Healthy Andy

Recently, a friend asked me about an email she recieved concerning eating fruit on an empty stomach.  The information she’d been sent informed her that if she didn’t eat her fruit on an empty stomach, horrible things would happen and she would die, die, die.

For some reason, this rumor about eating fruit in this way became associated with Dr. Oz, the medical doctor who became famous on Oprah’s TV show.  I’m not really sure why this is, since Dr. Oz didn’t come up with this, and my bet is, he disagrees with this concept as much as I do.

Eating Fruit On An Empty Stomach- A Myth?

The idea behind this old wives’ tale is, if you eat fruit with other foods, it somehow sits in the stomach and “rots” there, causing all kinds of problems.  On the other hand, if you eat only fruit, well then, it slides through your belly like greased owl poop and directly into your bloodstream, leading to your becoming nearly superhuman in strength due to the vast amount of nutrients in your body.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.  Gastric emptying is the term used for the stomach releasing its contents into the small intestine (where most of the heavy-duty nutrient absorbtion occurs).  The rate of gastric emptying relies on a number of factors, mostly:

• how liquid the stomach contents are
• how nutrient dense the contents are
• how much volume of food is stretching out the stomach

Typically, even a solid meal is emptied out within a few hours, and no, mixing fruit in with other foods does NOT lead to putrefication.  While fruit does tend to break down more quickly all on its own (due to the high water content), if it’s mixed in with other food, it simply stirs into the liquid mix (called chyme).  It’s not chemically altered due to the presence of other foods.

Actually, for some people, mixing fruits with other foods is a good idea.  For example, diabetics or those with insulin resistance will react poorly to the rapid spike of sugar in their bloodstream from the quick digestion of a meal of only fruit, so mixing in some other sorts of foods with a lower glycemic index (that’s a measure of how sugary a food is) will actually slow down how quickly the sugar  is released into the body.

Don’t fall for this silly myth about eating fruit on an empty stomach.  It was made up out of thin air by some wacko trying to sell his “special” diet plan based on only eating certain foods in certain combinations.  There’s no evidence that he was remotely accurate. 

Here are some REAL guidelines on eating fruit:

• First off, actually eat fruit.  This sounds like a self-evident statement, but studies show Americans rarely eat fruit at all.  Fruits are packed with nutrients and antioxidants that keep your body working correctly, slow the aging process, and generally keep you alive.  So for God’s sake, actually eat some!
• Second, eat ACTUAL fruit, not fruit bars, fruit chews, fruit drink, or any other processed fabrication that pretends to be fruit.  Usually, what you get is a glorified piece of plastic painted pretty colors and stuffed full of artifical sweeteners.  In fact, a whisteblower organization recently found that the “fruit” in many cereal boxes was anything BUT actual fruit.
• Finally, drink fruit juice sparingly.  You’re far, far better off eating the entire fruit.  The whole fruit contains fiber, and there’s about a million studies showing that fiber helps keep you alive in many, many ways… too many to discuss here.  When you juice a fruit, you cheat yourself out of the fiber.  Another result of this is an increase in that glycemic index I mentioned earlier… without the fiber to slow the digestion of the fruit down, you end up dumping a lot of sugar into the bloodstream at once.  Read my article about insulin and weight gain to see why you don’t want that.

Keep things simple and natural, and you really can’t go wrong.  Don’t worry about silly little fads or tricks.  Stick to the basics.  A whole foods diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts, eggs, and lean meats will keep you alive and vital in the long term.

Stay healthy!

Concerned because you couldn’t get around to eating that Happy Meal you bought at lunch, and it’s almost four in the afternoon?  Don’t be.  It’s hasn’t started to go bad yet.

In fact, you can wait a little longer.  A LOT longer, to be more clear… like several MONTHS longer.

A disturbing series of pictures taken by a NYC artist shows a Happy Meal set out for months showing no significant signs of decay or rot… the hamburger patty and fries do shrink slightly, but that’s it.

You realize what this means?  Folks, even BACTERIA won’t eat this crap.

See for yourself at  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319562/McDonalds-Happy-Meal-bought-Sally-Davies-shows-sign-mould-6-months.html

Avoid the Deathless Happy Meals and stay healthy!

Remember that little egg recall thing a few weeks ago, about a couple of cartons of eggs being recalled for being just a little over-ripe?  And by “a couple of cartons”, I mean, HALF A BILLION eggs, and by “a little over-ripe”,  I mean “covered with salmonella”?  Yeah, the egg farmers are real real sorry ’bout that.

The piles of manure heaped so high that doors couldn’t be shut, the dead animals and flies lying around too numerous to count, the loose birds allowed to roam around and track feces all around the farm.  Yeah, whoops, said the egg farmers.  Gee, do we feel embarassed about that little mess.

During a hearing investigating this outbreak, the egg farmers tried to blame the rapid growth of their business on the unsanitary conditions.  Because hey, it’s easy to overlook innumerable rotting dead animals and massive piles of manure choking your farm when you’re making so much money you can make a tailored suit out of hundred dollar bills. 

I’m not really sure how that’s supposed to be a viable excuse.  “We got so big, so fast, that we let our food become contaminated”.  Really?  Greed is an acceptable excuse for illegal and dangerous behavior now? So if I rob a bank and shoot the whole town up doing it, when I get caught, I can just say, “Hey!  I really, really, REALLY wanted a lot of money.”

The bottom line is, this massive industrialization of farming is going to inevitably lead to violations like this being more and more common.  You just can’t stuff zillions of chicken in a little space and then be surprised when chicken poop is all over the place. 

Of course, this doesn’t let the companies off the hook- if you want to sell food, you have to do it safely.  I’m just saying that the bigger these “farms” get, the more likely that they won’t be able to keep up with sanitary or healthy conditions.

I put “farms” in quotes because these huge farms don’t look like what most of us think of as farms.  They look more like factories.

If you haven’t seen it, a great documentary on the subject is “Food, Inc.”, and I highly recommend you watch it.  It’s a real eye-opener into how food is actually produced in America.  You can check out their website here.

Stay healthy!

Source article: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/22/egg.recall.congress/index.html?eref=rss_health&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_health+%28RSS%3A+Health%29

Remember when everyone told you that eating fatty foods was going to give you high cholesterol?  Turns out, the story may be more complex than that.  Recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the higher your intake of sugar, the worse off your cholesterol levels are. 

This is actually a really interesting article on a couple of levels.  First off, let’s just talk about the cholesterol thing.

It’s kind of a big deal that somebody bothered to check this out, because as I mentioned before, for a long time the assumption was that eating foods high in cholesterol makes your blood cholesterol levels higher.  In this study, researchers questioned over 6,000 people on what they ate and then used that information to estimate sugar intake.

Blood samples were also drawn from all of the subjects, and the researchers found that with increasing sugar intake, the blood profiles got worse. Specifically, low sugar intake correlated with lower LDL (bad cholesterol) levels, lower triglycerides (this is also bad stuff) and higher HDL (good cholesterol).  So low sugar intake= better cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Interestingly (to me, at least) this correlation was strongest for HDL levels (again, that’s the good cholesterol).

There’s some potential confounding variables (big words for “a monkey wrench”) in this study.  For starters, if you’ve read any of my other posts concerning scientific studies, you know my stance on the dubious nature of self-report.  Simply put, PEOPLE LIE.  They fib about everything.  In fact, they even lie to themselves, when there’s nobody else looking!

Self-report is simply very, very unreliable.  Even if someone isn’t lying, they may over or underestimate whatever you’re asking them about.  So it would’ve been better to have these participants fill out a food diary as they actually ate throughout the course of a week (or whatever time frame you like).  That way you know they aren’t under or overestimating by trying to remember just what they ate last week. 

Try that out yourself, by the way.  Think back over what you ate last week.  I’ll bet you forget at least something.  Even harder would be to remember portion size.  So filling out a food diary would’ve been better (but logistically harder to do).  Of course, you still would have the problem of people lying on their self-report, but there isn’t much you can do about that, unless you’re planning on forming some sort of Food Self-Report Justice League (if you do, I’ll join if there’s a cool badge involved).

Anywho, the point is, self-report is a problem. But, considering the typical tendency of an individual is to UNDERestimate sugar intake… or really, underestimate any sort of unhealthy behavior (people hate to admit just how bad their diet is), then the problem of self-report isn’t as bad.  In fact, it may lead to the researchers underestimating just how important sugar intake is… in other words, the effect of sugar on cholesterol may be even GREATER than they measured. 

So, I’m willing to accept their findings as valid.  But there’s actually some more interesting facts that the researchers found out that I don’t think they planned on finding.

Namely, this: almost TWENTY PERCENT of the subjects were getting at least a quarter of their daily calories from sugar.  Not “carbohydrates”, SUGAR.  That’s almost 50 teaspoons of sugar a day.  Hang on.  Let me do some googling and calculating here.

Okay, I’m back. Fifty teaspoons of sugar translates to about eight ounces, or ONE FULL CUP of sugar!  EVERY DAY!

Gee, I wonder why we’re all so freakin’ fat?

One more reason to cut out the sugar, folks.  Start switching over to a whole foods diet and stay healthy!

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/20/added.sugar.lipids/

I love it when Science proves me right.  For years now, I’ve been hunting down and punching in the face anyone who stubbornly insisted on the outdated dogma that red meat is bad for you.

“No, no,” I’d explain, as my blows rained down upon them, “it isn’t red meat that’s the problem.  It’s PROCESSED meat that’s the problem.”

Now, a meta-analysis study published in the journal Circulation is backing me up.  A meta-analysis is where researchers take a whole big giant pile of other research papers and use that data to examine something.   In this case, they sifted through a ton of research studies on red meat and its effects on health and found something interesting.

They found that all these years, most researchers’ conclusions were falling prey to a confounding variable, which is a dirty little detail that throws everything off.  It works sort of like this.  If I see every Ford truck fall on the side of the road because their tires fell off, I might say hey… Fords aren’t so safe.  But, it could be that it’s the TIRES themselves that are the problem, not the entire vehicle.  So it could be that the Michelin Man didn’t do his job and the tires they made for Ford are defective, and Ford vehicles are just fine and dandy… it’s all Michelin’s fault instead.

DISCLAMER.  I think both Ford and Michelin are fine companies and that example shouldn’t be taken as any sort of attack on either company oh PLEASE don’t sue me angry corporate lawyers.

Okay, back to our discussion.  I think we see how a confounding variable works, right?  So the problem with the last few decades of research has been, when researchers found a link between “red meat” and health problems like diabetes or cardiovascular issues, they didn’t pay close enough attention to exactly what was going on.

You see, “red meat” is kind of a broad category.  You could lump steaks, hamburgers, beef hot dogs, and any and all other forms of red meat into this category.  And by just closing your eyes and accepting that broad category as being responsible for health problems, you miss the boat entirely.

What the researchers of this journal article found was that it wasn’t red meat but PROCESSED red meat that seemed to be the culprit behind all these health problems reported over the years. After all, most of the red meat consumed in this country is either highly processed, grain-fed, or eaten mixed in with all kinds of unhealthy crap.    Let’s look at each in turn so we can see where the confusion came from.

Processed Foods

I’ve ranted extensively about the problems with processed foods on many occasions.  To sum it up quickly, any sort of processing makes a normally healthy food into an unhealthy food… usually by adding salt, sugar, and various chemical additives that would downright terrify you if you knew what they did to you biochemically. 

So it isn’t that making beef into hot dog form is the problem, it’s the nitrates and salt  and MSG and other gunk they mix in there that causes all of the problems.

Grain-Fed Cattle

Next, by raising cattle in couped-up pens and stuffing them full of grains, you create an unhealthy animal that produces unhealthy meat.  Cattle are grazers by nature; they are evolutionarily designed to meander around, eating grasses of various kinds and occasionally going “moo”. 

Cattle that are fattened quickly and cheaply by grains become full of the inflammation-causing Omega-6 fatty acids (which I talk about a lot in articles like this).  So, when you eat them, YOU become full of those Omega-6s, and become prone to inflammation, which leads to the release of a hormone called cortisol that creates all kinds of health problems for you.

Here’s more of a discussion on grass-fed animals vs. corn-fed if you want to know more.

Unhealthy Junk On the Side

While a hamburger patty made with grass-fed beef isn’t so bad for you, the high-glycemic bun, the sugary ketchup, the french fries on the side soaked in trans fats and covered in salt and ketchup, and the insanely sweet soda full of high-fructose corn syrup definitely ARE all bad for you.

Barbeque sauce?  Tons of sugar and other chemicals like MSG.  Really, most of the stuff we stick on the side of eating a good old fashioned chunk of beef is just plain garbage.  So, if researchers see people eating steak covered in barbeque sauce getting fat, they might think “It’s that darn red meat again!  Curse its oily hide!” 

When, really, it’s the sugary barbeque sauce that is spiking insulin levels and leading people down the road to diabetes.  Barbeque sauces (or all the other junk food “sides”) are confounding variables.

Healthy Red Meat

So, how exactly DO you eat red meat and not die or get sick from it?  Easy.  Eat it in its most natural state.

Once again, I’ve ranted about a whole foods diet and how it’s the healthiest diet for you in the past.  Basically, the more you process or change a food, the more unhealthy it becomes. 

Cattle in their most natural state are grass-fed, free-range animals.  So start there by buying grass-fed meat.  Grass-fed meat has a balanced Essential Fatty Acid profile, meaning it has a healthy ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids.  So, your body won’t get inflammed by having too many Omega-6s, and you won’t have any ill health effects from chronic inflammation.

After that, don’t take that lovely grass-fed meat and start mixing it in with a bunch of junk.  If you stuff it in a sausage casing with a bunch of salt and chemicals, then gee, I guess you’ve made it unhealthy, haven’t you?  And if you cover it in sauces that are full of sugar or eat a bag of chips along with it, again, don’t blame the red meat if you get fat and sick.

To sum it all up, red meat is NOT bad for you.  Only when we start messing with it, do we turn it into something unhealthy.  So stick to a grass-fed steak… and stay healthy!

Source article reference:  Micha R, Wallace SK, et al.  Red and processed meat consumption and risk of incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis.  Circulation, June 2010;1;121 (21): 2271-83.

Maybe the title of this post should be about how SUGAR makes you fat, not insulin, but hey, we’re not looking to point fingers here.  I’m just looking to fill you in on the mechanism of insulin and weight gain, and how those high glycemic index carbs make you fat.

So the first thing that happens is, you eat a big ol’ pile of sugar.  Or bread, or whatever other carbs of choice you want to blame for that bulge in your belly.  Since refined carbohydrates have very little fiber, or filler material, that sugar very very rapidly gets digested and assimilated into your bloodstream.  Unrefined carbs, of course, have a much more muted effect, but with refined carbs you’re basically mainlining sugar.

The immediate effect of this is to dramatically spike the level of sugar circulating in your bloodstream.  As a consequence, your body then releases a massive surge of insulin, which is the hormone the body uses to clear sugar out of the bloodstream.  The more sugar in the blood, the more insulin gets released.

Here’s where we run into the first problem.  High levels of insulin signal the body to store and keep fat.  You’ve essentially just shouted at your stomach, STAY FAT, NO MATTER WHAT.  This holds true regardless of caloric intake.  In the presence of high levels of insulin, your body will not burn fat- instead, it will start to break down muscle and burn that instead. 

You may have encountered this already.  Ever starve yourself like crazy trying to lose weight, and nothing happens?  You were probably eating refined carbs of some sort (when you did eat), and therefore signalled your body to hang on to that fat for dear life.  You probably got sluggish and cranky, but not thin.

There’s more.  Insulin is an antagonist to Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and glucagon, another hormone.  What’s an antagonist?  What it sounds like… it essentially means that insulin blocks or inactivates HGH and glucagon.

So, why should you care?  Well, glucagon is a hormone that tells your body to burn off fat, so I bet you care about THAT.  And HGH not only tells your body to burn fat, it also tells the body to put on lean muscle mass (which increases metabolism and therefore burns off even more fat).

If it sounds like a double whammy, it is.  Insulin itself makes you store fat, and shuts down the hormones that tell you to burn if off.  Bummer, right?

I’m not finished.  Insulin also makes you hungry.  You see, as your blood sugar spikes, your body over-reacts and dumps tons of insulin into your system, which does its job and clears out all of the blood sugar.

As in, ALL of the blood sugar.  So after you spike your blood sugar up, it comes crashing back down.  This is why, after you binge on carbs, you get that sugar rush followed by a huge crash of energy… and a desire for more carbs.  As your blood sugar drops, your energy levels drop along with it.  And, as your body senses a dramatically low level of blood sugar, it gets desperate for exactly that… more sugar.

Kind of a mess, isn’t it?  Plus, refined carbs don’t have any of the fiber to tell your stomach to feel full, so you gobble down tons of the stuff and still feel like eating.  So, let’s sum up:

• You eat a ton of calories but don’t feel full.
• You spike your insulin levels and tell yourself to stay fat.
• You deactivate the hormones that tell your body to burn fat.
• You have a huge energy crash coupled with a fierce desire for more carbs.

Practically makes you think that sugar should be illegal, doesn’t it?  But remember, ANY refined carbohydrates are going to have this effect.  The higher the glycemic index (how sugary the food is), the worse the effect (i.e, the greater the insulin and greater the weight gain).  Quantity of carbs consumed is another obvious factor.

Is it any wonder why I tell people to avoid this stuff?  Refined carbs are practically poison, my friends. As an extra added bonus, there’s some research suggesting spiking insulin levels are a contributing factor to aging. Remember I said it deactivates HGH?  HGH is the hormone that keeps us young (just ask Sylvestor Stallone, he got caught going into Australia with about a million vials of the stuff).

Switch over to a whole foods diet, avoid the carbs, and stay thin and young.  It’s just that simple.

Pass this article along to your sugar-loving friends with the buttons below!

Stay healthy!

A couple of idiot researchers have come up with a fantastic suggestion to actually increase the amount of refined grain products in the diets of children.  Because we’re apparently not fat enough already.

Oh, they think they’re helping.  In fact, the suggestion is basically this:  let kids eat more snacks made with whole grain flour, because hey, it’s whole grain, so it has to be good for you, right?

Wrong.  Listen, folks, just because the food has buzzwords like “whole grain” or “organic” on it, doesn’t mean it’s automatically good for you.  I cringe whenever I hear somebody bragging about scarfing down a bag of cookies that they bought from Whole Foods, like that somehow changes the fact that they just sucked in enough sugar to choke their pancreas for a week.

“Whole grains” are only healthy to eat when you eat them like that… AS WHOLE GRAINS.  As in, oatmeal.  Wild rice.  That sort of thing.  Not if you pound it into flour, add a bunch of sugar, salt, sweeteners, and God only knows what other sorts of processing chemicals, and turn it into a “Whole Grain Snack”.  No, sorry.  A whole grain cracker is still just a cracker, and will still spike your insulin levels and make you fat.

Oh, sure, the fact that you used whole grain flour to make it might make it SLIGHTLY less horrible for you, but that’s like smoking low-tar cigarettes.  It’s still a bad idea.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  Any time you process a food, ANY TIME you process a food, you start to make it unhealthy.  The more processed or refined it is, the more unhealthy it is.  The nitwits who wrote this study are trying to make it sound like eating graham crackers- crackers full of sugar and made with hydrogenated vegetable oils- should actually count as a eating whole grains.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  I guess Grape Soda counts as eating fruit now, too.

If you’re looking for a guarenteed way to get fat and stay that way, start pretending that sugar-filled processed snacks are whole foods. I mean, jeesh, this was an old Bill Cosby comedy routine!  He used to joke about how he baked his kids chocolate cake for breakfast because it contained eggs, milk, and wheat, so it must be healthy!

Part of the problem is the outdated food pyramid and so many researchers’ stubborn refusal to open their eyes and realize that it isn’t working.  Some people simply do as they are told, believe what they are told, and refuse to look into the facts for themselves.  This is a real problem in research, obviously, but that really doesn’t stop it from happening.

If these researcher had stopped to think for a microsecond, perhaps they would realize that a focus on getting anything at all with the words “whole grain” involved into your body might not work out as planned.  However, here’s what happens.  Somebody declares “We need to find a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!” and the solution doesn’t need to make sense so long as the words “Kids eating more whole grains” is somehow involved.

HEY!  I’ve got an idea!  Here’s a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!  Make waffles out of whole grains, and drench them in maple syrup!  Thin City, here we come!  Then we’ll soak spinach in sugar water, and put chocolate sprinkles on carrots… I AM A GENIUS.  I have single-handedly just solved our nation’s obesity epidemic.  Just turn everything into a sugar-covered snack, and it will all work out just fine.

Or, we’ll all explode into fatness even faster than we are now.

And parents, I know kids love snacks.  Of course they do.  Everybody does. They’re tasty.  But pretending a sugary snack is somehow good for you, because some microscopic portion of it is made of something that used to be healthy, isn’t helping.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.  The laws of physiology don’t care if you really, really, REALLY want to believe that eating a graham cracker is the same as eating a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.

The only way to lose the weight (diet-wise) is to cut out the processed foods, especially those with sugar or sweeteners added, and stick with a whole foods, unprocessed diet.  There’s no real way around it.  So instead of lying to yourself and getting frustrated with not getting any results, simply focus on changing your habits to match up with what works in reality.

In the meantime, I’m going to buy these moronic researchers a bicycle and tell them to pretend it’s a rocket ship.  So they can go straight to the Moon and stop making such stupid claims.

Stay healthy!

Source: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/07/23/Sneaking-in-whole-grains-via-snacks/UPI-82061279937609/

Celiac disease is a condition affecting the intestines, generally consisting of an inflammatory response to the protein called gluten in wheat, rye, or barley.  Often misdiagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome, the disease is mostly managed through diet- namely, avoiding gluten, as you might expect.

For a good fifty-plus years, we’ve known about the link between gluten and celiac disease, but recently, some researchers have pinpointed the actual specific components of gluten that trigger the inflammation behind all of the nasty symptoms of celiac disease.  What that means is,  the entire molecule of gluten isn’t what causes the allergic-type reaction, but some little pieces of it.

Out of thousands of peptides, or little itty bitty fragments of gluten protein, less than one hundred are involved in producing the celiac response, and really only three of those do most of the damage.

Why is this important?  Well, now that those three specific pieces have been identified, it’s theoretically possible to create a therapy around those peptides.  Think of it almost like immunization, but with these little pieces of gluten.  You expose someone to tiny amounts of these three peptides, with the hope that the body will get used to them and no longer create a hyperactive response when gluten is consumed.

Of course, the simple way to deal with celiac is still simply avoiding gluten, and since a healthy, whole foods diet doesn’t contain any of that stuff, you don’t have to wait for Science to get around to creating this fancy approach to dealing with celiac disease.  Don’t forget, refining grains like wheat, rye, and barley can create all kinds of other problems for you, including diabetes and obesity. 

It may not be easy to get off of the grains (especially the refined ones), but really, it’s the best path overall for your health, whether you have celiac disease or not.  All the same, anything that can help relieve the suffering of this condition is certainly a welcome addition to the healthcare toolkit.

Would you rather be immunized for gluten, and run the risk of diabetes, obesity, and other health problems once you start eating bread and cake and pasta again, or would you rather train yourself to stay off of grains altogether?  Let me know in the comment section below!

Source:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10713775

Earlier today, I posted a huge win for Science with a gel that fixes cavities.  Well, Science just crapped the bed, because now we’ve got this:  the first genetically modified (GM) animal is about to be released onto the market for human consumption.

Oh, great.  Because we haven’t screwed up our food supply enough with pesticides, herbicides, or high fructose corn syrup.  It wasn’t enough that we started genetically modifying corn.  No, now we’re going to take the next step toward complete stupidity and start eating Frankenfish.

What’s the modification?  They’re taking salmon and inserting  DNA from some sort of eel so it will grow faster in a fish farm.  Farmed fish is already unhealthy, for the same reason penned-up livestock isn’t as healthy as grass-fed beef or chicken, but this is really taking it to another level of unhealthy… and un-natural.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been genetically modifying animals for centuries… through breeding.  But that uses the natural processes of genetic selection, not some cut-and-paste laboratory procedure where we’re combining DNA of animals that don’t breed.  Now we’re adding together bits of DNA that  never evolved to be together, and doing it in a way that Nature never allowed for during the evolutionary process.

What could possibly go wrong?

Here’s a basic rule of thumb to hold on to.  The more modified, refined, or otherwise un-natural a food is, the worse it is for you.  The further from Nature you get, the more opportunity you have for some weird, unforseen side effect.  So stick to whole foods, and eat as wild as possible (in a sense of getting closer to Nature, not with reckless abandon).

Avoid Frankenfish and stay healthy!

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7857310/Giant-salmon-will-be-first-GM-animal-available-for-eating.html

Right, so last week was Antioxidant Week… this week, let’s roll with a little Omega-3 information.

I guess I’m giving away the answer to the title with that intro, but hey, this isn’t a mystery novel, it’s a health information site, so that’s okay.

Meat… especially red meat… gets a bad rep, and it really shouldn’t.  Now, if you’re a vegan who does what they do for ethical reasons, that’s cool.  I personally do not subscribe to those beliefs but I do respect them. 

I’m talking about the health reputation of meat.  For a while there, everybody seemed like they wanted to punch red meat in the face, metaphorically speaking, of course.  Fish and chicken, well, that was okay, but red meat… red meat was a dirty SOB who deserved a horrible death.

Well, all that was just plain wrong.  In fact, chicken and fish can be worse for you than red meat.  YES.  You read that right.  There’s probably a lot of out-dated nutritionists pooping in their pants right about now after reading that, and I don’t care.  By the time I’m done with this article, you’ll see why I can make that statement and feel 100% confident about it.

To explain why, first we need to understand WHY red meat was thrown out of the house and sent to die in the woods.  In a word:  fat.  In a couple of words:  The People Who Hate Fat Movement.

Not too long ago, everybody was convinced that a low-fat diet was the way to go.  It made intuitive sense:  if you didn’t want to BE fat, why would you EAT fat?  Surely, the fat on your dinner plate, just transmorphed into fat on your butt.

Red meat tends to have more fat in it than chicken or fish, so, the reasoning went, red meat is bad and will break into your house and steal your TV. 

Plus, there were some studies showing that people who ate red meat tended to keel over and die faster than other people.  So even more reason to hate red meat, right?

WRONG!

The problem is, this reasoning is flawed on several levels.  Let’s start with the first wrong assumption:  that fat is bad.

It’s not.  Fat is actually a vital nutrient our body desperately requires.  It does things like make up cell membranes and build nerves (your brain is included in that, since it’s a big ol’ bundle of nerves) and form the basis for hormones. In particular, there are fats called Essential Fatty Acids (fatty acid is just a fancy word for fat) that are, as the name implies, essential. 

Essential, meaning, you have to eat them, because your body can’t make them by itself.  The main EFAs are called Omega-3 and Omega-6.  You should have a balance between the two, but most of us don’t.  Most of the USA has around a 30:1 ratio in favor of Omega-6, which causes all kinds of health problems (which I don’t have space to go into here, but I talk about it in other posts).  The short version is, a diet high in Omega-6 makes you die young.

Red meat can be a big part of the culprit with that skewed ratio.  Notice I used the words “can be”.  That’s the key.

How’s red meat involved?  Well, because cattle aren’t raised the way they were meant to live.  Namely, they’re not allowed to walk around and eat grass like they’ve done over the course of a couple hundred thousand years’ worth of evolution.  No, instead, we pen them up into tiny spaces and stuff them full of corn, which makes them get big and fat faster (which makes them more profitable).

Corn, by the way, is pretty high in Omega-6 fatty acids.  Not so much that eating a cob of corn is a problem, but when you’re stuffing livestock full of corn almost exclusively, guess what?  All that Omega-6 goes into the cow.

Grass, on the other hand, is high in Omega-3.  Some of you are anticipating where I’m headed with this.  Since we all know “you are what you eat”, if a cow eats mostly food that’s high in Omega-6, what’s it mostly full of?  Yep.  Omega-6.  What sort of fat will be dominant in a corn-fed steak?  Omega-6.

On the other hand, if you have a cow eating mostly food high in Omega-3, what’s it mostly full of?  Omega-3, right. And, of course, a grass-fed steak will be high in Omega-3 compared to Omega-6. 

So, the problem isn’t red meat.  The problem is, how’s the red meat being made?  The fat content is not the issue… the fat QUALITY is the issue. 

Therefore, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with red meat, just because it has fat in it.  So long as the fat quality is good, the meat is healthy.  This also goes for other animal food products, like milk and eggs.  Whatever is in the feed that the livestock is consuming, determines how healthy the food coming from the livestock will be.

Notice I included eggs in that last paragraph.  Remember I said red meat can be healthier than chicken or fish?  Here’s the part where I explain that.

Chicken and fish aren’t magical creatures that automatically get to be healthy for you just because they’re ugly.  Like any other animal, what they eat determines how healthy they are. 

Chickens are also designed to be free-roaming creatures that eat wild grasses and bugs and all sort of stuff.  Guess what most livestock chickens do?  Live in a tiny cage and eat Omega-6 filled corn.  Guess what they’re mostly made of?  If you didn’t say Omega-6, you’ve deeply hurt my feelings.  Guess what a corn-chomping hen’s eggs are mostly filled with?  Omega-6.

Conversely, free-range, grass-fed chickens are chock full of Omega-3s and so are their eggs.  The same principle even applies to fish!  The bottom of the fish food chain is algae, which is like the Big Momma Gold Mine of Omega-3.  So fish eating algae are full of Omega-3, and fish that eat fish full of Omega-3 are also full of Omega-3 and so on and so forth.  This is why fish oils from wild-caught fish are so high in Omega-3s that they form the basis for Omega-3 supplements.

However, some fish is now grown in fish “farms”, pools of water where the fish are corralled and fed a crappy diet.  Which, as you know now, means they become crappy to eat.

So nobody gets a pass just because their name is “beef” or “chicken” or “fish”.  It’s all about how you were raised, and what you were fed while you were being raised.  Remember, quality of fat is more important than quantity of fat.  Animals raised in as close to a natural, wild state as possible, will have the healthiest meat, eggs, and milk.

This is why wild game is a fantastic food source.  By definition, those little buggers are out there running around, feeding on wild grasses, berries, each other, whatever they normally would eat in a natural state.  And, therefore, their bodies are composed of a healthy mix of essential fats (amongst other things, of course, like protein).

So now you know why I get excited when I find another place carrying grass-fed eggs or beef or chicken.  It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s a bazillion times healthier.  What’s your body worth to you?

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Stay healthy!