Fixing the lies

OK, so I lied a little bit in the first post/in this blog... I don't swear very often among other things. My sister says not to be a potty mouth so from now on I'm gonna try to avoid it (but it's so hipster to use the f-word repeatedly). I'm also not very fat, although I used to be. But I'm also not skinny and due to my love of food I never will be.

I'd be a liar if I told you I'd do things and then didn't. Since I said I would explain the theory behind the meat diet I'm gonna do that now. If you followed my link from the first page (you did... didn't you?) then you understand most of it, at least slightly. Unless of course, like all of us, you think scientific papers are really boring and even seem to be intentionally difficult to understand at times -- and were unable to figure out what the point was. The point was that the two men in the study who were eating nothing but meat showed no obvious signs of deteriorating health after one year. This isn't what one would expect at all. They weren't even taking vitamins and they didn't develop any deficiencies. They were also eating a diet that consisted of about 75% calories from fat and only 25% from protein and almost none from carbohydrates. The theory, as far as I can understand from reading various sources, is that we don't need plant material as our sources of micronutrients, we don't need carbohydrates (mostly from plants) and can replace them with fats - making a change in the way our body gets energy, and we don't need fiber to keep our bowels moving regularly as long as we only eat animal products.

It calls into question a lot of things which we - and primarily for good reason - hold to be true. For example, we know that if we eat a normal diet but don't get enough fiber then we will have problems - so what actually causes the issues if we can go without fiber? What causes scurvy and how could we get vitamin C from meats? Why would someone want to eat lots of fat? How did they not develop vitamin deficiencies? What about cancer? How could all of this meat not cause kidney damage? What about Eskimos? Don't they essentially eat this way? Why has this not been studied to death?

And of course I think that last question is the most important one. And in some ways we can answer it. These days, and even in the recent past, there has been a hysterical reaction to meat in general and specifically to fatty meats. The idea of an all meat diet is generally responded to with "you're going to die." Everyone is absurdly insistent on the healthiness of vegan diets -- which are honestly questionable. Imagine a school trying to set up a volunteer study. The only volunteers would be considered insane or at least abnormal by the civilized in society, the higher-ups in the school would be very unlikely to authorize something like this, and the cost to insure the researchers and volunteers against potential health issues and liability would be prohibitive. On the other hand, given the popularity of vegan diets, a school doing a similar study on vegan diets would run into none of these roadblocks, despite potential health issues, and if the volunteers reported that they "felt really good" it would be expected and left unquestioned.

The final part of the theory is the explanation for why they were able to eat so much saturated fat and cholesterol without developing heart issues. But they did somehow, as one of them had improved blood pressure levels and other was unchanged (The one whose BP didn't change had been living on this diet for about 9 years on and off, had low-normal blood pressure levels, lived an inactive life, and lived to be over 80 years old, despite being born in the late 1800s). I'm going to leave this research to the reader, but still give a brief explanation. There's a theory that dietary saturated fats and cholesterol aren't the cause of clogged arteries and other problems, and there are at least a few studies to support it.

That's it for the day cuz I'm tired, so onto the food

Today I ate a lot of walnuts. I had to include them in my diet because they travel well and don't require preparation. I also made a meatloaf with my brother and his wife out of ground turkey, pork sausage, and bacon. We took pics :)

INPUT
Breakfast: 4oz milk, smal bowl of egg salad, multivitamin, vitamin D
Midmorning: handful of walnuts
Lunch: Other half of the previous block of white cheddar, another handful of walnuts
Afternoon snack: last bit of cheddar, handful of walnuts, 4oz milk
Dinner: Large wedge of delicious meatloaf
Dessert: half a cookie with 4oz of milk

A fair amount of water