Link for 11.8.24

It started out as a web log, but picked up only one link...

Health

People are claiming for the "carnivore diet," "meat three times a day," the same benefits people have claimed for the low-fat, vegan, complex-carbs-based McDougall Diet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehy-Vnkvz3c&t=1860s

Well, I'm biased. I've never had any of the major chronic diseases, like arthritis and diabetes, that either diet is supposed to cure, so I can't speak to that, but I can say that I feel groovy on the McDougall Diet assuming clean fruit and vegetables--which you can't take for granted these days--and lose my appetite on any diet that calls for a lot of meat, butter, and eggs. Which way of eating more natural food and less overprocessed junk appeals to an individual may be genetically predetermined.

But how can a high-fat, carb-free, high-protein diet offer any of the same benefits of a low-far, high-complex-carbs, low-protein diet? Our bodies adapt to the natural food available, to some extent, but how could radically different balances of nutrients relieve any of the same chronic conditions? 

I have a guess. You can have minor recurring symptoms like heartburn, indigestion, irregularity, and that sluggish brainfogged feeling, on any diet if you don't drink enough water and get enough exercise. You can have a major chronic condition that's caused or aggravated by reactions to chemicals in processed foods, maybe monosodium glutamate; that would be relieved by almost any planned diet of natural foods, though bacon... Or it could be the glyphosate. In the 1980s people who ate the McDougall Diet felt great, and many were in fact healed of chronic conditions. Today people who follow the printed instructions for the McDougall Diet feel terrible, and many have flare-ups of chronic conditions. And when they went on uncensored Twitter and tweeted about how much better they felt within days after going to some place that banned glyphosate spraying, or at least banned spraying on food, everything became crystal clear. 

If you feel ill when you eat plain raw fruit and vegetables, and better when you eat a lot of meat, butter, and eggs, I'd recommend assuming it's the glyphosate. Our primitive ancestors did not eat meat every day, though if they domesticated fowl they might have enjoyed an egg for breakfast every day. They might have ungratefully called vegetables starvation rations, but they would have had more vegan days than meat-feast days. That people are trying to live entirely on meat tells us something about the chemicals sprayed on crops these days, not about the benefits of a plant-based diet in et per se. If fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains were unsprayed, these people might feel even better on a plant-based diet than they now feel on a meat-based diet. 

I wish the best to Dr. Berry (though now the idea of a science-fiction "doctorberry," a fruit with some sort of medicinal benefit, is stuck in my mind). I don't believe eating meat at every meal is sustainable for the human body, but meat and eggs contain far less glyphosate than sprayed foods so it's possible that some people need to do a cleansing "carnivore diet" before gradually reintroducing plant-derived foods to find out which ones are clean enough to be tolerated. 

God have mercy on us.

Poor Dr. (John) McDougall was too old to wrap his mind around this, but I'd like to see Craig McDougall work with it to move us all forward. Vegan diets harm people who can't buy or even grow glyphosate-free vegetables! Berry talks very frankly and specifically about the extent to which his digestion controlled his "testosterone-poisoned" emotions, and I'd like to see psychiatrists pick up on this, too.