Lipoprotein Lipase.

Speaking personally I found it almost impossible to exercise (i.e. jogging 45mins 4 times per week) when I was 20kgs over weight.

After three months of Taube/Atkins inspired eating I had lost the excess, found exercise much easier and more enjoyable so I did more creating a virtuous circle. Loosing weight enables you to exercise not the other way around.

I think exercise is useful for keeping the weight off. It enables you to cheat more diet wise and get away with it and it releases various feel good chemicals into your body which acts a mild anti-depressant.

I believe you’ve got the relationship right; when your diet allows your body to burn fat, you feel more like using that fuel. The one area where exercise seems to really help is in up-regulating insulin sensitivity, which helps keep your overall insulin level lower. Hard work — weights, cross-training, etc. — appears to be better for insulin levels than aerobics.

I saw his little cohort of meds. A statin, an anti-reflux drug and he might have been on a diabetes med too but I’m not sure. I have no idea what his doc told him to do as far as lifestyle changes but I’m pretty sure it was some variation of “eat less fat and calories, eat more fruits and veggies and fiber.” Dad interpreted this as “an orange with breakfast, an anemic-looking salad or tomato with dinner and I ain’t giving up my Evangeline Maid bread, thankyouverymuch.” He told me later he’d “gotten better.” Yeah right, dad. He always hated doctors.

Well, late last year he informed me he’d been in the hospital April 2008 with major blood loss. It had taken a while to sneak up on him; they caught it on an annual exam. I did a Google search for “diabetes anemia” and guess what? He may be in the early stages of kidney damage.

I try to tell him about this stuff. Useless. He vaguely understands kidneys have something to do with going pee. He knows next to zero about how diabetes works. This is not an unintelligent man. He joined the Navy in 1970, retired in 1992 and managed to attain Senior Chief rank along the way. He just never saw any reason to learn about the human body, just as I never saw any reason to learn calculus–or join the Navy.

I doubt my father will live to see seventy. I hope I’m wrong.

Meanwhile after all my reading I’m coming to believe I got a bad start in the first place because my mother has always eaten like crap. If you look at me head-on, the midline of my face is crooked. Always has been even before the orthodontia and the headgear. I found Weston A. Price’s book on a website last night and compared the photos of people on traditional diets versus people on industrial diets and considered that when I was a small child my sprouting permanent teeth were so crooked and my jaw so misaligned that I often got in trouble for eating my meals too slowly. My lower jaw is still underdeveloped. It’s a mess. I look around and every other person I see has a narrow, pinched-looking face, some with bad teeth and some who had to have had braces growing up. (And some who have them now, as adults!) I think that even if we get this obesity thing sorted, our next big crisis is going to be, as Dr. Price put it, the physical degeneration of entire generations of American and other post-industrial children.

My daughter was born with reflux in both ureters, an underdeveloped right kidney and a propensity for tooth decay that cost her her upper front baby teeth (they’re all capped now and she’s lost one at age four). Her brother suffers from a central auditory processing deficit and obesity. I won’t be having any more kids. It isn’t fair to them.

Sorry your dad (and you) have had such a rough time of it. That’s what all this nutritional nonsense is doing to people. I needed braces and so did my wife, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with our daughters. They like their meat and eggs and nuts, and while we give them bread if they ask for it, they rarely do.

I suppose ‘philosopher’s stone’ has always been used in the literature as something that, on the surface, is brilliant and wonderful and 6 shades of awesome but always brings out the worst in human nature and outcomes (Midas etc.).

Interestingly enough, Azoth was a term for a universal medicine in alchemy, and is also the word for nitrogen in Slavic. This is coincidental however…

From a dietary standpoint, we couldn’t have done much worse.

With regard to food subsidies, have you watched the documentary “King Corn”?

http://kingcorn.net/

It explores exactly that — public policy and food subsidies. Most importantly, without gratuitous “gotcha”-s and embarrassment of its subjects. In this case, the Iowa corn farmers, who know they are producing, well, crap.

I recommend throwing it in the Netflix queue and watching it.

It’s on my to-do list. I noticed it’s available for instant viewing on NetFlix, so I’ll catch it one of these nights. Thanks for the reminder.

I don’t blame the farmers. I blame the politicians who buy their votes with my money.

Rants happily accepted. The drive to push statins on everyone is insane. Pushing statins on elderly women is worse than useless; it’s probably harmful. Your body makes cholesterol for all kinds of reasons, one of which appears to be protection against cancer.

I feel that this is the biggest problem. Even if the government read GCBC and believed every word (and hey, maybe they did and do!), it would be incredibly difficult to go back on the current dietary recommendations, not because they’d be admitting they were wrong (though I’m sure that’s part of it, too), but because they’d never be willing to give up the money they receive from agriculture lobbyists.

In that sense, I feel that a huge part of the solution is to get rid of the subsidies in the first place… isn’t corn and soy so prevalent in our food as fillers and additives because it’s so cheap due to those subsidies? But I know the chances of that happening is also next to none for the aforementioned reason.

And what’s really annoying is that that farm subsidies were supposed to be a “temporary” form of assistance during the Depression. There’s nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.