That all changed today. I think it’s time for T. [...]]]> I’d heard of the China Study which supposedly proves veganism is healthier than eating animal foods. But I hadn’t read the book, so really couldn’t have an opinion about it. I’d heard from some LC bloggers that it was bunk, but again, nothing definite.

That all changed today. I think it’s time for T. Colin Campbell to get a real job.

If you’re a numbers junkie and haven’t seen this brilliant blog post already, go NOW. You will be catatonic with delight. And she lays out Campbell’s own data in a way that even a statistics-ignorant layperson like me can somewhat understand.

Aaand… she’s very neutral in tone. She is not pushing any particular agenda. She just wanted to see if the numbers lined up.

So there you go. Have fun, kiddies. Unless you’re vegan, in which case you’ll ignore her completely and pretend there are no problems at all with the study. Good luck with that, ya hear?

Anyway, I don’t want to call her out by name, but an old friend of mine from high school recently [...]]]> I don’t know if I have OCD, but whatever it is, it’s going crazy right now–usually I start these things out with a picture but I have none to use for this post. Argh.

Anyway, I don’t want to call her out by name, but an old friend of mine from high school recently hurt her leg and her doctors recommended bariatric surgery if she wants to be able to walk long distances ever again. Her BMI’s somewhere in the 50s range. She had a weight problem back in high school too, and along with most of the rest of us she’s put on additional weight over the years. I asked her what she’s tried so far and she listed off “dieting” (whatever diets that might be), Weight Watchers and eating more veggies. She also apparently has a thyroid problem, which for some reason her docs didn’t seem to want to wait til that got most of the way straightened out before making grand sweeping pronouncements about the fate of her GI tract.

She’s looking at resecting rather than lap band, too, which especially worries me. Lap band is at least reversible in the majority of patients who get it. Resecting, not so much, and the mortality rate is higher.

If there’s anything I can do to help her not have to have the surgery without getting in her face about it then I will do so. I figure the best way to do that is to just provide information. Now’s the time to make all that WILFing* I do pay off for someone besides me. Well, as far as it has paid off for me, anyway, up til now.

To start, here’s info on hypothyroid, which I believe is the condition she’s suffering from:

Stop The Thyroid Madness – Anyone suffering hypothyroidism has already gotten the song and dance about TSH and maybe T4, and only been prescribed one of the synthetic thyroid drugs. This site is a gateway to the rest of the story.

Thyroid-info.com – A site put together by a patient advocate. There’s at least one really good piece there on why it’s important to do more tests than just the TSH to diagnose your specific thyroid problem.

Now, here are some sites about low-carbing, people who’ve done it and people who recommend it:

Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb – Dude who lost well over 100 pounds following the Atkins plan. He’s leveraged his weight-loss story into two published books, a popular low-carb blog and a podcast radio show. He’s also a fairly regular fixture on the yearly Low-Carb Cruise. I think my friend will like this guy a lot. Click on the Blog link to read his blog, obviously.

Michael Eades, M.D. is the author of Protein Power, a popular low-carb weight-loss plan. This one goes a little heavier on the science but oftentimes it’s still easy to follow. The commenters help clarify things, too.

Low Carb Friends is a message board for people following any sort of low-carb plan. They have an awesome before & after photo album too.

The Lighter Side of Low-Carb is written by a bloggy friend of mine (never met her in person) who comes up with some pretty amazing LC recipes for those foods we LCers most often miss on our diets. Oopsie rolls, cauliflower & mozz pizza crust, cheesy taco shells, you name it.

Low-carb diet plans…

Atkins is still the best-known. Ignore all their ads for shakes and bars and crap unless you are REALLY craving something sweet… all that soy can’t be good for the thyroid. You don’t need that stuff to do Atkins, anyway. It’s possible to do the entire shebang on whole foods alone, with maybe a multivitamin for insurance.

Sugar Busters is an oldie too. I don’t know much about it but there are people who’ve tried it and been successful.

South Beach Diet – I’m not crazy about this one because the author is all OMG I’M A CARDIOLOGIST LOLZ and harps on the nonexistent “dangers” of saturated fats. Duh, Dr. Atkins was a cardiologist too. But this plan seems to work pretty well for people who can’t deal with the strictness of Atkins or similar plans, and who absolutely refuse to go the rest of their lives without grain.

That’s all a start, anyway. I think I might like to put together a site eventually that is more comprehensive but that would provide resources for the curious or concerned and address issues that frequently come up, like the legendary increase in LDL cholesterol that some people see on low-carb (it’s harmless and frequently overstated, but I don’t have room to explain here).

If it helps my friend get her bearings and discover that she has other options besides surgery, though, it’s all to the good.

While we’re at it, does anyone know of LC foods that are easy to prepare for someone with an injured leg who can’t get around the kitchen much? She’s married, but he’s military. She has kids, but I’m not sure they know how to do food prep yet, and she’s limited in her ability to teach them right now for the same reason she’s limited in her ability to cook. If you can’t figure out the comment system, shoot me an email and I’ll pass on your suggestions to her. Thanks!

—–
*WILF = What was I Looking For, or an acronym signifying mindless clicking around the Internet, which I tend to do when I get into reading about diet and nutrition stuff.

I [...]]]> I have skipped this probably two weeks in a row and I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of it that although I’m writing this at 13 minutes past midnight, let’s pretend I’m actually writing it on Sunday, so I’m totally lying with the datestamp. Yes, I’m that OCD. Fuck it. Let’s roll.

I was going to take a photo of a lacto-paleo cheesecake I made “tonight” in honor of my child’s sperm donor’s recent birthday, but he cut into it before I could yell HangOnASecLemmeGetTheFuckinCamera. So you get kitties again instead, because I like pictures to go with my LinkWithin plugin. This is my cat Lundi getting mommy hugs. She likes to get up on the bathroom sink and then prop her paws on my chest and purr like crazy while I pet her.

OK, there’s the cute part, on with the bitching.

—–

First up tonight, I had been looking for some info about the Paul Campos book The Obesity Myth, which I checked out of the library some time ago. He had shared a story about a little girl who’d been diagnosed with obesity at the age of three, and I was looking up particulars, including her name. I know her first name is AnneMarie or Anne-Marie or Ann-Marie or some variation thereof and that was the best I could do. Anyway, in the process, I ran across this interview with him from last year.

Paul, Paul, Paul. I fucking hate you. Do you want to know why I fucking hate you? Because you drive me certifiable. You really do.

First off, there’s so much you say about obesity that just makes too much damn sense. I totally agree with you that a large component of the obesity debate is moral in nature. People really do believe fatties get fat on purpose. (I am a fattie, in case you’re late to the party, so I am using the term ironically.) And boy do they hate us for it. I want to call up all sorts of metaphors to illustrate this, like clubbing baby seals and hijacking Santa’s sleigh and canceling Halloween but I just can’t get up that level of snark-fu this fine evening. I’m kind of in a hurry. Anyway. They hate us. Just because we’re fat. I think that’s fucking stupid, and I applaud Campos for pointing up its absurdity.

I also think he may be onto something when he says there’s more difference in health status between men and women, and the young and the old, than there is between overweight people and slender people. Of course, he’s probably counting everyone who’s the least little dab over the upper limit for normal BMI, so the argument isn’t entirely honest. And I don’t know where to begin to follow up all these grand sweeping declarations of his about how actually harmless obesity is and therefore we should all stop worrying about it unless the fattie in question is so huge they have to move him or her with a tow truck. So I’ll leave it alone for now and simply applaud him for saying that there are much more serious health problems to worry about than how much energy we’re storing.

That said, as I stated up there somewhere, I have read The Obesity Myth. And unlike the legions of fattiebloggers who scanned, like, the first chapter and went “OMFG see it’s NOT our faults we’re fat and it’s NOT gonna kill us and this guy is AWESOME!!!1!!!one!!!”, I read large portions of it, if not the whole thing. I have this bad habit of skipping around in books and reading them in non-chronological chunks, so I can’t say for sure, but I got quite a bit of territory covered.

And… This guy is a whackjob. A few examples of said whackjobbery:

1. He claims feminists, particularly NOW and their ilk, have never cared about body image issues. More accurately, he wonders why they are so mysteriously silent on the issue. Typical fucking man, you could get in his face and scream at him that his skid-mark-encrusted underwear is all over the floor again for the third time this week and he’d push you out of the way ’cause you’re blocking his football game, then five minutes from now dig through his dresser and wonder aloud why he has no clean shorts. They don’t listen. Ever. I’m sick of it.

2. Actually, he seems to have quite the hard-on for knocking feminists, because next he blames them for the destruction of marriage, which means women spend a lot more time on the meat market, which means we can’t afford to let ourselves go. Unlike, of course, say, Italian women who sit at home cheerfully packing on the pudge while their hubbies go around boinking every nubile young teenager in the village. He seriously uses this as an example of proper womanhood, y’all. I’m not making this up. Because feminists suggest we don’t have to put up with this shit, it’s their fault we can’t be fatties anymore.

3. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere that I read in his book did Campos even come close to addressing the fact that obesity is often a symptom of chronic disease even if it is not the cause. I actually agree with him that it’s likely to not be a cause of illness. Cool with me. I’m hip, dude. But somehow he cannot wrap his brain around the idea that maybe if I suddenly gain fifty pounds in a year connected with childbearing even though I am exclusively breastfeeding, maybe that means there is something wrong. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, for example, frequently occurs in postpartum women–and it causes weight gain, and thyroid dysfunction is nothing to fuck around with. If Campos had his way, millions more hypothyroid women would go undiagnosed, ’cause being fat ain’t nuttin’ but a thang.

Idiot. Naturally, because being so chunky you can’t tie your own shoes or walk faster than fifty yards an hour is just a normal genetic variation and can’t be avoided, the fat acceptance crowd embraces him wholeheartedly and even says he’s a good feminist. Yeah. Because ignoring and dismissing entire fields of feminist work is totally a feminist thing to do.

One of many reasons I avoid the fat-acceptance movement like the fucking plague it is even as I acknowledge the importance of (1) treating fatties as human beings and (2) not making fatness into any more of a moral issue than a runny nose or a bad rash.

And Paul? Do me a favor? Quit sacrificing fat women on the altar of your lack of marital success. I’m pretty sure you’ve been dumped on your ass by a feminist woman at least once in your life. You don’t come out and say so, but it’s not difficult to read between the lines. If I want your help, I’ll tell you how to give it. Til then, pick something else to write about. No love, Me.

—–

Second up tonight is something I have been meaning to bitch about for a few weeks now. It isn’t a major thing, just another symptom of the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to make fatties out to be subhuman and dysfunctional.

New Theory: Messy Apartments Can Lead To Obesity

I think there should be a law against using the word theory unless you’re going to use it correctly. Creationists use it to discredit evolution, the implication being that “theory” means “guess.” The same usage is going on here. If you’re accustomed to reading headlines about the latest research studies in some field or another, you might be misled into thinking there’s some new study out about a link between messiness and fatness.

You would be wrong.

The article quotes a Glamour writer and no, she’s not aware of any studies either. She hasn’t even talked to anyone else about this subject matter. It’s just something she came up with one day and wants to put out to a wider audience.

If you look at her story as she tells it, though, all you can really discern is that she gained eleven pounds and let her apartment go to shit at the same time. She seems to think the messy apartment led to the weight gain. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the weight gain led to the apartment getting messy. Why in the world would it do that? Aren’t I blaming a mess on fatness anyway? No, not really. Just as I think obesity is a symptom of diseases like diabetes (type 2, anyway), I also think weight gain can be a sign of depression–and who the fuck cleans house when they’re depressed? Mutants, maybe, but for most of us, housekeeping is the LAST thing on our minds.

But let us not pass up an opportunity to diss the fatties. Why, that wouldn’t be any fun.

‘K, got to go. By the way, if y’all see any snark-worthy material out there on the internets, I’d love to have it. I find plenty on my own, but I’m sure I miss a lot of stuff. Later.

Epic. Win. Super Bowl 44, 7 February 2010

I no longer have any excuses for not seeing this weight loss through.

Too bad the textbook Speshul Genotype Vegan had to [...]]]>
“Meat Pieces” by Suat Eman, courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Why Our Family Eats Animal Products: Part One from Nourishing Days is a breath of fresh air. It’s not often you see someone lay out the reasons they eat animal foods without supplication, mitigation, or apology.

Too bad the textbook Speshul Genotype Vegan had to show up in the comments. I have to admit, she was nice about it. But that kind of talk is still horseshit, for the reasons I lay out in my comment:

Chandelle, there is a huge difference between having a normal variation in one’s genetic makeup, and having a health problem. You are not an herbivore. If you can’t consume animal foods without negative health response then there is something wrong with your body.

I don’t know how to put it any plainer than that. I applaud everyone here who has been polite about this but I don’t want you convincing some impressionable young mind out there that they’re just a normal variation going in an evolutionary direction that will eventually separate from the rest of the species, so why not adopt a diet that ultimately will destroy their health.

I can’t be sanguine about this. For three years I suffered from menstrual problems that would have sent any woman with health insurance running screaming for the phone to get an appointment with their GYN. I didn’t have health insurance and none was forthcoming. It was so bad the first day or three of the cycle that I often had to stay home and use rags from the rag bags to supplement my usual period repertoire.

Last year I read something at the WAPF website about vitamin A and how people with certain health conditions can’t convert beta carotene (and healthy people can’t convert it *efficiently*). I decided to find a natural source of A to supplement with and found one that was from fish liver oil.

Lo and behold, suddenly my period problems improved dramatically. I used to get this weird cramping on one side before all heck would break loose. If I have kept up my A supplementation for the previous month, I no longer have that pain. The flow has lightened to the point that I can go out in public on the first day again and not have to go to the bathroom every half hour to make sure I’m not leaking.

It’s a miracle. It makes me wonder how many women have gotten hysterectomies or been put on weird, damaging drugs because their doctors never figured out what was going on.

And I’m angry. Furious. Because the government allows food sellers to record the presence of vitamin A content on the labels of plant foods, even though not a single plant food in the entire world contains the vitamin. Beta carotene is no more vitamin A than a lump of clay is a brick. Nutritionists are no better, routinely lying to us about the best sources of vitamin A, informing us that they are plant foods such as carrots.

That kind of crap encourages the militant vegan groups. I’m furious. I despise them. If I could shut every one of them down, I would. I’m not a violent person, but I’d love to disgrace them all into oblivion. They should be ashamed of themselves.

How many more nutrients do we have to find this stuff out about before it shuts those groups down? Fats? B12? Minerals, which half the time aren’t bioavailable in plant foods unless you cook the hell out of them, but we’re told it’s “healthier” to eat them raw?

Do me a favor? Whatever is going on with you, quit telling people it’s “just a natural variation” (not a direct quote from you I don’t think, but that’s the idea you are trying to get across). If you’re really curious about why you’re so different–and you ARE different–then go find out. It’s entirely possible no doctor will be able to help you. They don’t want to hear about health problems unless those can be cured with some fancy new drug. But you never know. You might get lucky.

Whatever the case. I know that some vegans who try to eat meat again have problems digesting it because their bodies have stopped making the necessary enzymes. Maybe that was your problem and maybe not. Maybe you didn’t really try every type of animal food you could–maybe you didn’t know about pasture-raised. You’re reading this blog, so I doubt that’s the case, but I have been wrong many times before and will be again.

But whatever it is, you’re not normal. I have no problem with you adjusting to your health situation as you feel moved to do. But don’t go around misleading people who don’t know any better. We suffer too much from that in this culture as it is.

And if by some unlikely chance you are some kind of a mole from PETA or wherever, you can take this to heart: If I ever get the chance to shut PETA down, nonviolently of course, I will jump to it. And I am not by far the only one. Know this: Some of us have been hurt by believing in the vegan ideology–not just the diet part, the *ideology* part–and we are NOT happy about the outcome.

I’m just glad I wasn’t trying to have another child. I have reason to believe my daughter’s kidneys were damaged by my lack of natural vitamin A intake during my pregnancy with her, as it is. She’s lucky she’s not blind too. Think about that next time you want to reassure someone that vitamin-starving their bodies is a fab idea. If you don’t care about the adults, the kids have no say in the matter.

I can’t blame the blogger at all if that pisses her off. The commenter, I don’t care so much. I’m just tired of everybody being polite about this. I actually tried being a vegan for a few weeks in 2005. I was already suffering from postpartum depression and social alienation and having been dumped by my baby’s father. The change in nutrition to outright malnutrition pushed me over the edge for a while.

Thea’s not just lucky to be sighted. She’s lucky to be alive. In retrospect I don’t think I would have hurt her in the state I was in at the time, but had I gotten much worse, who can say?

Just because a hearing-impaired person needs hearing aids, doesn’t mean any old person ought to start wearing hearing aids on a lark. So if you see another example of Speshul Genotype Vegan out in the blogosphere someplace, take what they have to say with a very large grain of salt.

If you take said grain of salt perched on top of a sixteen-ounce Porterhouse, all the better.

This past year I heard about a study that showed saturated fat helps in calcium absorption. I was trying to explain to a friend just now why low-carbing makes more sense nutritionally than a low-fat diet, and wanted to bring up that point. I couldn’t find anything about saturated fat specifically right off [...]]]>

This past year I heard about a study that showed saturated fat helps in calcium absorption. I was trying to explain to a friend just now why low-carbing makes more sense nutritionally than a low-fat diet, and wanted to bring up that point. I couldn’t find anything about saturated fat specifically right off the bat (I don’t want to sit here all day, I’ve sat here too long already), but I did find this:

Factors associated with calcium absorption efficiency in pre- and perimenopausal women

I love articles like this. They’re from peer-reviewed journals, so nobody’s going to call me a wacko for linking to them. Not to say that everything coming out of a peer-reviewed journal is going to be worth the pixels it’s taking up on the internets, but a lot of it is.

Worth repeating:

Interestingly, at the time of the calcium absorption measurement, the women who had been randomly assigned to the intervention group had significantly lower mean fractional calcium absorption values than did the women who were assigned to the assessment-only control group (0.34 compared with 0.36, P < 0.001). This was the direction of difference we expected, because we found lower dietary fat intakes to be significantly associated with lower calcium absorption values, and the women in the intervention group had significantly lower dietary fat intakes than did the women in the assessment-only control group at the time of the calcium absorption measurement.

More and more, low-carb advocates question the conventional wisdom about dietary fiber intake. This is yet another data point in support of that:

We speculate that a potential link between a low-fat, high-fiber diet and poor calcium absorption is related to intestinal transit time. We showed previously that a faster mouth-to-cecum transit time is associated with poorer efficiency of calcium absorption, suggesting that gut motility has a large effect in healthy subjects (6). Fat intake may alter gut motility and affect absorption by slowing transit time and increasing the duration of contact with the absorptive surface (21). Increased fiber intakes may inhibit calcium absorption by increasing the bulk of intestinal contents, speeding the transit time of the stool, and in theory allowing less time for absorption to occur (21). Future studies are necessary to enable us to better understand the physiologic mechanisms for the interaction between dietary fat, dietary fiber, calcium intake, and calcium absorption in the gut.

They don’t think the type of fat in the diet really matters, but this study was from ten years ago and I think new data have arisen since then. I just need to take the time later and dig it up.

If calories were all that counted in a person’s diet (i.e., way of eating), no one would ever suffer from a nutritional deficiency disease. This is just as important as beriberi or scurvy, it just doesn’t happen as fast or as spectacularly. But just because something’s not flashy or fast doesn’t make it any less devastating when it finally kicks in. So yes, watch what you eat, and don’t just eat for energy intake.