nothing about any given individul. Why? When you threw out the initial data, you threw out just about all of your information, the individuality was averaged away totally when the mean was computed; you no longer can distinguish one unique individual from any other. A miniscule additional amount was kept by computing the standard deviation, and additionally for any extra moments computed. For a population with N members, to retain all the information you had, you would have had to compute N moments, but that would be a very confused expression of the same information contained in the initial data. Given the statistical moments, you would *still* never be able to reconstruct the initial data. These give specific information about each individual in the sample, and this complex person is being defined by only a handful of numbers that are being considered a priori "important". You really have no idea who or what this person is.
I have described above, the actuarial statistical method, to which through government and insurers, you and your physician have been reduced.
Make the example a little more relevant to IQ scores by letting those numbers be correlation coefficients betwwen IQ and "successful behavior", whatever that may be What does an IQ score actually mean beyound the ability to take the specific IQ test with varying extraneous influences like tightness of underpants? How does one define "successful behavior"? Possibly by being selected by the USSC to be POTUS?
To bang the use of IQ nonsense over the head on a second count, even regarding the statistics of a population and its parameters, correlation does NOT imply causality. Then, to use such a fictional implication regarding an individual of a population is to heap outrageous insult on an already egregious injury.
You can obtain causal results only when your system under consideration can be EXACTLY defined and known and when every aspect of the system is under complete structural control and specification.
In any human system, and in any system that is an entire planetary, physical or economic system or ecosystem, this condition cannot obtain, and so causal relationships derived from statistics in such complex systems are absurd, and out of the question.
An engineering system that requires determination of the future and computability of that future based only on correlation coefficients is a guaranteed diasaster.
------------------------------------------------------------------------The evolutionary history as well as the specifics of human biochemistry shout one thing with consistent clarity and that is that
Homo Sapiens Sapiens Is Fundamentally Carnivorous
Evolutionarily, we were prototypically designed to eat meat. Argument on that point is simply foolish. Nevertheless, can humans as a species get away with a vegetarian diet? That depends on what you consider vegetarian. Lacto ok? Ovo ok? Generally as food, the plant kingdom does not provide much in the way of protein, and when it does, e.g. in lentils or even better amarinth, the spectrum of aminos provided does not match our animal requirements. For humans, vegetarianism is an artificial constraint for which I have difficulty believing that anyone gets any karmic brownie points. But if you feel like rotting your body and brain without knowing what you're doing for spiritual purposes, by all means persist, and decrease the population of morons.
Do note that you can get away with a vegan diet that consists of beans, lentils and rice in warmer climes, and various vegan societies have used this combination. You will generally not find successful vegan societies in colder climes where an increased calorie intake is required simply to maintain thermal homeostasis.
I am not going to go on about it here, but do take a look at the chemistry of digestive systems of herbivores, and note the profound differences. Cow or horse digestion would be a good start, since they are clearly mammals, and they live on grasses and such and do not eat other animals. Trust me, it will be enlightening.
Some people seem to do better with a degree of vegetarian constraint than others, and that may very well *correlate* statistically, but have no causal effect on any given individual with their particular genetic makeup. Your blood type does *NOT* dictate what your diet should be. Your diet should be based in paying attention to your own body and your own person, using your own intelligence. If you get it wrong and refuse to change because you have this idiotic ideology, you should die; better luck next life time - if there is one. "Grüß Gott! Wenn du ihn siehst"
If you've had your gall bladder removed surgically, use you head: you will not be able to digest fats as well, and eating large quantities of them will cause you distress. "Gee, doctor - it hurts when I do that!" "So don't do that." Try to reduce fat in your protein; they tend to come together, please pardon the expression, but remember that some essential vitamins are oil soluble, and that means they need to be eaten with fats.
You may have been born with lactose intolerance; use your head.
Certain foods, for many people it's peppers, cause gastric distress. Raw onions can be even more often a problem. Distress and pain are nature's way of telling you something doesn't quite work for you; use your head. All people are not created physically equal, and some have special needs as well as the opposite. Your're not weird and socially unacceptable, you're a normal variation. There are some things to which our individual chemsitry does not take. It is not a moral issue one way or another. Vegetarians are not more moral or ethical; if morality is your reason for adopting a dietary lifestyle, get a life and get a brain. If it's an adpation to your own peculiar physical and chemical needs, know what you're doing. It's a difficult adaption that needs applied intelligence and more knowledge, and more specific knowledge of biochemistry than you will find here regarding specific foods. This is only an incomplete outline of the possibilities.
This seemingly academic question with nonexistent moral overtones may soon have a rather practical application since the world's population continues to increase and the worlds's food supply under the "care and guidance" of the corporate globalists is decreasing in very many different ways, notably in quality, quantity, diversity, poisoning and dependence on corporations in the entire food chain. You will soon all be dependent on private corporations, their talons in your throat, for the very water that you drink, and it will be poisonous water.
It does indeed take more energy, care and effort to make protein food sources that it does carbohydrate food sources. Both, of course, are being routinely destroyed and polluted, whether or not you actually have the time to pay attentions to those realities. Protein sources are already shrinking, as are carbohydrate sources, but still, carbohydrates are our last resort, and while O type constitutions may not survive this deprivation, A types are better equipped, and B types, which are, say Asians, are the best equipped to handle the profound worsening of the inevitable situation of overpopulation. It is already a problem, made a thousand times worse by the global corporatist totalitarians tht have already come to your government.
What I am saying is that in this corporate and governmentally induced worldwide famine created by western-anglo governments, these governments have irrevocably signed the death warrant of all western civilization, but their own death warrants as well. In the long run, it is probably long overdue and the best thing to happen provided the rulers are exterminated once and for all. They are less than useless.
People of the US may survive to the degree that they can return quickly to being farmers and shepherds using still available "hierloom seeds", and now scarce animal breeds that can live on their products without the aid of various special foods containing hormones and antibiotics among other things that must be bought specially.
If the ruling class of the US or any of their spawn survive, it would be a grave mistake. Agrarian China will definitely survive, simply because they can provide their own food, a "luxury" the US corporate gummint removed ages ago.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Damned if I know; that depends, on many things, including what is available and keeping up with what the lethal host of marauding corportatists are poisoning you with at any given time. Difficult? It is damn near impossible, especially since they are determined to remove all choices from you. You will eat what they will allow you to eat, or starve. You will take the meds you are prescribed, or they will be shoved down your thoat. You will, of course, obey orders - given by the most monumentally ignorant and stupid creatures that ever walked the face of the earth. Welcome to their paradise, slave. But, I digress. Return then to the the matter of food, so that you have some reasonable knowledge and criteria for making decisions in the very lean times to come to avoid both stravation and self poisoning.
You need certain amounts of protein, vitamins, minerals and water to survive, and there's little doubt about that. The proteins are there primarily as the building blocks necessary for the continuous repair and replacement of your body's cells. The center of your biological being is the CNS, and by biological proceesses, the body will do what it must to maintain its CNS core. The rest of the body is expendable in that service.
If sufficient calcium is not freely available for the functioning of the calcium gates that are the basis of neural conduction, the body will happily leach the required calcium from your bones causing osteoporosis. The ability to absorb calcium through the GI tract seems to diminish with age in both males and females, moreso in females. Recent government pseudoscience in this area proclaims that ingestion of additional calcium (which should also come with additional magnesium and phosphorus) has no effect on the development of osteoporosis. Who and what are you going to believe. What questions do you want answered?
If sufficient amino acids in a proper spectrum is not freely available for the maintainance, repair or feeding of the CNS the body will break down your muscles, yes even the heart, to make up for the deficit.
In short, as a general rule, the CNS has first dibs on all resources. It's probably a good idea not to force the body to consume its own musculoskeletal structure by adopting some foolish diet.
Body fat, of course, is consumable, and most often the consuming of this fat is the reason for people not living in an artic environment to make adjustments to their diets. In Arctic environments, extra body fat acts as an insulator, and also a reserve of fuel that the body can use to help maintain its optimal operating temperature, and homeostasis generally. The body actually adjusts under conditions of extreme cold to use the pathway of consuming this fat reserve to maintain body temperature; in other climes this pathway is normally not needed.
The fundamental question of a fat loosing diet is, how can I induce my body to consume its own fat while not gobbling up my bones, muscles, internal organs and various connective tissues? The obvious related questions are, how did I get fat in the first place, and how do I not get fat again?
Does being fat even matter? Actually, short of the extremes where diaphragmatic motion is compromised, personal image and social vanity, it has little to do with anything, regardless of what the corprorate pseudoscientists will try to tell you.
One answer might be, keep your current diet and go live in the Arctic for a year, running around on the ice a lot. Coming back, of course, you would be right back where you were in no time.
There is an old argument that says quite simply and fairly rightly,
calories-in - calories-used = fat
There is some truth to this, but there is also the truth that not all calories-in are created equal; what you eat for those calories-in does actually matter, and it matters in terms of your own body's biochemistry. Sugar, however, is not a good staple of choice, nor even is vast amounts of rice or potatoes.
One important difference between carbohydrate calories and protein calories is that excess carbohydrates are routinely stored in adipose cells, while excess protein calories are not stored, but eliminated. This sounds like really good news, but as usual there is a down side, and a simplistic and extreme use of that reality can cause a problem. Notice I said eliminated. The body eliminates its waste products or other things that shouldn't be there in the first place, like toxins through stool, urine and sweat. Excess protein tends most to be eliminated through both urine and sweat, using sweat more under conditions of heavy exertion, so mostly the elimination is in urine, and that means taxing your kidneys. In a long haul, this is probably not a very good idea.
Kitties love liver, and will eat it gratefully, but if you feed your kitty a solid and steady diet of liver, expect to have squirts of kitty urine all over the place. Kitty is out of balance. Better to feed kitty a variety of foods that exploit all of her biochemical pathways and not tax and overuse her internal apparatus wearing them out. Treat yourself as you would your kitty - kindly.
Different people are different, and do different things. Besides the genetic encodings that determine most of what you are, there are physical differences and differences in activity levels that make a difference as to what is optimal to eat and how much or what to eat.
It comes as no shock that a person 6' 6" will on average require more calories generally that a person who has height 5' 6".
Muscle mass consumes calories by its very existence, and a body builder will use more calories simply to supply his body than will a nonbody builder of the same height.
Physical activity consumes calories, but not near so many as exercise faddists are foolishly inclined to believe. It will take more jogging than you would believe to "burn off" that candy bar. On the other hand, a life of regular intense physical activity, aerobic or anaerobic, preferably both, conditions your body to a generally higher level of calorie consumption, a higher and more efficient metabolism rate, so while bursts of faddish exercise are silly and useless, possibly even dangerous, a life that includes a regular schedule of intense exercise is far from silly and far from useless.
There is more than muscular exercise. People who think a lot burn more calories than those who don't. :-)
Those O types back around 170,000 BCE were fairly active; being a couch potato then was a pretty risky occupation, and prehaps nature has not quite caught up yet with our relatively physically inactive ways. Exercise and physical activity means cells are getting banged around a lot; they are certainly going to need repair and replacement more often with that activity level than with a lower level of activity. The liver, again, on average, is probably merrily pumping out the cholesterol needed for cell wall repair at a generally higher rate that we need with lower level of activities.
There are those who are of the simplistic opinion that blood type will tell you what your should eat. Maybe it will tell me what I should read too. Nothing is that simple; seek simplicity - and distrust it. Your blood type could provide a suggestion based on fairly good scientific reasoning; but, you are not your blood type. A singular individual who needs to look at the various suggestions, get to know your own body, and act accordingly.
Certain foods "disagree" with many people. It is rare that well cooked meat, fowl or fish will disagree with anybody, while it is quite common for certain vegetables, particularly raw vegetables to disagree. Notable are peppers, particularly bell peppers, and raw onions. Some people cannot even handle raw or dried hot peppers without severe allergic reactions on the skin of their hands.
The disagreements can be either allergic reactions, or problems of digestion. Lactose intolerance is a genetic matter, and probably also is an intolerance for the protein gluten that is a major component of wheat and many other common grains that humans have lived with from agricultural revolution on, and therefore most western breads. I have never heard of anyone being allergic to or intolerant of rice. Most people have something that doesn't agree with them, and such disagreements need to be taken into account in what is eaten. These disagreements change with time, as do some allergic reactions.
Certain mushrooms are poisonous to some, but not to others. You are not weird, just particularly you. Certain mushrooms, "Oyster Mushrooms", e.g., provide such a remarkably appropriate amino acid spectrum that they can be good substitutes for meat; this is rather an unknown piece of biochemistry to almost all so called experts and dieticians.
There is no reason for anyone to tell you what you should and should not eat; only you can figure that out, by learning and paying attention to your own body.
There is no such a thing as complete moron, however, as I learned from the internet on stumbling across a website whose author was so very pleased with itself being a "fat free vegan". If this is for real, and not even more idiot and ignorant than it sounds, it should expect death, and death of children who will be being deprived of all fat soluble vitamins. I'm clearly not writing for such things that are incapable of distinguishing between thought and feeling, and so are utterly disconnected from reality.
All of these considerations still leave many questions open for any given individual in modern times. Consideration needs also to be made of the nature of the foods.
We now have a completely pervasive government, that ceased to be a servant ages ago (if it ever was) and lives for its own sake, invading all aspects of human life as a lethal disease. We have government economics, government trade, government science giving rise to government technology, government agriculture and government food, government media and government pharmaceuticals, and every other instrument of psychological engineering for which there is not even any lame excuse of government science and various other government truths by fiat and ukase.
The food contains the toxicity of the government that now determines its creation, and the only strategy seems to be one of hedging bets by understanding that different things are toxic in different ways. A most varied diet (soon, I'm sure to be precluded by toxic government) at least allows that the intake of any one specific toxin, and therefore of all toxins generally can be minimized.
So there is my ultimate conclusion: eat what seems personally salubrious for good reason through knowledge, and while doing this vary your diet as much as you possibly can, while that is still possible The global corporatists are doing everything possible to make sure that your options are nonexistent.
If you actually believe anything said by your corpagov trained "dieticians", who know no chemistry or biology, but who have learned to spout pompous polemics authoritatively, while barely being able to count, and stop drooling, you deserve exactly what you get in terms of health and lousey tasting food.
Eating fats does not cause your arteries to clog, and there is no legitimate science that says it does; on the other hand, eating anything in excess will probably do you in. The cholesterol scam is exactly that, and the proffered cures (statins) for a nonexistent disease are poisons that induce rhabdomyolysis, i.e., disolving of muscle tissue. Your serum cholesterol level is actually reduced by eating proteins and fats, and increased by eating carbohydrates, and in particular starches, both of which also tax your insulin producing beta-cells. Your serum cholesterol level is governed much more by what your liver produces, but that cholesterol is an essential element of your continued existence. The "ketosis theory" of high protein diets is not science either, it is a fabrication with no basis in measurable fact; but is based primarily on a simplified understanding of the insulin-glucogon axis, which is however still an unignorable, well and long known biochemical reality that still manages to be routinely ingnored. Learn it, check it, along with everything else here, and do with it as you please.
Here, for example, is a good place to read. Diet DoubleDare: Protein Power
It is my personal understanding that the Eades have evolved the best understanding of human food, nutrition and diet that is known.
Eat well and wisely, with variety - live long, and prosper. No, I do not give nutritional consultations.
Dieting, for the purpose of weight loss, is a different matter altogether. In this case, you are attempting to introduce a subtle change and imbalance in your life to cause a change. Unfortunately, people vary greatly, and there are no good hard and fast rules for this. I know people who remain trim and muscular on a diet rich in starchy carbohydrates; I, on the other hand, as an adult, will blow up like a balloon unless I cut those starches to a minimum.
This webpage is provided for educational and informational and debunking purposes only. It is not rendering medical advice or professional services and this information should not be used for diagnosing or treating a health problem, or a perceived health problem. The site author and the content providers make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied regarding anything said or understood.
TOC1. 2. 3.
Top of Page (TOC)
Email me, Bill Hammel at
COPYRIGHT NOTICE REGARDING ALL ORIGINAL WORK HEREIN:
© August 2005 by Bill Hammel (bhammel@graham.main.nc.us).
Permission to use for any noncommercial, educational purpose.
This copyright and permission notice must appear in all copies.
Permission is also granted to refer to or describe these
documents in commercial books, products, or online services.
These documents may be freely reproduced, copied and disseminated
by any electronic, digital or written means, but in no case may
such copying or dissemination be charged for. The idea is very
simple, no person or body has supported any of the original
works contained in this pages. They are works of love given
freely. I find repugnant the idea of someone expropriating,
for profit, what I give freely. If you have a problem with
this, ask; rules always have exceptions.