Last night I was watching Joe Rogan’s episode asking a doctor and a researcher if saturated fat causes heart attacks from arteries blocked by cholesterol. I began researching what doctors and researchers are saying on YouTube after my cardiologist prescribed some cholesterol lowering drug that has to be injected, and costs a fortune. It’s covered by insurance, but my wife buys insurance and covers a few hundred people in a medium sized corporation, so I know how she is struggling to deal with the rising cost. We always pay attention to what the insurance company is being charged. We should all look at that as being our money, because it is. We waste it on insurance companies which waste it on medical groups and pharmaceutical companies which waste it on rich stockholders. But nobody seems to agree on why we are becoming ever more diseased and obese.
What I learned on this Joe Rogan episode is that not everybody gets sick and fat. While the doctor repeated that we know saturated fat causes heart disease, the researcher argued that there is no proof of that, and recent studies contradict it. The study that caught my attention was one in which vegetarians who shop at a health food market were asked to bring in friends who also shop there but eat meat as well as vegetables. They looked at their lipids over a period of time and there was no significant difference.
So they can’t both be right, can they? Maybe they are. One of the first YouTube videos I watched was Dr. William Davis, who wrote Wheat Belly, in which he blames obesity on wheat. But in the course of explaining this he showed some pictures of what a wheat field looked like in the early twentieth century, and what it looked like after a couple of scientists developed a new strain, mid century, which made previous strains look like dwarf grass. It is not, he argues, the same wheat our great grandparents ate.
When I looked at trend lines, the heart attacks and obesity trend lines made it look like saturated fat from red meat is a problem. But there is something else that is at the beginning of those trend lines, and that is feedlots where this new grain is part of a mash that includes antibiotics. So the studies can be showing that cardiovascular disease is from eating red meat and saturated fat, or it can be showing that animals fed on antibiotics and grains which make them obese, and quickly, transfer to humans the problems with the grains they are being fed and the antibiotics they are being fed.
To imagine the problem being faced by government we need only go back to the Nixon administration, when he was afraid he might not get re-elected because food prices were rising fast. Something had to be done. His agriculture secretary was Earl Butz, who continued with Gerald Ford, trashing the New Deal as communism and championing factory farming. Specifically, cheap grains were subsidized, corn, wheat and soy, and we were for the first time told how to eat, through a government created food pyramid. People thought the government was concerned about their health, but what they were doing was shifting people from good food, which was expensive, to eating grass seed with a cheap corn syrup sweetener. Nixon got re-elected and we were the joke of a Butz.
It’s hard as hell to decide what to eat because the cardiologists say don’t eat saturated fat and take expensive drugs to lower cholesterol. I tried taking a statin and four days later had a grand mall seizure. I quit them and was okay, but my doctor, going by the book as usual, said that couldn’t be related to the statins, I had to get neurological tests, and if I didn’t get them, my driver’s license was in jeopardy. That was several thousand dollars, and when I asked what it showed I got no answer. I got a raised eyebrow hinting there was some problem best not shared with me, maybe that I’m actually a woman trapped in a man’s body, how the hell would I know if they do not show me the scans and interpret them? I think they just didn’t want to admit that statins can cause seizures in some people. Just cut off the cholesterol to the brain so the lipid panel fits the guidelines. Thousands and thousands of dollars because I took that goddamned statin for four days, and now they want me to inject myself.
So I am saying no. I will look after myself because all the medical profession is, now, is a conveyor belt. It passes through a data field and when it trips a switch I go on a statin and blood pressure medication. I was given some kind of medicine, I think an ace inhibitor, which almost killed me. I was too weak to walk uphill after taking one. I was on 50mg of beta blocker, and I developed atrial fibrillation.
Finally, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and treated for it, and given 50 mg of flecainide to restore my heart rhythm, and suddenly did not have high blood pressure or heart problems anymore. But my weight had gone up to 210, when I wanted to weigh between 170 and 175. I knew I would eventually ride the conveyor belt to obesity and disease, the medical people would do an intervention, a stent or surgery, and of course medical devices can be installed. I said no. I’ll be my own doctor unless I have to have an intervention because of a heart attack or stroke. But I am not going to participate in this farce to enrich the corporate farms and for profit medicine and for profit government any more than necessary.
The day I realized I weighed over two hundred pounds I headed out walking, and I walked six to ten miles every day, including up a mountain to get my heart rate over 120 for a half hour, and counted all my calories. If it went in my stomach it went in the app. I was holding myself to about 1200 calories net a day, often less. I started doing private pilates classes about five times a month. I dropped metoprolol from 50 mg a day down to taking 12 mg if I was going to be exercising hard and wanted to hold my heart rate down a little bit. And then I started being aware of paleo, and of the issues with grain. I started making l. reuteri yogurt, and I dropped sugar, assuming Dr. Davis is right that simple carbs are sugar.
I am like a lot of people who have been trying to not eat fat, thinking low fat stuff is good for me, that whole grains are good for me, eating that oatmeal every morning with a handful of walnuts, counting calorie intake versus what I burned with exercise. But now I think the whole system is factory farming and we are like the animals. We are fed as cheaply as possible and kept penned up inside propaganda structures, which give us false choices and disempower us casually if it enriches the richest among us, the investors in factory farms, antibiotics, and in a huge, bloated complex that makes money off denying health care and charging us for drugs we paid a government agency to develop. In other words we have become the Great American Cash Cow.
Joe Rogan and his guests could not solve the strange problem of whether or not saturated fats cause heart disease. The establishment guy was self centered which he masked by trying to be self-deprecating, to no avail, because he assumed the primacy of the great organizations, the American Heart Association, the FDA, and all the other Grand Poobahs whose word is accustomed to being the final say. But the issue focused on whether eating saturated fat causes heart disease. There was only tangential attention payed to what I think is the real issue, and that is cheap feed for the poor and middle classes, which causes obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Like Bill Maher would say, I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.
If we could go back in time and shift the goal of the United States from putting all the money the economy can generate into the coffers of the most insecure and greedy people in the world, and put our resources into our own best interests, we would all have a good diet, which would include meat which has a price reflecting what it costs to grow a normal, grass fed animal in pasture. We wouldn’t be eating grass seed sweetened with corn syrup, and we would not be drinking sugar water. We would be eating high quality meat and organic vegetables, and by doing so, it appears, would not be puzzling, as perhaps the cows do, as to why those who are feeding us are also killing us for profit.