Everything You Know About Food is FAKE NEWS!

On Pluto TV I watched the documentary Fat Head, in which a computer programmer named Tom Naughton decides to take on Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me.  In Super Size Me, Spurlock ate McDonald's 3 meals a day for 30 days and guess what?  He gained weight.  No shit.

So you think the premise for this is going to be this guy is going to eat fast food all the time and lose weight.  Which is true--with a caveat.  It's what he eats that's different from Spurlock.  Basically he does a low carb diet.  He eats some hamburger buns and breading but mostly he stays away from carbs like French fries, ice cream, and sugary sodas.

See that was the real problem with Spurlock's diet:  he was gorging on French fries, regular Coke, ice cream sundaes, apple pies, and buns/biscuits/English muffins.  So in a way he was right, but for the wrong reasons.  It wasn't just McDonald's making him fat, but the type of food at McDonald's he was eating.  By eliminating most of the carbs, Naughton lost 12 pounds in 28 days and what you might think is really weird, his cholesterol was improved.

With doctor interviews, bad animation, Jay Leno-type man-on-the-street questions, and a lot of sarcasm, Naughton talks about how everything we've been told about food from about the early 70s on has been totally bass ackwards.  Or as Trump would say:  FAKE NEWS!

It was in the 70s when the government started saying we should be lowering fat intake and eating lots of grains.  In the process they ended up telling us to eat a lot of carbs.  And then were baffled at why people were getting fat and issues like diabetes became so prevalent.  Ironically, "health" food advocates around that time also protested using animal fats at fast food places and the like and insisted on using what became known as "trans fats."  30 years later those same groups then said to stop using trans fats!

While the movie is a little over-the-top with some of its criticism and simplification, I still buy into most of it.  Why?  Because when my doctor put me on all the diabetes meds he said to do what?  Stop eating carbs, especially refined sugar.

Which is easier said than done.  Not only because I really like things like French fries, but our whole society is largely geared towards eating carbs.  Look at breakfast foods:  cereal, toast, muffins, donuts, pancakes, waffles, French toast--all loaded with carbs.  You want something portable for lunch?  How about a sandwich?  Made with bread of course.  Or have you looked at most "Lean" Cuisines or the like?  Most of them are filled with pasta or potatoes or the like.  Why?  Because those are cheap and "filling" and "healthy" by conventional standards.  And dinner?  Potatoes, rolls, or whatever.  Look at our favorite foods:  hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, ice cream, etc.  It's all loaded with starches and sugars, which is what leads to fat and diabetes.

There's also a section debunking something we've long been told:  high cholesterol diets lead to heart disease.  In reality there's no correlation.  Even anti-cholesterol drugs claim in the fine print that they don't cure or treat heart disease.  In many ways cholesterol is good for us; basically every cell in your body uses it.  The worst "bad" cholesterol doesn't come in the foods we associate with high cholesterol like bacon or sausage or eggs.  It's actually in "good" foods like bread.  Like I said earlier, Naughton ate plenty of fat and yet his "good" cholesterol level went up and his cholesterol ratio improved to "excellent."  So forget that noise about fat = cholesterol = heart disease.  It's a load of crap.  (I watched part of another, better-looking documentary on the paleo diet that said the same thing.  Confirmation!)

Now you might say this is just an anecdotal example (the same way Spurlock's movie was) but the thing is, there really is no scientific evidence supporting the government guidelines on "healthy" eating.  In fact, it's largely the opposite.  The guidelines that became the food pyramid weren't made by scientists; they were made by politicians and bureaucrats and rubber stamped by a few tame scientists.  In other words:  FAKE NEWS!  One of the earliest studies called the "lipid hypothesis" showed that in countries with high fat diets there was more heart disease, but this conclusion came by excluding a lot of countries that didn't fit the data, like where they eat a lot of fat but don't have heart disease--Norway for instance.

Another thing is that when people go on low fat diets they often get depressed.  Why?  Because our brains want salty animal fats.  We might be more "evolved" and yet our biology is still mostly the same as it was tens of thousands of years ago when they ate animals and wild grains.

WILD grains, not what we have today.  A thing at the end talks about how in the late 70s they started growing a modified "dwarf" wheat that's shorter but has more yield.  By the mid-80s pretty much everyone was doing it.  And not long after cases of food allergies and gluten sensitivity skyrocketed.  Because our guts weren't used to this new wheat.

Now the problem is what Naughton does in the end is buy a farm and grow his own food and raise chickens to provide eggs and so forth.  What about those of us who can't afford to buy the farm?  The problem I have trying to be low carb is it's not all that portable.  And it's expensive.  I mean for breakfast you can make sausage/bacon and eggs but try eating that in the car without toast, English muffins, or biscuits.  The best substitute I can think of are low carb tortillas.  I'm not sure how well that really works.  Lunch is more problematic.  Sandwiches are out if you want to eliminate carbs.  And things like TV dinners as I've said are loaded with pasta or potatoes usually.  There are Atkins meals but those are like $4 a pop and take about 6 minutes to cook.  Most of the time I just say fuck it and make tuna sandwiches that I eat at my desk while I'm working.  Dinner is easier since I can just make it at home.  Except that I love French fries and pizza too much.  I should probably eliminate those entirely.

Then there are all the hidden sugars in products.  Things like ketchup, pasta sauce, and even canned peas all have added sugar in them.  Reading labels for bread the problem is many breads--even "healthy" ones--have sugar/corn syrup and molasses.  That's part of why they have so many carbs.  The problem for poor people is so many of the cheapest most convenient items are full of carbs:  mac n cheese, ramen noodles, spaghetti, etc.  In cities like Detroit it's really hard for poor people to find and buy fresh vegetables (low carb ones, not like potatoes or peas for instance) or fresh, lean meat.  So they end up buying a lot of high carb stuff and that can lead to problems.

Anyway, if you're looking to lose weight, you're probably doing things wrong.  Instead of low fat or low calorie, you should be doing low carb or paleo.  Your body will thank you.

(BTW, if you're wondering, it says at the end the movie was entirely self-funded, not produced by McDonald's or Atkins or anything.)