The Huffington Post, that source of minimal knowledge that we are all unaccountably familiar with, published an article on improving your diet to avoid diabetes this week.  At last the World Health Organisation have come right out and said change your diet to reduce diabetes.  I am sure the Boards of Nutrition in the UK and USA will be nonplussed.

Why?  In the UK, in particular, ours voted against dietary advice for people with diabetes.  Several of the board members also have interests in Kraft, Mars, Coca Cola, so naturally they voted against giving people nutritional advice along with their diagnosis of diabetes, as outlined in Hannah Sutter’s ‘Big Fat Lies‘, a thin but very comprehensive volume written by a lawyer shortly after Gary Taubes excellent study ‘The Diet Delusion‘ came out.

Both of these volumes conclude that a low carb diet is the answer, which is part of the truth and certainly better than poisoning yourself with sugar, chemical additives and white flour, but long term, I can tell you that it is not the complete and fully comprehensive answer.

Having spent years on a variety of eating plans, and having listened to an awful lot of people talk about what they eat, I can tell you that after you have got rid of the ‘Pure, white and deadly‘ sugar and flour, you should focus on getting ten, not five, portions of vegetables and fruit per day.  You will see a magnificent improvement in your health, and you certainly will not be hungry. Once you have achieved that, you will have little room left for anything else, but I can tell you that low carb in itself contains too much fat, and too much of the wrong kind of protein, which we have been eating far too much of as far back as the seventies. It is also simply too heavy as you get older, so once you hit tipping point on your long term low carb efforts, up the vegetables considerably.

Even a cursory look at the world of raw food will show you the benefits of a raw food diet, but again, it has its problems long term.  It is also a steep learning curve for most people, and some people just cannot completely manage it.  From a personal perspective, I would say as a rough and ready way of actually having a life – concentrate on getting your ten a day before you even start investigating further as this will get your body working properly faster than anything else.

OK evangelizing over.  Can you see why an increasing proportion of the population no longer trust authority figures such as governments to give advice?  Advice is never impartial.  When your doctor or some aggressive type challenges your choices, they are not necessarily talking from a position of knowledge.  The only person that can deal with your day to day health is yourself, and woe betide you if you prioritize anything above your health. (such as caring for someone else.) If someone is sabotaging your health, get them out of your life as fast as you can, because I am (almost) living proof that compromise is not an option.

Why were we given incorrect advice on nutrition for several decades?  Money. John Yudkin, a comparatively quiet man who advised against sugar and simple carbohydrates, was not nearly as well backed or funded as Ancel Keys, a noisy American with a lot of research funding to preserve.  The result was that millions of people were given incorrect information for decades, the information distributed by the medical profession, who do not receive a great deal of nutritional training.  They merely deliver the information.

If I had listened to my doctor instead of Wolfe 6 years ago, I am entirely confident that I would have had my first serious heart attack, and/or had treatment for depression by now.  My last few doctors have tested my blood, told me that I eat too much, and that they are very surprised that I am so fit.  The fact I have strong symptoms of an impending heart attack or stroke, and have nearly collapsed several times is apparently of no consequence at all. The fact that I am sole carer for a very dependent person does not even ensure that I matter enough to save.  I am past caring what they say, since I no longer trust them with my health as a result.

I may not be in perfect shape right now, but I am still here, with the benefit of a great deal of knowledge, if not motivation. (it is very difficult to care how long you live when the future looks a bit lonely and grim.)

So much for that. The point of today’s post is – whatever your health issue – do some reading for yourself.  I cannot tell you how depressing it is repeatedly telling people that they need to eat more vegetables and having them decline. As a research interviewer, I was able to tell what people were eating the minute they opened the door, such are the effects of a high vegetable diet.  The most important things for your overall health long term? Gym? Protein shakes? Slimming Classes? Expensive healthcare?

No, the most important things, from my insight gained from interviewing hundreds of people:

eat as many vegetables as you can
then eat some fruit and a small amount of fish
get a dog
if anything stops you doing the above, change things and just do it.

Had to get out of Glasgow fast this morning, as the family are cranking up to cause us problems again.  Went to see a house I was interested in, and it is extremely solid, although I am not too sure if the lack of mobile signal and evidently pisspoor broadband (I am half a mile away right now, but in the same loose grouping of buildings) might put me off.

So, I am in a Taste of Scotland Restaurant with rooms.  I do not normally waste any money on such places as the difference between a 40 GBP B and B and a 140 GBP Hotel tends to be minimal.  The linen matches and they give you home made biscuits.  If I wanted home made biscuits, I would not need to pay a hundred pounds for them.

This is the view from my window, taken by someone else.  This is what Scotland charges for.  People from other places think this is magnificent.  On the native scale, this view is probably around six out of ten, but foreigners, including English people, seem to think it is out of this world.

It is near to Campbeltown, Kintyre, which I checked out before I returned to this hotel.  Basically, the song, ‘Campbeltown Loch, I wish you were whisky’ is a reference to the level of boredom induced by living there.  It is very nice, very friendly but not remotely stimulating.  Stimulation can be overrated when the skin on your face has just indicated that you cannot do any more caring right now.

In the last two years, it has become apparent that my body is saying no to much more of the twenty-four-hour-stuck-in-the-house-under-stress thing.  I now get an unpleasant rash all over my face when I am stressed for a few weeks.  The only thing that clears it up, it seems, is getting right away and not thinking about anything much.  I am not happy about this, but I am not sure how to go about elbowing myself any more room. I miss the years when I was able to work and swim every day.  I miss how much better I looked when I was eating properly.  I miss not caring about not seeing people who do not have dementia, because I had time and space to think about something else.

I announced some time ago, that there was no reason why I should be expected to parent my mother’s children.  They do not seem to have understood what this actually means.  This means I will not be held responsible for my eldest sister’s war of nerves with my mother, which she seems to take for granted, and I will not be tolerating the drunk lying and not turning up.  What on earth is so difficult about saying you are too drunk to drive on a Sunday afternoon?  If my sister’s drinking is so important to her that I have to be a twenty four hour servant and die childless and lonely with no pension, then I am not sure why she isn’t proud of it.  It must be a good thing to do, surely?

Anyway I have now delegated responsibility for the lunatic’s tortured love for her mother to the drunk.  I wish them the best of luck with that new relationship. I spent today driving and laughing about Tantric Super Vegetable Guru, which has led me to believe that my Wolfe fetish is all about stress relief.  I have handed my emotional self to somebody entirely disinterested as he is the best person to look after something nobody wants.  I think this is an interesting and complex idea.  I doubt that every exchange we ever had would fill even a paragraph of one of my blogs, and yet I evidently decided that yes, he was the man for the job. It was clearly the right decision, since in terms of self expression, I have positively bloomed ever since.

The same cannot be said for my health, sadly.  The first year after he shut me down the first time, I tried and tried not to confuse my intense pain with loss of belief in myself and what I was eating.  I was OK for a while, but the weight loss had stopped anyway because of the stress induced by the family. Eventually it came down to the social exclusion issue.  Nobody I know is raw, and it was not really possible or practical to go out with normal eaters in a country of salad dodgers.  My social life improved markedly when I finally ate something ‘normal.’ My health, however, has ground down to a markedly low level currently.

Usually, when I rest, I look completely different in under a week.  It is difficult to determine why caring is so tiring.  Emotional exhaustion is a strange thing.  Because it is a slow and yet time killing activity, you do not understand that sticks falling on the floor, hearing aids going missing, phone calls she refuses to make, are gradually eroding your sense of self to the point that you are physically drained.  It gets to the point where you forget what walking at a normal speed feels like.  I looked at a log that I wanted to walk to today, and guessed that I could not make it that far, because I was judging it on what she could do, not me.  Hence your health is quite seriously affected when you take on permanent rehab of someone else.

Thankfully, I am very mean with money, and did not spend everything I was supposed to in the earlier stages of her illness, otherwise the financial issues would be starting to press by now.

One less thing to worry about.

Vaxxed – caveats

I have no children, since my life has not followed a path providing the necessary capital. The only person I would have seriously considered children with does not want to know me, even if he did I am not in a position to drop everything and get knocked up.
I do not have any interest in your choices in regard to vaccination, so there is no point in sending vitriolic bullshit in regard to what I will be saying about this topic.
I am not particularly anti-science, although I do have a positive attitude to alternative health as a result of poor response from doctors, who I have lost a measure of respect for over the years of dealing with my own health and the health of others.
Doctors at first response level do a lot of administration and are presented with guidelines, which many are inclined to follow slavishly, just like everybody else.

Today, in a decision making reversal lasting all of 20 or so hours, Robert de Niro announced that he would not be showing Vaxxed at the Tribeca film festival.  That is the decision he has come to, and I am sure there will be continuous heated debate as to what has caused his sudden reversal in attitude. I am not particularly interested in engaging in that either.

Here is what my experience of the last few years has taught me.

The public are superstitious.  They appear to believe that the word science conveys some sort of magic in terms of rightness and wrongness.  One website I visited prior to writing this announced that

THERE IS NO DEBATE IN SCIENCE

This itself, is an unscientific and incorrect premise.

I hate to be the one pointing this out, but science is much like statistics.  Science requires funding.  The payer of the piper calls the tune in terms of the parts of the research released, which reflects the bill payer.  To view examples of this, one must simply bring to mind the number of conflicting pieces of advice about diet that are published every day, on a variety of websites.  As I said many years ago, you could easily argue that cream cakes were superfood if you listed the nutritional properties.

Andrew Wakefield’s life has been ruined by his attempts to alert people to a topic he clearly believes in.  He is still engaged in legal wrangling with the BMJ, and he is still trying to tell people that MMR is not a good vaccine.  I am not sure what people imagine his motives for doing this would be, other than clearing a name which has already been destroyed.  Would he not be better to quietly get on with an alternative life and save himself the time and money?  Calling him a con-man merely makes the opposition’s case even weaker, since they are clearly threatened by his information.

I, for one, will be watching Vaxxed, which has received some welcome publicity from this move by Tribeca.  I want to hear what Andrew Wakefield has to say.  They also trashed his name here in the UK.  If you had any knowledge of how medical hierarchies and medical sales work, you would watch it too. If you had any understanding of how whistleblowers are dismissed, you would also want to hear what he has to say.

I am not sure why the public would be so ready to believe that voodoo magic science, paid for by governments and organisations which are themselves unduly influenced by sharp suits and corporate money,  would prove that a highly trained individual would blacken his own name to release information to them. From the trailer, I see a man showing me statistical analysis.  Having worked with statistics, I can tell you that you can argue about what they show for several years, or you can decide what line you wish to take in an argument. It is all about the presentation.

This is yet another example of what you have to look forward to as an unfree citizen of a corporate state.  The education system, social networks, media and the advertising that you buy into every day will tell you what and how to think.  You will become lazy, like these people who think science is magic, and you will be only too happy to accept a scapegoat rather than think for yourself.

It is really up to you what you choose to believe, but the fact that so many people are so vicious about their superstitions in regard to information which is bought, lobbied and paid for, tells me that the world has a bleak future.  Thank goodness I have no children to worry about.  The minute any doubt whatsoever was expressed about MMR, they should have returned to separate vaccines until the doubt was cleared up.  Instead they destroyed one man, who is still trying to show you why he doubted in the first place.

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