I
am an M.D., not a nutritionist, but I have been advising patients for
many years on diet. Sally Fallon's message: Animal fats and cholesterol
are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal
growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from
disease and optimum energy levels.
I agree with this, and have long
been a proponent of avoiding sugar and not worrying too much about fats.
The Mediterranean diet is probably the healthiest on the planet. and
incorporates olive oil, fats, etc.
In Defense of Food
An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. The following is an excerpt,
and I advise this book for people interested in nutrition and diet
health.
"Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat
it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because most of what we’re
consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car,
in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating.
Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no
longer the products of nature but of food science. The result is what
Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about
nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become."
Different
societies have different diets, and it works for them - all except
America, a country of "edible food substances". Obesity, and even
children's obesity, is more common here than in other countries.
So
what about a vegetarian diet, which some people say lacks the necessary
nutrition animal fats provide. Well, this works great in the countries
that follow it, like India. And we must remember the reason for this
diet, for some people, is spiritual - the feeling is that when we eat
animals, we acquire the vibrations of the animal - fear when it is
killed and the characteristics of animals, and this makes us more
aggressive and less peaceful.
As a proponent of meditation, when I
was meditating frequently I was a vegetarian, and I felt that this did
help. But when I started playing frequent tennis, I seem to need to eat
meat, so I did.
If one watches what a child does, and eats
accordingly, it will work. A child might want candy and sugar, but after
a while he will ask for vegetables - or meat - or milk - something
healthy.
So is Sally Fallon correct - of course. But it all depends where one is on the path. Listen to your body - and eat accordingly.
