Comets or Contagions?
Throughout history, philosophers believed that comets were “harbingers of doom, disease, and death, infecting men with a blood lust to war, contaminating crops, and dispersing disease and plague.”
The Blog that Challenges Policitally Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
Throughout history, philosophers believed that comets were “harbingers of doom, disease, and death, infecting men with a blood lust to war, contaminating crops, and dispersing disease and plague.”
This is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The premise that coronavirus is highly contagious and can cause disease provides the justification for putting entire nations on lockdown, destroying the global economy and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. But is it contagious? Does it even cause disease?
My last post elicited a lot of comments, including some that raised legitimate criticisms, which I hope to address in this follow-on.
With coronavirus dominating the news, we’ve seen a contagion of conspiracy theories—coronavirus is a bio-weapon invented by the Chinese, coronavirus lingers on paper money so governments are going to decree a cashless society, coronavirus has given the Italian and Iranian governments an excuse to crack down on dissidents, coronavirus is caused by 5G, which was rolled out in Wuhan—and outbreaks of worst-case-scenario thinking, like the claim that coronavirus will infect 80 percent of the UK population!
Southern Maryland, where I live, used to be a premier tobacco-growing region. Then in the 1980s, as the risks of tobacco smoking became clear, the state of Maryland instituted a tobacco buy-out program. Tobacco farmers received a large payment for ten years in a row to never plant tobacco again. The problem is that what replaced the tobacco was mostly soybeans—a crop that is far more carcinogenic and dangerous than tobacco. Fields-of-lung-cancer became fields-of-every-kind-of-cancer.
Diabetes is on the rise, both type 1–in which the pancreas does not secrete insulin –and type 2–in which the cells’ receptors for insulin don’t work. Either way—and the likelihood is that most diabetics have some combination of type 1 and type 2–sugar can’t get into the cells (so they starve) and sugar levels in the blood remain high.
Years ago I wrote an article called “Be Kind to Your Grains. . . and Your Grains will be Kind to You,” noting that grains are very difficult to digest without proper preparation such as soaking and sourdough fermentation.
I recently learned that near the end of his life, Bill W, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), went to his board of directors and urged them to add nutritional therapy to the AA protocols. The board turned him down.
I have long believed that native peoples—in the Americas, in Africa and in the South Seas—began to suffer from infectious disease as soon as they came in contact with European colonists. In fact, many have asked me how such healthy people could succumb to disease so quickly.
Recently I wrote about lab meat, a product that uses bovine fetal serum (BFS)–blood extracted from living fetal calves–to feed meat protein molecules grown in a laboratory.
Now let’s turn our attention to two other imitation meat products new to the market, which the press has heralded as breakthroughs in fake meat: the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger. Will these new products overcome the observation that veggie burgers are “tasteless pucks?”
In my last post, I discussed Dr. Roizen’s recommended supplement plan, noting the drawbacks of each product. The discussion provides a natural segue into a look at the subject of vitamin products in general.
In my last post, I discussed the dietary suggestions of Dr. Mike Roizen, chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic. The doctor admits that even though he was eating a “good” diet, full of colorful fruits and vegetables, he still found that he was missing a lot of vitamins and minerals.
Dr. Mike Roizen is the chief wellness officer at the “famous Cleveland Clinic,” where the rich and famous get examined and treated. He is the author of You: The Owner’s Manual: An Insider’s Guide To The Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger, among other books, and over two hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles. He also served on FDA advisory committees for sixteen years.
Laboratory-produced meat or lab meat—sometimes called “cultured meat” or even “clean meat”–is in the news these days, with gushing articles in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many magazines. The publicity machines are whirring at high speed, and all the chic arguments are on display. “Save the planet bite by bite,” is one of the slogans. If we eat lab meat instead of real meat, we’ll save the land from the desecration by cattle, cut down on water use, protect the air from cow farts containing methane and forestall global warming. Lab meat would be kinder also, because no animals would be killed.
Recently I participated in the 2018 Long Island Food Conference, the lone meat eater in a lineup of speakers espousing “plant-based” diets. The keynote speaker was Francis Moore Lappé, whom you will recognize as the author of the very influential Diet for a Small Planet, the 1971 book that convinced many to embrace a diet of grains and beans.
Flavored milks are highly sweetened beverages made with powdered skim milk—they are actually the dairy industry’s way of getting rid of all the skim milk left over from the production of butter and cream, mostly for ice cream. Since Americans are huge ice cream eaters (and since Americans are eating more butter these days), there’s an enormous amount of this waste product that the industry needs to get rid of.
“Pasteurization of milk ensures safety for human consumption by reducing the number of viable pathogenic bacteria.” So begins an article published in the Journal of Food Protection, published in 2011.
Recently I attended the 2018 Global Food Forum, organized by the Wall Street Journal, held in the Intercontinental Hotel in New York, and sponsored by Pratt Industries (maker of recyclable packaging), the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, US Soy and The Australian (news coverage).
Earlier this year I made a trip to Switzerland to give two talks on raw milk and to visit one of my boys, who lives in Geneva. Of course, the food in Switzerland received my special attention.
A few weeks ago, on a trip to British Columbia, I ate in a local restaurant. When eating out, I always try to order something simple, without a gravy or sauce, since these sauces are bound to contain MSG. So I ordered a plain crab cake with rice and vegetables—no sauce, no mayo. Boy, did that crab cake taste good! About midnight I knew why. I woke up with a dry mouth, a terrible thirst and a headache. The next day I felt sore all over, like I’d been in a fight. My hands felt like they had arthritis.