Do I hear the sound of revolutionary hoofbeats pounding the sod? Saddle up, friends! Let’s overthrow the reign of the idiots!

LOL! I love your attitude about it.

–Jimmy

*rage*

And saturated fat? Who cares?? The ONE drawback with finding saturated fats in grain-based foods is that you’ve got the perfect recipe for making triglycerides: the glucose or fructose source for making the glycerol core, and the lipids to attach around the glycerol core–voilà. Other than that? Some sources, such as Mary Enig (you need to read her if you haven’t), say that we ought to be getting as much as fifty percent of our fat intake as saturated! So I would WELCOME more sources of that fat. Some forms of saturated fat are even antimicrobial in nature, and they are extremely stable, so they’re far more useful in cooking and fewer people get sick from them going rancid.

I have a tub of LARD in my fridge now, mmkay? Bring that saturated fat ON. If you eat the tub of lard (over time, of course), you don’t *become* the tub of lard.

I agree with the commenter who said the USDA is all about preserving the grain and soy industries. On top of that, the FDA is all about protecting the GMO and drug industries. In the nineties I read all kinds of stuff in Mother Jones and the environmentalist media about the people President Clinton was appointing to the FDA. We’re talking former Monsanto execs. Not coincidentally, the FDA decided we didn’t really need to label GMO foods. Funny, I thought we were supposed to let the free market decide? How is the market “free” if the consumers are chained in ignorance? I have a right to know what is in my food. Period. End of story.

Getting back to grain, and speaking of Mary Enig, who is on the Weston A. Price Foundation–it’s interesting that the government pushes that on us as the ideal food, but then doesn’t tell us how to prepare it properly. Did you know there was a pellagra epidemic in Europe not long after maize was introduced? Central and South American natives knew how to prepare corn so that they got maximum nutritional benefit from it–they would soak it in lime (as in, the stuff you fertilize your garden with) and then go on to prepare tortillas and that kind of thing with it. The limewater broke the seed coats down chemically, releasing niacin. The Europeans who came to the New World didn’t see what was so important about that, so the peasantry in Europe was baking and cooking with raw, untreated corn. Being poor and not having many other food sources of B vitamins, they quickly succumbed. Pellagra is not a pleasant deficiency disease to have.

In the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s they ran into a similar problem. A lot of people were left destitute after the Civil War and what do poor people typically exist on? Grain. And we’re talking about a lot of people who had to cook their own food for the first time in a long time, and they didn’t know what to do with corn. They suffered a lot. Those who were fortunate enough to have a cow, or who came from folks who never owned a lot of slaves, did better because they knew how to prepare hominy or because the tryptophan in milk converts to niacin. But for those who weren’t so lucky, let’s put it this way, there’s a reason the South is the butt of jokes about inbreeding. It’s because a lot of the traits we associate with people of “poor breeding” actually come from malnutrition. And pellagra manifests as sallowness, weakness, and mental illness before it kills you. And anyone who’s survived malnutrition to have children is going to pass on nutritional deficiencies to their children too, so the kids grow up mentally deficient and physically diminished. It was ugly. I don’t think the South ever fully recovered.

B12 deficiency results in violent behavior as one of the early symptoms and they’re telling people to pig out on grain and cut their meat consumption.

Government standards are making this country disabled and insane. It makes me pretty nuts too.

Dubious, I could not agree more. We need to get back to eating NATURAL food and GMO products are NOT natural at all. Well stated.

–Jimmy

Tis true, tis true…

–Jimmy