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Tonight I served my five-year-old a big bowl of rat chow for dinner, then asked her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which she (supposedly) learned in school yesterday.\u00a0 She couldn’t do it.\u00a0 This was annoying, because she recited the whole thing last night.<\/p>\n
So I fed her some fish food.\u00a0 That didn’t work either.\u00a0 I tried dried cat food.\u00a0 No better.\u00a0 Rabbit chow.\u00a0 Nada.<\/p>\n
I was experimenting because I’d seen several articles on … what’s that called? … the spider web … no… the tennis net … volleyball net<\/em> … ah, the internet!\u00a0 There were all these articles about how a high-fat diet can adversely affect your mammary.\u00a0 No wait, that’s not it<\/em> … your mummery.\u00a0 Hang on, it’ll come to me<\/em> … nope, I’ll have to look it up again.<\/p>\n Got it.\u00a0 There were these articles about how a high-fat can adversely affect your memory.\u00a0 I found this disturbing because as a performer, I have to memorize a lot of material.\u00a0 When I act in plays, I memorize every line in my scenes – mine and everyone else’s.\u00a0 That way I know if another actor forgot a line and I can cover.\u00a0<\/p>\n (Once, in a bad production of “A Shot in the Dark,” I spent more time covering than I did saying actual lines from the script.\u00a0 Strange, because the actor who forgot half his dialog was a vegetarian.)<\/p>\n When I\u00a0perform on\u00a0cruise ships, I do two different half-hour standup shows … alone, with no teleprompter and no one to cover for me.\u00a0 So I take memory seriously.\u00a0 I also eat a lot of fat, and my memory is just fine.\u00a0 I still remember the phone number my parents had when I was a kid in Iowa.\u00a0 My dad used to call me “Total Recall.”\u00a0 So when I saw the headlines, I smelled a rat.<\/p>\n Yup, it was a rat, all right.\u00a0 For this study<\/a>, researchers fed some rats a low-fat diet (7.5%) then tested their physical endurance and memory by having them run on a treadmill and find their way through a maze.\u00a0 Later, they fed the rats a high-fat diet (55%) and repeated the tests.\u00a0 Wouldn’t you know it, the rats didn’t do so well on a high-fat diet.<\/p>\n Let’s set aside the possibility that after eating all that fat, the rats became much more intelligent and thought to themselves, “Running a maze is stupid.\u00a0 I’m going to just sit here until that dumb @#$%ing researcher gets tired of writing on his pad and gets me out of here.\u00a0 I haven’t finished reading the sports section on that newspaper lining the bottom of my cage.”<\/p>\n The point is, a high-fat diet isn’t natural for rats.\u00a0 I looked it up, and rats are listed as omnivores who will eat pretty much whatever is available, but prefer cereal grains.\u00a0 (They probably like looking at that American Heart Association seal of approval on the box.)\u00a0 When you feed an animal – or a human – an unnatural diet, you’re going to get negative results.<\/p>\n The Lipid Hypothesis became accepted partly because when researchers fed rabbits lard and cholesterol, the rabbits rapidly developed heart disease.\u00a0 Well, go figure … rabbits rarely attack pigs and eat them.\u00a0 When other researchers tried the same experiment on dogs, they couldn’t induce heart disease, no matter how much lard they fed them.\u00a0 So they concluded that dogs don’t get heart disease.\u00a0 But they do – if you feed them grains.<\/p>\n If rats eat a lot of fat and then become lethargic and stupid, that says nothing about how a high-fat diet affects humans.\u00a0 We’ve been eating fatty diets for hundreds of thousands of years.\u00a0 We didn’t become fat until we started eating grains.\u00a0 (And we didn’t become stupid until we started feeding fat to rats and thinking the results mean anything.)<\/p>\n In another rat study<\/a> that hit the news this week, researchers suggested that high-fat, high-protein diet leads to insulin resistance.\u00a0 Once again, we’re looking at animals that aren’t eating anything close to their natural diet.\u00a0 If a high-fat, high-protein diet had the same effect on humans, the Inuits and the buffalo-hunting tribes should’ve been plagued by diabetes.\u00a0 They weren’t.\u00a0 But after Native Americans were herded onto reservations and forced to live on flour and sugar, they became one of the most diabetic populations on the planet – more than 50% in some tribes.<\/p>\n Studies on actual humans don’t show these results.\u00a0 In fact, they show exactly the opposite.\u00a0 In one recent study<\/a>, Alzheimer’s patients showed improvements in memory when they were given ketones.\u00a0 The natural way to produce ketones, of course, is to eat a high-fat diet and skip the carbs.<\/p>\n