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Unhealthy dogma means unhealthy food
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Part 1: Introduction
Public health recommendations over the last thirty years have been to reduce fat intake to as low as 30% of calories to lower the incidence of coronary artery disease. In the face of such recommendations, the agricultural industry started shifting food composition toward lower proportions of saturated fatty acids and then to all fats in general. Fat contents of foods were replaced principally with carbohydrates. The unfounded, but still entrenched, belief in a connection between dietary fat and heart disease has spawned an enormous processed-foods industry based on those beliefs. It doesn't help consumers that such foods are cheap to produce and profits are greater for their manufacturers.
Fifty years ago, grocery stores stocked only about 200 items, most of which were grown, produced and processed within a few miles of the store. Today, a supermarket can carry 50,000 food items or more, most of which are highly processed and refined, and are transported thousands of miles. Europeans and Asians are increasingly following trends in the USA where the population spend over 90% of their food budget on such commodities. These foods contain high levels of refined sugars, high fructose corn syrup, white flour, refined polyunsaturated oils and trans-fatty acids, as well as excitotoxins such as monosodium glutamate and aspartame. We are warned against junk foods; these are the real junk-foods. The logical result of these nutrient-depleted foods is that we in industrialised nations now have to consume much more of them to satisfy our bodies' basic nutritional requirements. And that, in turn, means that we are forced to consume a greater number of calories in order to satisfy our bodies' basic nutrient needs. The Americans have an apt name for this diet: they call it ‘SAD-CRAP', which stands for the Standard American Diet — Cereals Refined And Processed.
Recently, such high-carbohydrate diets have become recognised as contributing to the rising numbers of cases of metabolic syndrome and obesity, both of which are becoming common themes in the medical literature. Blood fat and cholesterol patterns which lead to the formation of atherosclerosis and heart attacks are also recognised as being caused by such changes. Despite these findings, the same recommendations are still promoted vigorously. As a consequence, the world is moving toward more unitary dietary recommendations; and agricultural practices have been adopted to decrease saturated fatty acids to as low as agriculturally possible. This has changed, and it still changing, the composition of the animals we eat.
Today, it is increasingly difficult to buy fresh, wholesome food. What used to be healthy, no longer is.
There are many examples: Meat is so lean today that Mrs. Beeton would regard it as being of very poor quality indeed. I normally buy meat straight from the farmer, but recently I tried some beef that I bought from a supermarket; it was dry, tasteless and tough. That doesn't make it unhealthy, necessarily, but other changes brought about by ‘healthy' dogma do. For example, here in the UK, there are some truly depraved, overly-draconian laws forbidding pigs (even organic-raised pigs) from being fed on virtually anything but denatured pellets made from low-grade grains and soya. Of course, even the most brain-dead specialist in wildlife is aware that pigs in the wild, such as wild boar, are true omnivores, who feed on thousands of varied, different things such as earthworms, insects, dead animal carcasses, grains, plants, leaves and grasses, roots, fruits and flowers, and even the bark off trees. But it seems the agricultural authorities are deathly afraid of more natural diets for domesticated animals. The pig diet, high in omega-6-rich seed oils, changes the composition of their body fat so that it is less saturated; cattle, which should eat grass, are also fed a ‘healthy' diet based on grains and soya. These are positively dangerous.
There are so many such examples that I'll just give one in detail: modern milk.
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