If we keep doing farm work on the weekends, I’ll probably end up in great shape.

I mentioned in a previous post that Chareva hasn’t been working out at the gym, but hasn’t needed to because she’s been laboring around the farm all week.  I usually head to the gym on Sunday, which wasn’t an option this weekend because it was closed for Easter, but I certainly got in a good workout nonetheless.  As I sit here writing, my hands are forearms are sore.

When we first moved here, the pastures were all surrounded with old, rusty barbed wire.  Besides being an eyesore, the barbed wire was a tetanus shot waiting to happen, especially with two rambunctious girls who don’t always see the need to keep an eye on what’s in front of them when they’re running.  Some weeks ago, we paid a guy to come out and knock most of it down with a backhoe.  Unfortunately, he left several piles of tangled barbed wire and t-posts behind.  He also knocked down some dead trees along the driveway and left much of the wreckage from those behind as well.  (I’m not complaining, mind you — he didn’t charge much, and it was a relief to be able to cross our driveway without climbing over two barbed-wire fences.)

Chareva has been adding to her garden in the front pasture – pumpkins and watermelons, among other future treats – and we needed to add more fencing around the newly-planted beds or risk having her efforts end up feeding the local deer instead of us.  Since we’re trying to re-purpose as much existing material as possible, the obvious solution was to free the t-posts from the tangled piles of barbed wire and use those for an expanded garden fence.

So we spent a good chunk of Saturday working with a pair of bolt-cutters.  One of us would pull on a t-post, and the other would start snipping away at the barbed wire until we could extract it from the mess.  Some of the posts were too bent to be useful, but we still ended up with a good supply.  Then we turned our attention to the piles of tangled wire, with one of us carefully unraveling it while the other cut it into sections small enough to stuff into a garbage can.  (We’ve filled four of them so far, and we’re not done yet.)  Then we hauled the t-posts to the garden area.

We also had to move a knocked-down gate post with a base encased in concrete to a junk pile we’ll have hauled away later.  I tried dead-lifting it, but there was dirt packed around the concrete, so I lost my grip a couple of times.  The good news is that I didn’t drop the concrete base on my foot.  The bad news is that the post bounced up and smacked Chareva in the ribs as she was trying to help me steady the thing.  (She’s fine, but she got me back on Sunday by yanking a sharp tree branch into my legs.  Never mess with a farm woman.)  We ended up having to roll the post to the junk pile, which involved  some serious huffing and puffing since it wasn’t exactly shaped like a wheel.

I was pretty well wiped out afterwards, but recovered enough to play 36 holes of frisbee golf before dinner.  I’m proud to say I don’t suck as much at the game as I did just a couple of months ago, largely because Sara convinced me to switch to her grip.  (To quote her directly:  “Daddy, it’s getting boring beating you all the time.”)

On Sunday, we took on more heavy tasks.  First we hauled some rather large tree branches across one pasture to what’s called “the burn pile.”  Okay, I admit it:  I’d never heard of a burn pile before.  In case you haven’t either, it’s a pile of junk you can legally burn, providing the stuff in the pile can actually be burned and you get a permit from the fire department.  I believe we could probably roast around 200,000 marshmallows over our burn pile once it’s ignited.

Next I yanked some big bushes I don’t want (because they’re ugly and full of thorns) out by the roots, which involved pumping with my legs hard enough to negate any need for doing a set of leg presses at the gym.  Those went on the burn pile too.

Finally, I pounded a dozen or so t-posts into the ground to expand the fence around the garden.  We wanted to put the posts in neat lines, but the terrain had other ideas.  There’s a reason Tennessee’s theme song is Rocky Top: there are rocks and rock shelves under the soil everywhere, usually directly beneath the spot where I intend to pound in a t-post.

I discovered the rock issue awhile back while installing the baskets for my frisbee golf course.  To keep the baskets anchored, I pounded in some garden stakes over and around the bases.  Some of the baskets ended up several feet away from my planned locations because the garden stakes collided with stones or rock shelves a few inches down.  I’d be hammering away, and the sound would go from whack-whack-whack to ping! ping! ping! when I hit solid rock.

Same thing happened on Sunday with the t-posts.  Chareva would get me lined up with the other posts, I’d start pounding with the (really heavy) t-post hammer, and then ping! ping! ping! … I’d hit a big ol’ rock a few inches down.  Move the post a few inches …whack-whack-whack  … ping! ping! ping! … move it again …whack-whack-whack  … ping! ping! ping! … remove it and repeat the process until I managed to sink it.  Our fence won’t run in nice straight lines, but I don’t believe the deer will be any less dissuaded from eating our garden.

By the time were done, my arms and shoulders were spent.  Yeah, I lift weights every week at the gym, but this is whole ‘nuther type of exertion.  This weekend gave me the most thorough workout I’ve had in quite awhile.  I slept like a baby afterwards.

Speaking of babies, someone left a comment asking for more puppy pictures.  They don’t look so much like puppies anymore.  Below is a picture of Sara with Coco, one of the puppies, when we first got them five weeks ago.  The next picture is of Sara and Coco today.  Look how much Coco has grown in size relative to Sara.

I think that raw-meat diet agrees with them.

I didn’t know there was a generation called the Echo Boom, but apparently that’s the term for Americans born between 1982 and 1995 — and there are a LOT of them, thus the “boom” label.

A  blogger named Tim Smith writes about Echo Boomer issues on his Echo Boom Bomb blog, and he recently interviewed me about Fat Head.  You can read the interview here.

I finally dumped our Google reserved spots after readers alerted me that ads for lap-band surgery were appearing in one of them.

That’s the problem with Google’s ad-placement software:  if I write about the horrors of bariatric surgery, we get ads for bariatric surgery showing up.  If I write about the damage caused by high-fructose corn syrup, those annoying “Sweet Surprise” ads show up.  If I write a post explaining why the hypothesis that high cholesterol causes heart disease is bogus, the Google spots will display ads for Foods That Lower Your Cholesterol!

I kept hoping someone or some piece of intelligent software at Google would recognize that I often write about products and services I urge people to avoid and adjust the ads accordingly.  Apparently that will never happen.

I’ve turned down advertisers who wanted to buy space to promote products I don’t buy and wouldn’t recommend — low-carb junk foods and suchlike — so if Google is going to keep placing ads for products and services I would never intentionally promote, it’s time to live without their monthly checks.

The items I do actively promote here — DVDs and the tee-shirt we produced ourselves — are selling quite briskly, so thank you all very much for the ongoing support.  Every time we sit down to fill a slew of new orders, we feel blessed.

Just when I think the medical profession can’t sink any lower, it digs a trench a climbs in.

My previous post was about a new study claiming that surgery reverses diabetes more effectively than diet and drugs – the only problem, of course, was that the diet was the American Diabetes Association’s high-carbohydrate diet.  The study was set up to produce a better outcome for surgery.  That’s sinking pretty low.

Now here’s the new low:  Researchers are giving a diabetes drug to pregnant women, essentially drugging their unborn babies, in an attempt to prevent the babies from becoming obese.  Here are some quotes from an article in the U.K. Daily Mail:

In a world first, dangerously overweight mothers-to-be in four British cities have started taking a diabetes drug during their pregnancy. The doctors behind the controversial NHS trial say that obesity among pregnant women is reaching epidemic proportions and they need to act now to protect the health of tomorrow’s children.

Yes, they do need to act now.  They could start by telling pregnant women that the Eat Well Plate (the UK’s version of our USDA Food Plate) is a crock of @#$%.  Here’s what the official Eat Well site recommends:

• Plenty of fruit and vegetables
• Plenty of potatoes, bread, rice, pasta and other starchy foods
• Some milk and dairy foods
• Some meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein
• Just a small amount of foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar

So you’re an obese, insulin-resistant British mom-to-be, and you follow the Eat Well guidelines by eating plenty of fruit, plenty of starchy foods, and just a bit of meat and dairy.  Great.  You just sent your blood sugar through the roof.

I swear, every time I see these government goofballs put fat and sugar into the same category, I want to kidnap two of them, stuff a pound of sugar down one’s throat and a pound of lard down the other’s, then have them compare notes on the effects.  They might notice a slight difference.

However, there is likely to be unease about resorting to medication in pregnancy for a problem that can be treated through changes in diet and exercise.

Yes, this problem can be treated through changes in diet.  But not if the diet consists of plenty of fruit and plenty of potatoes, bread, rice, pasta and other starchy foods.

If the strategy is a success, the treatment could be in widespread use in as little as five years, with tens of thousands of overweight but otherwise healthy mothers-to-be drugged each year.

This will be a boon not just for the pharmaceutical industry, but for the paper industry as well.  Doctors will be going through prescription pads like crazy.

The Daily Mail recently revealed the rise of the ‘sumo baby’, with the number of newborns weighing more than 11lb soaring by 50 per cent over the last four years.

Remember the days when a big baby was considered a healthy baby?  Not anymore.  Now more and more babies are big because they’ve already been biochemically programmed to become obese.

The trial involves 400 pregnant women in Liverpool, Coventry, Sheffield and Edinburgh. They have started taking metformin, which has been safely used by diabetics for decades and is cleared for the treatment of diabetes in pregnancy. It costs just pence per tablet.

Okay, maybe not a huge boon to the pharmaceutical industry.  But tens of thousands of prescriptions will still add up to a tidy profit.

The study aims to exploit the ability of metformin to lower levels of the hormone insulin in the bloodstream. Obese women make more insulin than other mothers-to-be and this leads to a greater nutrition supply reaching the baby. It is hoped that lowering levels of insulin will reduce the supply and so cut the odds of babies being born obese.

What, they’re blaming high levels of insulin?  No, no, no .. insulin has nothing to do with becoming obese.  Just ask all those people who are calling Gary Taubes an idiot on their blogs.  The problem here is food reward.  The moms are eating too much palatable food, so their babies are sitting there in the womb thinking, “Dang, that’s good stuff!  Salty, sweet, fatty … delicious!  I’m going to open the spigot on my feeding tube and have another couple of servings!”

Study leader Professor Jane Norman of Edinburgh University said: ‘One of the challenges is that many women feel perfectly healthy but there is very good evidence that women who are obese have an increased risk of pregnancy problems and their babies are at risk, and we’d like to reduce that risk.’

Addressing concerns about unborn babies being medicated for a problem that many would say could be treated by diet and exercise, she said: ‘I absolutely support the improvement of diet and encouraging exercise. ‘But we are increasingly faced with women who start their pregnancy obese. Saying at that stage to eat less and exercise more is not particularly helpful.’

No, we shouldn’t be telling pregnant women to eat less.  We should be telling them to eat differently.  We should be telling them to adopt a diet that doesn’t pump their unborn babies full of insulin.  Giving pregnant women a drug to beat down their glucose and insulin levels when switching to a low-carb, high-fat diet will accomplish the same goal is just nuts.

p.s. — I apologize for going all day without checking comments.  I was juggling projects and just now got around to it.

One of the times I interviewed Dr. Mike Eades for Fat Head, he told me (after we were done shooting) that the usual treatment pattern for type 2 diabetes and other diet-related ailments goes something like this:

• Doctor puts patient on a low-fat diet
• Patient’s condition doesn’t get any better or gets even worse
• Doctor declares that diet won’t fix the problem and prescribes a drug

I’m afraid we’ll soon be seeing more and more of an alternate version of that treatment pattern:

• Doctor puts patient on a low-fat diet
• Patient’s condition doesn’t get any better or gets even worse
• Doctor declares that diet won’t fix the problem and recommends surgery

There were some dramatic headlines this week about a new study showing that weight-loss surgery works even better than diet or drugs (wow!) for reversing type 2 diabetes. Here are some quotes from a news story in the New York Times:

Two studies have found that weight-loss operations worked much better than the standard therapies for Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control. Those who had surgery, which stapled the stomach and rerouted the small intestine, were much more likely to have a complete remission of diabetes, or to need less medicine, than people who were given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise.

Hmm, I wonder what the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise would be? We’ll come back to that.

The new studies, published on Monday by The New England Journal of Medicine, are the first to rigorously compare medical treatment with these particular stomach and intestinal operations as ways to control diabetes. Doctors had been noticing for years that weight-loss operations, also called bariatric surgery, could sometimes get rid of Type 2 diabetes. But they had no hard data.

Experts say better treatments are desperately needed for the disease.

“Type 2 diabetes is one of the fastest growing epidemics in human history,” according to an editorial published with the two studies.

Yes indeed, rates of type 2 diabetes have been skyrocketing in the past few decades. Now … what’s changed in the population since, say, 1980? Have we been suffering from a shortage of bariatric surgery, whereas our grandparents all had their stomachs stapled as part of their high-school graduation ceremonies? I don’t think so.

One of the studies, conducted at the Catholic University in Rome, compared two types of surgery with usual medical treatment. After two years, the surgical groups had complete remission rates of 75 percent and 95 percent; there were no remissions in patients who received medical treatment.

The second study, at the Cleveland Clinic, compared two types of surgery with an intensive medical regimen. The remission rates one year after surgery were lower than in the Italian study — 42 percent and 37 percent — at least in part because the American study used a stricter definition of remission.

Sounds as if those Italians need to tighten up their definitions a bit. Otherwise we’ll have diabetics moving to Italy so they can become non-diabetics. The Italian Tourism Board may even start a new campaign.

Come to Italy! The scenery is a-lovely, the people are a-nice, and your fasting glucose will-a drop by 30 points!

I looked up the study conducted in the U.S. to see what “typical” regimen produced such lousy results compared to hacking up the digestive system. Can’t say I was surprised:

All patients received intensive medical therapy, as defined by American Diabetes Association (ADA) guidelines, including lifestyle counseling, weight management, frequent home glucose monitoring, and the use of newer drug therapies (e.g., incretin analogues) approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Fabulous. The non-surgical patients were told to follow the ADA guidelines … you know, the guidelines that explain how carbohydrates drive up your blood sugar and therefore you should base your diet on them. Talk about rigging the game in your favor. That’s like spiking one team’s Gatorade with vodka before the Super Bowl.

Tom Brady is having a rough day out there. He’s been sacked six times, he’s been knocked down three times, and he’s fallen down 22 times for no apparent reason. I guess the Giants are just a better team, folks.

Every 3 months for the first 12 months, patients returned for study visits with a diabetes specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. Patients were counseled by a diabetes educator and evaluated for bariatric surgery by a psychologist and encouraged to participate in the Weight Watchers program.

Double fabulous. The patients were counseled by a diabetes educator. Here’s all you need to know about that: Hope Warshaw is a diabetes educator.

Then they were encouraged to follow the Weight Watchers diet – another low-fat diet. The researchers not only spiked the opposing team’s Gatorade with vodka, they added a few sleeping pills as well.

Folks, Brady just went down again despite not being touched, and I don’t think he’s getting up. This Giants defense is on fire today!

So we had one group of patients who were encouraged to follow a low-fat, high-carb diet and another group of patients who underwent surgery and – surprise! – the surgery group had higher rates of remission. Boy, mangling the digestive system Mother Nature gave us must perform some biological miracles.

It’s been nearly three years since I wrote about gastric bypass and lap-band surgery, so here’s a review of what patients are told to eat afterwards:

The second phase of the Lap-Band diet consists of 5 to 6 weeks of a modified full liquid diet; the key component of this phase is consuming two ounces of a protein shake every hour for ten to twelve hours a day with two ounces of other liquids such as soup, baby food, or sugar-free gelatin three times a day.

During the second six weeks following Lap-Band surgery patients may eat food that is shredded in a food processor prior to eating. The basic foods on the Lap-Band diet include meats or other forms of protein, vegetables, and salads.

After Lap-Band surgery the stomach will never hold more than 4 to 6 ounces per meal, so making every bite count is essential for healthy and nutritionally rounded weight loss success. Protein is especially important following Lap-Band surgery. The Lap-Band diet does not include most bread, potatoes and other starchy vegetables.

Surgeons reduce your stomach to an itty-bitty pouch, so you’re encouraged to base your itty-bitty meals on protein foods and vegetables while skipping the bread, potatoes and other starchy vegetables. In other words, it’s a low-carb diet … the itty-bitty version. Even if you ignored the advice and wanted to eat a big bowl of Kellogg’s Krave, you couldn’t. The itty-bitty pouch wouldn’t hold more than few ounces.

So we’re supposed to be impressed that people who undergo surgery and are limited afterwards to a few ounces of protein and vegetables end up reversing diabetes? Based on this rigged result, we’re perhaps going to start treating more diabetics with surgery – without first comparing surgery to a simple low-carb diet? What kind of doctors would promote that idea? Perhaps we should look at the disclosures in this (ahem) study:

Dr. Schauer reports receiving payment for board membership from Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Surgiquest, Barosense, RemedyMD, and Stryker, consulting fees from Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Stryker, Gore, and Carefusion, payment for expert testimony from Physicians Review of Surgery, and lecture fees from Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Allergan, Cinemed, and Quadrant Healthcare, holding a patent for a medical device to enhance weight loss in codevelopment with the Cleveland Clinic, royalties from Springer, having an equity interest in Intuitive Surgical, Barosense, Surgiquest, and RemedyMD, and receiving institutional grant support (to the Cleveland Clinic) from Ethicon Endo-Surgery and Bard Davol; Dr. Kashyap, receiving consulting fees from Ethicon; Dr. Brethauer, receiving consulting fees, lecture fees, and payment for board membership from Ethicon Endo-Surgery and lecture fees from Covidien; Dr. Kirwan, receiving grant support from Nestle and ScottCare.

Ah, I see. The study was conducted by a bunch of doctors who are paid by firms in the weight-loss surgery industry.

No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

Oh, that’s okay. I think the conflicts already reported were quite enough.

Some of you may have heard Jimmy Moore’s interview with Dr. Mary Newport, who halted and partially reversed her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease by feeding him coconut oil.  My mom just sent me a newsclip that gives a brief version of the same story:

We tried giving coconut oil to my dad, but he was too far gone.  If only I’d known 10 years ago what  I know now, Dad and I might still be enjoying playing golf together.

Ketones have been shown to help with Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and other brain issues … yet your average nutritionist will still tell people to avoid ketogenic diets in general and coconut oil specifically.   Too much saturated fat, doncha know.  Eat your grains and cook with canola oil.

That’s why the average nutritionist is a menace.