Fitness And Nutrition General

But, hey, let's demonstrate how argumentum ab auctitore is fallacious: I had the misfortune of being in the same room when my mother turned on Dr. Oz today. His guest, until I forced her to change the channel, was Dr. David Perlmutter. He's an authority who preaches that literally any carbohydrate is not only categorically evil (on the level of child-murderer evil in this guy's mind), but is the direct cause of diabetes, obesity, cancer, and, most recently, Alzheimer's. And he means any carbohydrate. In fact, since things like whole-grain wheat products contain gluten, they're categorically worse than sucking down a quart of high-fructose corn syrup according to him.

In the interests of disclosure, I want to punch both Dr. Oz and Dr. Perlmutter in the face. Then bury them neck-deep in half-frozen vat of elephant diarrhea. Then light them on fire. I can't decide who I hate more: the idiot who thinks that vegetables cause cancer or the media *** who has made a living repeating junk science that was debunked before I had short-and-curlies. To clarify, Oz, like so many media ***, has spent years talking about how fat causes heart disease. He's a cardiologist by training but apparently never read any of the studies published in the early '90s showing the irrelevance of dietary cholesterol and fat intake (above and beyond its native calories, of course).

But, yeah, battle of authority, head-to-head: who is right, the person who says that all non-plant matter causes cancer or the person who says that all plant matter causes cancer?

Here's a minor hint: bleeding neither of them.

Cancer is only partially understood, but we've got a rather good idea of what it is and how it arises. It is basically just normal cells that have mutated sufficiently that they don't stop growing. That's it: they just grow and overtake healthy tissue that has built-in delimiters until the organism dies. The mechanism of mutation is where things get muddy. For one, every single time we're in the sunlight, we're exposed to carcinogenic energy. Ditto being anywhere near electricity, which would include our own neurons, to say nothing of the massive amounts of 100% natural EMR in the world. On the list of mutagens, though, natural foods don't even rate unless you've burnt them (all forms of smoke and carbonization are mutagenic/carcinogenic, meaning not just cigarettes but also marijuana and campfires and burnt toast).

If we're exposed to carcinogenic factors literally every second of every day, why doesn't everyone have cancer? For one, our DNA is either incredibly stupid or incredibly resilient, depending on your personal level of cynicism and religious belief. It's full of redundancies, junk data, and even rogue viruses (not kidding: apparently non-functional parts of the human genome are often virus code that got inserted millions of years ago). Moreover, most mutations that occur in DNA result in failed cell division and the alteration gets flushed out when the cell dies. It takes literally billions of mutations to hit upon a very specific series of effects to cause cancer cell growth. There are a few shortcuts, like how HPV has a nasty habit of invading certain cell-lines and accelerating the process, but cancer is mostly just an inevitable consequence of human frailty that has only started to rise to prominence now that we live long enough for it to appear more often. Cancer in kids is tragic. In a 50-year-old, it's irritating. In an 80-year-old, it's just life.

About all that can be said is that some of the chemicals used in highly prepared and processed foods might be troublesome. It's a big "might," though. Half those chemical names written on the ingredients list of a Hot Pocket are not some sinister concoction built by a mad scientist but natural compounds that never got a colloquial name. I imagine at least some people here know what lecithin is and a Latin scholar could spot its roots instantly, but the ignorant masses would have no idea that it is a thickening agent derived primarily from egg yolks and soy beans. Then again, we live in a world that is trying to turn a boring protein like gluten into a mass-murderer just because a few people have flattened villi.

Oh, and who is getting rich by telling us that saturated fat, gluten, animal protein, or fructose are dangerous? Because the correct response to any claim that anything is good, bad, or indifferent, is "Follow the money." If no one appears to be actively making a buck by telling you something (for instance, I've seen virtually zero capitalist exploitation of the claim that phytoestrogens in soya are detrimental to male testosterone production), then it might be true.

And, ultimately, any diet that suggests completely foregoing a given nutrient is probably wrong. Giving up animal flesh, though, is demonstrably a bad idea. It's not as bad an idea as, say, living exclusively on a diet of Twinkies and canned cheese spray, but it's pretty close. The human species would still be a bunch of chimpanzees without animal protein and fat. Our brains look like sugar-*** with all the energy they consume, but they grew that big both because we started eating meat and because we needed to keep doing so. Our alimentary tract is a confused mess because our parent species have been herbivorous, insectivorous, root-and-nut eaters (one of our ancestors had a mouth full of molars to grind roots into something digestible), and at one point we were even eaters-of-the-dead, not dissimilar to hyenas. We really started to advance when we developed a taste for marrow by figuring out how to get at the stuff by making axes and, consequently, became much more adept at killing animals instead of waiting for a lion to do it.

Anyone who mentions that most technological advances come from war is spot-on, provided you consider war to be an extension of the fight to survive.