Caustic Commentary, Fall 2018

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Sally Fallon Morell takes on the Diet Dictocrats

PURE POISON?
The Internet is atwitter with a claim by Harvard professor Karin Michels that coconut oil is “pure poison.” Dr. Michels made the announcement during a lecture in Germany, given in German, and reported in Business Insider Deutschland. The video of her lecture has gone viral, with over one million views. Coconut oil is a poison, says Michels, because it’s highly saturated, so it raises LDL-cholesterol and blocks our arteries. Apparently, the professor from Harvard knows more than Mother Nature, who poisons little babies by putting saturated fats of these kind into mother’s milk. Studies have shown that coconut oil does not raise LDL-cholesterol or contribute to heart disease, but Michels lives on the antisaturated fat planet where real thinking is not allowed. For example, she might have asked how the inhabitants of the tropics have survived over the centuries eating so many coconut products filled with saturated fat. But Michels touts the party line, that we should consume only liquid oils and also avoid red meat and dairy products. The real question is, what kind of university would hire someone so obviously in the pockets of industry, still spouting the same old, tired, wrong, dangerous nutritional advice? Surely the world’s most prestigious university can do better than this.

CHEESE FOR LONGEVITY
The anti-saturated fat pronouncements of Dr. Michels notwithstanding, evidence exonerating cheese continues to accumulate. The latest is a study out of Poland, which looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The researchers followed over twenty-four thousand participants for six years. The researchers found the consumption of any kind of dairy to be associated with a 2 percent lower risk of death from any cause, while consumption of cheese was associated with an 8 percent lower total mortality risk. Researchers involved in the study call for reformulating the dietary guidelines, but critics are throwing cold water over their conclusions. According to Dr. Holly Lofton, director of the weight management program at NYU Langone Health, “Cheese can be quite satisfying and filling for patients but it is also often eaten in mindless settings like dinner parties. This can lead to weight gain, which increases cardiovascular risk” (sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180828085914.htm). Wrong again. For example, women who eat cheese show lower weight gain as they age (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2007;84(6):1481-1488). So you can still enjoy cheese in “mindless settings like dinner parties” and outlive your cardiologist as well!

LOW-CARB DIETS, SHORTER LIFE?
The food industry is worried about the growing popularity of low-carb diets, which means of course diets that avoid white flour and industrial sweeteners. After all, the manufacturers get much more profit if people eat cheap carbs rather than real foods like meat and cheese. So naturally, a new study has come out—from guess where? Harvard of course—which found that “low-carbohydrate, high-animal-protein diets significantly increase the risk of early death” (The Lancet Public Health 2018). Another headline: A new study of more than 24,800 adults in the U.S. found that those who limited their carb intake had a 32 percent higher risk of death from any cause than people who ate high-carb diets. The researchers also did note a greater risk of death for those on a high-carb diet. The sweet spot of lowest risk magically landed on the government-sanctioned “moderate carb diet” of 55 percent. As Zoe Harcombe has pointed out in her excellent analysis, there are just so, so many things wrong with the study. For starters, the researchers did not look at people on a genuine low-carb diet, which means carb consumption in the range of 10-20 percent and animal fat consumption in the range of 60-80 percent of calories. And they used all the statistical tricks in the book, including reliance on food frequency questionnaires (sample question: During the past month, how often did you eat any kind of cheese? Include cheese as a snack … cheese on burgers, sandwiches, and cheese in foods such as lasagna, quesadillas, or casseroles. {Please do not count cheese on pizza}), uneven intervals, inflation of insignificant findings using relative risk, small interval confounding, and failure to adjust for alcohol, an important confounder. The researchers strangely contended that no one in this study of American adults consumed more than 1660 calories per day. Really? For an amusing and maddening look at what passes for science coming out of Harvard University, visit Zoe’s blog at zoeharcombe.com/2018/08/lowcarb-diets-could-shorten-life-really/.

NO CAUSE FOR ALARM?
We are not seeing a lot of studies on the effects of soy foods these days, but one seems to have slipped through the cracks. Researchers at the Nutrition Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) looked at reproductive cells and tissues in infants receiving either soy-based formula, milk-based formula or breastmilk. The researchers found the most pronounced changes in soy-fed girls, with estrogen-like responses in vaginal and urethral epithelial cells and in serum estradiol and follicle-stimulating hormone levels (J Clin Endo & Meta, 2018). According to study author Margaret A. Adgent, “Modern soy formula has been used safely for decades” and the changes were “subtle and not a cause for alarm.” Of course, these changes would be subtle in infants, and we know that tiny amounts of hormones can make huge differences in long-term development. For now, the American Academy of Pediatrics is not changing its stance: soy formula is recommended for infants who cannot digest milk and “in situations in which a vegetarian diet is preferred.”

PLUMMETING IQ SCORES
Test scores of our children are on a downward path, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. In the U.S., scores on SAT tests (a proxy indicator of cognitive ability) are at an all-time low while at least half of all children have a chronic health problem such as developmental delay, behavioral problems, obesity, allergies, asthma and mental health conditions. In Europe, test results in Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, Austria and Germany show the same trend. Commentators blame environmental factors such as pesticides, but there are many others: vaccinations, antibiotics, genetically engineered food, EMR, soy foods, plastics and above all the current lowfat, high-sugar diet consumed by most children, with the blessing of educators and physicians. Researchers are beginning to express concern about the mismatch between available cognitive abilities and “the expected larger demand for non-routine analytical-cognitive jobs,” noting that “cognitive tasks at the workplace as well as in daily life and in organization, maintenance and especially innovation are rising” (healthimpactnews.com, June 19, 2018). Put another way, who is going to keep the lights on, fly our planes, fix our roads and bridges, build our cars and computers and produce our food when half the population has trouble with cognitive tasks?

BREAD AND CHEESE
Mankind did not consume grains or dairy foods until the Neolithic age, which began in the Fertile Crescent about twelve thousand years ago, or so say promoters of the paleo diet. But archeologists have uncovered evidence of breadmaking dating back some fourteen thousand years, at a site in northeastern Jordan. The discovery shows that bread-making predates large-scale agriculture. And it was quite good bread, made with fine flour of wild barley, wheat and oats as well as from tubers of water plants (pnas.org/content/115/31/7925). Archeologists have also discovered a large bag containing a mysterious white substance in the tomb of Ptahmes, mayor of Egypt’s capital city of Memphis during the thirteenth century BC. New analytical methods have revealed the mass to be solid cheese (Anal. Chem., 2018, 90 (16), pp 9673–9676). The cheese was made with milk from goat, sheep and, strangely, African buffalo—a species not typically associated with domestic animals. The researchers also found the brucellosis bacterium, leading to warnings about the need for pasteurization. But our paleolithic ancestors seem to have survived a diet containing both unpasteurized milk products and bread made from grains, including wheat.

DON’T MESS WITH MERCURY
The Centers for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry warns people about the toxicity of mercury and provides information on cleaning up toxic spills from fluorescent light bulbs, thermometers, thermostats, electrical switches and school science labs. Breathing mercury vapors can affect the nervous system, damage the kidneys and harm other parts of the body, the agency warns (atsdr.cdc.gov/dontmesswithmercury/index.html). As pointed out by WAPF advisory board member Laura Hayes, the website does not mention the fact that if a doctor or nurse drops a vial of a thimerosal-containing influenza vaccine, the building must be cleared and a HazMat team called in to clean up. Expired mercury-containing vaccines cannot be thrown away as regular trash, but must be collected by those specializing in the disposal of hazardous materials. But CDC thinks it’s fine to inject mercury into the bloodstream, even into the bloodstream of babies and pregnant women, or to put it in people’s mouths in the form of amalgam fillings that are constantly outgassing mercury vapor fumes. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can make people go crazy, and nothing is crazier than the double standard regarding mercury toxicity.

EMBALMING FLUID
Don’t mess with embalming fluid either. Recently a woman in Russia died after doctors mistakenly injected embalming fluid (formalin, a 40 percent solution of formaldehyde in water) into her abdominal cavity. She succumbed three weeks later, of organ failure. According to Lewis Nelson, MD, of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, formalin in the body is “very dangerous to all living tissues and would disrupt the function of nearly every living organ.” Yet formaldehyde is added to four of the eleven licensed influenza vaccines in the U.S. (some of which are given to pregnant women) and to twenty-six other vaccines including DTap, Hib, Hep A, Hep B, polio, Tdap and typhoid. (thevaccinereaction.org/2018/04/embalming-fluid-in-vaccines/) The amounts may be small, but then the individuals they are injected into are often very small, sometimes only one day old, and the effects are cumulative.

SATISFYING PICKY TODDLERS?
“Eating guidelines that satisfy even picky toddlers and active teens” is the title of an article by Casey Seidenberg, published in The Washington Post, July 26, 2018. The diet that is going to satisfy your toddler, she claims, is two servings of fruit, three servings of vegetables, six servings of whole grains, two or three servings of dairy, and two servings of protein (eggs, beans, chicken, fish or meat) per day. For school-age children, the portions are increased (grains go to nine servings) and for teens they are increased again (grains go to eleven servings). Such a soul-crushing diet is of course a recipe for creating picky eaters and hungry children—there’s no fat, no salt, no cream, no butter, no bacon, just a lot of dry vegetables, grains and meat, impossible to choke down. What if your child is drawn to junk food (which he will be)? “Don’t be overly restrictive” is the advice—in other words, let them satisfy themselves with junk food. If your child seems to be managing unhappy emotions with food (yes, they will be unhappy), the advice is to “talk to them about their feelings.” The truth is that the diet suggested by Ms. Seidenberg (who is just following the USDA guidelines, after all) is a form of child abuse, bound to create unhappy, unhealthy, unsatisfied human beings.

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