At first I was mad, then I was embarrassed, then I was just frustrated. I had just come from a lecture and my world had been
For the last 37 years of conscious adult life (I consider myself brain dead and uninformed at least until I was 20) I had been smothered by the misconception that eating fat and meat was tantamount to ingesting roach feces. I thought my proclivity towards vegetarian consumption was based on science and common sense. I mean after all, have you ever seen a fat vegan? These people look like they are refugees from the set of the Walking Dead. Realistically this should have been a deterrent unless I was wanting to become a permanent halloween character, but I was focused on the 2% body fat that these meat shunners tended to espouse. I equated skinny with healthy. I know now that this is somewhat like equating having an English accent with being smart, it ain’t necessarily so!
Granted, there are a lot of skinny folks who are fairly healthy and there are a lot of fat folks who are very sick, but there are also some thin people who are sick as sin and some plump people who are healthier than a hound dog with a pork chop collar. So fact number one that blew my medical doors was what we look like on the outside has very little correlation to what we look like on the inside. It’s a whole lot more complicated than that. If you want to get all esoteric about this you can say that a person’s beauty is on the inside and, while that may be true in a spiritual sense, you can be pretty ugly on the inside (physiologically speaking) and be a 10+ on the outside. Statistically it is more likely for you to have diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer and a plethora of other illnesses if you are seriously overweight, so I am not advocating being heavy, it’s just that moderation from both ends seems to be the ideal.
Fact number two, sugar and his devil twin insulin is the root of all evil, not money. Too much money and all you suffer from is exuberant luxury and terminal opulence, too much sugar and you…die! We have been bamboozled by years of false teachings regarding nutrition, and unfortunately the guided gentry of the medical society are largely responsible for perpetuating the myth. I have swallowed this gospel hook, line, and lard and have preached for thirty years that a low fat diet is the holy grail of health. I learned today that I have been a harbinger of hubristic hoohoo. First, this is ridiculously simplistic. The mechanics of metabolism would make a Swiss watchmaker jealous. Stating with legalistic finality that limiting one class of nutrients was the cure of all the world's ills is dangerously dogmatic and simply wrong. When momma said eat a balanced meal those many years ago, she was right. Moderation in all and nothing in excess, except maybe Pokemon Go.
The third fact is that what sometimes thought of as good can actually turn out to be bad, sort of like watching Seinfeld. There was an old Greek philosopher, it’s hard to remember which, there were so many, who said “everything in moderation, nothing in excess”. It was known as the Greek Ideal, as opposed to Venus, who is Greek, but not that ideal. In this case it is our old friend insulin. This pancreatic hormone does a very good thing when it is in small quantities. It regulates blood sugar and prevents your serum from becoming molasses. But when there is too much, and too much for a long time, bad things happen, much like that uncle who visits for weeks at a time. Insulin resistance, like the French resistance , lead to death and destruction. The insulin problem is at the root of many maladies such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and impotence. That is not a pretty picture. Control the sugar and you control the insulin. And in this particular sense sugar is synonymous with carbohydrates. You can’t lump all carbohydrates together, just as you can’t lump all college professors together, some are good, some are bad and some just smell funny. The key is identifying which carbs elevate the insulin most and avoid those like you would a herpes invasion. Increase your protein and even your fat (I still cringe when I say that it is so entrenched in my being) but limit carbs if you want to hang around as long as possible.
I have revamped my simplistic nutritional mantra, Eat balanced, lower trans-fats, low sugar, and high fiber.
