Interesting items from my inbox and elsewhere …
Has this site been blocked?
A reader sent me a screen cap of what showed up on his phone when he tried to access the Fat Head site while at a hospital in Chicago:
Okay, it’s just a glitch, right?
I don’t want to seem paranoid or anything, but maybe I shouldn’t have written that post about the lousy “heart healthy” menus in hospitals …
Harvard is pure poison, part one
I mentioned Harvard’s latest “low-carb shortens lifespan” study briefly in last week’s post. Zoe Harcombe took it apart, and so did Chris Kresser. Since they covered the study so well, I chose not to do a deep-dive on it. But I did download the study and found this table rather interesting:
That tells you all you need to know about the reliability of studies based on food questionnaires. According to one of the questionnaires used in the study, people who are overweight (according to the BMI scale) are living on 1546 calories per day on average. As you know, I’m not a fan of the BMI scale, which will declare you overweight if you’re muscular. But there’s no way on God’s Green Earth thousands of people with a BMI of 28.5 are living on 1546 calories per day, muscular or not.
In his WWII-era starvation study, Ancel Keys had men live on 1500 calories per day. Here’s what they looked like:
Apparently if they’d consumed 46 more calories per day, they would have beefed up to a BMI of 28.5.
This study sucks. Period. Harvard should put Walter Willett out to pasture before they lose all credibility … if they haven’t already.
[Note: earlier I had the wrong photo of starving men in this post. That one was a POW photo … although the guys in the correct photo look just as bad.]
Harvard is pure poison, part two
Meanwhile, another Harvard professor made headlines not with a stupid study, but with a stupid remark about coconut oil. Here are some quotes from The Chicago Tribune:
A Harvard professor wants you to reconsider the dangers of consuming coconut oil, a popular trend within the wellness crowd as of late. Self-appointed “wellness experts” and “health gurus” online promote coconut oil for its immune support, digestive help and as a healthier fat for cooking.
But in her German-language talk “Coconut Oil and Other Nutritional Errors,” which is nearing 1 million views on YouTube as of Wednesday, Karin Michels, an adjunct professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, calls coconut oil “pure poison” and “one of the worst foods” she can name.
Notice the attitude of the reporter. Self-appointed “wellness experts” and “health gurus” online promote coconut oil, but – hold your breath in awe, now! – a Harvard professor called it “pure poison.” LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE TRUE EXPERTS HAVE SPOKEN!
The attitude continues with this paragraph:
Still, there is a disconnect between public and health expert perception in the United States. A 2016 survey by the New York Times showed that 72 percent of the public versus 37 percent of certified nutritionists believe coconut oil is “healthy.”
Got that? A majority of the unwashed masses believe coconut is healthy, but just 37 percent of certified nutritionists do. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE TRUE EXPERTS HAVE SPOKEN!
What that survey tells me is that the Wisdom of Crowds is in full effect. Most nutritionists still believe coconut oil isn’t healthy … um, yeah, because that’s what they were taught in school.
“Class, repeat after me: saturated fat is bad!”
“Saturated fat is bad.”
“Vegetable oils are good for you!”
“Vegetable oils are good for you.”
“Saturated fat is very, very bad!”
“Saturated fat is very, very bad.”
“Whole grains are good for you!”
“Whole grains are good for you.”
“And saturated fat is very, very, very bad!”
“Saturated fat is very, very, very bad.”
“Congratulations, you’re now an expert. Go out and design heart-healthy menus for hospitals.”
Most news outlets felt obliged to also quote from the American Heart Association and to point out that coconut oil is 82 percent saturated, while butter (a known killer, of course) is just 63 percent saturated.
So there you have it. It’s more saturated than butter, so it must be poison. Good luck explaining why people on the island of Tokelau, who get a majority of their calories from saturated coconut fat, have virtually no heart disease. Mark Sisson mentioned several studies of coconut oil in a post as well. Bottom line: there are no studies that demonstrate any harm, and several studies that demonstrate improvements in overall health.
Harvard’s advice on diet and health is pure poison.
It’s not the fat harming our health, says a medical-industry ultimate insider
At least one former Harvard faculty member isn’t blinded by dogma. Dr. George Lundberg, who served as a JAMA editor for several years in addition to stints on the faculty at Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford, recently let loose in an editorial on Medscape. Dr. Lundberg begins with praise for Gary Taubes:
Taubes demolished what the medical, scientific, and nutrition fields (since at least the 1960s) had spent countless billions of dollars building and profiting (but also dying) from: the fat food theory of the causation of “diseases of human civilization”—atherosclerosis, coronary artery heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, stroke, cancer, dementia, and even osteoporosis and arthritis.
Then he moves on to why the fat food theory gained such a foothold:
Big Public Health. Big Farming. Big Agriculture. Big Government. Big Academia. Big Industry. Big Marketing. Big Advertising. Big Advocacy. Big Medicine. Big Publishing. All were marching to the tune composed by what they thought—in good faith, I believe—was good science.
As the scientist, medical journal editor, insider, I was even involved in the mass “Campaign Against Cholesterol,” led by the American Medical Association, doing everything we could from within organized medicine, and using many industry partners who, of course, stood to profit via their new low-fat products.
Real-world application is where the science, and especially the public health, communities failed. They did not keep their eyes open to the evolving real-world experience. They did not challenge the dogma and prevailing practices as the truth became more and more obvious during the mass-fattening of the population in the developed world.
I’d say there’s a good reason fewer people are listening to doctors, nutritionists and Harvard professors these days, wouldn’t you?
I suck at Facebook … sorry
I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I appreciate the power of social media, but I don’t like the Facebook interface. Never have. The privacy issues bother me as well.
But the main problem is that I can’t keep up. The Fat Head group has more than 12,000 members — which is great, but I can’t possibly read all the posts. Because of the group and Fat Head itself, I also have more than 2500 “friends” … which again means I can’t possibly keep up. It would take a week to read what people post in a day. When my real friends (i.e., people who actually know me) post on Facebook, I never see it because my feed goes on forever.
So I don’t keep up on Facebook. I’m okay with that … but I recently discovered there’s a feature called Messenger that I’ve never checked before. And course, there were hundreds of messages in there I’ve never read … people asking questions, thanking me for making Fat Head, inviting me to be on podcasts, etc.
Sorry. I promise I wasn’t intentionally ignoring y’all. I’m just not good at keeping up with Facebook and probably never will be. If you want to reach me, I actually do check my Twitter feed (@TomDNaughton) and my Fat Head email address (TomNaughton@fathead-movie.com).
Vegetarianism is a temporary condition
I’ve mentioned in a few posts that most vegetarians quit the lifestyle within ten years. Turns out they don’t last anywhere near that long, according to an article in Smithsonian Magazine online:
In the United States, most meat-abstainers lapse within a year, according to a new report put out by the the Humane Research Council, an animal advocacy organization.
In a survey of around 11,000 Americans, the organization found that 84 percent of vegetarians and vegans return to eating meat, says the Huffington Post. Most lapse within a year, while nearly a third don’t last more than three months.
Hmmm, since an animal advocacy group conducted the survey, I wonder if they have any theories on why people don’t stick with vegetarianism?
So why do so many people fall off the bandwagon? According to the new survey, says HuffPo, the researchers “found that a majority of them lacked social support, vegetarian-themed group activities and didn’t like sticking out from their friends… Other reasons for giving up: having trouble with animal-based cravings and the difficulty of doing anything cold turkey, so to speak.”
I see. It’s the lack of vegetarian-themed group activities. Perhaps they should get together more often and protest outside of steakhouses.
I have another explanation: they give up meat, they start to feel lousy, so they start eating meat again. And many of them probably only gave up meat in the first place because of a dumbass Harvard study.
Our chickens will never wear diapers
Our newest flock of chickens is coming along nicely. I like chickens. I like their eggs. I like their quirky behavior. But I will never, ever like chickens enough to put them in designer diapers:
Around 10 years ago, Julie Baker was raising chickens with her daughter on their small farm in Claremont, New Hampshire when she first saw a YouTube video of a chicken wearing what looked to be an upside-down apron that stretched across its backside. The diaper, so to speak, was used to catch chicken poop so the birds wouldn’t leave droppings everywhere (chickens do not urinate separately from defecation. Their urine is technically in their excrement). “I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, I so need to do that,’” Baker said. Baker’s daughter liked to bring her favorite chicken, an Old English hen named Abigail, inside their house, and because chickens poop close to a dozen times per day, Baker needed a better system for managing Abigail’s excrement.
So she began sewing Abigail diapers out of cotton fabric, and soon other poultry owners asked if Baker could make diapers for their chickens, too.
Diapers for chickens. Good grief. Sounds like something you’d sell to a bunch of kooks in San Francisco.
In wealthy cities like San Francisco, chickens have even become an unlikely status symbol, with poultry owners going to unimaginable lengths to care for their pets. As The Washington Post reported in March, certain chicken owners have hired “chicken whisperers” to consult on their pets’ comfort (to the tune of $225 per hour). These nouveau livestock enthusiasts have also been known to invest in personal chefs for their birds, and some have even installed smartphone-enabled, motion-detecting coops that control ventilation, temperature, lighting, and security from afar (ballpark cost: $20,000).
Our latest flock of 25 chickens cost $100, by the way. I can’t imagine who spends $20,000 on a smart-phone enabled system to take care of birds that cost $4 each.
That being said, if anyone out there wants to pay me $225 per hour to whisper to your chickens, I’m up for it. Heck, at that rate, I’ll even sing to them. But I’m definitely not changing any diapers.
If you enjoy my posts, please consider a small donation to the Fat Head Kids GoFundMe campaign.
There have been times that it was blocked by our corporate firewall (we are a gas and electricity marketer). I assumed at the time that its connection with a movie (right there in the name) caused Cisco to categorize it as a movie site. We had been having issues with employees watching Netflix at work, so that seemed like a likely category to have been blocked.
That would make sense. I couldn’t imagine a hospital in Chicago would have 1) heard of me, and 2) decided to block my site.
This Harvard study – and the apparently uncritical acceptance of it by the journalist quoted – is part of the larger problem of “brand-driven” education and research. The prestige of the Harvard name drowns out any attempt at a critical analysis of the claims being made. From what I’ve seen in CSPI’s “Healthletter,” they go out if their way to feature people with Ivy League or equivalent affiliations for their “expert interviews.”
That’s my concern, that media reporters see “Harvard” and are awe-struck. Given the university’s stupidity on nutrition and the fraternity/sorority issue, I wouldn’t send my kids there if I had Warren Buffett’s money.
Ha! Yeah, neither would I. BTW I must give credit to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for the term “brand driven education.”
On a (somewhat) related note, over at Diet Doctor there’s a petition being introduced to get the US government to change the nutrition guidelines.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/sign-a-petition-to-change-the-dietary-guidelines-in-america/comment-page-1#comment-9843996
As I mentioned in the comments section, I’m with you on this issue: forget “reforming” the guidelines and let’s just ignore them. It’s not as if we need governments to tell us how to eat.
I’m reminded of a line from the South Park episode “Gluten Free Ebola:”
“We are the USDA! If it wasn’t for us people would be eating chairs and dirt!” I bet some of them actually think along those lines.
That said, I do greatly appreciate the efforts at Diet Doctor even if I disagree on this particular point. They are along with this site a fantastic source of important and accurate information.
Nina Teicholz made the point that yes, we’d probably be better off without federal guidelines. But since they’re going to exist, it would be better to get them right.
The quality of the US Presidents from Harvard speaks volumes. Harvard is hard to get into, unless you are a legacy or your family has given a lot of money etcetera. Probably harder if you are of Asian ancestry.
BTW: To access blocked sites use a Virtual Private Network. It makes you look like someone else and bypasses site blocking.
Maybe Yale should take a crack at these studies. 😉
Sure, we’ll put Dr. David Katz in charge. He can write a review, then review his review under a false name and compare himself to Einstein.
And Shakespeare…don’t forget Shakespeare.
The branding is very real. Friends who have been offered professorships at Harvard and other Ivy League schools are typically low-balled, with the understanding that it’s super cool to be able to call yourself a Harvard prof. Now, if you use that name to supplement your income, it makes sense, but my friends have routinely turned down worse pay to stay where they are.
Given how things are going, it won’t be long before people refuse to admit they went to Harvard.
“Good luck explaining why people on the island of Tokelau, who get a majority of their calories from saturated coconut fat, have virtually no heart disease”.
I suppose the Harvard professor didn’t know that fact. Or else she managed to “actively forget” it after it caused severe cognitive dissonance.
But what can you of the guy who admitted, “Real-world application is where the science, and especially the public health, communities failed”?
Science. Public health. But they didn’t bother to check what was happening in the real world.
One’s own ivory tower (private or communal) is so much more comfortable. And, of course, far less trouble.
I’m sure the Harvard types would simply declare Tokelau a “paradox” and move on.
I just saw an article where filmmaker Kevin Smith lost 50 lbs. on a vegan diet at the suggestion of his doctor after his heart attack. He looks horrible and I said so on his Instagram. Of course, I got blow back from one vegan who proclaimed his health was perfect at age 50 and told me that I should try it some time. I told him I was a vegetarian as a teen and was always sick. He replied with the pat…”You weren’t doing it right!” LOL
I suggested that Kevin Smith will eventually become an ex-vegan when all the problems from being a vegan crop up, unless he blames everything but the diet.
Strange how many people aren’t doing it right.
A nurse followed up and told me that I wasn’t “eating the right foods”, then asked me about the so-called “Blue Zones”. I quoted my friend, a nutritionist, who likes to say, “Vegan diets are fine as long as you add meat to it.” She went Claire Julsing Stryd on me…”Well, I’m an actual health care provider. He’s just a nutritionist — so I know better!”
I informed her that she learned little about nutrition in nursing school and should stick to emptying bed pans.
I bet that went over well.
If you have any of a variety of health conditions from inability to convert plant precursors of retinol to retinol, insufficient production of taurine or many known and unknown metabolic hangups, you can’t do veganism right.
Veganism is an ideology that is simple, elegant and wrong. (After Albert Einstein, IIRC. Wrong here means morally incorrect.
I’ve been sitting between 1500-1700 calories for over 20 years. No wonder I am holding BF! Started with the Zone Diet where they suggested men should be around 1300 calories. I’ve been experimenting with the Carnivore Diet for the past month. Down 5 lbs. but I pee a lot, nausea, fatigue and I am past the keto flu stage. What’s worse is that with all the meat I am consuming, I still cannot get my calories up past the 1700 mark without stuffing myself. At this point, I just don’t see it being the miracle others say it is. I’ve asked the medical proponents for advice and they fall strangely silent…ie Shawn Baker.
Maybe it’s not for you?
I find more meat = better, but everyone’s different. I personally have no problems eating a pound of meat at a meal (eat 1-2 meals per day, sometimes after 36+ hour fasts). Last week, after a 36 hour fast and exercise (HIIT, Body by Science lifting), for my “breakfast” (about 10am after exercising about 7am) I ate about 1 pound 80/20 ground beef and a half pound of shrimp, some black olives. No issues. (That’s about 1843 calories for the beef and 225 from the shrimp, so let’s say 2,000 calories.) Did not eat again for about 8 hours, at dinner.
I just ate 1.21 lbs. of steak for lunch, after 8 oz and four eggs for breakfast. It’s 2 hours later and I could eat again. Fasting doesn’t work for me.
This study was done in the general population and not confined to people like you. This is biology, where every rule has an exception.
I had not heard of the fraternity/sorority situation at Harvard. What a sad situation.
My father (B.S. Electrical Engineering, 1943) said he would never have survived basic training if it had not been for Sigma Chi Fraternity. Everyone, including officers going into the Army Signal Corps, had to go through basic training.
During my initiation week in 1971, we had two nights of “fun and games”, one when we were trucked, like cattle, to an abandoned farm. I will not provide details. The years before, there were fun and games every night (Good Lord).
It’s just PC thinking run amok. Would I want my daughter joining a “gender-neutral” frarority? I don’t think so. Let’s see … males and females living in the same house at a time when there’s drinking going on. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
Honestly, I don’t see how that would be a whole lot different from living in a co-ed dorm. And there was no absence of drinking in the dorms I lived in..
Actually, I wouldn’t want my daughter living in a co-ed dorm either. I’m old, so we didn’t have co-ed dorms in my day.
Why they posted that chart is beyond me. Or else every one in the survey was on a diet. Wait this was a long term study.
Oh well, brain dead zombies can’t think straight.
You need to check this ASAP! There is a kind of hack which hijacks the website and redirects to other things ONLY ON MOBILE DEVICES. Looks fine on a laptop or tower, but phones and tablets go elsewhere. I had this happen on a couple of WordPress sites. Check your .htaccess file in your home directory and see if it has a lot of junk. If so, you have some work ahead.
I don’t believe there was any redirect.
Oh, dear. Chickens–which can transmit diseases to humans–living inside someone’s house in a city full of anti-vaxxers, used needles and poo in the street. What could go wrong?
If money had been no object, I’d have moved to California instead of Indiana. I’m now glad that money was an object.
After my 11 years in California, take my word for it: you ended up in the right place.
” Baker’s daughter liked to bring her favorite chicken, an Old English hen named Abigail, inside their house,…”
Anyone who lets chickens run inside their house either lives in a barn, is an idiot, or both.
“Hey, I got salmonella, but there’s no poop on the floor!”
I can see an exception for San Francisco. You can’t let your chickens out of the house there — too much poop on the sidewalks.
OTOH, if some cosmic combination of indoor chick poop and outdoor homeless poop is what it takes to trigger the final Plague in San Francisco, I guess I’m ok with it.
Idiots Living In Barns … good name for a band.
Wait wait! Your chickens can supplement their diets with the parasites and bugs IN the human poop, and you can charge the city a cleaning up fee! (Oh, on the other hand, the human parasites and bugs would probably cause a zoonotic disease in the CHICKENS!)
Never mind!
Another excellent takedown of the Harvard dogma here
https://cluelessdoctors.com/2018/08/17/when-bad-science-can-harm-you/
actually there are so many.
They must be desperate to think they can get away with such poor “science”, like the AHA “Presidential Advisory” on saturated fat, the Naude review in ZA, etc. Oh wait, they DID get away with it, headline news the world over. Peak Stupid is approaching. Also Peak Vegan which is not dissimilar.
I am currently cheering myself up with a vision of Walt Wallet eating his 63 portions of fruit and veg while wearing diapers, surrounded by vegan chickens. It’s all your fault.
If I’m responsible for that image, I’m grateful.
I noticed that the youtube video of Karin Michels you refer to has comments turned off. This should be the first sign that they are not willing to engage in discussion to even back up what they claim is true and to move on to a more credible source for information.
While searching for information on how to change a recipe from vegetable oil to a better alternative (butter, lard, etc) I ran across this site:
https://www.livestrong.com/article/427972-can-i-substitute-butter-for-vegetable-oil-in-a-cake-mix/
Which includes this ridiculous quote “It’s the saturated fat that makes butter unhealthy, because it can raise your low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, commonly referred to as your “bad” cholesterol.” Needless to say, I did not need to read any more of that article.
They also do not allow comments (at least this post) otherwise I would have pointed out (politely) that they are wrong. Needless to say, I will avoid this website in the future if I want credible information.
I’ve noticed that more and more. Articles promoting the same old, same old have comments turned off. I think we know why.
Here in the UK, The Guardian is Vegan Central. Most of the comments (that I’ve seen) agree. The Daily Mail is more of an equal opportunity rag and happily posts every health scare article. Often the commenters there know a LOT more than the journalists. Probably the reason comments are turned off on so many “advice” sites. The Little People are challenging the dogma from The Annointed. The large people are following it.
Yeah, it must be embarrassing when some know-nothing journalist writes a health article that’s little more than quoting from government authorities, then gets shredded in comments by people who actually know something.
Not only does BMI flag muscular people as fat, it passes skinny fat people. That is people with heavy torsos and thin arms and legs, for example.
It was designed for populations, but even that has limitations.
Yup, when I was in high school, I weighed 155 pounds. Skinny arms and legs, but a fat belly.
I recall several years ago where a young guy in the military, a competitive bodybuilder, was threatened with a general discharge because, at 5’9″ and 215 lbs. w/single digit body fat percentages, he was considered, based on his BMI, to be overweight.
Good lord. Yeah, you wouldn’t want that guy on the team, eh?
BMI, Ancel Keyes’ third gift to our metabolic disaster, after the Lipid Hypothesis and the Mediterranean Diet.
Just think how much better world health would be if he’d retired after inventing the K-ration.
He was multi-talented, apparently.
Big sugar would have found another stooge.
As you say, “Follow the money”.
My theory about why most vegetarians go back to meat is this: Most see a documentary such as Food Inc or Forks Over Knives and see the horrible conditions of factory farms and assume that all farms are representative of factory farms, so they go into full Social Justice Warrior mode and say they’re vegetarian or vegan, but then they see militant vegans acting like a bunch of deranged tin foil hat wearing 9/11 truther flunkies, so they think “okay this vegetarian movement is for the koo koo birds” so they go back to eating humanely-raised animal products.
There’s this one vegan conspiracy theorist who runs a blog which claims that militant vegans are actually “Big Meat operatives” and “crisis actors” paid to play a stereotype to discredit the non-militant vegans. I don’t believe his conspiracy theories about “false flag vegans” but I do agree with his opinion that militant vegans do more harm to their cause than good.
Well, at least the conspiracy theorist recognizes that militant vegans are making them all look bad.
I despise Facebook as well.
I’ve met folks that claim to hate Facebook but absolutely LIVE on it. Nonstop stream of low-/no-value digital diarrhea. Glad you’re not one of them.
Nah, you won’t see me living there. I’m a big fan of the Wisdom of Crowds effect, but I try to focus my time on social media so it’s not just a time waster.
If you haven’t seen it, look up “The natural history of the chicken”, it’s a documentary featuring various stories about chickens, in between facts about the chicken industry. My favorite segment was the wealthy housewife I call the crazy chicken lady, who had a pet rooster on whom she lavished all her mothering instincts. Diapers were only the start! It’s an interesting film.
Good grief. That may be worse than being a crazy cat lady.
Tom, I love this blog. I’ve been reading here since 2009? but seldom comment. Just wanted to give you ??
I’ve been up and down the paleo, Keto, vegetarian, vegan, vegan keto (whaaatt?), and plain old normal eating roads for years.
Here’s what I’ve figured out: vegetarian food tastes great when you serve it with a side of meat.
I eat a varied diet, not low carb at all, but about 90% whole food. I even eat bread and make pizza crusts, etc. and maintain a healthy weight and good health. I am an omnivore who eats more on the veg than meat side, but that just means a deer or a chicken takes me a little further (we’re hunters and raise chickens, it’s our primary protein source).
Getting back to nature, Close as possible, might just be enough for most people, but I get it, ain’t nobody got time for dat. And he’ll Mondelez needs to make money on those granola bars make your own their better anyway) and peanut butter crackers and Mac ‘n cheese and other assorted junk carbs.
My primary gripe isn’t about grains per se, it’s that the grain umbrella is so YUGE and has been distorted and semantically redefined so that a serving of Chef Boyardee beefaroni counts as “heart healthy whole grains.” Bang Head On Desk. Add to it the reliance on semiotics to promote/program the notion of HHWG and you get mindless, unquestioned consumption by people collectively guilted into buying crap.
I mean, we know soda and candy bars aren’t good food, but muffins (cake with an innocuous name) and OJ (I am Frooot!) are healthy! No, but symbols convince us otherwise.
Ok I’m going on too long and I’m getting into Preacher, meet Choir territory. So in closing I’ll say this: chickens in the house? What the hell are you thinking? It’s ok to say no to your kids lady, especially when the idea is crack-potted from the get-go.
Chicken whisperers. My kid is an ace at it, gets even the most stubborn and flighty Bantams to come to her. I should farm her out. At $225 an hour that’s nice income for a 7 yo.
Love from NJ (pinko central)!
It would be a nice income for most adults as well. Although to keep her employed, you might have to move to San Francisco, which probably makes NJ look like a bastion of conservatism.
I work at the Pentagon and your sight is blocked based on it being a gambling site! I didn’t have that problem when I worked for the Air Force but since moving offices about a year ago I keep getting that error. I check back every few months just to see if the block has been removed but no such luck. Now I can no longer check the site on my “lunch breaks”!
A gambling site? Like gambling with our health by eating butter?