You Can’t Heal Health Until You Heal Food – Dr Udo Erasmus With The Skinny On Fats
What’s the saying? “you are what you eat”. While putting it less charitably, some say one third of what you eat feeds you – the other two thirds feeds your Doctor / your surgeon or that liposuction clinic down the road. Quite.
Now, if fat is a feminist issue, may I, as a bloke look at it – pretty please? It’s likely that fat is not just a subject to skirt around but one that matters to trouser folk too. If only the F word hadn’t been so demonised, if only f*ts hadn’t come with so much ‘lard assed’ baggage. But, and here’s a Big Butt – what if we were just following orders, what if the science had, well, not been fully played with a straight bat? What if ever so much of it was actually balls – not just in the spoken word, but simply and un-transparently, not been cricket.
How so? Well, excess carbs for one as they’re driving a global diabesity epidemic. It’s as if the villain in the piece has not been independently Umpired. While the US has gone from 3 million to 30 million diabetics in a generation, maybe there’s something in the ‘water’ (other than high fructose corn syrup, additives and cuddly colour dyes). We’ve turned nearly 40,000 generations of human dietary existence (and near paleo feeding) into fully ‘sugar expectant’ homo sapiens with the blessing of carb over-loading ‘public health’. The biggest, unstructured, non placebo controlled, double blind, clinical trial the world has ever seen. Except it had none of those normal ‘clinical trial’ controls – instead it’s what we call: real world evidence. No one was paid to give sponsors their preferred answer, no peer review process to be deftly navigated – just real world heavyweight evidence.
So what of Dr Udo Erasmus? Polish by birth, he was poisoned by pesticides nearly four decades ago which started him on his quest as the highly inquisitive author of: Fats That Heal, Fats that Kill. Those 460 pages are a finger lickin good read while he deep dives into the culprits along our journey, building as he does a scientific analysis of most, to least, harmful foods. Pretty much at the bottom of the pile is margarine – those chemical substances, a sadly promoted substitute for grass fed butter. Again, we were just following orders and advertising. Only slightly less bad than margarine are fried oils & sugars – sounds like a regular diet of a Big McNation to me. Udo cites four Nobel Prize Winners for their Century old lessons, buried long ago among the mists of commercial self-interests. From Thorsten Thunberg, to Otto Meyerhof, on to Albert Szent-Györgyi and Otto Warburg – each adding to the other, standing on the shoulders of those giants who went before them – except each, a highly talented reductionist, missing the great over-lapping lesson of Nature that fats are needed to make proteins work. Fats tell our lizard brain when we’re full, while sugars, usually nutrient lacking, never do – for 40,000 generations we have been hard wired that way and the advertisers know it.
Imagine if that long lost School friend had seen you after a few years apart, and was itching to say, “hey, those long hours of yours and comfortable family life sure look to have taken a bit of a toll, you’ve gone, well, dare I say it, a bit: sugary”, rather than “you’ve gone all to fat”. Because excess sugar in most cases is what gets stored, those 2,500 recent calories that have to be depleted before our 100,000 calories of bodily stored fat reserves can be metabolised, ‘burnt as energy and turned to ketones’ while fuelling our system. What if artery damaging sugar consumption was again the villain in the piece, tearing at our arteries with tiny cuts, while cholesterol was the inbuilt, anti-inflammatory toolkit of bodily repair? In short the ‘scab’ to heal our sugar besieged blood transportation system.
Clearly, fats are a human issue but one where their name is their biggest barrier to renewed healthy consumption, or as Dr Mark Hyman, Functional Medicine specialist says “Eat Fat Get Thin” – so we can all get into that skirt or trousers with ease.
But only natural fats need apply.