Some Mockery, Then Some Information

I have to confess that I'm feeling differently about you. Ever since I saw you naked. I've lost all respect for you. I don't understand how anyone could let happen to them what you've let happen to you. It's astonishing. Clothes sure do make the man. Clothes, and buckets and buckets of pork rinds. It's like pudding poured into a canvass sack. There is a sort of shape. Are there any bones in there? Or is it all batting.

Food is about health. Exercise is about fitness. You can have fit people, elite athletes, who get by on genetics and training. Are they healthy? If health is the absence of sickness, then yes they are. But I see health as a reservoir of potentials. It's not just what's on the surface. Are you able to fight off sickness, and not just avoid it somehow. Can you confront it, and beat it before it gets a hold. And all those diseases that await most people down the line -- are they dormant or incipient or festering now? If so, that's not health.

Same with healthy people, with their great diets. It's not the same as fitness. Diet makes fitness easier, but fitness is about performance, and that has to be practiced. Training. By these standards, though, it is clear that the starting point is health, and fitness follows. Diet, followed by training.

I jumped ahead in the Taubes book. Here's the upshot, about why carbs are bad. All calories can be made into fat. Free fatty acids. That's just a form of usable energy in your blood. These fats are stored in cells as FAT -- blubber fat -- by being bound together as triglycerides. The glue that turns the good free fatty acids into the bad blubber is glycerol. Your body gets glycerol by burning carbs -- glucose. So the more carbs you burn, the more glue there is to bind fats. Glycerol is the limiting factor.

Isn't that interesting? It's exactly the same idea as with omega 3. You can't make anti-inflammatory hormones unless you have omega 3. The more you have, the more you can make, and that's a good thing. The more glycerol you have, the more blubber you can make, and that's a bad thing. The wrong lesson to draw from this is that you shouldn't eat carbs. Plants are carbs. Eat plants. Don't eat glue factories. Grains. Some bread? Sure, once in a while. All the time, at every meal? What, is there a famine? As I say, wheat is great if you're starting a neolithic civilization. But too few calories is not the problem, in 21st century America.

Someone told me last night that Canadians didn't seem nearly as fat as Americans. I immediately said that was because the US government started to sponsor a poisonous -- low fat -- diet, starting in the 80s. Exactly the time when obesity started its meteoric rise. Although meteors don't rise. Sure, low fat generally means fewer calories. But it also means low ESSENTIAL fats. You can turns carbs into fat, but never into essential fats. So it's a malnutrition diet. Brilliant. Thanks for that. Instead of getting the essentials, we got hydrogenated and transfats. Where's a bloody coup d'etat when you need one.

So, review these notes, and we'll discuss them next time. Meantime, re-read chapters 34 and 35 in my study guide.

God bless the United States of America.


J