Blood Pressure

The advice here with regard to blood pressure seems good and well founded. Part II about cholesterol on the other hand ...

While I am not convinced that cholesterol is the boogie man portrayed in popular health advice, it seems to me that certain subcategories of cholesterol are markers that should be watched. LDL, bad cholesterol, and HDL, good cholesterol, are examples of this. Although my doctor disagrees. He basically told me that the cholesterol numbers are of no value. Instead he is testing the size of my cholesterol. I should have this information soon.

Nor am I convinced that one should eat saturated fat like candy. Many in the alternative health area do think this. I doubt I will add butter to my morning coffee as some do! I have been known to add a little coconut milk to my coffee, may Ansel Keys forgive me! (Ansel Keys is the inventor of the meme that cholesterol is evil.)

Some Ideas Are So Dumb They Can Only Be Believed By Religious People

Since religion according to dictionary.com is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe," I suppose we are all religious in some sense. But what I am more specifically talking about is the need for some people to justify themselves through religion. Some have the ability to put their brain into neutral, and believe what tickles their fancy or their ego. One such religious belief is British Israelism:

British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is a doctrine based on the hypothesis that people of Western European descent, particularly those in Great Britain, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The doctrine often includes the tenet that the British Royal Family is directly descended from the line of King David.

British Israelism is data mining at its "finest." While data mining is a legitimate term, I am using it to describe a very human process of selectively harvesting data that, with a little tweaking, can "support" a preconceived notion. In terms of the Bible a related term is "proof-texting." 

Let me give you an example. The British Israel advocate may start out with two true statements: 1. The word "brit" in Hebrew means "covenant." 2.The word "ish" in Hebrew means man. So what conclusion is drawn? The English word British therefore means "covenant man."

Argh. 

People do this all the time. The health field is particularly suspect. You find the health study that says what you want, and suddenly it is the most important study ever. But the way such studies work is that you can often find studies that say the opposite. I am not saying that better health is unknowable, but to be careful which dumb religious health idea you buy into. 

What makes me smile about British Israelism is that it is in one sense true. Since we are all related to each other, there are very few people alive today that do not have "Jewish" blood. Hitler would not be pleased. And of course the "De" in my last name means that I am a descendant of royalty and nobility. That, and 14 rubles, will allow me to ride the bus anywhere here in Murom, Russia. 

This video presents this idea well, and provides the additional information that I have one billion atoms that used to be in the body of the bard, William Shakespeare. That no doubt explains the excellent quality of this blog.

Vitamin Sugar Water

There is an interesting lawsuit going on against Coke for their product Vitamin Water. Here is how one blogger sees it. 

"So what is Coca-Cola’s defense? You might think that they would pull out all the stops to show how healthy Vitaminwater really is. Well, no… In a recent court briefing the lawyer representing Coca-Cola claimed that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.” So despite all the marketing and packaging that implies otherwise, they have acknowledged that Vitaminwater was never designed to be healthy."

As the blogger points out you need to read labels. No, that is not strong enough. YOU MUST READ EVERY LABEL. 

The version of Babylon that is the Western Food Industry wants you as a customer and will do whatever it takes to get you to eat its products. Knowledge is the first step to stop their plan. I have been urging my readers to obey the command of Revelation 18 and have God's people "leave" Babylon the Great. One way to do this is not to eat its food. You will definitely receive bad health if you don't leave her "tender" care.

No Fat Russian Girls

At least that used to be true. In my first trip to Russia everyone one was thin. At least I felt a little self-conscious since I was over the borderline between overweight and obese. Now, overweight but not close to obese, I fit right in.

Sure, on that first trip there was the occasional beer belly and chunky babushka, but now it is common. It is only natural that we gain weight as we get older. For some reason the human metabolism changes as we age. If we eat the same foods we did when we were younger, we gain 5 to ten pounds a decade. Russia is getting older at an alarming rate, but what I am noticing is more than that.

It is not the restaurants. You can still get great meals for about the same price as the US, but these are gourmet meals. You might have to wait longer, as everything is made fresh. But I did notice that the desert sections of the menu are much larger now, and I see a lot of ice cream eating going on.

I am not sure why everyone here in Russia is heavier than in years past, but I do have a guess. Wherever the western diet spreads, people get sick and fat. I hope these observations will encourage me to continue eating well.

Don't Diet

Later I will review the The Perfect Health Diet. While I found the book incoherent, I did find one point of agreement similar to my agreement with the video I posted last week. This is from location 6598 in my Kindle edition:

Some diet gurus advocate different diets for weight loss and maintenance. This is unnecessary. Since it is possible to lose weight eating the same calories as a normal person, it's not necessary to eat a diet different than a normal person's to lose weight.  

While the book critiques diet gurus who suggest diets, do you want to make a guess what the book does a few pages later? That is right, the authors offer a diet! This book will receive the full "Positive Dennis" critique very soon. 

But the authors were right in the first place: "dieting" is a mistake. The first reason is that while one is dieting,  they do not learn permanent techniques for healthy eating. The dieter learns temporary techniques that do not necessarily apply to the normal eating habits they will eventually adopt. It is like being an ivory tower intellectual where the theory does not fit reality. One needs to adopt permanent lifestyle changes, not temporary ones. A dieter is worse off if they yo-yo back and forth in weight. I am not talking about natural weight cycling based on the seasons, although we modern humans tend to do this backwards and gain weight in the winter and lose it in the summer. What the dieter is doing is messing up their metabolism, maybe semi-permanently. 

5 lbs. of Fat and MuscleAnother reason that dieting is dangerous is that those of us who are fat have been eating a lot of crap. This crap is stored in the fat. As we lose weight this crap is dumped into the blood stream. There is a real danger that one will overwhelm the toxic removal system of the body by forcing it to rapidly deal with lots of chemicals. Slow is better. 

There is also the danger of confusing your body. If you lose weight rapidly the body may think that a crisis has occurred and that the body is starving. Thus the body reduces the metabolism in order to preserve life. This makes weight loss more difficult. 

Should one ignore what one weighs? My surprising answer is yes. Instead concentrate on eating a proper diet at a level of calories that would supply the body you should have based on your height and size. I think most of us know what we should weigh. We may not like the answer, but we know. If you want some guidance, click here and look. 

For me the answer was no more than 185. How many calories do I need for that level of weight? Oddly enough there is great disagreement. WebMD thinks it is 2000-2200 for a sedentary male. The American Cancer Society says 2600. Fitness Magazine suggests 2063, which was about what I originally figured when I started my healthy eating program.

So what I did was eat 2000 calories a day. All these figures were for a sedentary person. I was that then, but now I am not, although I am at best lightly active at this time. This means that I am under eating slightly, but only slightly. 

So am I asking you to keep track of what you eat? Yes, I am. As Peter Drucker, business consultant, once said, whatever you measure is what you concentrate on. If you do not measure your calories, you will have no idea what you are eating. There will be surprises. I still remember my shock in discovering the calories in an Ultimate Cheeseburger. I have not had one since. 

How does one count calories? With modern technology the answer is that it is surprisingly easy. We will talk about that the next time I write about health. 

What is 2000 calories? Here is a visual aid.