So, Chef, according to you, for the millions of people who have taken lipitor it doesn’t work, and every doctor that prescribes that drug is wrong, lol
Yea right. I am sure it has some side effects, but f*ck so does everything nowadays….I would rather take that chance…..since I have been on lipitor my numbers have went back to normal.

Well then, at least this is not a subject I am passionate about…

‘I would rather take that chance’ to take a drug that will raise your mortality chances MORE than the condition you’re taking it for? Good call <rolls eyes>. In your words: ‘yea right’.

Remember, in medicine, the sheeple are always right. ‘Millions of people do it, so it must be the right thing to do.’ Are you f*cking kidding me? Seriously?

No, actually, the millions of people that take Lipitor are the same geniuses that eat ‘fat free food’ to the tune of 14+ BILLION dollars/year thinking that will make them lose ‘weight’ or is somehow ‘healthy’. Or the hundreds of millions of people that drink ‘Diet’ soda thinking they are some how mitigating body fat storage by doing so. Or the fools that spend BILLIONS of dollars to take meds to relieve the SYMPTOMS that manifest themselves as Type II Diabetes. Or the neandraphucks that think if they eat 60% of their diet from ‘complex’ carbs that somehow all hell wont break loose because their doctor, their government and every f*cking commercial for starchy shit food out there TOLD THEM that they need sh*tpiles of whole grain goodness and lots and lots of ‘complex’ carbs in their diet. F*cking madness.

No, these are the people that take their diet and health advice from doctors that are driven by research made by companies that make their money SELLING YOU DRUGS TO MASK THE SYMPTOMS OF DISEASE because there is not one dime to be made on disease PREVENTION. It is in their very best interest for you be and remain alive, but sick. Healthy people DON’T BUY LIPITOR. Snake oil salesmen, I kid you f*cking not.

Just like the sheep that take Alleve/Tylenol/Ibuprofin EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THEIR LIVES to mask a SYMPTOM and never, ever do ANYTHING about the CAUSE. How’s your liver, now? Swiss cheese? Spotted like a hyena’s ass?

And yes, as a matter of fact, those doctors ARE wrong in the assumption that the risks of statin use outweigh the benefits. The fact is that it DOES lower your cholesterol and the the fact is you DONT NEED ITS HELP to do so. YOU CAN DO THE SAME DAMN THING ON YOUR OWN WITHOUT SPENDING A SINGLE DOLLAR ON MEDS.

I have one word, that if you remove it from you diet your cholesterol numbers and glubule size will run so fast into the green zone your head will spin. By the way, this omission can also not only drop your triglycerides from in the 300s to below 75 in as little as 30 days, but removing some kind of millions-to-one chance of a genetic anomaly, it will CURE you of hyperinsulinemia, hypertension, hypertriglyceridemia and obesity. I said CURE, not mask the symptoms with some bullshit drug.

Sugar….

Don’t take my word for it. Get your blood work done, then Knock your carb intake down to below a hundred grams a day and NEVER EVER get it from starches except PWO. Wait 60 days, get your panels done again. Tell me what changed…. and no, there are no f*cking cheat days or ‘refeeds’ or any of that shit. You want to KNOW?! or guess? Once you KNOW you can tweak and experiment as you like, but don’t come back and say: “that shit was whacked, my numbers didn’t do what you said, I only cheated twice a week and changed this and this and this. You must be wrong.’ Do it right, do it so you KNOW. Then decide. What is a two month experiment in being healthy compared to a f*cking lifetime of being a slave to drug that exists only to make someone else a profit? You LIKE being taken for a ride? You like being f*cked for money? If that’s the case, I have some land under the Brooklyn Bridge you can get for real cheap.

Tell you what I have no f*cking time for, ever, not even a little. “Yeah, that might work, but I cant live without XXXXXXX every day (insert bullshit here: oatmeal, brown rice, honey, pasta, loads of fruit, quinoi, etc). Its really easy: eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, very little fruit, almost no starch and absolutely no sugar. Period. Get your meats from grass fed sources so your Omega3/6 ratio isn’t totally wacked and for the first thirty days, take one gram of fish oil for ever 10lbs of body-weight/day. The next thirty days, take .5g/10lbs BW. then get your numbers done. Be sure to ask for globule size on the cholesterol, too.

You have, what you perceive is ‘bad’ cholesterol? DO something active about curing the CAUSE. Lipitor/Statins just work on the symptom. When you stop taking them because your numbers are now ‘healthy” and keep eating the same shit and find yourself right back where you started: spending $$$ on their drug. Exactly what they want and exactly what they plan on. They’re in the business of making money, not educating YOU, after all.

Fire away…

“REPENT!! EAT PALEO OR MEET THY FATE!!” … anyone that has crossed my path in the recent past has caught the hot end of the fork on my hopes that we can all eat the way nature intended, in a way that makes sense both on a physiological and economic level,  the way we might just be able to sustain (locally, that is the point of all the following rant).

All fire and brimstone, flowing samite robes and big f*ckoff white beard asside, something has been nagging at me and I was unaware of how profoundly it was bothering me until I tried to type this post. The rattling bones in the closet for me on this all this paleo-vangelism I spew forth, day in and day out, is what actually happens if everyone listens? Not just clients, our athletes, my friends and loved ones, I would consider the vast majority of my life a success with that level of achievement. What fills me with angst is what happens if EVERYONE goes Paleo? What if all marketing sway falters and real, fundamentally natual feeding rises as the one true path to the powers of the earth and EVERYONE EVERYONE decides to stop eating grains?

Uh oh… turn away from the fan! What do we do if all of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Far East decide to eat by the sacred “Thirteen Words”: ‘Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar?’ This is not a ground breaking observation, but it’s new to me in it’s scope and leads me to some conclusions that I am not only uncomfortable with but that push my oft knee-jerk and Pollyanna neo-liberal expectations around like a skinny kid in a mosh pit.

No more nasty grain eaters, nothing but natural, Paleolithic eating, worldwide. We’d be in a world of serious trouble, oui? The 1.3 billion rice eaters in china, 1.1 billion rice/legume eaters in India and two billion stragglers that depend on starches for 60% to near 90% of their caloric intake would need how much broccoli to replace the caloric density of all that starch, exactly? What is the deficit in acreage caused by tossing all that grain in the bin and replacing it with grasslands? If we start to think of feeding the 4.5 billion people we’re instantly adding to the table on grass fed meats, do we actually have ANY primordial forest left after we clear cut for grasslands to make our Paleo ends meet?

An analogues conversation reared its ugly head the other day with a few words shared among friends about how we live in the US and our levels of conspicuous consumption. We want all the politically oppressed and downtrodden of the earth to have all the opportunities that we have… er… well… some of us do, far more profess such lofty ideals, a few absolutely oppose such a rabidly ‘worldly’ sentiments, but for the sake of argument, lets hit the middle road. We would certainly like to sell American made autos to every driving-age person in India and china, right? Wrong. Last figure thrown at me was 600liters of water per car to get it out of the factory. If we sell 750 million cars over the next few model years, we run out of water to drink, to put a really REALLY simplistic spin on the data. No mention of the resources needed other than water, a few of which might create global unrest just to get all those folks on the road: where do they park, petrol stations to feed, roads (paved and otherwise to build/maintain/rebuild. Fact is we just can’t afford to ‘LET THOSE PEOPLE HAVE WHAT WE HAVE’. Shudder, stagger, gasp! How could anyone say such a thing?!?

Switch that whole thought back to ‘eating smart’, as we would put it. My libertarian friend put it pretty plainly: ‘those who can afford it, will, those who can’t, wont.’ Am I ok with that? I am not ok with that when it comes to education, or health care, or ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’… all of which effect changes in my life from places far and wide as would a nationwide or global reduction in the illnesses brought about by ‘crap feeding’ and the financial burdens put upon the healthy by the dietarily diseased.

Ok, so I want to live in world that is un-poisoned by hundreds of thousands of tons of pesticides/fungicides/chemical fertilizers dumped on the land and washed out to sea. I want to have a vague sense that the generations to come will be healthier and there by financially more apt to survive the new challenges our food based economies will provide (food will be the ultimate resource when the worlds population hits 10 billion in our lifetime, no” if’s” about that). I want all this to be a way of life for all humans, ‘as we were meant to eat, as we were ‘designed’ by nature to thrive’… but how the hell do we pull this off?

If I asked this question in 1820 the answer would be very different, not even a problem, really. So what’s changed? Population. We can’t feed us all in the way we should be fed; we won’t be able to feed us all in the way we shouldn’t be fed. Not now, certainly not in 50 years. So what do we hope for? Another man-engineered solution? Genetically altered grains and harvesting of Antarctic Krill are the only two solutions I’ve seen any data on that come CLOSE to feeding the teeming masses we will have in line for food in the next generation…. But I want none of my ‘people’ to eat that way, I haring them every day to do everything  BUT eat that way. So it boils down to its ok for my ‘kind’ to eat ‘right’ but not ok for ‘them’ to do what we do. Factually, statistically, it’s really not ok.  Is this conversation getting darker than I had ever hoped possible? If we want to feed as intended, do we rely on nature shutting down the reservation book via a worldwide catastrophic pandemic? Does the naturalist eater survive only when the seas rise and a few hundreds of millions perish? Does eating Paleo really have to cause an understanding that it’s really ‘us and them’… well, it is very Paleolithic that the strong survive/thrive and ‘those that can’t, won’t’? Am I cool with that? Are you? Do we even have a choice?

I want you to part the clouds and hand me a solution that makes some sense. Please.

Look, you really don’t have to hide it, I know more than a few of you panic and do a quick check of the nearest exit when The Paleo Evangelist in me gains purchase on the soapbox. Having a conversation with me about food or dietary science can be a little taxing on the patience: I have issues with shutting up and even bigger issues with those that fill their bushels with “I cant’s”.

Does any of this sound familiar?
“I can’t have my coffee without milk. Nope. Can’t do it. The earth’s crust would crack and swallow countless Nuns and innocent orphans if I even attempted something so fundamentally impossible.”
or
”Not eat pasta? I can’t do that. Nope. No way. Every one of the earth’s economies would falter and implode if I stopped eating refined wheat products. ’
Don’t forget the classic
”I can’t be bothered, It’s too time consuming to eat/live that way. I MUST have fast food crap twice a day because I need to work nonstop every minute to pay for the added health care I require because of all the shit I eat. I have to go now so I can master how to txt msg my boss with one hand while driving, eat a KrispyKreme and snort diet Coke at the same time. ”
and the tried and true crowd pleaser
“It costs too much to eat all that natural stuff. I can barely make ends meet with the cost of my diabetes meds and the added expense of my kids larger clothes every two weeks and the seven shot lattes I need every time my insulin avalanche causes my energy to hit rock bottom.”

No faster way to get me into high gear than to toss up a fine dusting of “I can’ts”:

“No, actually, you CAN. You simply CHOOSE NOT TO. Fine by me, but… …speak plainly, m’kay? You CHOOSE not to… You CHOOSE to suffer from the litany of nasties we all know come from eating ‘engineered’ foods, you CHOOSE to live in the fetid swamp of auto-immune disorders and gastro-intestinal compromise that come from eating gluten and grains, you CHOOSE to drag your chronically inflamed arse down the path completely avoidable disease factors that will not only end your life prematurely but while you continue to support companies that KNOW you CHOOSE convenience over sanity and will continue to milk a profit out of your CHOSEN willing ignorance at the expense of your very existence.” (Run on sentences make me giddy, me thinks.)

Now, I have family and friends that flip me the figurative middle finger and say, ‘Look, that’s all peaches and coconut milk for you, FoodFreak, but I don’t WANT and knowingly CHOOSE NOT TO do what you do, come what may. So f*ck off, with love, but f*ck off.” … who can argue with that? I don’t agree but in the end it’s not my life. I would rather that my tax dollars not go to patching the holes they chewed in their own buckets, but that’s another article all together.

Finally, I shouldn’t be casting stones. I at a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and enough phenominally good ice cream to make Mike Moore do a double-take (a vacation choice I have made this past week)

The point is, you KNOW what needs to be done to get to that place you have wasted so much time hemming and hawing about… GET MOVING. NOW! I will spare no kind words for the “I can’ters” that would rather rationalize away their lives than take one solid, perhaps frightening and painful, step FORWARD.

Now, if you approach me and whisper, ‘But, Cheffy, I don’t know HOW…” then you have a partner, a brother, a mentor, a comrade in arms that will move a mountain with his bare hands just to get you to a point where you know how. My dream is that you will learn WHY as well as HOW, and care enough to pay that forward.

The fact that you arrived here means one of a few not entrirely disseperate things: either you misspelled the url you intended to visit or by some stroke of absolute cosmic serendipitous genius the ice from the bourbon you just tossed onto your keyboard spelled out ‘cheffit’. You might have had the questionable fortune to read one or more of my fairly frequent  bitch/moan/celebrate/exalt/rants on any of a dozen or so sites that encompass the crux of my emotional biscuit.

Regardless of the possibility that you don’t know how or why you’re here, you’re going to get served a savory array of truly random musings. Mostly loud mouthed soap box evangelist evulsions on food science  and human movement sauced with fine natural reduction of loose politics, looser spiritualism and the more than occasional philosophical side dish. All this spent bandwidth is meant to define my boundries so I can be corrected by those wiser, focused by those more true and called to task by those more valiant.