Today I want to talk about healthy food. "Healthy" food.

I'm sure a lot of people have fallen into using the term because if someone asks you what your diet is about you might just say that you're trying to eat "healthier" and this way of speaking ends up portraying certain foods as healthy and others as unhealthy. I do believe there is such a thing as an unhealthy food, but I'm not so sure healthy could accurately describe any food. I don't think pomegranates or blueberries are any healthier than potatoes or steak.

When you can, it's always a good idea to cross reference other examples of species. Was there food that could be considered healthy for people 200 years ago? Or 1000 years ago? Or how about for moose or squirrels?

I think the answer lies with Weston A. Price. He went around the world to find out what was going wrong with peoples' teeth and what he found out was that people who weren't trying were the ones that had no trouble. They just ate the food that was available to them. They lived in an unaltered environment. The idea of certain food being healthy does have some relevance because it seems that the majority of food we have available to us (if not all of it) isn't as nature intended. The extent that food can even be healthy is simply our body's ability to utilize it. And something having Vitamin K or Omega 3 fat is really only healthy in the context that members of our society are deficient in those micronutrients. So it's not that the food is healthy, but that it fills an unsatisfied need for the majority.

I think that there are certainly trends in nutrition. When low-fat hit the scene, it had a lot of power. We look back and it seems like a plot to cause a lot of chronic illness and increase medical costs... or profits... or... whatever. But I think the reason it caught on was because it worked. It probably solved the majority of health issues that were happening at the time. And through some combination of people spending many years on low fat diets and the alteration in our food supply to cater to the low fat appeal we have ended up in a pretty lousy state.

That's why the Paleo diet seems to work so effectively. But not for everyone. Because it's a remedy for the symptoms of a typical diet in a typical body. And as time has gone on and we've been able to see what happens when people go on a Paleo diet for a while we see that it solves a lot of problems but actually causes some new ones. Paleo has been redefined now to include more carbohydrates but originally it was basically a natural foods lower carbohydrate diet. As people have run into problems which generally equate to carbohydrate deficiency, they have dropped the idea that Paleo means low-carb and instead you should titrate carbohydrates to the necessary point. This is the Paleo diet now, but let's not pretend that it's always been that way.

And that explains why they are always coming out with new diets and why "we can't figure out the right diet." Because there isn't one. There are remedies for the ruts that we get into, but there really isn't going to be a solution in the modern world. And whether a natural environment provides for a perfectly healthy diet or not is a mystery as well. That's why the Paleo diet is so great, because it was founded through skepticism. And that means that even the people that follow it will be skeptical enough to reform their opinion as changes are needed. And there seems to have been a Zeitgeist the past few months that you really do need to eat more carbohydrates.

And who knows if our problems are even related to our food supply. Now we are finding out that there are estrogenic agents in plastics. At the very least it could just mean you shouldn't store your food in tupperware or heat it up in the microwave. At the most... well... there are people that are heavily anti-estrogen and they think it is implicated in pretty much all health problems we face.

When you look at the sustainability issue, it seems hopeless. And the first culprit always seems to be that we took too long to realize we were causing damage. But environmentalists have existed for as long as I can remember. There have always been people aware of the damage we are causing to our environment. Originally it was the Native Americans as the Europeans took over the land. But the ones that understand the damage we are doing are not the ones making the decisions of whether to do it or not. It's become more complicated now as our world is rooted in capitalism but even before this it's easy to see why things went to shit. It's much harder to preserve something than to utilize it. If there are two people and a tree, protecting the tree is a 24 hour a day job while cutting it down is a job that can be done in a matter of minutes. So, we have always been aware of the damage the manipulators have been doing, it's simply a futile fight to oppose it.

Lierre Keith thinks that our planet could only sustain a human population of 300 million. This led me down an interesting path of thought. Pretty much everyone has an opinion of the Holocaust and its concepts. A very grand majority of people think that it is based in evil. But there is no such thing as evil, simply what is, was and will be and its accompanying explanation (if there is one). Calling something evil is just writing it off as something you don't understand, it's giving up on understanding it because anyone who uses the term evil doesn't identify with it (unless under some bizarre delusion, which isn't impossible...)

And I'm not going to try to pretend that I could possibly figure out why what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s did, but I think it's a much more beneficial thought experiment to propose justifications than to simply be disgusted with it. One of the logical fallacies we tend to have is that if someone does something we see as wrong, we will write off all of their thoughts and conclusions as wrong. And we always come up with cheap excuses to explain why the Holocaust targeted Jews. What if Hitler originally conceived his ideas in the name of sustainability? And as time went on the focus became not sustainability, but rather how to follow through with his goals. The Holocaust really is an interesting thing because it explores a small part of human nature that we are rarely ever granted access to. Most people have a very misguided view of the world and they choose to think of the Holocaust as an exception. That it happened once and all we have to do is kill everyone that enabled it and it won't happen again. It's like getting mold on your fruit and throwing away the fruit and assuming you'll never get mold again. Obviously we all know better than that, but that's the logic. Just like when people are sent to jail. Just take the bad people out of society and that's how you get rid of the "bad."

The problem is that a bad apple isn't simply a bad apple. A bad apple is either an apple that didn't receive adequate energy supply from the tree or due to some factor or another it attracted unpreferred bacteria or any other number of factors that made an apple "unfit" for its "function". A bad apple is not simply a bad apple, but a result of its environment. And I probably don't have to say it, but there really is no such thing as a bad apple. An apple may be unfit for being eaten by a human, but that doesn't make it bad, it just makes it a bad apple for human consumption. It will be consumed by other organisms and will also serve its purpose to the tree (for example if the tree is unable to give that apple much energy, but limiting its energy for that apple it is conserving energy for other, presumably more important, functions).

I suppose I'll admit it is possible that the Holocaust was drawn up in rage, but such a conclusion is very unlikely. Such overwhelming rage is most certainly not healthy and at least up until his time, unhealthy people were not made figures of political authority. Health is a very important thing to humans and prior to the infection of capitalism, our main measure of health was our most accurate one, our eyes. But now we have measures for human fitness. Rather than physical competitions (not only are we hardly physical, but fighting isn't even "allowed" by our society) we have a competition for who can acquire the most money. Admittedly the focus is not entirely on money, but it is certainly the primary focus. And it's not entirely misguided, either. Your ability to support a family is heavily influenced by your financial status. And definitely moreso than your physical fitness or physical and mental health.

(I could go on but I think that proves my point)

I'd like to mention that I am not trying to teach anything. I'm not even trying to inform what I'm writing about. What I'm trying to do is to get people to think. I listen to people talk about stimulating things and the things I draw from it are not what they tell me but what I think about as I listen to them talk. It may coincide with what they are saying, but it may not as well.

Knowing facts is not very useful. Understanding facts is extremely useful. A lot of times knowing something while not understanding it is more harmful than anything. And of course I say knowing something disregarding whether it is true or not because if you do not understand what you know, then there is really no reason to think it's actually correct. To clarify, lots of people "know" lots of things and a lot of time people "know" things that are not true. And if you do not understand something, you may as well not know it given how often we are wrong about things we think we know.

So what I like to do is to present all possibilities to myself and over time I will promote and demote hypotheses based things I know. Human logic has its limitations. Suppose a person is eating their typical diet and for some reason they quit eating peanuts and over a month they lose 5 pounds. That doesn't say much. Were they exercising? What did they eat in place of peanuts (if anything)? Did everything stay the same (sleep, medicine, work, stress, sex)? Well, if we go back to the original fact and don't ask the questions we can come to 100 different conclusions and a lot of them can/will contradict each other. It could be something as simple as assuming that the person lost 5 pounds because cutting peanuts out of their diet was healthy or thinking that the weight was lost because it was unhealthy. Because weight loss can occur due to "healthy" decisions as well as "unhealthy" decisions. This is why you can't learn things from other people. Or you can learn things from other people and then wonder why you have no control over the state of your body/health. What's beneficial is to remember that someone lost 5 lbs while cutting out peanuts but to also take everything you learn with a grain of salt unless it came from the effects of your own body because you end up knowing about 1% or less of all the important factors from that testimonial. Then when it comes to you... well it's still not even close to 100% of inputs but you have a lot more to infer from and you also have a gauge of how unusual certain behaviors are and whether they have had similar effects in the past. Ultimately we are our only teacher and the only function others can effectively do is to help make links in our logic by thought experiments. The more amount of what we know that is learned from others, the more likely we don't know much at all.

I used to work with a girl named Sarah Dean. She had worked at the front desk for about a year and a half by the time I left Providence but even up until my last day she still asked questions. That's because the part of your brain that tries to understand things didn't work in Sarah's brain (that's an exaggeration, of course, but she really didn't analyze things on a conceptual basis most of the time). Sarah had been working in medical records for a while when I started at Providence and started at the front desk after I had been working there for about 3 months. But somehow I asked much fewer questions than Sarah. Because my outlook of my job was understanding that I was the link between a requestor of medical records and a receiver of medical records. First you have to know what situations you will not fulfill the request in. And rather than know who does not have access to records, try to understand why someone would not have access to another's records. That's the key difference between me and Sarah. And that's the key difference between knowing something and understanding something. Knowing something really only helps when that one particular situation comes up but if you understand something it will almost indefinitely have much more application than that one situation.

I'm just randomly deciding to write today about allergies. I drank some milk today and got "that" feeling. The feeling that I'm allergic to what I just ate. Allergies are an interesting topic because it's one of those Western Medicine words. It describes something that is actually there, it's not delusional by any means but it really only gets us 80% there in terms of understanding what is taking place. Western medicine is somewhat like a car and I feel like maybe Eastern medicine is walking. A car will get you a lot of places and pretty fast, but ultimately to arrive to your destination you almost certainly have to get out of your car and walk. And I think Western medicine has a lot of important applications, I just feel like it's missing accuracy that's not possible without Eastern medicine logic.

One point of interest I find about allergies is the perception of relationship between an allergen and an allergic person. When working at an allergy clinic, the tone was always that a select few people have problems with allergies and the rest of us are just okay, that we don't have allergies. That allergies are weaknesses specific to people who have allergies. As time goes on and as more people seem to have allergies, it's seeming more like there is some blame to place on the allergens themselves. And this is the tone you get from experts, as well. If allergies were a problem for just a select few, then why would a food expert advise caution about eating a particular food for it's tendency to be allergenic? That makes it seem more like we all tend to have allergies to varying degrees and it would make sense given how similar our makeup is to one another.

Addressing milk as an allergen brings us to several hypotheses. One thing to consider is that raw milk contains lactase. We have a lot of people that are supposedly lactose intolerant and the idea is that milk we used to consume contained lactase, which is the enzyme used to break down lactose. This isn't necessarily useful in determining that lactose is the one and only problem with modern cow's milk but rather to consider how many other enzymes or nutrients that our body is used to utilizing in digesting milk. It might be something we know of or something or possibly not. And maybe human's have always had issues with cow's milk. We tend to stumble upon problems and it's assumed that since this is "suddenly" a problem, that it's always been okay up to this point. That is likely, but not necessarily something you can hang your hat on to make a proper conclusion.

It seems the problem with allergens is that we are presented with a substance that our body is used to handling in a certain way and for some reason we are lacking all of the proper tools to effectively break it down. There this idea that the mercury in fish is dangerous. That conclusion was come to in a study where pregnant women were being fed predatory fish such as sharks that are very high on the food chain. Very few people eat fish so high on the food chain and these fish collect mercury from the fish they have consumed. The vast majority of fish that we eat do contain mercury but poisoning is not a worry if the fish also contain and sufficient amount of selenium, which all but the most predatory marine animals (very high on the food chain, such as sharks and dolphins) do.

It would make sense that such a process as a food being presented to our body without all of the proper tools for breaking it down will lead to so-called foreign substances in our body. Of course this is the calling for an immune response. The more processed a food is, the further away it becomes from something our body recognizes as food. And there isn't necessarily an important function in our body recognizing something as food, it's just that the further away we get from those familiar things, the more likely we are to have unbalanced reactions occurring in our bodies.

And this is where fully hydrogenated oils come into the logic. It's pretty well accepted that partially hydrogenated oils are bad for us. So much so that little time is even given to discussing them. It seems that they are so unquestionably bad for us that it's not even worth talking about. Sounds feasible to me. So then the question of fully hydrogenated oils comes into play. Seems like it would receive a resounding disapproval because it is clearly a chemically altered substance just like the partially hydrogenated oils. However, studies have been unable to show any negative results of consuming fully hydrogenated oils and that the breakdown process shows that our body treats fully hydrogenated oils exactly like stearic acid, which is a natural fat found in chocolate (in cocoa butter, more specifically) and has been deemed unharmful.

And this is a nice time to throw in the Mat Lalonde argument that just because we haven't been eating something for thousands of years doesn't make it bad for us. There is logic in thinking that foods that have been consumed for many thousands of years are safe to eat (at least in the state that they have been eaten for this time) but it's also important to acknowledge that this doesn't prove the opposite, that we cannot successfully introduce new foods to our body safely. A useful thing to consider is when certain animals are transplanted to new ecosystems. Some trees have gone extinct due to the introduction of an exotic species of bug (while that exotic bug certainly flourished, at least until the new source of food became depleted).

One thing I find interesting is that my reaction to dairy most certainly varies. I don't know how much the variation is related to the dairy product I'm having a reaction to or to my current state of health/the compilation of stresses my body is under. The worst allergic reaction I have ever had was to a little carton of Muscle Milk after a pretty long and intense bike ride in the cold. I believe the product was actually lactose free, which convinced me that I had a milk allergy and not that I was lactose intolerant. Thinking back, now, it's entirely possible that the protein isolates could have been part of the reaction and it's not unlikely that there were artificial gums in the product (it was chocolate flavored).

I'm really curious what the deciding factor is between good and bad stress is. Maybe if our body has gotten used to the stress over time? We've been exercising forever so our body's reaction to acute moderate physical stress is beneficial. We haven't been consuming genetically modified wheat for that long so our body can't figure out how to turn that into something beneficial? Or maybe that's not even correct, maybe our body is able to have a hormetic response to gluten.