Robert Paterson's Weblog: Food

May 21, 2013

The Secret of Health for Canada's First Nations - Return to the Old Ways of Eating - It's Working

Here is the first part of a 3 part series on how a community in Alert Bay have taken charge of their health by giving up the modern diet and returned to their ancestral ways - a high fat and high protein diet. Weight has dropped and so has Type 2 Diabetes.

I am so excited by this. Here is the science.

Posted at 10:41 AM in Aging, diet, Food | Permalink | Comments (0)

The FDA and BIg Pharma want us to be ill? - 3 issues this weekend suggest they do

This weekend I saw a number of news items that caused me to think more about the role of the corporatization of health. It is clear to me that there is a a group of people who don't want us to be healthy and who are invested in our being ill. If I am right what can we do?

In this post I make a case for the problem and I offer up a way of dealing with it.

Breast Cancer and the BRCA1 Gene

First of all, if you wish to test for the Breast Cancer Gene that affects abiut 10% of women but also drives a very high chance of getting Breast Cancer, you will have to have at least $4,000. For this test and the gene are subject to copyright! Link Here

"Unlike routine tests for diabetes or high cholesterol, however, the BRCA gene evaluation — performed by only one company in the United States, Myriad Genetics — is phenomenally expensive, with a “list price” close to $4,000 when a related genomic-rearrangement test is included in the analysis, which oncologists typically recommend."

If you go to 23andme you can get a whole range of gene tests for $99! Testing for genes is no longer expensive. But if you have the copyright and you have a gene and a test that is rooted in a killer problem, then you can charge what you want. What a business!

C Difficile and Fecal Transplants

C Difficile is a major cause of death now. It is caused by a failure of our gut health. Poor diet and the use of antibiotics can kill off the good bacteria leaving us exposed to the bad. THE way of curing this is very simple and works in less than 2 days. It costs almost nothing. It is called a "Fecal Transplant". And yes it is just that. Good poo from a person with a healthy gut is given to the sick person via an enema. Think Blood Transfusion.

There is next to no risk. The patient is often at death's door and time is critical. But now the FDA want to regulate this. Not by setting a standard that any practitioner can get ready to apply but by demanding a lengthy application for a licence to experiment on a human. More at this link here at Wired.

This can be a death sentence if there is no time. I have to ask why? I can only think that the FDA are against treatments that cannot be monetized by their supporters.

The FDA is always quick to step in when there is a non corporate idea.

Alzheimers and Vitamin B

Alzheimers could become the most expensive disease out there as many boomers get it. Of course the real costs are social. Sufferers demand such a high level of care. Big Pharma have been trying for ages to find THE drug and have failed. We are starting to understand though that Alzheimers is a lifestyle disease. It is avoidable. The pathway is diet again.

High levels of Vitamin B preserve brain power and size. More at this link

"Older people’s brains shrink about 0.5 percent a year from the age of 60, and faster in people with vitamin B12 deficiency, mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease, Smith said. If that pace can be significantly slowed before full-blown Alzheimer’s develops, it may delay the disease’s progression so that older people can enjoy better lives until they die from another cause.

“If you delay the onset by five years, you can halve the number of people dying from it,” says Jess Smith, a research communications officer at the Alzheimer’s Society, a U.K. charity."

So here is the Big Pharma issue. More research has to be done. But in today's research climate, unless there is a blockbuster pill that can be copyrighted, there is no money. Research into real health does not get funded.

“We need bigger studies and more evidence that looks at what homocysteine is doing and what is actually going on in the brain.”

A. David Smith agrees. He plans a study of B vitamins in 1,200 people over 70 with MCI and elevated homocysteine. He needs 6 million pounds ($9.1 million) to pay for it. Miller plans another large study and wants to see if folic acid in flour in the U.S. leads to different results there. Meanwhile, the lack of blockbuster-drug potential presents funding hurdles.

“The pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to make any money on this and the supplement companies aren’t going to have enough money to do it,” Miller said. “This would have to be government-funded. I’m just not sure the climate is right for it now.”

The good news is that the American Gut Health project has shown us that we can crowd fund this kind of research. I have sent my poo in already! I also participate in the D Action Study to study the impact of Vitamin D. I am going to apply to test my genes at 23andme. I want to check out my ancestry which is a major factor in health risk.

I think that my health is up to me. I do my own research. I help others do theirs. I take action. We can all do this can't we?

If gut health IS the core health issue. Then all of us can take control. If you wish to know more about this, Michael Pollan has written a wonderful introduction here. If you want to know even more, Jeff Leach has a short book for $2.99 that is the bible here.

Health is the arena where we as individuals can beat the system.

Posted at 10:30 AM in Aging, Corporatism, diet, Environment, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Food Systems, Health, Natural Organization, Personal Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 11, 2013

Young Mothers Today - What will your kids think of you in 10 years time?

This was a brutal piece of propaganda in WWI. It showed a father's children asking him the question that he had to give the right answer to.

So Mothers and Grannies and Dads of today. What will be your answer to your kids in 10 years time - When they know that you knew now about junk food but you said and did nothing?

Mcdonalds-free-coca-cola-glass-olympics-2012-shopping-branded-everyday-on-sales

Is it not a parent's job to protect?

I think that it is certain that in 10 years time, the link between chronic illness and the obesity and Type 2 Diabetes and junk food will be clear to all of us. There will be no debate anymore. It will be clear that this food is poison. It will be the same as the link between smoking and cancer. You would surely never advocate your kid smoking now would you? Would you go to the store and buy your kid cigarettes as a matter of course?

We all "Know" this now deep down. We know now that this kind of food is the worst thing we can give our kids.

It will be hard for our kids to forgive this if we just go along. "You pestered me into eating this." Everyone was doing it" "I was too tired to cook" "There was so much advertising, I fell for it" "The school said it was safe" "All your friends were eating it and I did not want you to be left out"

These excuses will be answered with "But, you knew Mummy!"

So, what's your stand?

Posted at 07:39 AM in Children, diet, Food, Food and Drink, Health | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 10, 2013

Maybe Wine O'Clock Not So Often - Giving Up Drinking - Help!

I love wine. But it does not love me anymore. It affects my sleep too much now and I am just not as resilient as I was in how I recover.

3 glasses is way too much. 2 is on the line and 1 seems to be okay. Maybe none would be best?

So here I am at the point where so many of us find ourselves. We have to give up habits that we have had all our lives and that we love. Every night for 50 years I have drunk wine. I drank a lot of it. This is my favourite habit.

You have your own habits too, don't you? It may be wine. It may be candy. It may be pop. It may be pizza. It may be smoking.

For me, this is the last frontier. I have given up all the other bad ones. What helped me with smoking and grains, is that for me, I feel the bad effects of those bad habits directly. My lungs hurt when I smoked. I got bloated with grains. In wine's case, I am no longer sleeping well. I wake up often and feel so dehydrated. So this feedback is a help.

What is really hard is when people have a habit that is bad for them that they do not feel directly. Worse, is when they feel good. You Cup Cake eaters know what I am saying! You beer fans know too.

But while I feel shitty after I drink, I feel wonderful as I do. I also enjoy the anticipation. Just thinking of my first glass of wine...! Wine Oclock has been getting earlier and earlier! So I am trying an old and successful strategy for me.

What I am doing is progessively cutting back. I am now at 1 glass a night. It has taken me a week to get here. The tough time is from 5 - 6pm. But I find that once I have had my 1 glass, I am not so frantic. I also find that delaying and then giving myself a small treat, helps me cope with the longing. The difference in how I sleep and feel is quite measurable too. So my body is sending me poistive feedback, when my mind is longing for another glass.

But my mind has a helper too. The money side is interesting and an incentive too. Wine was our largest expense - much more than food. I am keeping a tab. We will save at least $250 a month. That is the same as my phone and internet costs.

Money is a good incentive for the mind. A good friend did this when he gave up smoking. Paul had a piggy bank and put his $20 a day (2 packs) into this. It was enough for him to take his wife on a cruise at the end of year 1.

Lastly, I am going public for a good reason. Tough commitments made in public are easier to keep that the ones we make just to ourselves.

You can see how I am approaching this - what works for you? How have you found success in giving up your favourite bad habits?

Posted at 12:40 PM in Aging, diet, Food, Health | Permalink | Comments (9)

April 26, 2013

Rita McNeil died of an infection she caught in hospital - Why & what to do

It was announced yesterday that Rita McNeil died as a result of an infection she she acquired in hospital after surgery. She is not a rare case. (The Globe have just printed a retraction saying now that Rita McNeil did not die of a hospital sourced infection. This does not change the meat of the story that follows - that hopsitals and surgery are not safe)

Most of us think that surgery is safe and that so are hospitals. Neither is true. Especially today when hospitals have long given up being clean and have relied on drugs to keep infection at bay.

Here are the stats for Canadians.

"Hospital-acquired infections sicken 250,000 patients annually and kill between 8,000 and 12,000 Canadians. The bugs patients catch while in care are one of the leading causes of death in this country; they kill twice as many people as breast cancer."

Here is how it is for residents of California.

"One in 20 hospital patients get infections. In California, roughly 200,000 people get hospital infections annually, and 12,000 of them die, according to state Department of Public Health statistics. That makes such infections one of the state's leading causes of death, ahead of automobile accidents and Alzheimer’s disease."

Hospitals have become the most dangerous place you can be in today. Why is this?

First of all hopsitals are not clean and nor do the staff, including doctors, take cleanlines as seriously as their predecessors. Back in 1900, the ONLY defence against infection was how clean the hospital was and how carefully the staff followed the rules about their own person. The #1 work of nursing was keeping the total environment clean.

With the advent of anti biotics, this pressure to be clean has gone away. Cleaning is now performed by cleaning staff and is often seen as mopping and dusting. In 1900 everytime a patient left, the entire bed and all the screens would be cleaned. Everything would be sterilized.

The widespread use of antibiotics, especially with livestock, has reduced their efficacy and has produced resistant bugs. The high carb diet has and the use of anti biotics has also created a new environment inside us! Many people have very toxic gut flora that is just waiting to get out and play.

C Difficile, lives in our own gut! It kills 30,000 people a year in the US.

So what can we do?

Today, most of us think nothing about surgery. We think it is routine and safe. As you can see from the stats, it is not safe. Much of surgery today is not vital. It may be useful but not vital. A Doctor friend of mine has a rule for himself. If he would not have the surgery without an anesthetic, he would not have it. This was the choice until 1860. You had surgery as a last resort. So the first step would surely be to avoid surgery. But what if you have bad knees? Ask why as a first step. What else can you do before having surgery?

More than 500,000 joint replacements were performed in Canada last year. The demand for knee and hip replacement is growing at 15% per annum. I was on my way to join this group myself. But since I lost 35 ilbs, my knees are of course much better. The waiting room was full of overweight people.

Being over weight for decades put a terrible strain on our joints. Pick up a 50 pound bag of potatoes and walk up and down the stairs and you will see immediately what I am talking about.

You have to have surgery. How do you reduce your own risks?

A high grain diet messes up with your gut flora and set up C Difficile to become dominant in your system. Change your diet. Investigate the topic of gut flora. See how it is central to your health.

We bring C Difficle into hospital in our own bodies. We give it the optimal environment to thrive by how we eat and by how we use antibiotics and how the food industry uses them. You can eat a diet that offers you high gut health and that gives CD a rough time.

Routinely taking anti biotics for minor problems also ruins your gut flora. They kill off your good flora and they promote C Difficile. Avoid antibiotics unless you really have to use them. Use them sparingky and when you do, work to restore your gut flora with the right kind of diet and with pro biotics.

Buy different food. Most of antibiotics today are used by the factory farming system to keep their cows, pigs and chickens alive long enough to go to market. The FDA announced that 80% of all antibiotics used are used on livestock. You can make the shift to buying meat from producers that don't factory farm.

We are not helpless. We have many choices before us that can give us a strong immune system and a healthy body. I fear that we take for granted that we can do anything we want and then be fixed risk free, that we have given up taking charge of ourselves.

What will it take to give us the incentive to take charge? We wear seat belts in our cars. We worry about plane crashes. Most of us don't smoke now. But we think a pill or the knife will fix us risk free. Did you know that the #1 cause of death for Americans between the ages of 35 and 50 is from reactions to precription drugs?

My book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy, is an overview of how you can take control of your own health. At $2.99, it is surely a bargain?

Posted at 08:13 AM in Aging, diet, Food, Food Systems, Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 19, 2013

Why there is hope that you can make a living and have a good life today

What is the economy that will give us all hope - real hope that we can have a good life? I think that it is what I call the Networked Artisan. This is a person who makes things by their own hands but uses often the new tools to do this and the network to connect and sell to a community that can be next door or across the way.

It can be a micro farmer like Amy and Verena at Heart Beet Organics on PEI who operate a 2 acre farm using large greenhouses to produce veggies 10 months of the year.

As part of the pattern for all Networked Artisans, they sell direct to customers and create close personal relationships with them. Farmers markets grew by 17% last year. Food will be at the core of this new personal movement. Trust is at the heart of it.

In the UK there are web hubs springing up that make it easier and easier for customers to become part of this.

This is Big Barn. Check it out and see how amazing it is.

Are you a knitter? There are 3 million knitters in an online community called Ravelry. Here they compare projects, help each other and sell things to each other. It is a vast tribe of knitters.

Here is the link.

Underneath all of this is a new market. This is the market of the people who no longer trust the corporate offering. They know that they lose control and that they are often lied to. This is why food is a wedge. For as people learn how the processed diet is so bad for them AND how they have been misled as to its safety, they seek food that they can trust.

How big is this market?

2.5% of a population are the Innovators who jump in early. In America that is about 8 million people.

13.5% are the Early Adopters - that is about another 40 million.

So nearly 50 million people are ready for this kind of offering. That is a huge market for a small artisan. A market that the Big Corporates cannot reach and compete in any more. They will be excluded over time.

Meanwhile, all the technology that is taking away the jobs in that sector, is helping the New Artisan. You have rock bottom communication costs. You have top flight tools. Want an ecommerce tool - Woo Commerce. Want CRM - Paupress. Want to publish a book - pressbooks. Want make a prototype - 3D printers. Each year, the tools get better and cheaper.

And most importantly as we see in Ravelry and Big Barn, we see the online aggregators getting better. You have an appartment - Airbnb. You make fountain pens - Etsy.

The next wave are going to be local aggregators like this new one for Portland.

Soon every commnity will have such a site. It will get easier and easier to become part of this.

The future is here now. The empowered person in the empowering network of people who want trust and meaning back in their lives.

So what do you do?

My first book - You Don't Need a Job - explores this shift in detail. If you want to know more abouyt what is going on and how to become part of this, then please give it a whirl.

Which cultural world do you live in today - Which will be best for you?

Greece: The odyssey - 21st Century style - and ours too?

Horse meat scandal 'an opportunity in adversity' for artisan food firms

Self Publishing - The Heroic Age - Like Blogging 2000 - 2004

Posted at 10:25 AM in 3D Printing, Books, Capitalism 2.0, Community, Corporatism, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Freelancing, Great Disruption, Health, Human Workplace, Local Resiliency, Making a Living, Mindset, Natural Organization, Open Source, Open Space, Organizations and Culture, Paleo, Paradigms, Peak Oil, PEI, Resilient Communities, Social Economy, Workplace, You Don't Need a Job | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 16, 2013

Greece: The odyssey - 21st Century style - and ours too?

Greece: The odyssey - People & Power - Al Jazeera English.

What will life be like in the UK and the US and Canada for our young and old as more and more of us are shut out of the job and the official institutional world?

In Greece, where there is nothing left of the old but a shadow and NO confidence in government, there is a new hope. This excellent video shows how many city slickers are returning to food making in the country and on the Islands. All are asked if they would return to the city if things got better. All say firmly no.

Micro agriculture is surging.

They know now that this life can sustain them and offer them a freedom that they never had before.

I see small early signs of this movement too here in Canada. On PEI there are quite a few new tiny farms that are already viable. I see so much land here in the Eastern Townships with housing that is much cheaper than in town.

I offer more context as to why this is taking place and how you can get ready in my book, You Don't Need a Job

Posted at 01:39 PM in Books, diet, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Great Disruption, Health, You Don't Need a Job | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 15, 2013

Diet - we have done what they told us to do and look what happened!

So if the standard view of nutrition - eat less animal fat, eat healthy oils, drink low fat milk and eat more healthy grains - is right - why is this chart the way it is? Surely if we took the nutritionists' advice, we should all be thinner and more healthy now?

Is this because most of us disobeyed and ate more animal fat and red meat and less healthy grains?

Well we did almost stop eating lard. So what fats did take animal fat's place?

Now we see this - we have an answer. It is vegetable oils that have taken over. THIS is the fat that we eat today. We eat hardly any of the "bad" fat that they all go on about. But they still talk abut eating too much fat. So what fat are we eating? Its the fat they recommend!

And grains? What have we replaced all the calories we ate in animal fat with? With grains.

And what about all that red meat we should avoid?

And what about all the sugar we have been eating?

Note that sugar itself has been in decline. What has been on the rise is HFCS. This is in nearly all processed food. And what about soda?

All sodas are up. HFCS replaced sugar in about 1980. Also look at how "diet" soda has taken off. We thought that diet soda would help. And the result was? We got fatter.

And what about milk? Low fat is less fattening right?

So 65% of all milk drunk by kids is 2% or low fat. Is this helping?

So what is wrong with this picture?

We have done all that the nutritionists have asked us to do and we are fatter and more sick than ever.

Time for Nutritionists to think a bit harder. More here

It's hard for us all to give up these ideas. 35 years of the message being pounded into us has made the conventional wisdom the truth. If you are puzzled by why this has not worked, please give my book a shot. You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy offers you a broad manual for how to take charge of your health - I cover diet, your body and your social world. I wrote it for people who now question the whole message of health. Do you wonder about diet? Do you wonder about exercise? Do you even wonder why medicine has not made us well.

If you have these questions, I may offer some new answers.

Posted at 01:14 PM in Activity, Aging, Books, diet, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 13, 2013

Are you a boomer? What is your retirement looking like?

How are we boomers going to live out our long lives? I worry about this myself a lot. My concern is why I have sold our big house on PEI and moved to a small one here in Quebec near my kids. It is why we have set this house up to run on very low energy costs. It is why we bought in town so that we can walk everywhere if we have to.

I have a tiny pension and the government one too. I do have some savings but I wonder about their safety and again how long they will last.

The situation for most Americans - where I have the data - is dire.

75% of American nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in savings. Most have no pensions.

One of the biggest exposures that all older people have as they age in becoming chronically ill. What price illness? What price disability?

More than any factor - even energy costs - being chronically ill is the greatest threat that any boomer will have to how we live out these last decades.

This is why I took charge of my health. It is why I urge you to think about taking charge of yours too. For at our age, the forces of Natural Selection - that protect the young so that they can have kids - have abandoned us. We have no protection except what we do for ourselves. Here is more on this vital topic by the expert in aging, Professor Michael Rose.

You can do a lot to reduce your risks of becoming disabled by chronic illness. It is all about living your life as close as possible to our evolutionary fit. Eating what we are evolved to digest. Using our body as it needs to be used - that is being active, sleeping well and getting enough sun. And having a purpose and so a proper social place and connections.

These are all easier to find as we get older and have more time.

My guide for how to do this and why is here You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy.