Posts Tagged: Nutrition

Nutrition in Three Words

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By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer  Happy Monday, everyone! Only eighteen days left ’til the solstice and the end of the Mayan Calendar. Whooo-daddy! Who knows what’s gonna happen? Haha. Anyway, I’ve been rabbit riding across the web, spreading glad tidings and 180D cheer,  and I bring you a gift today: a lovely little piece from our inestimable Mateo, entitled Nutrition in Three Words. It’s published over at  Exterminating Angel Press Magazine; this Winter 2012 issue is themed: Words, Words, Words. No peeking- can anyone guess which three words nutrition is all about? Thanks to Tod Davies for the feature.

Dangers and Myths of Low Carb Diet Plans

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The world is drowning in low carb diet plans.  Low carb fever has swept the nation, and perhaps the world.  If anything, with #1 documentary films like Tom Naughton’s Fat Head and groundbreaking books like Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories, the low carb diet has done nothing but gain steam since the days of Atkins. This, in part, is a beautiful thing.  The low carb diet masters of the universe have indoctrinated the public with a totally different portrait of what causes obesity, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many other conditions.  Thank God!  That saturated fat causes heart disease thing was starting to get really old, especially after the whole saturated fat and cholesterol theory (the lipid hypothesis) was disproven decades ago. But is the low carb diet the… Read more »

Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods

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We now have the amazing technology to splice foreign genetic material into plants and animals to create more well-endowed species.  Isn’t it great!  It’s the best thing since Jesus turned all of that bread and fish and stuff into wine or whatever. Or is it? Genetically engineered foods are pretty messed up.  Strictly from a moral, or ethical, or even historical perspective – things tend to go pretty haywire when humans try to play God.  In the case of GMO foods, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Like any new invention with virtually limitless profit incentives, the world is awash in information touting GMO foods to be a creation with nothing but altruistic and “advancement” motives.  Nothing could be farther from the truth. The dangers of genetically modified foods is an… Read more »

Dangers and Side Effects of High Fructose Corn Syrup

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It’s made from corn silly!  It’s good for you! Has anybody seen those ads?  The ones put out by the Corn Refiners Association?  I have. Not only are there numerous dangers of high-fructose corn syrup, there’s actually dangers of high-fructose corn syrup commercials – I laughed so hard when I saw those I nearly fell out of my chair and bonked my head. The high-fructose corn syrup dangers all stem from the fact that it is completely devoid of nutrients, extremely sweet and addictive, and loaded with an isolated, refined form of fructose that is very difficult for the human body to properly process. Astute researcher Gary Taubes calls fructose “the most lipogenic carbohydrate,” meaning that it has a tendency to get converted to fat more than any other type… Read more »

Dangers and Side Effects of Aspartame Products

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Aspartame isn’t exactly tame as its name suggests.  Aspartame dangers and aspartame side effects are reported on a continual basis to the FDA.  In fact, aspartame is responsible for more health complaints than any other commonly-used food additive in the United States. Aspartame products include, first and foremost, diet sodas.  Yeah, you know, the stuff that Michael J. Fox used to do commercials for while claiming to drink a half dozen a day.  He made some big bucks for doing those ads no doubt, but all the money in the world, and a truckload of stem cells, are unlikely to eradicate his Parkinson’s disease. What does Parkinson’s disease have to do with Aspartame?  Funny you should ask.  Russell Blaylock, M.D., reports that aspartame, as well as chemically-similar flavor enhancer MSG,… Read more »

Vegetable Oils

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The most commonly-used type of oils in the United States and soon to be most nations, are none other than corn and soy oils and other plant-derived oils.  These are the most common oils in the diet because these crops represent the monstrosity that is American agribusiness.  They are grown cheaply, the government pays subsidies for excess, and the excess has given the food industry a strong impetus to create as much foodlike stuff out of it as possible.  It’s a good example of how Capitalism turns to Crapitalism. Once upon a time there were these things called butter, beef tallow, and lard.  These were the types of fats used in every household.  Other fats came from naturally-fatty foods that could be easily pressed without complex chemistry, such as olives,… Read more »

Why Milk is Bad for You

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Milk does a body good right?  Well, real milk can, but what’s sold at the supermarket is worlds apart from what can be considered nutritious food.180 Degree Health wants you to understand, when it comes to modern pasteurized, homogenized,store-bought garbage, why milk is bad for you. We are conditioned to believe that a diet without milk is dangerously low in vitamins and minerals.  If we don’t get enough calcium, our bones will just turn to dust and we’ll collapse. Milk is a very nutritious food, but there are cons of milk often not highlighted.Many people have a very poor tolerance for it, particularly those who don’t produce much lactase – the digestive enzyme that digests milk sugar, or lactose.  Even more importantly, milk sold at the grocery store, because it… Read more »

Fructose

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Fructose, a type of sugar, has historically been granted a “get out of jail free” card due to its presence in fruit.  It’s the same sugar that’s in fruit, and fruit is healthy, so fructose must be healthy goes the story.  But is there such as thing as too much?  Without a doubt, yes.  Also, when it’s in the form of a refined sugar does it behave the same as the tiny amount of fructose found in natural fruit? I’m sure you’ve guessed, as I dedicated a whole category solely to it, that the answer is “hell no!” One of the biggest dietary departures if not the biggest dietary departure from traditional human diets is the massive increase in the consumption of fructose.  Whether one could ever consume too much… Read more »

About High-Fiber Diets. Do they help with IBS or Constipation?

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Fiber.  Gotta get that fiber.  Even the cartoon South Park is inundated with fiber propaganda, as one of the characters, Mr. Hanky, a talking turd overflowing with Christmas cheer, touts the benefits of “getting a lot of fiber” in your diet. Fiber is lauded as the holy substance that can help cause weight loss, relieve constipation, prevent colorectal disorders, stave off colon cancer, lower cholesterol levels, and just about everything else shy of reupholstering your furniture for you.  But fiber won’t help you fight disease any more than it will help the appearance of your old furniture. Most of the benefits attributed to fiber are the result of research done by a man named Denis Burkitt (of Burkitt’s lymphoma fame).  Burkitt, like many doctors, researchers, travelers, scholars, and anthropologists in… Read more »

Dietary Cholesterol

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Strangely, many people feel that foods that contain cholesterol: such as butter, red meat, and eggs, will contribute to high cholesterol levels if consumed.  It’s strange, because even in the infancy of the “beware of high cholesterol levels” craze, no one ever accused dietary cholesterol of raising blood cholesterol levels. No one accused dietary cholesterol of this because dietary cholesterol does not do this.  Even Ancel Keys, virtually the sole creator of the anti-cholesterol era, knew quite well that dietary cholesterol did not influence blood cholesterol levels. The message that cholesterol was bad, but that you could eat all the cholesterol you wanted; however, was obviously too confusing.  Still to this day, even the most astute medical professionals still believe, like the general public, that there is good reason to… Read more »

Dietary Fat

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Dietary fat is generally the most feared of all food substances.  From the beginning of time until the middle of the 20th century; however, fat was the most highly-regarded and honored of all food substances.  Why the 180? In the middle of the 20th century, up and coming scientist Ancel Keys developed a theory that fat caused heart disease, which was, and still is, the leading cause of death in modern nations despite its extreme rarity before the 1920’s.  He found plenty of data to support his theory, most notably that Japan and a handful of other countries that consumed less fat than America had lower rates of heart disease.  He only picked seven countries that backed up his theory, but that was evidently enough for Keys to pronounce, “case… Read more »