Yet another self-proclaimed dietitian online waxed poetically and utterly cliched in her blog about how if only Americans could move more and eat less we could divert the terrible current scourge of obesity and all its many related facets. (In my head I saw her clutch at her pearls in mock empathy). Everyone agreed without question in the comment section, “think of the cost to the taxpayer!” was a common refrain. Everyone was there for the canned answer. Everyone knew the wisdom she was going to divulge before attending her Sunday service of the church of faith based ‘Nutrition Chapter 1’.
Video games, TV, and oh’ God, those phones! Phone time, do you ever see the young people with their heads in phones?! The lazy youth rarely did a thing, not as in yesteryear where people were motivated to take care of themselves! As the Puritans in the church congratulated each other in their dietary purity of somehow consciously controlling their bodies set-weight point and autonomic nervous systems by simply making the “RIGHT” (pure) decisions surrounding food — I wanted to tell them this: “you’re full of shit.” The self-righteous puritanical hegemony is how we got here and oh’ yeah — “you’re all going to die.”
My Story.
I used to watch my mail carrier back in around 1999. She walked from house to house delivering mail on most days in every sort of weather. How did she maintain her obesity I wondered as I stayed effortlessly skinny on a diet that could only be referred to as crap. I tried to guess how many miles she went, 5? 7? More? And she carried that mail bag with her…it looked heavy. Her calves were amazing, but above that she hefted a couple of broad giggling rolls of fat and multiple chins. Was there a diet that could help her? I wondered. Why didn’t those long walks control her appetite? Did she binge on cake and ice cream in a flurry of self-indulgence into the early morning hours? Or, like a lot of my friends on austere dietary measures but kept struggling with weight, and why in the heck was I so skinny?
I shelved the thoughts as I picked a random snack and sat down to daytime television, oblivious to “healthy habits” – in time that was going to radically change.
About ten years later, my Dad became diabetic. No problem! I will go online and find an answer….hmm, okay I’ll buy 50 books (that often contradicted each other) and find the answer! Eat less! Move more! Don’t eat fat! Eat the fat! Buy more books, and more books, get obsessive. Go find historical books. My Dad finally went to a clinic that starved him down to a skeleton. The type 2 diabetes remained stubborn.
I started to wonder if I could budge my own personal set point of weight. Could I put on a stone? Get slenderized? Not really. I could manage it for a week or two…but not much worked. I took up running. I took up 3 hour gym sessions 5 days a week. I stayed the same size, just fitter. It really did seem that there was a set weight point in my brain and that it did a good job of weight regulation. Actual science seemed to back the ‘brain is in charge – not willpower’ hypothesis but the information reaching the public wasn’t, as is evidenced by decades of ‘eat less and move more.’
My nutritional answer quest is on year 15 of no answer to the original question: why couldn’t the mail-delivery-person lose weight. But I finally feel like I have an answer.
Dad died of type 2 diabetes after suffering an amputation. (In his later years he was buying the majority of his groceries at the dollar store which to him was a good deal and ideas to the contrary were ‘hipster’ and ‘unAmerican!’)
My Mom died of stroke (age 54) — and despite my new obsession with healthy eating (after fifteen years of curiosity my diet did improve modestly…) my heart had ‘low-function’ and I was prediabetic — but 3 hour gym sessions!! Was all that exercise and running for nothing? (Turns out I love running and cycling – it takes no convincing for me to go exercise.)
As my health turned downwards I started a supplement journey. The more health food I ate, the worse my digestion became. I developed diverticulitis. Arthritis. All the ITIS! Why does healthy food make me sick? All the books say it shouldn’t – except maybe that quack “Dr.” Gundry whose simple ‘pancake’ recipe takes 45 minutes to prepare. I spent thousands of dollars on health programs, diets and supplements.
I vacillated between healthy diets, diets that I didn’t even truly believed made sense (cough Paleo…) I figured that I was truly a N=1 freak — because my health journey always ended in disaster. I honestly felt a lot better, with more energy, better skin tone and bounce when I ate McDonalds. But by then food had a religious aspect to it, so McDonalds was like … selling a baby and doing cocaine to my middle-aged woman self. Utterly wrong.
Then I read the Dorito Effect*, and the light came on. What if it’s food additives. All the books I had read had warned about heavy metals, luckily at least the heavy metal iron was good for me! Or was it? What if we’re, like it mentioned in the Dorito Effect, all eating pig feed and getting pig feed results. And while gorging on otherwise deficient yet fortified foods we were getting walloping levels of iron, and what if some of us, like myself couldn’t handle the iron. (See Hemochromotosis, 1:300 Americans, possibly more, mostly Caucasian hold on to excessive iron, and because iron deficiency causes the same immediate symptoms as too much iron.)
What does excessive iron cause? All the ills of obesity and type two diabetes[1], Fatty liver (NAFLD)[1], Alzheimer’s[ 1] and new connections are made every day even to arthritis, gout, etc.
“This constellation has been named the ‘dysmetabolic iron overload syndrome (DIOS)’. Current evidence suggests that elevated body iron stores exert a detrimental effect on the clinical course of obesity-related conditions and that iron removal improves insulin sensitivity and delays the onset of T2DM”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23289518/
I had been supplementing iron as I hit middle age and as a woman thought I needed it because I was so very tired all of the time. “Thank goodness” I thought, “all those other heavy metal elements are all toxic, but I take a necessary one so it’s okay!” I was an idiot.
The postal worker I had observed probably ate a very fortified “healthy” diet and suffered similar results that I now faced as I rowed my boat into middle-age.
Most of us in the so called “Diabetes Belt” consumed high levels of cheap fortified foods. Pinching a penny is a virtue where I grew up. I had always wondered how the blue-collar people kept being told they just didn’t “burn enough calories”. For example during my youth, my Dad was an indoor shop welder — no air conditioning of course, it would get above 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and he had to wear long sleeve denim to prevent burns and would go through a handful of salt pills a day. The hard work of the working poor was brutal. Sure he slowed down, he literally broke down, but even in a wheel chair he thought he would knock down a wall in his house and do a bit of remodeling. When Dad came home from work, he had to work on the farm too — it was non-stop for decades. For everyone. It was always manual hard labor and people could only dream of indoor desk jobs, yet, they are accused of sloth. If only they had eaten less and moved more! (Says a person who has never had to endure anything other than maybe a 5k fun run…)
We’ve been poisoned.
Poisoned. That was the result of my fifteen years of research. When I look at my kids, both with autism, I wonder if things could have been different if I had known. If I hadn’t been taking those handfuls of prescribed vitamins AND existing on Nutrigrain bars which I had developed a pregnancy craving for but never since.
Anyway, as long as the public points the blame finger at each other making puritanical claims of indecency — nobody looks at the government /corporations (are they different? Really?) and what is in the food, I figure not much is going to change. After fifteen years I’m almost in heart failure, and I have moved my limbs furiously over these years. I have eaten less. I’ve been a strict Vegan, Vegetarian and once for just a few days Carnivore (that one did not work out…) I have the gym membership, a good bicycle and a dozens of medals from running events. When do the benefits kick in? Twenty years possibly? Thirty?
Time and time again I witnessed the best protector against mortality from a bad diet was to have a very high income with exciting vacation destinations. It did not seem to be in reach of someone like myself, who still would prefer the snacks and daytime TV if I was to be honest.
Calcified Arteries a Thing Since 1955!
“During his first term as President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered several serious illnesses. Particularly important was the massive heart attack he experienced in the fall of 1955”
PubMed NIH
Historically the rise of heart attacks rose right along with the phosphate used to preserve food beginning in the 1950’s. Various forms of inorganic phosphates kept being tested and going into use over the following decades. Up marched the rate of heart attacks. America was admonished for eating too much animal fat.
Here I’m going to generalize some very important but complicated terms and I would suggest researching this on your own as there are nearly a dozen form of phosphate preservatives and more used in pharmaceuticals. There are a few forms of phosphate to preserve food and the chemistry gets complicated because ‘phosphate’ used in fields early in the year is natural, but inorganic phosphate as a food preservative had long been known to be able to move calcium into the arteries and many of the phosphates have only ‘recently’ (since the 80’s) been approved as food additives.
” Phosphates are quite different from other ingredients conventionally added to emulsion meat products. There are eleven different phosphates which have been approved for use in meat products and each one is somewhat different from the rest in its functional properties in meat. Unlike ingredients such as salt (sodium chloride), phosphate is not phosphate. The following discussion focuses on some of the properties of phosphates.”
Phosphates in Sausage, Meat Extension Office
When Dr. Barnard, renowned Vegan and a really good looking Vegan activist / medical doctor, said he tapped the hardened calcified artery during an autopsy he says he was told, “that’s your Sunday roast!” (something like that) he was gripped by the reality that red meat was calcifying arteries — but how? How I wondered! How did that fat get to the heart and say not the toe? I searched for a very long time on how saturated fat moved calcium to replace elastic tissue, and although I didn’t find the connection to rump roast, I did find a clear connection to meat preservatives.
“…inorganic phosphate in food additives is effectively absorbed and can measurably elevate the serum phosphate concentration in patients with advanced CKD [Chronic Kidney Disease]. Foods with added phosphate tend to be eaten by persons at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, who consume more processed and “fast” food. The main pathophysiological effect of phosphate is vascular damage, e.g. endothelial dysfunction and vascular calcification.”
NIH
Although the NIH understands the chemistry and history of meat preservation the information given the public consumers goes very deceptively as follows:
“Phosphorus is found naturally in dairy, meat, and plants. It’s needed to help cells work properly. Phosphates enhance flavor and moistness in deli meats, frozen food, cereals, cheese, and baked goods, as well as in sodas and prepared iced tea mixes.”
Wow that sounds awesome Web MD! It goes on to say maybe some people have a bit a sensitivity, you know like how I get the poops if I get into the dairy.
In fact there is natural phosphate in most food, but also synthesized lab produced phosphate additives that have a horrible impact on the heart, bowel and kidneys.
Even Healthline, one of the worst “health” web sites online grudgingly concludes after a long and polished article:
“High phosphate levels have been linked to kidney disease, intestinal inflammation, decreased bone density, heart conditions, and even premature death.”
“Limiting foods that contain trisodium phosphate and other phosphate additives is especially important for people with kidney disease, heart conditions, IBD, and osteoporosis.”
Healthline
The meat preservatives now so commonly used: don’t have to be labelled, at least in the US. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to tackle food laws abroad.
To wrap up — it’s the shit in the food.
[Fun Fact: Half the people with Type 2 Diabetes are in the normal weight range but the Puritans love to hate on overweight people, so they’ve demonized an entire very debilitating hard to control illness that is wrecking the lives of millions, like one Youtuber said the other day, “I’m not even going to address Type 2 Diabetes because it’s not serious, you can eat your way out of that easily. It’s not nearly as serious as cancer or other dangerous diseases.”
Youtube food evangelist
To summarize, in the United States we don’t have an Obesity problem. We have a food additive problem. The B-Vitamins are required for fat deposition and are included in otherwise low-nutrient food sources. Food producers are allowed to put in more vitamin mix then required so that labels can say, “200% of your daily required…” The low-nutrient food sources are also fortified with iron which causes a whole Pandora’s box of health issues particularly for white Caucasian people such as metabolic disease. Vitamin C causes an uptick in Iron acquisition and is also commonly added to food and supplemented meaning most people get several times their iron requirements daily. And finally, worth of an entire book by itself: inorganic phosphates that can literally turn your elastic happy heart arteries to stone.
In the final chapter of the food industry religious manual the Puritans have decreed: thou shall not question the science and the science will be whatever we ‘feel’ it is.
Photos: by me
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor Paperback – March 15, 2016 by Mark Schatzker (Author)
An interesting look at flavoring and creating palatability that tricks the brain. Science has the ability to make anything taste like anything pretty much, but taste used to give us clues about ‘good for us’ or ‘bad’. Flavor is very important in finding healthy foods, but the bonanza of pounds per acre harvested has created a dillution of nutrients making many natural foods taste, well gross, watery, and flavorless. Meanwhile processed foods deliver on flavor.
The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well 2021
by Mark Schatzker (Author) This isn’t an exactly must read, it’s mostly a retelling of the Dorito Effect with a couple of crucial elements thrown in: B vitamins are a requirement for obesity, and we’re being fed “pig feed” pretty literally too. I thought the whole book could just be that and worth the read / cost. It has quite a bit of filler.
Worth noting and a must read:
The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio
by Forrest Maready (establishes that heavy metals aren’t good for human health, and how toxins can work there way into the food system and long after the data is in: persist and even be ignored.)
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
by Gary Taubes
(This is a low-carb book. The first research asks all the right questions I think, but his conclusions are very weak, but at least he’s tackling the obvious.)
There are many, many sources I couldn’t include because I never expected to write this. Do your own research and for Christs’ sake ask questions. Don’t listen to the church of nutrition.
The Clot Thickens: The enduring mystery of heart disease
Malcolm Kendrick
So does fat (that is not water soluble) just float around in our arteries wreaking havoc? As soon as we eat it, does it migrate into our arteries (but somehow NEVER the veins? This book takes on the obvious and as a nice byproduct debunks a lot of great Youtube Nutrition zealots. Must read for those with high cholesterol.
