Snake Oil

Note:  This post was originally written, and then not published, in 2019.  It's actually not finished, and frankly I hesitated to publish it, but I'm putting it up now, as its more or less written.

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Charles DeFate, who wasn't an Indian, holding a bottle of Montana Indian Remedies, which weren't Montana Indian remedies.  There's so much wrong in this photo, it's hard to state where they actually begin. Insulting to Indians.  Insulting to Intelligence.  And Insultling to Science. But Americans still buy off on crap like this.

Why do Americans continually fall for such non scientific unadulterated baloney?

Not a day goes buy where I don't get a pile of spam emails that advertise complete crap that's being sold as miracle cures or ways for lazy people to gain health or loose weight.  It's simply amazing.  But then, by the same token, turn on your television during the day time (which I don't really recommend) and you'll be assaulted by the same type of material.

A person would think that, in 2019, with science having advanced so much even since the last mid century, that people would run fleeing from science into complete bogosity, but they do. And the number one way they seem to is in the bogus fad. To given just a few examples, here's a selection of spam email stuff or topics that I receive almost every day:

CBD Oil

"Essential Oils" 

"Fit Freeze Ice Cream" 

"Keto Bread" 

this is truly amazing...
“51-Year-Old Mom Shocks the World When She Loses 42 Lbs Eating ICE CREAM Every Single Day!” 

Who Else Wants To Plug A Wire Into The Ground And Produce Electricity (It's Real)

It's truly reached the complete bullshit level.

Let's start with something that should be obvious.  You, if you are reading this, are a human being.  When exactly our species (homo sapien sapien) got up and running isn't completely clear, but it's a long darned time ago and I have no doubt that archaic members of our species, the Cro Magnon's, were around earlier than we suppose and also, frankly, a lot like more of us than some would like to suppose.

Moreover, we're evolved to fit a pretty wide eco niche, but an eco niche nonetheless.  Almost all of our modern physical and for that matter mental problems are due to our having left what we were evolved to do and that we're occupying a false eco niche that's unhealthy for anyone or anything.

Your DNA expects you, in other words, to be out there (truly out there) doing the things you were evolved to do, an awful lot of which has to do with acquiring the food you are supposed to eat the way you were supposed to eat it.  Mess with that much and you end up overweight and overwrought.

And there isn't much doubt we're both of those things.

In other words, living in a pathetic plastic environment will lead you, pretty soon, to think that somebody like Billie Eilish actually has a point on something and actually is interesting.  She doesn't, and she isn't. She's just a messed up 17 year old.

Don't do that.

That's a mild example, of course. There are a lot more than that.  People who lament our current era in comparison to the past can legitimately state that our society is about as messed up and confused psychologically and morally as it has been at any point since the 1st Century, with it getting more messed up and confused by the day.

Okay, taking that down a bit further, you were evolved to live in a certian environment and eat certain things.  Do that as closely as you can, and you'll be a long ways towards a healthy existance, and a more pleasant one that you might otherwise lead.

Which takes us to  some things that should be obvious.

Ignoring the above, and science, and proceeding with baloney cures and diets isn't going to do anything for you.

Let's start with the fad diet.

At anyone time there's a fad diet going on.  Some of them are more enduring than others, and some actually have some science behind them. A lot don't.

I"m constantly meeting people who are on "clenses" and other pseudiscientific food based pursuits.

Your liver is busy "detoxing" things all the time.  The concepth that if you do this or that you are detoxing your body in some scientific beneficial ways is crap.  That doesn't mean that you should continue to injest stuff that makes your liver work overtime.  You aren't a polar bear, for instance, that has a heavy duty liver going for it.  So you shouldn't be boozing it up every day by any means.

But drinking lime infused cucumber water, or whatever, doesn't do anyting other than put your kidneys to work.  It isn't going to detox a darn thing.  If you feel it is, it's probably because you were on a diet of Ho-Hos and Bud Lite to start with.  Not eating crap and drinking 50 gallons of beer a day is why you might feel better.

Likewise, almost every fad diet really has some serious questions surrounding them.

The fad diet de jure is the Keto Diet, or more properly the Ketogenic Diet.

If you don't know something about Keto, it probably means that you are working at the Starbucks in Jonchon, North Korea and don't get around much, as everyone else in the entire globe has heard of it and, right now, about 75% of the people in the Western world are on it or claiming to be on it.  Basically, the diet is a high fat, portein based, low carbohydrate diet that came about as a treatment for epileptic children who were otherwise hard to treat.  As the diete is low in carbohydrates the body is forced to consume fats rather than the carbohydrates that hte body would normally turn into glucose.  If there aren't very many carbohydrates hanging around the liver is forced into convering fats itno fatty acids and ketone bodies.

That's all well and good, I suppose, for the treatment of epilepsy, but what does it have to do with losing weight?  Well, at least at first, people do.

There are scientific reasons for that, but let's state a couple of obvious oddities first.  The first is that all you are really doing with this, in some ways, is unnaturally replicating what you would pick up with a natural killetarian diet anyhow.

Now, I'll be frank, I'm not in the "red meat will kill you dead" camp by any means.  Indeed, for a vareity of reasons we're heavy on meat consumption in this house anyhow.  I have another thread lingering in the  hopper on this topic.  But I'm also not in the eschew bread and never ever look at it again camp. 

Indeed, to really be on the Keto diet you have to eschew all carbohydrates which includes bread.  Oddly I've heard some people on the diet claim that you can drink alcohol, but I can't see hwo that could possibly be true.  Still, having looked into it extremely briefly apparently you can drink hard alochol and some wines.  It must be beer you can't, maybe.  I'm not gong to bother studying it.

Anyhow, the problem I have with this thesis is that first of all it forces your body into a state that it's not naturally in, which strkes me as a bad idea, and secondly, bread has been a human staple for so long we have no long how long that is.

We know now that human beings have been harvesting wild grains, pounding it into flour, and baking it millenia.  People took up making bread before they took up farming.  Entire cultures lived on mostly bread (not a very good idea either) for centuries.  If bread was going to badly blimp up everyone all of Europe would have looked like hot air balloons for all the Middle Ages.

Now, obviously that's absurd because people were engaged in heavy labor all the time and food was short so they burned off what htey were eating and didn't eat that much in hte first palce so. . .

hmmm. . . wait a minute. . . .

Exactly.

I only know one person really well who had adopted the keto diet to loose weight, and really needed to loose weight. Taht person lost a lot at first, and the it stopped.

No suprise there.

Your body was evolved for feast and famine in the first place, and that's what's going on there.  At some point the DNA, I suspect, overrides everything else and decides to ignore what's going on and the progress ends.  Too many calories in. . . not enough calories out.

And while I'm definately not in the "red meat is going to kill you" camp, it's difficult for me to beleive that what I see people on the keto diet eating is really a great idea. Three full meals of nothing but fatty meat?  Can that really be good for you? 

It might not be harmful if your job burns off a zillion calories a day, but otherwise, there's some reason to question that.  Indeed, simply by observation it's long been noted that American Southerners die younger than those elsewhere, and that the high fat diet has something to do with that.

So in the end, again, eating a more natural diet, including raising it yourself and harvesting it, including the ribeyes, is probably a better way to go.

Before I trail off from this, however, I will note that I do think that the Intermittant Fasting diet, assuming a person is healthy enough for it, probably is backed up by science as eveolutionary biology woudl completely support it.  In a state of nature, we rarely got full square meals a day. 

I'm not going to go into depath on intermittent fasting, but I'll note that I've seen and experienced that working simpply by acciddent.  For whatever reason, at some points in my own life I haven't gotten three square meals a day and when that was the case, I really lost weight.*  And others I've known who do that, most who are simply indifferent to foods, experience the same thing on occasion.

That's a rather obvious calorie in, calorie out, type of things, we'd note.

So there's something to that, and its not a weird offense to nature.  Combine that with a natural diet as noted, and you probably are doing as well as you can.

And what would that natural diet be?  Well Michael Pollan claims its to "eat real food, mostly vegetables".  I don't eat that way, but if I had my ruthers I'd eat all food I raised or caught.  That would create a problem with my long suffering spouse so we don't quite make that, but I would if I could.  So, using the killetarian phrase I've heard elsewhere and used here, I'd go with stuff I hunted for, fished for, and raised, except when I couldn't.  That  seems the scientifically sound diet to me.

Well, what about supplements?

M'eh.

Now, there are people who need very legitmately dietary supplements.  It seems to me that when I was a kid every kid on earth took vitamins of some kind and ours did when they were young.  I get that.  But for some reason a lot of adults feel they need supplements that are of a highly dubious nature.  And right now dubosity is in full flower with "essential oils" and "CBD Oil".

Let's start with "essential oils".

There aren't any.  None whatsoever.

Oh, that's not true, some oils really are essential.  In our current economy, petroleum oil is, for example, essential.  Mineral oil is needed for machinery.

If you aren't a car or a machine, however, there's no such thing as essential oils.

The entire oncept is amazingly dubious, but people buy off on it, even educated people, for some reason.  I think the reason is a deep seated yearning for the natural combined iwth a modern "I never get outdoors" lifestyle.  In their heart of hearts the exponents of "essential oils", who are almsot all women, imagine themselves living out a scense such as depicted in the numerous Soviet Realism paintings in which buxom Russian lasses work in agriculture in bare feet, those bare feet sopping up gallons of essential oils

Soviet realist paining of farm women soaking up essential wheat and barely oil through their feet. . . or something like that.

Well, that's bunk.

If you want your body to have the essential anything it's supposed to have, eat what you are supposed to eat and avoid what you aren't supposed to eat.  If it comes from a processing plant that involves something other than squashing it, you probably ought not to eat it.

That's about it.

Among the oils that are now subject to a craze is "CBD Oil".

CBD Oil is, of course, part of the overall Everything Marijuana Craze that the US is now fully engaged in, a fad being fueled in part because of its illegal (under Federal law) status and the accompanying fact that its real effects can't accordingly be studied.  In spite of hte fact that the scientific data on nearly everything hemp related is completely lacking, the public is now being sold on an endless series of wild claims for the product that aren't backed up by anything other htan marketing . . .just like tobacco once was.

*I don't really get three full squares now.  I'm not a big person and I don't eat lunch everyday.  Oddly enough, if I do, it's simply as a vehicle to get a mid day break from working or because I happen to be home and there's food.  I never eat a large noon meal as a rule, and on the rare occasions I do, it wipes me out for the rest of the day.  I don't eat much of a breakfast either and if I do, it's usually breakfast  cereal with no sugar, which is about the only time I consume milk as I don't really like milk much.