Science and Engineeering

Seems like an unusual title for a health blog entry, no? Let me explain...

Science and engineering are terms we hear used together frequently, and the reason for that is simple, engineering is basically the use of science to make stuff "that works". Technology is the result of science and engineering, and we are so steeped in technology these days most of it is effectively invisible to us. We take it for granted... until it stops working.

Which leads me to how science and engineering is relevant to health. As we know science is a particular method of obtaining information, with filters in place (the so-called "scientific method") that are intended to eliminate incorrect ideas about how things work. It's a very useful approach and it really really works, without this method for testing "truth" we would not be surrounded these days by sophisticated technology that works.

But it is not the only way by which we arrive at "true information", and this is where engineering comes into the picture. Can you imagine what an engineers job would be like if they had to stop to test every single mechanical function they come across in their work via the rigorous (and very time consuming) scientific method? There are literally thousands of these "functions" in even relatively simple devices, like an air conditioner for example. In an automobile there are hundreds of thousands of these functions.

The difference, one of them, a main difference, between science and engineering is engineers use "anecdotal information" all the time. They do not have to mount extensive randomized double blind studies with controls to trust "mechanical" information that is apparent and obvious. If they did, it's safe to say, we would not have technology at all. The so called "simple machines" (inclined plane, lever, fulcrum, etc) were not arrived at (many years ago) through rigorous scientific method, they were merely observed to be true, and used by every engineer since.

How all this science and engineering stuff affects health is pretty obvious too when we think about it. The problem is basically we have been led to believe all anecdotal information is not to be trusted, because some of it is affected by the so-called placebo effect. And there is truth to that idea, but it is not the whole story, which leads me to my point.

Why aren't we taught that there are appropriate and necessary uses of "anecdotal information"? Is it so we can be made into better consumers of processed foods and the requisite pharmaceuticals "needed" to then "fix" the problems caused by those toxic substances? (Use of toxins to cure effect of toxins... now that makes sense... not!)

Is "science" deliberately misrepresented by food marketeers, in order to obscure the obvious, and sell us addictive (and harmful!) substances, and make us life-long "addicted" consumers of those products? On a related note, I have a book to recommend, "The Pleasure Trap", here's some information about it...    http://www.healthpromoting.com/the-pleasure-trap

Or is it because there is a certain "blindness" in science, an outsized (and inappropriate) level of belief in the idea we arrive at some fundamental and absolute truth about life and the universe through scientific investigation? When people say "science is the new religion" I think this is what they are talking about... we humans seem to have a need for absolute truth, due (Freud said) to our instinctual fear of death, which is another way of saying our deep and strong life force energy. So we "chase" science and mysticism in the pursuit of that "absolute".

Whether or not there is "absolute" loose in this cosmos is not the point of this blog however, it is the much more pedestrian (and central) concern - "how do we achieve and maintain optimum health and energy"...

So yes, we do have to find and rely on those mechanical functions that are blatantly obvious... what works... works. And yes, there is more than one way to skin a cat, body/mind are a single organism (IMHO), which means there is no escaping placebo effect to one degree or another. And that makes finding "what works" not only a process that unfolds over time, but also individual. We can however observe "what works" for whole societies throughout history, and basically trust those anecdotals. What we are seeing looking back over history, and more recently, is processed foods are designed for sales not health, but whole foods create good health (or we wouldn't be here as a species).

That much pretty much everyone can agree on. And IMO it is also safe to say those foods found in the (conducive) climates (that best support life without technological intervention, ie the warm climates) are those foods we are biologically adapted to, and the most basic causes of health and vitality, along with clean air and water.

What all this means to me it eat your fruits and vegetables boys and girls, in as close to their "source state" as possible... if you can pick them right off the tree, or out of your garden, and bring them directly to your mouth, by all means do so. Eat as close to "fresh ripe raw organic plants" as possible, for your health.

Which brings me to one last closing thought, a subject for a future blog... why is it we do not consider fruits as staple foods, when they are half the (fruits and vegetables) health equation?

Heart Warming Testimonial - Healing Cancer the Natural Way

Ah, the fruit festival is rolling!

Had to miss it this year darn it!

But some good vids are already rolling in, and they give some of the flavor of the event, and the experience.

The Problem of Getting Sufficient Calories to Maintain Energy and Body Weight

Any diet with insufficient calories is going to crash sooner or later (usually sooner). On an insufficient calorie diet people become thin, drawn, and just generally unhealthy. Calories are the nutrient we need every day to get thru the day because they are our immediate source of energy. But the rest, vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, essential fatty acids, etc etc... we can get those essential needs met over the course of weeks from a variety of whole foods.

So on a low-fat, whole food, vegan diet the problem is getting enough calories. Most people get most of their calories from fat. Calories in fat are very dense, in other words a small quantity of fat has a lot of calories. This is why, on conventional high-fat diets, if one eats enough to "get full", they will have eaten a lot of calories, too many in fact to easily maintain a healthy body weight.

On a low-fat vegan diet there are two primary sources for "enough" calories, fruits, where the cals come from simple carbohydrates mostly, and starches, where the cals come from complex carbs. (The cals in whole veggies are minimal, but those foods are rich in other essential nutrients.)

Bananas are the potato of the fruit world: they are versatile, cheap, readily available, and rich in calories and other essential nutrients. Depending on ripeness they can have quite a bit of starch (less ripe), and spotted bananas have converted the starch to simple sugar.

Contrary to the current but incorrect meme, insulin resistance is not caused by sugar, it is in fact caused by free floating fat in the bloodstream, which is what happens on standard diets getting most cals from fat. Fat in the blood inhibits the uptake, transport, and delivery of fuel to the cells (fuel is glucose and oxygen in combination), a problem known as insulin resistance. If one insists on continuing with a conventional high-fat diet the only solution to this problem is to reduce carbohydrate consumption to nil, converting the bods primary fuel source to fat, a condition known as ketosis. This is the basis of the so-called Paleo diet, or the earlier Atkins diet. However it's not as efficient or healthy IMHO as simply getting the fat out of the blood to begin with.

Check out this book, a low-fat vegan approach, but less "radical" than the 100% raw Doug Graham version. It uses cooked starches as the base, for sufficient calorie intake.

"The Starch Solution"

http://www.amazon.com/Starch-Solution-Regain-Health-Weight-ebook/dp/B007PF7MGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407765640&sr=8-1&keywords=the+starch+solution

"Healthy" Fats

There is a lot of discussion about healthy fats and being sure we have sufficient quantities of them in our daily diets. The so called Paleo diet proponents also suggest a diet with most calories coming from fats, including saturated fats (essentially a variation on the Atkins diet).

However the clinical evidence suggests a low fat vegan diet is highly effective in the context of disease reversal, and very possibly overall health, energy, and longevity. Drs. Esselstyn, Ornish, Bernard, McDougall, Fuhrman and many others not as well known have repeatedly shown and published consistent and decisive reversals of heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, most of the other so-called metabolic disorders, and even cancer in some cases.

These doctors suggest healthy carbs as forming the bulk of caloric intake, as much as 80% of the total, with fats and proteins splitting the remainder at 10% each. They eliminate animal products and refined vegetable oils entirely from the diet, and reduce consumption of high fat plants such as avocado and nuts and seeds to moderate levels.

The two approaches essentially invert carbs and fats in the calo-nutrient ratio, but also incorporate other common sense ideas, most notably perhaps elimination of processed, refined or otherwise fractionated food products, sticking with whole foods nearly exclusively. Both approaches can have beneficial result, pointing to the benefit of a whole foods diet on its own regardless of calo-nutrient ratio, but to the best of my knowledge only the high carb approach is shown to be a consistently successful disease reversal protocol.

Check out the information at this link:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/more-than-an-apple-a-day-preventing-our-most-common-diseases/

Carbs are not the source of Insulin Resistance

You might find this idea interesting - carbs are not the source of insulin resistance, they are the trigger, but only in the context of a high fat diet. The reason why is when we eat fat it ends up in our blood and inhibits the uptake, transmission and delivery of glucose and oxygen to the cells, resulting in elevated blood sugar, resulting in additional insulin, resulting in spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels and nasty metabolic swings. If we reduce our carb intake dramatically the problem goes away, but, the problem also goes away in the context of a high carb diet if we do not eat a lot of fat to begin with.

There's a lot of resistance to this idea, mostly IMO because we are inculturated to think fat is essential. Fat is certainly a more efficient (and profitable) way to distribute calories to society, they are approximately 10x more calorie dense than carbs. Most people also do not know that so called lean meats are about 60% of calories from fat, most likely because that information is not conducive to "good marketing".

Calories are not nutrition per se, but they are fuel in the everyday immediate sense, so conversion efficiency is important - when we eat foods (animal products) that use 30% (or more) of the calories in the food to metabolize the food, we are fueling inefficiently, with long term negative ramifications.

You might find this youtube vid interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_42LfH8veEU

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

I'm revisiting an older Mercola post because of something a friend sent

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

which led me to begin viewing two other vids of Campbell-McBride on youtube (better than the mercola audio interview by far)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONYR7vAD-A

http://youtu.be/Z_0NvcJZwa8

I agree with the idea digestion has been damaged by post industrial life styles, and that this problem is corrected most efficiently using the idea "food is medicine". This is IMO at the base of all effective non-medical healing of the maladies of the industrialized world. I would be curious to see if McBrides method is as rapid and complete as Graham's (water fast followed by fruits and vegetables) in healing the variety of life style damaged conditions we see in ourselves and all around us.  My money going in would be on Graham, she in my opinion suffers a typical situational (cultural/industrial) form of myopia in the idea that humans are biologically suited to the modern industrialized "delivery of calories system" (fats as primary source), which is predicated on convenience (distribution and concentration of calories) not health, in my opinion. Sure it's more "efficient" to distribute and consume concentrated calories (fats), but is it healthy?

Which is not to say the multitude of other fractionated processed and refined "foods" are not also responsible for galloping disease, it is an overdetermined problem. So McBride, and the paleo community in general, have it half right IMO by eliminating fractionated/processed/refined foods. But the (health) problem is complex because there is more than one thing causing it. Concentrated calories is also a (mostly unrecognized) culprit. We run most efficiently on fruit and vegetable carbohydrates (when consumed in context of whole fresh ripe raw organic especially). Yes we also burn fat for energy, but it is less efficient than carbs when pushed to be the primary source of fuel. And when it comes to health, it's difficult to argue against the most efficient delivery of fuel and nutrients to the body.

But there also seems to be a problem with combining high levels of fats and carbohydrates into one diet - it appears to induce the condition known as insulin resistance, precursor to unhealthy weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease, among many others. So it's kind of a "pick your poison" kind of thing, to be optimally healthy it's either going to be a mostly carbs or mostly fats question. And then you also have to ask the other question, which choice is better overall?

It is true that 100% vegan raw is not sustainable the way it has been practiced, in my humble opinion. Well it's not just my opinion, all one has to do is look for healthy long term 100% raw vegans in the world... it's a small number. But Graham recognized this problem early on and asked the right questions - if a 100% raw vegan diet is truly sustainable (peak health over the long term), it would also have to sustain peak levels of athleticism (not just disease recovery), and robust growth. Graham realized which parameters constitute ideal measures for sustainability, and AFAIK he is the only raw foodist to have analysed the "sustainable raw food diet" problem from that perspective.

We all have inculturated "industrial world" myopia to one extent or other, so it is not surprising that Graham's method (fruits and vegetables almost exclusively) is "a bridge too far" for most citizens of this modern world. And there are many effective ways to address the "damaged digestion" problem, but the question remains open as to which is the most effective method across the broadest population. And as long as industry (medicine, science, pharma, ag) principally control what is formally studied we will not have a satisfying "hard science" answer. As Doug Graham himself said once to me: "you have to find the thing you CAN do".