Recovering

I am recovering from being sick finally. I know this because my cough is now producing legitimate results, my throat hurts less and I'm able to survive once again on fewer hours of sleep.

Enough of that though. Today I want to discuss something that has been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I first read the story of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (say THAT five times fast). In case you forgot, he's the guy who lived with the Inuit people on and off for about 9 years, eating their diet (90% fish, seal, and caribou) and later took part in a study in which he ate only meat for an entire year (there's a link to that story in my first blog post). This has been weighing heavily on my mind because truth matters more to me than so many other things; and when I see controversy surrounding truth, I have to wonder what the truth of the matter is, and what the truth behind the controversy is. In this case, I am of course wondering about the answer to the question, "Is fat bad for you?" and why it has become so controversial.

I like to think of myself as a relatively simple person and I like to project this onto other people. In my mind then, this ought to be a simple matter (I will explain my theories as to why it may not be, but bear with me for now). To figure out if fat is good or bad for you, all that needs to be done is an experiment that controls for any sort of potential confounding variable that tests the hypothesis that fat is good or bad for you. If results are inconclusive, it seems obvious to me that fat is neither good nor bad for someone. This makes me think that there must be ulterior motives -- if there were not ulterior motives, no one would have a reason to create a huge fuss out of something this simple. So what are the motives for stating that fat is bad for someone if it is not... I can think of a few, mostly by calling upon my own prejudices, and one very important one that is not based entirely on my prejudices. I want to list them all anyway just for fun:

Hippies got into doing science and want to be able to say high fat diets (which consists of animal products) are bad for you so that people will stop eating meat and eggs from those poor birdies. Vegetarians want people to believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong, because they are self-righteous hipsters, so they want the information to come out in support of them. People for whom low fat diets work think fat people need to practice more self-control and discipline in order to lose weight. Farmers who produce vegetables want people to buy their products instead of animal products (hurt the competition to better oneself). Lastly, people (similar to vegetarians) who believe they are right and who would lose positions of power if they were shown to be wrong don't want information to come out that shows them to be wrong (obviously).

I hope you can understand that the last reason is devoid of my bias. I can understand why someone in such a position of power would behave this way (not that it excuses it). I can even understand the hippies' position even though I disagree with it. But what this amounts to is sufficient reason to create controversy in all levels of society among both lay-people and scholars. Essentially the point I'm trying to make is that nutritionists don't want to say, "Fat is not so bad for you," because if they were to do so, people would react by saying, "Well, what good are you if you didn't tell us this sooner?"

To get back to why this isn't quite so simple is to point out the simple fact that nothing about the way the human body processes food is simple. Especially, doing a long term study of the effects of a particular diet is a daunting task - one that even has moral implications - in addition to practical implications like the prohibitive cost, and the difficulty of controlling for variables (like midnight ice cream binges).

So, to reiterate, we have two big reasons for a difficult question and an apparently unfounded controversy. Namely, to answer "Is fat bad for you?" we first have to consider how difficult it is to study such a thing, and why certain people in positions to study such things may be opposed to it.

Well, after that crazy tangent, I come back to my main point - there is indeed someone who has studied this controversy in relative detail. His name is Gary Taubes (see his blog: http://www.garytaubes.com). I've been reading one of his books, called Why We Get Fat, when I get no-showed by my students at Barnes and Noble on Thursday nights (and after I see them when they actually show up... it's just more fun to complain, amirite). Anyway, his book details something that makes me feel so much better about not being a hipster...

Way back before the internet age, in like the 19th century, there was a pamphlet published called Letter on Corpulence. This pamphlet essentially detailed my diet: high meat, little to no carbohydrates, no beer, and was published in 1863. It tells the story of a man who tried and tried to lose weight and finally, by trying a high-fat diet, managed to do so. As it turns out, it was actually well known that this was the only effective means of controlling weight by diet. Only later on did we recoil from this idea and start trying low-fat diets for weight loss. In other words, the idea of eating high fat is not new, it has only gone out of fashion. So while I can't slip on my hipster glasses as I tell you that I'm a pioneer in the world of eating, I can still tell you that you've probably never heard of it as I sip organic fair trade coffee (which I don't actually like, it just makes me feel better about my carbon footprint - or something like that).

In addition to bringing up the Letter on Corpulence Taubes also reviews mounds of scientific studies that show that, for instance, the American Heart Association's diet doesn't actually produce heart healthy (or even lean) people, and other studies to that effect.

I feel like wrapping this up now, so I'm only going to make a few more closing comments. Taubes makes another point that perhaps the reason we have found it so difficult to understand obesity is because of the tacit prejudices towards the obese. While I don't necessarily like the specifics of his argument, he makes a good point - why is it that we tend to think people only become obese by being lazy or eating too much? I could tell you the sob story of my battle with my weight, but honestly it's not that sad - more aggravating than anything really. Like I said, I'm not really fat, I just would rather be less fat than I am and don't seem to be capable of it because I like food too much. The only thing I've wondered is something like this "Why is it that people who are less active than me and who eat more than me can stay thin, whereas I will get fat if I don't go to the gym 4 days a week and eat nothing but lean fish and green veggies?"

A better question for me to ask is this: "How have I not become morbidly obese?" Not just to say that I haven't always lived healthy, but to consider people in situations similar to mine who have become obese. They didn't become obese because they were more lazy than me -- I'm not even sure that's possible. They didn't become obese because they ate worse than I did. Indeed, by any standard I ate way too many treats and even my ordinary diet was too high in anything everyone will tell you is bad. One would think I ought to be at least be MORE fat than I am, if not obese.

Taubes asks us to consider genetic and hormonal factors, and what affect our diet has on them (and also how the modern diet isn't very good for most people). It brings to mind the question I asked earlier, "What does it mean to say something is healthy anymore?"

I don't feel like detailing input and output today, so I'll skip to food adventures.

On the recommendation of a distant friend, I decided to make a crustless quiche. Now, I know real men don't eat quiche, but this had bacon in it.
4 eggs
1/2 c salted butter, melted
3/4 c milk
4 slices cooked bacon, chopped
2 c shredded cheddar cheese
pepper
thyme
Preheat oven to 450. Mix all ingredients together in a bowl (be careful not to cook eggs in melted butter or with bacon). Bake for 20 minutes uncovered, then cover with foil and cook for 15-20 minutes more (cover sooner if it begins to brown too much).

It was amazing :) Thanks Ashley

Until next time...

*I had to edit a few things in this post because of inaccuracies. My bad!