You’ve got to give the anti-meat hysterics credit for their creativity. Since they can’t prove directly that eating meat will kill you, they’ve become quite adept at stringing unrelated results together into what (almost) looks like a chain of causality.

As I explained in my Big Fat Fiasco speech, this technique is referred to as teleoanalysis. In a nutshell, it works like this: we can’t prove that A causes C, but if we can find evidence that A is linked to B and B is linked to C, we’ll go ahead and declare that A causes C.

Teleoanalysis is partly what has kept the Lipid Hypothesis alive. Studies have failed over and over to prove that a high-fat diet causes heart disease – and in fact, low-fat diets have failed to reduce heart disease in clinical trials over and over. So the anti-fat hysterics trotted out a version of teleoanalysis that looks like this:

• High-fat diets (A) raise cholesterol (B)
• Raised cholesterol (B) is associated with heart disease (C)
• Therefore, a high-fat diet must cause heart disease

If this sounds logical to you, consider my own favorite version of teleoanalysis:

• Drinking lots of water (A) causes frequent urination (B)
• Frequent urination (B) is associated with diabetes (C)
• Therefore, drinking lots of water causes diabetes

With that in mind, let’s take a look at yet another Meat Kills! study that’s making a splash in the media. Here are some quotes from a BBC article online:

A chemical found in red meat helps explain why eating too much steak, mince and bacon is bad for the heart, say US scientists.

A study in the journal Nature Medicine showed that carnitine in red meat was broken down by bacteria in the gut.

This kicked off a chain of events that resulted in higher levels of cholesterol and an increased risk of heart disease.

Can you spot the teleoanalysis? Here it is:

• Red meat (A) contains carnitine, which when digested kicks off a chain of events leading to higher cholesterol (B)
• Higher cholesterol (B) is associated with heart disease (C)
• Therefore, red meat causes heart disease

Here’s the abstract for the study referenced in the BBC article:

Intestinal microbiota metabolism of choline and phosphatidylcholine produces trimethylamine (TMA), which is further metabolized to a proatherogenic species, trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO). We demonstrate here that metabolism by intestinal microbiota of dietary l-carnitine, a trimethylamine abundant in red meat, also produces TMAO and accelerates atherosclerosis in mice. Omnivorous human subjects produced more TMAO than did vegans or vegetarians following ingestion of l-carnitine through a microbiota-dependent mechanism. The presence of specific bacterial taxa in human feces was associated with both plasma TMAO concentration and dietary status. Plasma l-carnitine levels in subjects undergoing cardiac evaluation (n = 2,595) predicted increased risks for both prevalent cardiovascular disease (CVD) and incident major adverse cardiac events (myocardial infarction, stroke or death), but only among subjects with concurrently high TMAO levels. Chronic dietary l-carnitine supplementation in mice altered cecal microbial composition, markedly enhanced synthesis of TMA and TMAO, and increased atherosclerosis, but this did not occur if intestinal microbiota was concurrently suppressed. In mice with an intact intestinal microbiota, dietary supplementation with TMAO or either carnitine or choline reduced in vivo reverse cholesterol transport. Intestinal microbiota may thus contribute to the well-established link between high levels of red meat consumption and CVD risk.

Allow me to interpret that gobbledygook:

Humans who eat meat have more carnitine-eating bacteria in their guts and therefore produce more TMAO than vegetarians.  TMAO is associated with heart disease.  If we pump mice full of carnitine, they also produce lots of TMAO and get heart disease. So humans should cut back on meat.

More teleoanalysis. It’s just another version of this argument, which helped to establish the Lipid Hypothesis:  lard raises cholesterol, and rabbits get both high cholesterol and heart disease if they’re force-fed lard, so humans shouldn’t eat lard.

The only problem is that lard consumption was plummeting while heart-disease rates were skyrocketing.

The abstract also mentions the “well-established link” between meat consumption and heart disease. Since vegetarians are often more health-conscious in general and therefore less likely to consume sodas, donuts, candy and other junk, I’d expect them to have lower rates of heart disease than meat-eaters who consume the standard western (crap-filled) diet. But is that association consistent?

As I mentioned out in another post about yet another Meat Kills! study, here’s quote from a study titled Mortality In British Vegetarians:

The mortality of both the vegetarians and the nonvegetarians in this study is low compared with national rates. Within the study, mortality from circulatory diseases and all causes is not significantly different between vegetarians and meat eaters.

And here’s the conclusion from a study titled Dietary protein and risk of ischemic heart disease in women:

Our data do not support the hypothesis that a high protein intake increases the risk of ischemic heart disease. In contrast, our findings suggest that replacing carbohydrates with protein may be associated with a lower risk of ischemic heart disease.

In that study, the women who consumed the most protein ate 16.1% more red meat than women who consumed the least protein, but had lower rates of heart disease.

No consistency, no validity.

Enjoy your steak.

A reader sent me a link to an article about a rise in bowel cancer over the past 35 years.  Let’s take a look:

Bowel cancer rates among men have soared by more than a quarter in the last 35 years, new figures have shown.

In contrast, women have experienced a rise of only 6 per cent, according to the report from Cancer Research UK.

Increasing rates of bowel cancer may be linked to obesity and diets high in red and processed meat and low in fibre.

You just knew as soon as you read that first paragraph that red meat would get the blame, didn’t you?  I believe the reporter’s thinking process (if you can call it that) went something like this:

Hmmm, bowel cancer is on the rise.  Well, we all know red meat causes bowel cancer, so it must be diets high in red meat that are the problem.  Okay, off to write the story.

In the internet/search engine age, it takes perhaps two minutes to find out if people have been eating more red meat over the past 35 years.  Here are some graphs based on USDA data.  (Yes, the article is from the U.K., but I sincerely doubt food-consumption trends in the U.S. and U.K. are wildly different.)

Looks to me as if red meat consumption has gone down.  We’ve been eating less cow meat since the mid-1970s – hey, that would be about 35 years ago, wouldn’t it?  Pork consumption is about the same, but chicken consumption is way up.  Perhaps we should blame the rise in bowel cancer on chicken.

But wait … I can think of another explanation.  In a post last week, I linked to several studies suggesting that sugar feeds cancer.  So let’s take a look at sugar consumption:

Red meat consumption has been dropping since the mid-1970s, but sugar consumption has gone up.

Is this proof that sugar is driving the rise in bowel cancer?  Nope.  Correlation does not prove causation.  But when you have a negative correlation, it’s pretty strong evidence that there’s no causation.  In other words, if I propose that drinking coffee causes obesity but then gather data showing that obesity has gone up while coffee consumption has gone down, I’d have to conclude that it’s extremely unlikely coffee causes obesity.

Suggesting red meat is causing the rise in bowel cancer was just a knee-jerk reaction by the reporter.  It’s an opinion based on “everybody knows” evidence.  He could have fact-checked that opinion without ever leaving his desk, and in less time than it took me to type this paragraph – but he didn’t.  Sadly, this kind of intellectual laziness seems to run rampant among media health reporters.

Here we go again with the latest “Meat Kills!” study.  You may have already seen it reported in the news with headlines like Vegetarians cut heart disease risk. Here are some quotes from that article:

Vegetarians are nearly a third less likely than meat-eaters to die or be hospitalized from heart disease, British researchers report this week in another study supporting a plant-based diet.

Vegetarians have lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, weigh less and are less likely to have diabetes, as well, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study, which covers 45,000 people over an average of 11 years from the 1990s through 2009, shows that vegetarians were 28 percent less likely to develop heart disease over that time.

Well, that’s it, then.  Drop the burger, pick up the tofu meat substitute, and save your heart.

Nawww, let’s read on:

“The results clearly show that the risk of heart disease in vegetarians is about a third lower than in comparable non-vegetarians,” said Tim Key, deputy director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.

The researchers said they accounted for age, smoking, drinking, exercise, educational level and socioeconomic background in making their calculations. Over the 11 or so years, 1,235 of the volunteers were diagnosed with heart disease, and 169 died of heart disease – the No. 1 cause of death in both Europe and the United States.

In the disclosures section of the full study, Tim Key (quoted above) is listed as a member of the Vegetarian Society, United Kingdom.  That makes me a wee bit suspicious … although Chris Gardner of Stanford is also a vegetarian, and he conducted the clinical trial of four different diets that found the Atkins dieters lost the most weight and showed the greatest improvements in their cardiovascular risk factors.  Dr. Key isn’t necessarily biased just because he promotes vegetarian diets.

So let’s look at this particular study and ask ourselves some Science For Smart People questions:

Q: Is this a clinical study or an observational study?

A: It’s an observational study based on questionnaires and medical records.  We can’t make conclusions about cause and effect from observational studies, but at least in this case the researchers aren’t asking the study subjects to accurately remember everything they ate during the past several years.  Most people can surely give an accurate answer to the question “Have you been a vegetarian for at least the past five years?”

That being said, comparisons of vegetarians versus non-vegetarians are always likely to produce skewed results for the simple reason that vegetarians tend to be more health-conscious than the population as a whole.  That means they’re different in all kinds of ways.  Not eating meat is just one of them.

Q: Did the researchers control their variables?

A: Not really, no.  In the full text of the study, the researchers admit that the participants are not a representative sample of the British adult population.  In fact, both the vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the study population had lower-than-usual rates of heart disease.  Then there’s this little issue:

Risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes may be mediating factors through which vegetarianism affects the risk of IHD; therefore, the analyses were not adjusted for these variables.

In other words, since we believe meat-eating causes hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes, we didn’t adjust for any of them.  When I read that sentence, I scoured the study to see if rates of diabetes were reported.  Yup … and the non-vegetarians (let’s just call them meat-eaters from here on) had more than double the rate of diabetes.

Now … since diabetics are three times more likely to die of heart disease than non-diabetics, do you think maybe we have a confounding variable here?  If you believe eating meat causes diabetes (as the vegetarian researcher probably does), then yes, you could choose to ignore that as a variable.  But if you believe diabetes is caused by excess sugar consumption, you can’t.

Since clinical studies have shown that low-carb, meaty diets can control and often reverse diabetes, I seriously doubt eating meat causes diabetes.  So what we’re likely seeing here is that the vegetarians consume less sugar than the meat-eaters – once again, comparing health-conscious people to the population as a whole.

Then there’s the age problem.  Here’s the breakdown of the study participants with their average ages at the time they were enrolled:

6,831 non-vegetarian men, average age = 49.5
22,610 non-vegetarian women, average age = 46.3

3,771 vegetarian men, average age = 41.8
11,349 vegetarian women, average age = 38.4

With a little Excel magic, I determined that the overall average age of the meat-eaters at the beginning of the study was 47 years old.  The overall average age of the vegetarians at the beginning of the study was 39 years old.

The researchers compared their medical records 11 years later.  At that point, the average meat-eater was 58 years old and the average vegetarian was 50 years old.  Now take a look at the chart below, which shows CDC figures on heart-disease deaths rates by age bracket.

The heart-disease death rate in the 55-64 year-old-bracket is more than double the rate in the 45-54 year-old-bracket.  The meat-eaters were far more likely to fall into the age group where the rate of heart-disease death more than doubles.

Ahhh, but the researchers assured us they adjusted the data for age, gender, BMI and smoking status.  Perhaps, but I have my doubts.  Those “adjustments” are where a lot of mathematical manipulations occur, as Dr. John Ioannidis has pointed out in his criticisms of observational studies.

Here’s part of the reason I have my doubts:  in the study, the researchers made this statement:

On the basis of the absolute rates of hospitalization or death from IHD, the cumulative probability of IHD between ages 50 and 70 y was 6.8% for nonvegetarians compared with 4.6% for vegetarians.

“Absolute rates” means no adjustment for age or anything else.  And yet the meat-eaters, who fall into the 55-64 age group on average, had a heart-disease rate of 6.8%, while the vegetarians, who fall into the 45-54 age group on average, had a heart-disease rate of 4.6%.

Hmmm … the CDC chart shows heart-disease deaths more than doubling as we move from one age bracket to the next (an increase of 131%), yet our older meat-eaters were just 32% more likely to have heart disease than their younger vegetarian counterparts, according to the study.  Something doesn’t feel right here.  Given the difference in average age, the difference in death rates in the non-adjusted data ought to be more dramatic.

Oh, but wait … if you read the study, the researchers weren’t comparing death rates.  They were comparing a diagnosis of heart disease – a combination of deaths chalked up to heart disease and heart-related problems such as angina.  In fact, of their 1,235 medical data points, just 169 were actual heart-disease deaths.  Which leads me to our next question:

Q: Is there any important data that seems to be missing?

A: Oh, you betcha.  The researchers had medical records for diagnoses of heart-related problems, they had medical records for heart-disease deaths, they knew who was and wasn’t a vegetarian, and they dutifully reported the differences in all heart-related problems combined for meat-eaters versus vegetarians … and yet stunningly, they didn’t report the difference in death rates – not for heart-disease deaths, and not for deaths from any cause.

Never fear.  This isn’t the first time these researchers dug into the data they collected for the purpose of publishing a paper.  Here’s the conclusion from another study using the same dataset titled Mortality Among British Vegetarians:

The mortality of both the vegetarians and the nonvegetarians in this study is low compared with national rates. Within the study, mortality from circulatory diseases and all causes is not significantly different between vegetarians and meat eaters, but the study is not large enough to exclude small or moderate differences for specific causes of death, and more research on this topic is required.

In other words, We’d like more funding so we can keep torturing the data until it tells us that eating meat will kill you.

Go enjoy your steak.

In my Science For Smart People speech, I argued that laypeople need to learn a bit about science because there are so many contradictory studies published in the popular media. I gave examples from real headlines: Eggs Linked to Diabetes. Eggs Improve Glucose Control. Processed Meats Linked to Cancer. Hot Dogs May Prevent Cancer.

And so forth.

So let’s say you’re an avid reader of online news sites and are especially interested in health topics. Here’s what you could have learned during the past month:

1.  Ketones, a by-product of diets that are low in carbohydrates and very high in fat, may be effective for treating epilepsy, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

2.  Diets high in fat are bad for memory and other cognitive functions, but exercise may offset the damage and restore the brain to normal.

You could be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of Wait a minute … people with Alzheimer’s lose their memory and other cognitive functions, so I should eat more fat. But eating fat is bad for memory and other cognitive functions, so I should eat less fat. Hmmm, I’m confused … but wait … WHY am I confused? I didn’t used to be so easily confused! I’m probably losing my cognitive abilities from eating too much fat! Or is it from not eating enough fat? Am I supposed to eat more fat then go exercise?!

Let’s start with the Ketones Are Good article from the U.K. Daily Mail. It’s titled Could this elixir hold the key to weight loss? Experts hope it’ll also treat diabetes, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s:

There’s a new drink that could not only help you lose weight, but could also treat epilepsy, diabetes and possibly even Alzheimer’s. It might also be an incredible energy booster. When a group of international rowing champions took it, one of them beat a world record.

It sounds far too good to be true, but the drink’s scientific credentials are impeccable. It’s been developed by Kieran Clarke, professor of physiological biochemistry at Oxford University and head of its Cardiac Metabolism Research Group, at the behest of the U.S. Army.

Equally amazing is that the drink doesn’t involve a new drug. It contains something our bodies produce all the time. This key ingredient is ketones — the tiny, but powerful sources of energy our bodies make naturally when we start using up our fat stores for energy because there are no carbs around.

If ketones are so amazing and they’re produced when there are no carbs around, why not just go on a low-carb diet? Don’t worry; they’ll get to that.

We all have slightly raised ketone levels before breakfast because we haven’t eaten for a while.

I’ve tried explaining that to people who warn me that the ketones produced by my diet are going to ruin my kidneys. They often fail to grasp the concept, perhaps because they don’t have enough ketones fueling their brains.

The clever trick Professor Clarke has pulled off is to have found a way to make ketones in the lab. This means that instead of having to follow difficult diets (with unpleasant side-effects such as constipation and bad breath), you can just add ketones to a normal diet — in the form of the Drink, as it’s known.

Figures. You want to get funding to study the benefits of ketones, there needs to some kind of new product at the end of the rainbow.

In a study published earlier this year, Professor Clarke found that rats given the new ketone compound ate less and put on less weight than those getting the same amount of calories from a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet.

In the first trial Professor Clarke has run on humans with diabetes, completed within the past few months, the effects were also impressive. In the week-long study, eight people with diabetes had three ketone drinks a day as well as their normal diet.

As with the rats, their weight dropped (an average of nearly 2 per cent of their body weight), but so did their glucose levels, cholesterol and the amount of fat in the blood. The amount of exercise they did went up as they had more energy.

I’m not crazy about the idea of raising ketones with a manufactured ketone drink, but the article paints a pretty positive picture when it comes to ketones, explaining, for example, how ketogenic diets have helped kids with epilepsy control seizures. The takeway message: diets that produce ketones are good for your brain, suppress your appetite, help control blood sugar and raise your energy levels.

But as John Cleese used to say on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, And now for something completely different:  a New York Times article titled Can Exercise Protect the Brain From Fatty Foods?

In recent years, some research has suggested that a high-fat diet may be bad for the brain, at least in lab animals. Can exercise protect against such damage? That question may have particular relevance now, with the butter-and cream-laden holidays fast approaching. And it has prompted several new and important studies.

Ah yes, it’s all that cream and butter that make the holidays a threat to our brains. (If you follow the link, you’ll see a nice picture of a slab of butter to represent the threat.)  Couldn’t be all the sugar people eat over the holidays.

The most captivating of these, presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, began with scientists at the University of Minnesota teaching a group of rats to scamper from one chamber to another when they heard a musical tone, an accepted measure of the animals’ ability to learn and remember.

For the next four months, half of the rats ate normal chow. The others happily consumed a much greasier diet, consisting of at least 40 percent fat. Total calories were the same in both diets.

I’m wondering how the writer knew the rats were happily consuming the greasier diet. Did the researchers report on the number of happy squeaks the rats produced while eating?

After four months, the animals repeated the memory test. Those on a normal diet performed about the same as they had before; their cognitive ability was the same. The high-fat eaters, though, did much worse.

The article is based on a recent presentation, so I couldn’t find the published study online to look up which high-fat diet the rats with the bad memories consumed — not that I care all that much, since this is a rat study and I’m not a rat.  But I have looked up the high-fat diet used in several other rodent studies. The fat consists mostly of Crisco, soybean oil and corn oil. Those aren’t the fats I’d want to put in my brain – or a rat’s.

Then, half of the animals in each group were given access to running wheels. Their diets didn’t change. So, some of the rats on the high-fat diet were now exercising. Some were not. Ditto for the animals eating the normal diet.

For the next seven weeks, the memory test was repeated weekly in all of the groups. During that time, the performance of the rats eating a high-fat diet continued to decline so long as they didn’t exercise.

But those animals that were running, even if they were eating lots of fat, showed notable improvements in their ability to think and remember.

After seven weeks, the animals on the high-fat diet that exercised were scoring as well on the memory test as they had at the start of the experiment.

Exercise, in other words, had “reversed the high-fat diet-induced cognitive decline,” the study’s authors concluded.

You have to read most of the article to learn how the researchers believe high-fat diets cause cognitive problems:

Just why high-fat diets might affect the brain and how exercise undoes the damage is not yet clear. “Our research suggests that free fatty acids” from high-fat foods may actually infiltrate the brain, says Vijayakumar Mavanji, a research scientist at the Minnesota VA Medical Center at the University of Minnesota, who, with his colleagues Catherine M. Kotz, Dr. Charles J. Billington, and Dr. Chuan Feng Wang, conducted the rat study. The fatty acids may then jump-start a process that leads to cellular damage in portions of the brain that control memory and learning, he says.

Well, since our brains are made mostly of fat, I’d say that depends on what kind of fatty acids are reaching the brain.  It would also depend on whether the creature in question is biologically adapted to eating those particularly fatty acids.  I sure hope they’re not going to take some crazy leap in logic and assume that the effects of rats eating soybean oil tell us something about the effects of humans eating beef and butter.

Of course, lab animals are not people, Dr. Mavanji cautions, and it’s not known if exercise might protect our brains in the same manner as it does in mice and rats.

Still, he says, there’s enough accumulating evidence about the potential cognitive risks of high-fat foods and the countervailing benefits from physical activity to recommend that “people exercise moderately,” he says, particularly during periods of repeated exposure to alluring, fatty holiday buffets.

The amount of exercise required to potentially protect our brains from the possible depredations of marbled beef and cheesecake isn’t excessive, after all, he continues.

Head. Bang. On. Desk.

So there you have it. Ketones and ketogenic diets are good for your brain, but a high-fat diet – which produces ketones – will make you stupid unless you exercise.  No wonder people get confused.

I’m going to go eat more of Chareva’s high-fat meatloaf and try to figure this out.

I like Thanksgiving in Tennessee because it looks like this:

You’ll notice Sara decided to dress up as a Pilgrim.  The girls rode one of my buddy Jim Taylor’s horses after dinner, but I didn’t know that until they were done, so no pictures.

I spent Thanksgiving doing my duty as a patriotic American male – eating turkey and watching football – then spent the next three days finishing my assault on the briar jungle.  Here’s another before picture from last weekend, when I was just getting started.

Did I mention the briar was incredibly dense?

I’ve hated the stuff ever since we moved in.  Something about briar attracts discs when I play disc golf.  Even when I try to be careful reaching into the stuff, the thorns grab ahold of me and shred my skin.  Here’s what they did to me this weekend — and I was wearing sleeves.  The thorns poked right through my denim shirt.

So clearing the briar wasn’t a labor of love.  It was a labor of hate.  Here’s what the area looks like now that I’ve exacted my revenge.  I cleared the thorn bushes up to our property line.  The jungle continues on the other side, but that’s not my problem.

This picture was taken from what used to be the middle of the briar patch.

In addition to thorny bushes, we had thorny vines that wrapped themselves around the trees want to keep.  I cut the vines at the base and we pulled down the ones we could.  That’s Chareva in the picture below, yanking for all she’s worth to bring down a vine.  (I offered to help, but she had a personal vendetta against this particular vine and was determined to bring it down herself – which she did.)

Once when I pulled down a vine, it whipped me on the side of my head and a thorn caught my ear.  If I ever want to wear a diamond stud in my ear, the piercing job is at least halfway done.  I said a bad word and bled for awhile.

As I cleared the jungle, I found some dead trees.  We had no idea they were there … the briar was so thick, we never saw them before.  If they’re not rotten, we’ll cut those up for firewood.

We also collected quite a few dried sticks and branches for kindling.

I hacked away that jungle for three days (plus last weekend), working until dark.  It was tough and sometimes painful work, but worth it.  I am, as Charlie Daniels would put it, Dog Tired Satisfied.

Quite a few readers have lamented in comments or emails that their family and friends think they’re nuts for living on a high-fat/low-carb diet.  Yes, it’s discouraging, but I understand where the family and friends are coming from.  Just look at the kind of health advice they see in the popular media.  Here are some recent examples.

Bacon Will Kill You

You know you’re in for some head-bang-on-desk moments when a registered dietician writes an article titled The Truth About Bacon.

There seems to be an epidemic spreading through America known as Bacon-Gate!

What used to only be served with eggs at the breakfast table has slowly transitioned into more unconventional uses. Bacon is now offered in ice cream, wrapped around hot dogs, shrimp, and even dates.

For the record, I never tried to wrap any of my dates in bacon.  Not even Chareva — although on our first date, she tore into an Italian sausage with such gusto, perhaps I should have at least floated the idea.

You can find it in gourmet chocolate bars, infused in mayonnaise or jams, and countless other concoctions.

So the article starts on a positive note.  But you can guess what’s coming next.

Unfortunately, while its popularity is on the rise, so are concerns regarding the potentially harmful effects this salty staple can have on your health.

I agree … the rise in concern about people eating bacon is unfortunate.

The fact is, bacon is not good for you, especially if you are at risk for certain health conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure.

Here we go … a reference to arterycloggingsaturatedfat coming in 3-2-1 ..

The high fat content (68 percent of its calories comes from fat, almost half of which is saturated or artery-clogging, and one strip can contain up to 3.5 grams of fat), high sodium (one medium slice contains 150mg), and high cholesterol (30mg per ounce, about 4 slices). Cured bacon contains nitrates, and according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, nitrates in food have been linked with cancer.

The high fat content of bacon is the reason I eat it.  Yes, almost half is saturated, and most of the other half is monounsaturated, which is the kind of fat that’s supposed to make olive oil so wonderful for us.  All the saturated fat will do to you is raise your HDL … and make you happy to be alive in a world where there are pigs.

There are ways you can still enjoy bacon (in moderation, of course) and minimize its potentially unhealthy effects.

Yeah. Don’t eat it with bread.

Keep in mind that traditional pork bacon has some plusses: It is high in protein, vitamins and minerals, including B6, B12, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, iron, magnesium, potassium and zinc, as well as choline, a nutrient which helps improve cognitive performance, memory, mood and mental alertness.

So bacon is jam-packed with all kinds of vitamins and minerals that are good for you, but it’s also bad for you because it’s high in fat.  Here’s a wacky idea:  maybe there’s a reason Mother Nature put all those vitamins and minerals in fatty meats and then made fat taste delicious to humans.

The rest of the article goes on to suggest trying “healthier varieties” such as turkey bacon.  I have.  All it did was make me feel guilty for killing a turkey for no good reason.

Sugar and starch are shockingly good for you

The Eat This Not That guys are often near the top of my list of annoying people.  An online article titled 20 Shockingly Healthy Restaurant Foods left me freshly annoyed.

Good news: Amid the sea of fat-soaked failures that pervade the menus of newer major restaurant and fast-food chains, we uncovered some remarkably smart choices.

Here are just a few samples of the remarkably smart (but not fat-soaked!) choices they recommend.

Arby’s Super Roast Beef sandwich.  Just like a hamburger, this sandwich is piled with lettuce, tomato, and onion. The difference is that Arby’s replaces the beef patty with roast beef, which clears off enough excessive fat to make room for indulgent sides or dessert. If this were a burger, you could expect it to weigh in with at least 600 calories.

This is remarkably smart because it only contains 17 grams of fat and 5 grams of saturated fat, ya see.  They didn’t mention the carbohydrate content, so I looked it up:  40 grams, pretty much all from a white-flour bun.

Ben & Jerry’s frozen yogurt (1/2 cup). Frozen yogurt shops are all the rage right now, but Ben & Jerry’s has been quietly pumping out low-fat fro-yo for close to 2 decades. Skip the restaurant dessert and swing by here instead. Top a cup with chopped nuts and fresh fruit for one of the finest desserts you’ll ever encounter.

Only three grams of fat!  (Why do I feel like I walked into a Seinfeld re-run?)  There are also 23 grams of sugar – in a half-cup.  That almost equals an 8-ounce Coca-Cola.  Yup, remarkably smart.

The article recommends more remarkably smart choices like macaroni and cheese, chicken wraps, burritos, pancakes and even a big ol’ Oreo cookie – but one that’s not too high in fat.  The takeaway message:  as long as you limit your fat and total calories, everything else is remarkably smart.

Junk food and Alzheimer’s

I’m glad researchers are recognizing Alzheimer’s as a form of diabetes, but an article titled The New Junk Food Danger — Dementia? manages to give the exact wrong impression about what causes diabetes.

Not only does junk food make you fat, but it could cause dementia. New research shows that our calorie-laden diet boosts risk for dementia, a memory-robbing disorder some experts now call “type 3 diabetes.”

In fact, a shocking new study reports that teenagers who eat a diet that’s high in fat and calories already show “accelerated cognitive decline.” The researchers blame rising rates of dementia on our increasingly unhealthy eating habits and couch potato lifestyle.

Excuse me, but how many teenagers do you know who eat a diet that’s high in fat and calories but low in sugar and refined starches?  After that opening, you’d wonder if the writer has any clue about the insulin connection.  But lo and behold, the next section of the article is subtitled …

The Insulin Connection

While it’s long been known that type 2 diabetics are at higher risk for memory loss, another new study found that damage to key brain areas involved in memory and cognitive skills starts when blood sugar hits the high end of the “normal” range, even when other risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, and alcohol consumption are taken into account.

So it’s all that dietary fat pushing blood sugar to the high end of the normal range, is it?  I’d better order another glucose meter.  Mine’s clearly malfunctioning, since it tells me it’s carbohydrates that spike my blood sugar.

“Americans are literally eating a ‘diabetes diet’ that’s very toxic to the brain and other vital organs,” says Dr. Joel Zonszein, medical director of the diabetes clinic at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. “And the one of the most terrible complications — brain damage — is occurring in younger and younger patients.”

Yes, diabetes has been on the rise for 30 years now.  Hmmm … which foods did we start consuming in larger quantities during that span?  Red meat?  Eggs?  Whole milk?  Butter?  Nope, consumption of all those fatty foods went down.

“Most people with insulin resistance graze all day on high-calorie foods,” says Dr. Zonszein. “What they should do is eat three heart-healthy, low-fat meals a day with colorful fruits and vegetables, high-fiber whole grains, and lean protein, such as fish or chicken, on their plate.”

Ahh, yes, let’s put whole grains on our plates.  Nothing keeps your blood sugar down like grains.

Also limit—or better still, avoid—sweet drinks, including fruit juice and sports drinks. A recent study shows that high-fructose sweeteners, in particular, may be driving the development of brain-harming microvessel disease.

Finally, one piece of good advice.

We need bread!

I’m always suspicious of articles written by anonymous reporters.  This article in the U.K. Mail, titled Not a Grain of Truth, sounds as if it were written by someone from the bread industry — which it probably was.

Scientists dismiss 20 years of warnings that bread is responsible for fatigue, stomach pain, bloating and headaches

People are going without vital vitamins and minerals that are contained in each loaf

From hot buttered toast to the simple sandwich, bread was once the staple of the British diet.  But in recent years it has suffered from a serious image crisis and has become something of a health bogeyman, a food to be avoided and resisted.

Now nutrition scientists believe that most of the health alerts about consuming bread are myths.

I don’t care if you’re reading about nutrition, economics or global warming, whenever you see a blanket statement like “experts say” or “scientists believe,” you’re looking at an intentionally biased article.  The factual statement would always be “some experts say” or “some scientists believe.”  Pick any field, and the experts or scientists routinely disagree with each other.  When reporters write “scientists believe,” they’re telling you what to believe, not what is.  It’s just a weak appeal to authority.

Researchers at the British Nutrition Foundation said that people are instead going without vital vitamins and minerals that are contained in each loaf.

So let me get this straight … we should eat bread because we need the vitamins and minerals that government health agencies ordered to be added to bread so people wouldn’t suffer nutrition deficiencies from eating bread. Yeah, that makes sense.

And they have dismissed 20 years of warnings that bread is responsible for a range of symptoms, including fatigue, stomach pain, bloating and headaches.  They also dispute that wheat allergies are on the increase.

Really?  How exactly did those scientists dismiss warnings that bread can cause fatigue, bloating and headaches?  Was there some kind of research involved here?

Lead researcher Dr Aine O’Connor said that despite a massive downturn in bread consumption, Britain’s obesity crisis is the biggest in Europe and continues to worsen.

Yes, consumption of sliced bread has fallen, but consumption of grains certainly hasn’t.  People are eating their grains in the form of donuts, scones, pasta, pancakes, burritos, pizza, and Little Debbie Snack Cakes.

Dr O’Connor said that wheat allergies have not risen, but many people are now incorrectly convinced they suffer from wheat intolerance or an allergy to gluten (the protein found in wheat).

Strange, I seem to recall reading about a study in which scientists compared blood samples from 50 years ago to blood samples today and found that the rate of celiac disease really and truly has gone up – by a factor of four.  How does a blood sample become incorrectly convinced to develop antibodies to celiac disease?  I had no idea blood was so prone to hypochondria.

Since the anonymous bread-pushing reporter is quoting the British Nutrition Foundation as a source of unbiased expertise on the health benefits of bread, I went looking for information on the organization’s funding.  Here’s what I found.

The British Nutrition Foundation, established more than 40 years ago, advises the Government, schools, industry, health professionals and the public. It says on its website that it exists to deliver “authoritative, evidence-based information on food and nutrition” and that it aims to be “world class in the interpretation and translation of complex science.”

However, the organisation’s 39 members, which contribute to its funding, include – beside the Government, the EU – Cadbury, Kellogg’s, Northern Foods, McDonald’s, PizzaExpress, the main supermarket chains except Tesco, and producer bodies such as the Potato Council. The chairman of its board of trustees, Paul Hebblethwaite, is also chairman of the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Trade Association.

Sounds like exactly the kind of unbiased organization media health reporters should rely on when they write articles telling us what’s good for us.

This is what we’re up against.

p.s. — I’m driving to Illinois tomorrow (Friday) to attend my 35th (holy @#$%!) high school reunion.  I’ll check comments when I can, but I’ll be in the car most of the day.