Thanks for your thoughtful reply Txdon. Most people get ruffled feathers when someone offers a counter-view. Glad to see your not one of them.
too bad Weston died in 1948 and did not have access to the knowledge and indisputable facts concerning heart disease in the last 60+ years.
Yes it is a shame he passed. But the only indisputable fact I have been able to find about heart disease is the fact that for the hundreds of years they have been plotting it (and all the other diseases of civilization), it remained pretty steady and pretty low until the beginning of the industrial revolution, at which time the slope of the line increased somewhat, and then around the late 1950's it makes another big increase, with another big kink upward that looks like the end of a hockey stick around the 1980's. Does this correlate to the beginning of pasteurization around the 1900's, the death of the small family farm and the beginning of huge, industrial mega farm post WWII, and finally the beginning of the FDA's food pyramid scheme to get American's to eat up all the oil soaked grain being produced on these mega farms? Or did our genes suddenly change, or perchance we all decided to start eating like pigs at the same time? I don't know what kind of diet you had before your heart problems, but if you're like the rest of us, it was probably a SAD one (Standard American Diet). We eat the deadest food on the planet, and we have the stats to show it. After you grow food genetically modified to survive on dead soil, pasteurize, homogenize, irradiate, then microwave it, how can you expect there to be anything but empty calories left?
When talking to cardiologists at:
THE WEATHERHEAD CENTER FOR PREVENTING AND REVERSING ATHEROSCLEROSIS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MEDICAL SCHOOL AT HOUSTON AND MEMORIAL HERMAN HOSPITAL
they say it has been well known for the last 25 years that diet causes heart disease. Over 80% of people with known heart disease (heart attack or heart procedure) will not change their diet significantly. When there is no change in diet there is no change in the progression of heart disease.
I hope they didn't charge for that info, because I could have told you that for free. In fact, I'll guarantee you that everyone who religiously sticks to a SAD diet and survives long enough will eventually suffer the ill effects of it. Hippocrates got it right when he said all diseases start in the gut. We are what we eat. We are walking around with huge bellies, literally starving to death. The body is a miraculous thing and has the ability to heal itself, but only if we give it the raw materials to work with, and get the heck out of its way. When we get a cold, the body makes us cough, because it is trying to get the bad out. What do we do? We take cough suppression medicine. The body then can't get out the bad stuff by coughing, so it tries to do it another way. It gives us the runs. What do we do, we take stuff to stop the runs. Eventually the body runs out of ways to fight the sickness. If we had just left it alone and put up with a little cough, we would have been done with it in a few days and would have built up a resistance to what it was fighting in the first place.
At the Weatherhead center, They use the PET scan on the heart that shows the diet working. The scan is on people with heart disease, not rats.
No difference, their just using people as rats. They're still not studying the whole system in its natural enviornment. They are studying just a little part of it. Sure, they can probably come up with a way to make that picture of a heart look like the way they say it should look, but at what expense to the other systems. I laugh every time I see a commercial for a new drug and they have to list the side effects at the end. "Yes, you can have clear skin as long as you don't mind possibly going blind, having a stroke, or dying." At least everyone will comment how good your skin looks as they pass by your coffin. Lloyde E makes some very good points in his post. His foray into veganism reflects what many others have said. Good at first, bad over the long term.
There are a couple of diets/thoughts circulating which I heard about and I am not sure of source but sound interesting. One is you shouldn't consume anything that has a heart - guide line. I guess the consumption of "heart" foods oppose the nature of the human make-up and food need. The other thought is that we are dna programmed for our diet 1000's of years ago. So, based on your ancestral origin your diet should be in line with the food they ate - ie:asian or coastal areas: fish, in-land would be meat, agrarian would be grains only etc. So eating things unrelated to our origin throws us out of balance. You can see what our present western diet has done to our northern inuit peoples and aboriginals over the last 100+ years.
The above quote should say originally posted by Lloyde E. I haven't learned how to make that happen yet.
We actually stood up about 2.5 million years ago and called ourselves man, with the exact same brain capacity the we have now. For 2.49 out of those 2.5 million years, we had the same basic diet; forager/hunter. Our bodies evolved to that diet. It was only about 10,000 years ago that we started agriculture, a blink of the eye, about twelve seconds ago on a twelve hour clock. Humans don't have the natural ability to digest grain because we don't have a rumen. Apparently a lot of people started dying out when we first tried to eat grains, until they discovered that you had to ferment the grains first, then the grains turn into a form we can digest. The grains we eat today are not fermented. Guess what's going to happen?
The whole point I'm trying to make is that these studies don't study whole, natural, grass based food systems that haven't been industrialized yet. You're absolutely right, confinement animals pumped full of chemicals to keep them alive will kill you over time. But grass-fed, naturally raised happy animals will heal you over time. And I'm talking about all foods, not just animals.
Medicine is big business in this country, about 20% of the GDP. There are a lot of people out there who stand to lose a whole lot of money if people figure out how to stop being sick on their own. Small natural based farms selling unpasteurized, unhomoginized milk to people who want these things are under attack these days, literally at gunpoint by the FDA. What threat do these farms pose? I can go out and buy a pack of cigarettes and a six pack of beer, but I can't go out and buy unpasteurized milk for fear of arrest. What's wrong with that picture!
