"Healthy Eating" Makes Us Sick
November 7, 2013
(Groves, left, says liver is far more nutritious than vegetables.) Sugar in fruits, and carbs from bread, pasta, rice & potatoes are making us fat and sick, says nutritionist Barry Groves.
Our stomach is identical to a big cat, a carnivore; but they want us to eat like a rabbit.
In his book, Trick or Treat: How Healthy Eating is Making Us Ill, Groves says meat and dairy don't make us fat. They are good for us.
Are they lying about diet too? . Does the low-fat, carb-heavy "healthy diet" create illnesses that feed the trillion dollar health care and pharmaceutical industries?
From the Daily Telegraph
Oct. 20, 2008
For breakfast, Barry Groves had an extra large egg and a 3oz slice of liver, fried in lard. He washed it down with a cup of cocoa made with double cream.
At lunch, Barry, 72, who lives near Oxford with his wife Monica, 70, will enjoy pork chops, with the fat left on, plus a few green vegetables in butter.
Finally, the couple will have a light supper consisting of cheese with a home-grown apple or pear, topped with cream, followed by more cocoa.
Despite following this shockingly high-fat diet for more than 40 years, Barry now weighs 6lb less than he did on his wedding day in 1957 when he tipped the scales at 11st 7lb. (161 pounds)
He and Monica break every single diet diktat that has been trumpeted as "healthy eating". And yet, here they are, trim, fit and full of beans, albeit metaphorical ones. How on earth do they do it? And where are the rest of us - eating piles of fruit and veg, and steering clear of cholesterol-laden butter - going wrong?
After all, we've never been subject to so much education on good dietary practice, and yet prey to so many illnesses, ranging from diabetes to heart disease.
"Most people are eating in a way that is unnatural to us as a species," says Barry, who holds a doctorate in nutritional science and has just written a book called Trick and Treat: How Healthy Eating Is Making Us Ill. "We're a carnivorous species - our gut is identical to that of a big cat. Yet we're encouraged to eat foods that have been padded out with modified starch and vegetable oils, and complex carbohydrates such as bread, pasta and rice, which have all been labelled healthy - but not the fatty meat that our body actually recognizes."
This is why we don't know when to stop eating: "Try to eat too much fat - cheese, say - and your body will quickly tell you when it has had enough. But when you eat processed, 'low fat' food, your body never gets the message it has had enough, so doesn't tell the mind it is full."
Many people are familiar with the idea of a high-fat, low-carb diet, such as that practiced by the Groves - it is not dissimilar from the Atkins diet. The couple took it up initially in 1962, after piling on the pounds as newlyweds.
But Barry believes the way he eats is healthy, too. His cholesterol measures 8.2mmol (millimols per litre of blood) - current British Heart Foundation (BHF) advice is that people who are at high risk of, or who already have, heart and circulatory disease should aim for a total cholesterol level of less than 4mmol/l.
He says, however, it would be far more risky to have a cholesterol level that measures less than 7mmol/l than to have it high. Research has linked low cholesterol levels to cancer and depression. His blood pressure is irrefutably impressive at 115/62 mmHg (millimetres of mercury.) The BHF's target for the general population is to have a blood pressure below 140/85.
But hasn't it been proved that too much saturated fat is bad for the heart?
"The whole premise that eating saturated fat would lead to heart disease is based on two old reports," says Barry. "The first, in 1950, showed that if rabbits were fed a cholesterol-rich diet, it would fur up their arteries. Yet, rabbits are only designed to eat plant life, which has no cholesterol. The clogged arteries were caused by feeding them an unnatural diet. It could have been an allergic response.
"The second study was in 1953 when an American called Ansel Keyes, who charted six countries' consumption of fat, compared with their rates of heart disease and found a perfect curve upwards when he started with Japan at the bottom (low consumption) and America at the top (high consumption). Of course, Keyes had access to data from 22 countries, but simply ignored that from 16 countries which didn't suit his hypothesis." Barry points out that this study is often used now to demonstrate how not to do research.
Even the long-term investigation into heart disease, the Framingham project started in 1948 by the American National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and now in its 60th year, has found no evidence of a link between diet and heart disease, according to Barry.
"Professor Sylvan Lee Weinberg, a past president of the American College of Cardiology, said in 2003 that the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet could no longer be defended.
"So, when you think how long we've been given these healthy eating guidelines and how in that time the rate of disease has gone up not down, you have to ask if our modern ailments have been caused by the very diet that was designed to stop them."
What about those other tenets of a healthy life - five portions of fruit and veg, wholegrain cereals, soya milk, low-fat yogurts?
"Vegetables are not the problem," says Barry, "but there's no biological or chemical reason to eat them. Liver, for example, has all the minerals and vitamins we need. But fruit? The natural sugar it contains - fructose - is much more dangerous than simple glucose or table sugar. It has been linked to the rise in obesity."And he refuses to touch wheat. "It collects bacteria and dirt as it grows, and is impossible to clean. Then stored in silos, it is a haven for mice and rats, so it gets sprayed with insecticides. Put a wheat flower under the microscope and you'll see traces of rat faeces."
Soy milk is made with unfermented soya beans - "highly dangerous," claims Barry. As for yogurts made with skimmed milk, they "lack conjugated linoleic acid, which prevents cancer".
So how do we eat more healthily? "Eat purer foods, and ones that are more natural to us as a species. Cut down on bread and eat more fish, eggs, butter - any animal protein, anything that used to move around, that wasn't stuck in the ground. Liver, kidneys, snails - even insects will do."
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O - Thanks for the tip !
Latest! Paul A informs me that Barry Groves died April 29, 2013 at the age of 77.
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First Comment from Cornelius Bulik (Biochemist):
Since ancient times, well educated people have known that we are what we eat. We dig our grave with a fork and the knife.
Eating highly processed foods, particularly rich in sugars and adulterated fats is dramatically unhealthy. Eating regularly high amounts of sugar, grains, mainly wheat, trans fats and polyunsaturated fats we find in canola, soy, corn, sunflower oils, and margarine, make us fat and sick.
Barry Groves gives us a better way to be healthy, but not the best. Sure, his diet avoids the main culprits mentioned above; nevertheless, the animal food we find nowadays on the market, with some rare exceptions, are not the best food for us and our kids. They are overcharged with pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, and do not contain enough fat soluble vitamins, such as vitamins D, A, and mainly K2, and very little vitamin E.
This is because our animals no longer go outside and live under the sunshine, and they do not graze on good green grass. Green grass used to be the main fodder for beef, cows, sheep, goats, geese, ducks, chicken and turkey, and very often pigs were also let out to find the best food for them. All this today is gone, with the concept of industrial animal production, where animals are confined in a very small space, and fed GMO grains and soy, industrial flours, antibiotics and synthetic hormones.
Thus, dairy, eggs, and animal fats no longer contain substantial amounts of these fat soluble vitamins, vital for the health of animals, and of course, for our health also. Thus, we should eat free range animal products that graze on green grass, together with veggies grown in organic soil. We are better when we combine fresh and high quality foods from both realms, animal and vegetable, and avoid processed foods.
Refutation from "Deadeye Dick" :
I don't know where to start with this one. I suppose we could start with Groves' preposterous claim that our digestive system is that of a large cat. Here's a quick comparison:
Lion: Large canine teeth for tearing meat, saliva does not contain digestive enzymes, stomach pH of <1 (extremely acidic), liver produces 10X the uric acid of a man's, 7 meters of digestive organs. Lions produce vitamin C internally.
Man: Small teeth suitable for eating fruits, tender greens and cooked foods, saliva contains amylase and lysozyme (enzymes for digesting starch and inhibiting bacterial growth), stomach pH of 4- 5, liver produces 1/10th the uric acid of a lion, 9 meters of digestive organs (at much smaller body length/mass compared to a lion). Humans do not produce vitamin C, which can only be obtained from fresh fruit and vegetables.
Digestively speaking, a human is basically a great ape, with one difference - the ability to digest higher amounts of starch (roots, tubers, grains, etc.). A chimp eats about 95% of its calories from fruit, with some leafy greens and negligible amounts of insects and small animals.
A number of anthropologists have shown that the driver of human evolution was not meat eating, but storing and cooking starchy foods. For one thing, this is confirmed by the fact that large "undeveloped" populations like rural Chinese or South Americans are almost entirely vegetarian, with diets based on a starch like rice or potatoes. Even native Americans, held up as carnivores par excellence, subsisted on corn, beans, squash and grains like goosefoot until they were driven off agricultural lands and onto the inhospitable western plains where buffalo meat became a matter of survival.
Can humans eat meat and dairy? Apparently so, and probably some groups have higher biological tolerance for it, since most Africans and Asians are lactose-intolerant whereas most northern Europeans are not.
Should humans eat meat and dairy? Hell no! They will increase their risks for heart disease, diabetes, cancer and basically every chronic disease. Look at the book "The China Study" which used a massive epidemiological study of rural China to show that starch- based diets correlated with almost no incidence of these chronic problems. The only "perfect" food with all essential vitamins, minerals and amino acids (save vitamin C and B12, which is made by soil bacteria) is a potato.
For every Dr. Grove living into old age, there will be people dropping dead of strokes, colon cancer, heart attacks and similar issues at age 40. Many of the prominent low-carb advocates like Sally Fallon, Gary Taubes and Loren Cordain appear to be well on their way to the same fate.
If your readers want to hear a debate on the issue with leading experts, here's one (albeit a bit old) featuring Dr. Atkins (high fat, obese and dead of stroke) and Dr. McDougall (low fat, thin and healthy).
If you want a debunking of the "science" behind high fat diets, here's an extensive series of videos.
Henrique said (November 9, 2013):
Common sense, very good article. Funny to notice the "refutations" are the typical enragée bullshit you get from airhead activists and militants, dupes and hysterics, who want to push for a "perfect" lifestyle for all humans on Earth.
Their moralism linked with the fantastic opinion of fantastic "leading experts" ( B. Russel wrote "we shall train them to worship the word 'expert'" ) is disgusting, effeminate and out-of-line. I've always noticed that these vegetarians are very close, in mindset and attitude, to Socialists, Feminists, Environmentalists, Gayzists and all the other factions trying to FORCE us all into some ideal of perfection THEY ( and the fantastic people from Academia they worship sheepishly and who gives them "legitimacy" ) have devised.
There seems to be a subtle "fat-shaming" movement going on, the establishment is trying to interfere more and more, not only economically, in the most private habits of individuals, always using this tactic of the browbeating hysterics, moralism attached to science. Law, money and science legitimize each other, and form the whole of the system - in the control of the Elite, they ARE the enemy.