ESKIMOS, FAT AND FOOD SUPERSTITIONS

As most readers here will be aware, the extraordinary degree of misinformation about food and health that we read in the MSM has caused me to do a daily blog on the latest health scares and enthusiasms. It is extraordinarily sad how much energy many people put into going along with the nonsense they read. The longevity studies all tend towards showing that NOTHING in the way of diet or lifestyle change will lengthen your life but many people don't want to believe that so they follow any pied piper who comes along with a promise to lead them to the promised land of longer life. And the media simply pander to that.

One of the most persistent themes that you read in health advice these days is that animal fat is bad for you. A diet rich in animal fat is said to doom you to heart disease, cancer and diabetes. I was rather persuaded of that myself at one stage as there seemed to be some epidemiological evidence for it. Now that I am a health blogger, however, I do a bit more background reading in these things than I used to do and something I found while doing such reading was sufficiently amusing for me to put it up here rather than on my more specialized blog.

The eskimos are of course renowned for eating large amounts of meat and fat. They once ate little else (vegetables don't grow well in the Arctic!) and to this day that remains the mainstay of their diet. And the eskimos have always had a shorter life expectancy than inhabitants of less dangerous climates. But is that shorter life expectancy due to their diet? There is much to say that it is not. They have extraordinarily high rates of suicide, smoking and other behavioural pathologies, for instance.

The interesting thing about Eskimos, however, is WHAT they die of. With their huge intake of animal fats they should be dropping like flies of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, according to the conventional wisdom. But that is precisely what they do NOT die of. They have always had very LOW rates of those diseases. No doubt there is much more that could be said about the matter but when the facts on the ground are the OPPOSITE of what the conventional wisdom would predict, should it not make us just a little skeptical about the conventional wisdom?

I did not keep any links from my reading in the above matters but it should be no trouble to google up lots on the subject.

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ELSEWHERE

Heaven on earth: "Joshua Muravchik was a 'red-diaper' baby. He was born into a family that had close connections with radical Marxism and socialism for several generations. Perhaps it is this historical connection that brought about his book "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism". Socialism can be discussed on many levels. It can be seen as a philosophy or discussed as an economic system, or as Mises more rightly noted the negation of an economic system. Socialists tend to prefer to discuss socialism as an abstract future paradise. But Muravchik, in this book,discusses it as a historical series of events. Instead of engaging socialism on the basis of what it promises to do he discusses where it came from, where it was tried and what were the results. In the cold light of reality socialism loses much of the glamour that attracts so many intellectuals to it. Many people forget that socialism predates Marxism. Plymouth Plantation in the US was run on socialist principles when it was founded and the colony starved. When this experiment was replaced with private property and a market system the colony thrived and could feed itself -- an event still celebrated in the American holiday of Thanksgiving though few seem to know the actual reasons for it."

Partitioning: The way out of Iraq: "The Kurds and their militias have their own quasi country in which the Iraqi government does not govern and the Iraqi flag does not fly. Many of the Shi'ite areas are governed by militias, which have also infiltrated the Iraqi police and army. In Sunni areas, guerrillas effectively control many towns. U.S. forces have been unable to disarm any of these armies. The civil war will intensify if these regions are not allowed to govern themselves."

Blood on whose hands? "Capital punishment proponents often feel reflexively tentative and apologetic in discussing the issue. After all, abolitionists have sanctimoniously characterized proponents as "mean-spirited" and "hard-hearted" in defending the practice... It is abolitionists, however, not proponents, who must shoulder the heavy burden of persuasion... It is they whose policies would spill innocent blood....consider the number of murders committed by convicted killers who have not been executed. The sad truth is that unexecuted murderers often continue to kill, whether on Death Row while awaiting execution or amongst the general prison population. Their victims include prison guards, ministers, staff and other prisoners. Additionally, unexecuted murderers occasionally escape from prison to commit additional murderers. Imprisonment, even life imprisonment, is simply insufficient to protect innocent life from these murderers. Abolitionists cannot justify the innocent blood spilled by convicted murderers who were luckier in escaping execution than their victims. Third, many forget that a moratorium on executions actually existed between the years 1967 and 1976. During that period, approximately twice as many murders occurred as during the preceding ten-year period."

Remember this! "This week marks the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's bold stand against trading missile defense for an arms treaty. Recalling the lessons of the Reykjavik is key to winning the global war on terror. At least one house of Congress may be taken over by a Democratic leadership committed to cutting and running from Iraq. And in Iran, a terror regime is trying to pull the wool over the world's eyes about its nuclear program. What better time to recall the late, great President's nerve?... History proved the critics all wrong-including the scores of scientists who knew so much better than this simpleton who somehow landed in the White House. For all the times Reagan was derided as a mere movie star, his `doing a John Wayne' in the Iceland summit was exactly what the cause of freedom demanded... This President simply refused to let us down. The result was that in several years Gorbachev was gone. After seven decades of genocide and expansionism, the Soviet Union found itself overwhelmed by a free world choosing to defend itself. Gennady Gerasimov, senior Soviet foreign ministry spokesman in the 1980s, said at the time of Reagan's death that `Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail.' Today, U.S. interceptor missiles that can stop incoming nuclear warheads in space-Teddy Kennedy's `physical and technological impossibility' -are an operational reality."

A Muslim doctor gets it: "Americans must be wary of political leaders who accept the propaganda explanations. To win the war on terror, America's leaders must recognize the powerful role of the Islamic religious principle of jihad, Islam's belief that it must conquer the world, which derives from the above hadith. Belief in jihad is what causes so many Muslims worldwide to cheer terrorist acts such as 9/11, European subway bombings, and Hezbollah and Hamas attacks against Israel. Allowing jihadist teaching to continue is like allowing cancer cells to survive in a human body. The human immune system demonstrates that nurturing normal cells and respecting their variance sustains life. A healthy body nourishes cell diversity. A healthy body politic, similarly, must value respect for different beliefs. At the same time, if an immune system shows any tolerance whatsoever for cancer cells, the latter will terminate that body's life. The immune system of a body politic must have a similar zero tolerance for beliefs that incite violence against its citizens."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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