Open Letter to Michigan Governor Granholm
Dear. Governor Granholm:
I was very disappointed to read about your recent proclamation for a “meat out” day. You proclaimed that a wholesome diet of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains promotes good health and reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, which take the lives of approximately 1.3 million Americans each year.
The problem with this is that I know many overweight vegetarians and history shows us plainly that there are vast populations of people who never had a problem with heart disease, stroke, cancer diabetes or other chronic diseases. In fact, at the turn of the century, American and England were primarily meat-eaters. Heart disease was exceedingly rare. But in the last 100 years as sugar consumption has risen, so has chronic disease of all kinds.
I realize that you received an e-mail from an individual urging you to make this proclamation who made the statement, “No one has become obese eating fruits and vegetables.” They may be true but you should know it’s also true that no one has become obese eating meat exclusively either. Unlike most who speculate, I have put my money where my mouth is. I have been eating an exclusive meat diet for the past three years and during that time, I have lost 73 pounds and I am healthy by every objective measure. The same is true for many of my friends and family.
There has never been a single study or result that has shown meat to be harmful in the absence of carbohydrates. The whole anti-fat movement which was began by Ancel Keys in the 1950′s has been shown to be totally based on hype and misinformation. What we do know is that obesity has been consistently found among the poor and it’s no surprise, looking at the Michigan economy, that it would be found prominently in your state. Thus, I cannot blame you for wanting to do something about it. However, you have merely countered with the beliefs of a particular religion. It’s a very popular one that believes that things that grow from the ground are inherently healthy for human beings and that all red meat, specifically, is bad.
But according to USA Today(by way of the National Turkey Association), they say the breakdown is like this:
Chicken: 84.9 pounds
Beef: 63.5 pounds
Pork: 48.2 pounds
Turkey: 17.5 pounds
Lamb and Mutton: 1 pound
Most of that beef is mostly likely in the form of hamburgers. I eat about 2 pounds of meat per day which would mean that I eat over 600 pounds of meat per year, yet I am healthier than two-thirds of all adults in this country. How would you explain that? People are not eating more meat each year.
If you say it’s because I do not eat sugar or its products, I would say you are correct. You might say, if I ate fruits and vegetables, I would also be healthy. But I have experience eating those and for me, they are only nature’s little “gateway drugs.” These foods have very little nutritional value and affect blood sugar just enough to send a person searching for more and more sugar. These foods are simple sugars and they begin breaking down as such as soon as they hit the tongue. In my opinion that makes them no more healthy than any other carbohydrates. Yes, easily digestible and refined carbohydrates cause a more immediate impact, but eating salads and fruits are only good enough to make us unsettled and searching for more food. One would have to eat a large amount of these foodstuffs to match the nutrition in a single porterhouse steak. Antioxidants? Skip the anecdote by avoiding the poison.
If you want an example of someone who is really making a dent in the obesity epidemic, I would suggest that you take a look at what some in the soft drink industry have planned to do:
Both PepsiCo Inc., the world’s second-biggest soft drink maker, and No. 1 player Coca-Cola Co. adopted guidelines to stop selling sugary drinks in U.S. schools. The World Heart Federation has been negotiating with soft drink makers to have them remove sugary beverages from schools for the past year as it looks to fight a rise in childhood obesity, which can lead to diabetes, heart problems and other ailments.
This is a far more important step to curb the problem and it affects not just children but adults as well. It can be difficult to eat 108 grams of foods containing real sugar, but it’s quite simple to consume that much sugar in a drink. A 34-ounce bottle of Coke contains 108 grams of sugar, which happens to be threshold per day for a healthy population. According to Diabetologist George Campbell of South Africa, if a population exceeded the threshold of 70 pounds of sugar, per person, per year, they would begin experiencing the onset of chronic disease in that population. The figure proved extremely accurate for all the populations he tested the theory on. The research was non-controversial as well. That equates to about 108 grams of sugar per day. A person can exceed that amount after two and a half cans of Coke.
This would indicate to me that any reduction in sugar that can be accomplished by a population would only improve overall health dramatically. This would be far more effective than declaring a “meat out” day. When you take away meat, people consume more carbohydrates. Take a look at the labels of practically any non-meat item in the supermarket and see how much sugar is present. Even in “whole grain” bread, there is still close to 2 grams of sugar per slice and the effect upon blood sugar is almost identical to what happens when one consumes white bread. If a grain was truly “whole” it would be inedible. They all still require processing and the processing is what drives up their glycemic load upon the body.
My point in all of this is to suggest that you look past the religion and the fraudulent claims and take a look at the history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the Northern Inuit, or the Masai or Kikuyu groups in Africa who ate high-fat diets for centuries and see that they had no chronic disease until they began eating the refined carbohydrates of the whites.
The rise in sugar consumption has always been the problem and lowering it will again return us to the health we enjoyed in the past.
Speaking of the past, if you want to find out what happens when sugar becomes greatly reduced, take a look at what happened on Tokelau in 1979 when their trading ship ran aground. At this point, they were unable to get their carbohydrates and their health soared. They returned to their high fat diet of coconuts and fish and became extremely healthy. All sorts of diseases were reversed.
If that’s too abstract for you, take a look at what happened during the “war years” 1940 to 1946. During this period, there was severe food rationing in many countries such as Sweden and there was a severe reduction in heart disease. Skeptics would argue that in addition to sugar rationing, people ate less overall and people exercised more. Any of these could explain the improvement. However, two of these tenets have been thoroughly tested over the past 60 years. One of them has not. We have increased our exercise as evidenced by the billion-dollar health club and fitness industry. We have eaten less, in particular meat. However, we have increased our sugar consumption exponentially in the past 60 years and we have only gotten worse. So it seems clear to me where the intervention needs to happen.
Share on Twitter2 Responses
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
on March 19, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Permalink
[...] Plains, the Northern Inuit, or the Masai or Kikuyu groups in Africa who … More here: Zeroing In On Health – The Blog! » Open Letter to Michigan … Share [...]
on March 21, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Permalink
[...] Zeroing In On Health – The Blog! » Open Letter to Michigan Governor Granholm [...]