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- Ben Fuchs
Eating is terrible! It'll ultimately kill us!
Oh I know... you have to eat or you'll starve to death, and perhaps that may be true. But that doesn't dismiss the fact that how we eat today and how our bodies have evolved over the course of millions of years are as different as John Q. Public is from a caveman. And as far as going paleo, that’s a bunch of marketing gibberish. There’s little available in our modern food supply that our paleo ancestors would recognize. Does anyone think our prehistoric forbearers ate coconut flour or bacon?
Yes, it’s true that prehistoric man, was omnivorous and would eat anything, even the dreaded carbs. A recent University of Chicago study suggests that starchy tubers were an important component of the paleolithic diet and critical for speeding up proto-human brain development. But whatever they ate, it was always wild and fresh. And there was a feast or famine aspect for much of our history.
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- Ben Fuchs
Lipid is chemistry talk for fat, phobia means fear and for decades American consumers have been deluged with lipo-phobic propaganda and low-fat food fad hype. Beginning in the 1950’s, when a University of Minnesota professor named Ancel Keys came up with his “Lipid Hypothesis”, which blamed heart disease on fatty foods, and continuing for over 60 years, dietary fats have been vilified by scientists, academics and medical professionals as causes of obesity, heart attacks and cancer among numerous other health issues.
But, despite its insalubrious and unsavory reputation, fat, on the body and in the diet too, is actually an important part of good health. Fat functions include transportation of nutrients and essential fatty acids thorough the blood, the production of hormones and the production of cells. Fat is a shock absorber. It traps water helping the body and the skin maintain hydration and acts as a type of insulation helping the body regulate body temperature. Healthy digestion depends on substances like bile and prostaglandins, both fat derived. Fat on our frames is actually a type of gland tissue that produces and secrets numerous fatty hormones. And most fundamentally, fat is our body’s primary source for stored energy.
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- Ben Fuchs
In the book “God is a Verb”, Rabbi David Cooper makes the argument that the divine supernatural existence called “God”, is best thought of not as a thing but rather as a process. The rabbi suggests that rather than thinking about what is referred to as God as being some kind of “person” who lives in clouds, it might be more accurate to contemplate it as a movement or action, flowing through everything in the cosmos, from the smallest smallest subatomic quanta to the largest galaxies.
This dynamic of naming processes, making nouns out of verbs, in essence “thing-ifying” actions is called “nominalization” and it is nowhere more evident (and reaches a particularly egregious zenith) in the realm of medicine and medicinal diagnostics.
According to Wikipedia, medical diagnosis is the “…process of determining which disease…explains a person’s symptoms and signs.” Unfortunately, that is absolutely NOT what a medical diagnosis is. Rather, medical diagnosis, the major component of the “doctor’s office visit” is nothing more than a description of a patient’s symptoms and complaints recited back to the patient in Latin. This repetition of symptomology in the language of Ancient Rome is then proclaimed a “disease” and a protocol ensues that attempts to somehow “treat” the process being described. Not cure, but “treat” because, as Dr. Andrew Weil reminds us in his book “Spontaneous Healing” when it comes to degenerative diseases, no cures are possible. And of course, he is correct. No cure is possible because no one can “cure” a description!
