Restrictions Apply

      When the idea of a very low-carb diet is bruited about to family, friends, and even enemies, a common refrain is that it is too "restrictive".  Spoiler alert.  It is restrictive, very much so.  However, this restriction is not mere accident or cussedness on part of the proponent, it is in fact the entire point of the exercise.

     When someone is drying out from an alcoholic binge, they do not hear claims that they are pursuing a course of unhealthy restriction of their alcohol intake.  Nor do smoking quitters hear blather about their balefully low and restrictive tobacco consumption.   In the case of low-carbers, they are battling carbohydrate toxicity, and yes that's a thing, a monstrously huge thing, so restricting all that carbage is the most efficacious way to overcome it.  Additionally, at the same time the low-carber is battling carbohydrate addiction.  Which is also very much a real thing and is easily proven by most people's entrenched reluctance to quit their beloved "comfort" foods. Unfortunately, in this context the proper synonyms for comfort are, or should be, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, numerous autoimmune conditions, kidney disease, and fatty liver.

     "Autoimmune" covers a lot of sickly ground.  Conditions and diseases that once affected tiny percentages of the population are now rampant and increasing in lockstep with our miserable diets.  Walk down the aisles of any big box or grocery store in the U.S. and witness the prevalence of quasi-mobile human parade balloons.  A week ago, at a Wally World, I saw a husband, wife, and teenaged daughter who collectively had to weigh in excess of a thousand pounds.  This trio is, literally, a burden on society.  And as time goes on they will be a tremendous burden and drain on the medical system, along with a hundred million of their hefty compatriots.  Even now that system is becoming ever more ramshackle and swamped by a populous that is bound and determined to eat themselves to an early death.  A populous, and a medical establishment, that is sneeringly derisive of the idea of "restriction".

       

Span of Life

      I have become convinced that an ultra-low-carb lifestyle will result in a significant increase in lifespan for those who stick with it.  And it will be an increased lifespan almost by default.  By that I mean if you are not beset by any of the panorama of chronic conditions abetted by the catastrophically awful Standard American Diet, then of course you are going to live longer.  Almost all of those chronic autoimmune conditions are ultimately deadly.  They kill millions of people each year, which drags down the average lifespan of the population.  Which, after decades of increasing average lifespans, are once again on the decline. And that decline includes the many surgical and chemical interventions that were responsible for the rise in the first place.  It is more than fair to say that we are in the middle of an epidemic of chronic metabolic malfunctions.

     Without those medical interventions the average lifespan would not be merely in decline, but in free fall.  What is most certainly true is that the population's level of suffering has steadily increased despite all the drugs and surgeries thrown at the problem.  For instance.  Deaths from heart disease have, until recently, been on the decline, but the incidence of heart disease has increased substantially.  The same can be said for almost all other autoimmune conditions, which include diabetes, psoriasis, arthritis, Chrone's disease, IBS, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer's to name but a few.  All of which, and I do mean all, have a direct causal relationship with our excremental carbage saturated lifestyles.  And they all produce physical, and mental, suffering that would test the patience of Saint Bernadette.

     I would not be the least bit surprised to see in the coming years that ultra-low-carb eaters' lifespans increase substantially.  Baring the usual caveat of being hit by a bus, or having some other kind of fatal accident, lifespans could easily exceed a century or more.  There is a term of art in the low-carb community known as "healthspan".  Which means the amount of time you are metabolically and mentally healthy.  Again by default, if you have an increased health span you will ipso facto have an increased lifespan.  The biggest problem with this scenario will be the psychic pain induced by watching your age cohort dropping like flies far sooner than necessary because of their wretched dietary haabits.  

     No one wants to live to, or past, a hundred as a cognitively challenged, immobile, and pharmaceutically dependent lump of senile nursing home protoplasm.  Conversely, everyone would like to live past a hundred if they are metabolically and mentally healthy, active, and not in a nursing home drooling into their Ensure and swallowing twenty pills a day.  Such is now within our grasp. 

     

    

    

     

Correlation Is Not You Know What.

       As everyone knows, or bloody well should know, in the scientific world correlation is not causation.  However, in the fields of nutrition and chronic disease the conflation of corr. with cause is rampant.  Rampant and deadly.  Current nutritional dogma, and dogma it certainly is, demonizes meat consumption and glorifies plant consumption.   You've heard of the big lie?  This is one of the biggest lies around.  The lie is based on what is called "epidemiology".  Epidemiology works well for the control and tracking of infectious diseases, but when confronted with the explosive "epidemic" of chronic conditions we are currently experiencing, its usefulness is questionable, to put it mildly.

     When doing a nutrition "study", the standard investigative tool is the food frequency questionnaire.  The "data" derived from said questionnaires is entirely dependent on the subject's memory of how much and how frequently they eat the foodstuffs enumerated in the questions.  Can you accurately determine how much of anything you ate over the last year?  Didn't think so.  Can you accurately remember what you ate over that span of time?  And, even if you've written down everything you've eaten, are you honest about it?  Or are your answers meant to play to someone's idea of a "healthy diet"?

     Then there are the "confounders".  Which are circumstances which should be taken into account, but  are often discounted, or outright ignored in pursuit of what a researcher seeks to prove.  A typical such circumstance in nutritional epidemiological studies is baying to the public that "meat increases your risk of heart disease."  Only the putative level attested to by respondents is considered, and not what else a heavy meat eater normally consumes.  Such as fries, bread, cookies, ice cream, and the vast panorama of carbage processed food.  Meat is essentially guilty until proven innocent, which it almost never is.  Only if one is eating very few carbs, or none, can a reasonably statistical inference be drawn about the "dangers" of eating meat.

      Such a study has yet to be done, although there are increased efforts to do so in light of the near miraculous ability of ultra low-carb diets to ameliorate, or reverse, a wide variety of chronic conditions.  As they say, "More research is needed."  Which frequently only means "We need more funding.", but is literally true in the case of low-carb nutritional research.