PaleoJay's Smoothie Cafe Podcast #79- Time Magazine admits that Fat is Good!

PaleoJay’s Smoothie Cafe #79- Time Magazine Admits that the War on Fat was WRONG!

Yes, that’s right- even the mainstream media conduit of Time magazine has come our with their latest cover story that— FAT IS NOT BAD!  (Gasp!)

For those of us in Paleoland, this might seem like a no-brainer, like a “duh” moment, but consider this:  90% PLUS of the general population, INCLUDING M.D.’s and other health professionals like NUTRITIONISTS would NOT AGREE!!

This is actually quite shocking, since all of the latest science supports the idea that FAT is NOT bad to eat, and that

Sugars and refined carbohydrates are the real cause of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and ALL of the host of modern day degenerative disease and illness!!

Actually, that last sentence should be inscribed on a mountaintop, and illuminated night and day like the HOLLYWOOD sign in… well, Hollywood!

The cause is that crucial: the health, and the health care system itself in the USA is breaking down.  This is because of the adoption of the low fat hypothesis, spearheaded by Ancel Keyes in the 1960’s, that led us down a path of bad research, cherry-picking of data, and a false conclusion!

Ironically, Time Magazine itself trumpeted this “triumph”, back in 1961!!

Since then, when Ancel Keyes FALSIFIED his data from a study, and convinced the McGovern commission to back him…

WE HAVE GONE FROM A FIT, HEALTHY SOCIETY OF AMERICAN PEOPLE-

TO A LAND OF FAT, SICK, UNHEALTHY PEOPLE, UNFIT TO CARRY ON THE LAND OF THE FREE!!

Sorry to be so extreme, but this is an extreme CRISIS!

We are looking at 53 years of LIES, FAKE Science, and Mis-information!  This is a travesty, and it MUST be righted, to save us all!

Don't eat fat! Instead...

“But Jay, but Jay!” I hear you crying- “How can we feed the world with good, pure, God-made food if we don’t have tons and tons of grains?”

Thanks for asking, Grasshopper!  The truth of the matter is that: our future is IN OUR PAST!

Small, local, family farms are the BEST way to ensure ample GOOD REAL food for EVERYONE!

Back in the wake of the bad science of Ancel Keyes, the idea of “progress” was to GET BIG OR GET OUT in farming- this was in 1971- Earl Butz was the latest incarnation of Ancel Keyes, and the US Department of Agriculture went from supporting small family farms, to being the agent of their destruction- GET BIG OR GET OUT!  REALLY??

EAT THESE!!

Yes, that’s really how it went!  Thomas Jefferson is probably STILL spinning in his grave over that one!

And, from those two really bad decisions and conclusions, our family farms, the source of all of our food, and the economy of thousands of small farming communities,

HAS BEEN DECIMATED!!

Small family farms have DISAPPEARED- destroyed by Federal Government incentives to grow GRAIN crops that were not needed, at the expense of wholesome, nutritious crops like vegetables, fruits, and small and large animals and eggs…

The DIVERSITY of these small farms has been wiped-out, since competition from giant, corporate owned CAFO or confined animal feeding operations has been subsidized by the Federal Government by them offering grain subsidies to operations that grow GRAINS, and even subsidies to giant farms that DON’T GROW GRAINS (SO THE PRICE IS ARTIFICIALLY HIGHER!)…

What do we need to escape this catastrophe?

Simple- like in most of life!  Less; MUCH less GOVERNMENT!

Free markets- NO grain subsidies, i.e. taxpayer money going to pay giant corporate farmers to grow grain that no one needs or should even eat!

This ONE simple thing would give the incentive to farmers to grow real, God-made, nutritious foods; foods like broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, lentils, lettuce, raspberries, spinach, avocados, strawberries- the list goes on and on and on-

AND NOT GRAINS!!
How much would that change the world?

Suddenly, Young people could MAKE A LIVING FARMING ON A SMALL SCALE!
They could raise real, nutritious, God-made foods, and raise cattle and chickens and eggs and pastured pork and raw milk and butter and cream…

JUST LIKE IN THE OLD DAYS, WHEN WE WERE ALL HEALTHY AND FIT!!

And so, in a post-grain, subsidized Government-run misinformed micromanagement of farming, things would naturally revert to sanity:

REAL FOOD WOULD RESURGE!
VEGGIES AND GOOD DAIRY FATS, (UNPASTEURIZED) WOULD BE PRIZED, AND TAKE OVER THE MARKET!

PASTURED ANIMALS WOULD PROVIDE GOOD PROTEIN, AFTER LIVING GOOD LIVES IN NATURE, EATING GRASS LIKE THEY WERE INTENDED BY GOD AND NATURE RATHER THAN GRAINS THAT DESTROYED THEIR INTESTINES AND MADE THEM SICK!

CHICKENS WOULD RUN AROUND ON PASTURE, EATING BUGS AND WORMS AND EVERYTHING ELSE THAT GOD INTENDED THEM TO EAT- NOT A “VEGETARIAN DIET” IN A CONFINED ANIMAL FEEDING OPERATION/TORTURE CHAMBER!

And family farms, I mean family farms like those depicted in the Wizard of Oz movie from the 1939 Movie Musical would return in all their glory-

Young people could actually provide a life on the farm!

How cool is that??

We could actually go back to the future- but, this would be a future as presaged by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms; utilizing MODERN technology to replicate a primeval, natural, God-made landscape-

Things like electric fencing, and “chicken  tractors”, where chickens are allowed to “roam” after herbivores like their ancestors, but confined in a moving vehicle to replicate the ancient pattern, but in control…

Technology could easily be our friend in this, rather than our enemy…

But Government policy and control IS, and will continue to be our undoing-

UNLESS we let technology help us as INDIVIDUALS, and ELIMINATE the Governmental Control that is just SCREWING everything up- both health-wise, and environmental-wise…

Let’s just go back to the future- back to the founding fathers!

Limited BIG Government.

LOCAL Government raised ABOVE BIG Government!!

Common sense over Ancel Keyes Fake Science.  Local Markets over the FDA!!  REAL FOOD OVER PROCESSED FAKE FOOD LIKE SUBSTANCES!!!

J

Sustainable, LOCAL Agriculture KEY to our Survival

We have really gotten off of the straight and narrow in our modern food system!

I mean, would our grandparents have thought that Velveeta "cheese" and Margarine, i.e. congealed chemically derived vegetable oils were good and healthy???

We've been on a slippery slope for a long time, and just like a frog in a gradually heating pot of water doesn't know his peril, we are now like that frog- 

The water is near to boiling, and we still have not woken up!!

We need to totally revamp our food production system, to what it used to be.

Listen to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms and "Yoooh- what's up Y'aaal!" Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness to get a good overview of the basic problem, and what needs to be done.

We all need to know what to eat- "Just Eat Real Foods" JERF...

But we really need to know that these REAL FOODS

WILL STILL BE 

AROUND!!!

J

Healthy eating, Paleo style, on the road!

Here are the hands of your own PaleoJay, cradling the sumptuous supper of lamb, sweet potatoes, zucchini and sausage at the Trempealeau Hotel in the small Mississippi river town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin!  The menu was replete with shrimp, steaks, salads etc., all ready for a traveling Paleo person to have a tasty meal packed with nutrition!

It seems that there are still many places to go where good, ancestral types of food are readily available.  Just as in buying our food, the very best quality food is available from small, independent restaurants; places where great pride is still taken in excellence of ingredients, and in careful preparation- quite the opposite of the big "Chains" that are all about cutting corners, using the cheapest ingredients to maximize profits, and spending most of their extra money on advertising to seduce you into patronizing them.  

The Trempealeau Hotel is one of these small eating places of excellence.  If you are passing by La Crosse on I90, it is well worth your while to get off at hwy 157 in Onalaska and head north to the Trempealeau sign, and then west to the Hotel!  You will even pass within a mile of the fabled home of yours truly...  be sure to wave!

My point, besides being a brief travelogue, is that of bypassing what has become the degraded nature of  the Mass American diet and culture of today, and seeking out those places that are more like what our culture embraced 50 and more years ago.  Small independent restaurants, small and independent farmers- this is where we need to be spending our dollars!  Not on fast/crappy food, or big/crappy chains, but to those who have traditional or ancestral values of quality.

I believe one of the most important figures today in a sustainable farming model of excellence is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.  A working farmer, Joel is also an excellent speaker, and a convincing role model for traditional agriculture.  Joel's most recent book, Confessions of a Lunatic Farmer, is must reading for any modern person seeking health and sanity in our crazy modern world!

He shows a real, viable alternative to the failing Big Agribusiness model prevalent today...

Bottom line:  Caring about your health, and the health of the land beneath your feet, and the animals and plants under your care, is the essence of Good Stewardship, and is really what we were created to accomplish.  To quote John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement:


“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” 

I think Polyface farms is following that tradition.

J

J, Phil and Holly at our last nursing home "gig"

Independence Day, the Founding Fathers, Paleo diet, and Conservatism

Independence Day!  So what does that have to do with Paleo living?  Well, quite a bit, as it turns out...

The founding fathers of America had a strong vision of what they wanted this new country to be!  They wanted to escape the class structure that had so stratified the countries of Europe; the prevailing vision was of a country of small farms, where each family was largely independent and self-reliant.  Most of the settlers in America were of English stock at this time, and they were acutely aware of the top down, autocratic, controlling nature of that society: they meant to avoid that!  

And, for a long time, our country was pretty much what our Founding Fathers had envisioned- small, largely independent, self-supporting small towns, peopled by small, local businesses and small, well-run family farms that grew a wide variety of crops and a variety of animals.  Government was largely local,  and so those who lived within a community were pretty much the ones that ran it!  Charity was provided by the local churches, not government.

Things began to change in the 1960's, and by the '70's we had really started to go a different, dangerous path- ironically, we started to turn more into a European, top-down, big Government and big Food corporations and big Medical all started to morph into GIANTS.  Probably the main way this power was concentrated was by the advances into media: Television, especially was perfect for gradually brainwashing people into believing things that, before they were constantly being bombarded with such ideas, they would have found ridiculous, just by using their common sense!  Things like:

1. Fat is bad!  Don't eat butter- eat margarine, which is a kind of fake, industrial seed oil we'd like to sell to you, rather than to pay for its disposal.
2. Eggs are bad!  Instead of eating the eggs your own chickens lay, eat a big bowl (or two!) of processed grains, wheat and corn, from these great cereal boxes we will gladly sell you!
3. Meat is bad!  Red meat is a "heart attack on a plate!"   Eat this soy stuff; it tastes like pretty much nothing, but we will gladly sell it to you in all sorts of shapes and forms.
4. Grains are wholesome!  Make them the foundation of your diet, even though your ancestors hardly ate any at all (unless they had to), and they thrived on a diet of meat, eggs, veggies, fruits and nuts... we will gladly put grains into almost any product you buy, and we will engineer them to be positively addictive.  You will eat them all day long, day after day!
5. You are all sick.  You need the government to tell you how to eat, and you all need lots of medicines; statins, insulin for your diabetes, gastric bypass operations since you are all fat since you don't walk on your treadmill enough, and you are still eating too much fat.
6. This is how it's been going since then, with the top-down, autocratic Government itself taking more and more authority away from us as individuals, and increasingly telling us what we should eat, how we should exercise, what medicines we should be taking, taxing us at ever-increasing rates because they know much better how to spend our money on the common good than we do ourselves.

Today, July 4 2012, let's remember the spirit of those original Founding Fathers of the United States, who would be 100% behind the Paleo diet's notions of buying food locally- growing it locally, eating wholesome, real foods prepared in your own kitchen instead of in a factory, and eating all foods from local, trusted sources that raise their animals humanely, feeding them grass if that is what they are meant to eat by Nature and God.  We need to get away from the control of the New Self Appointed Royalty of America today:  Big Government, Big Medicine, Big Food!

Luckily, we can take back control- Television is on the wane, who watches commercials any more, for that matter who watches the evening news?  We don't need "filtered" news anymore; now we have the internet!  We can read the unvarnished truth instead!

The original American Revolution was a profoundly conservative revolution.  Nothing really like it had come before.  The French revolution, in fact virtually all other revolutions have been liberal, left wing, "Power to the people" socialist revolutions; ours was totally unique in that it was conservative, 

saying not to "take away from everyone else to share", which results in the powerful ones in the revolution itself just taking it all for themselves, and their cronies. 

In the American revolution, afterwards we were all free to provide for ourselves.  This is a profound difference, and resulted in the single most successful governmental experiment in history.  I think the only other political system on that level is the ancient Greek city-state; but then our American revolution incorporated most of their ideas from that earlier "experiment".

So, let's get back to our roots!  Think for yourself.  Don't listen to self-appointed "experts" that are shills of big corporations.  Read the real science behind things; don't get the "filtered" versions.  Here is a brief video featuring Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who really has this thing of sustainable agriculture, as the founding fathers of America intended, all figured out:

As Angelo Coppola of the "Latest in Paleo" podcast says: "Humans are not broken by default"!

In other words:  "We are made in God's image"; hardly "broken"!

J