Category Archives: Technology and Society

Saturated Fat

No, American Heart Association, butter, steak, and coconut oil won’t kill you.

I consider this reckless disregard for the truth. Any lawyers out there who can tell me why they wouldn’t be subject to massive class action?

Related: Moving on from “Let’s Move”:

In 2010, Michelle Obama kicked off the “Let’s Move” campaign to help combat childhood obesity. This well-intentioned effort drew national attention to a serious topic that needed to be addressed.

Sadly, I knew the campaign was doomed to fail; because failure is easy to spot when you wage war against the wrong enemy.

Exercise and healthy eating were central themes of her effort. I am the first to admit that exercise is vital to maintaining overall health, considering that I made my living as a personal trainer. But as I explain to all of my clients, exercise is a lousy way to lose weight, in spite of its many benefits.

Every week, I interview doctors, scientists, and researchers who are on the front lines of combating obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and other metabolic syndrome conditions.

The fact is our diet is almost exclusively to blame for these issues. For years, we have been focusing on the wrong enemy, as healthcare professionals, encouraged by the federal government, told us that fat in our diet was the root cause of these diseases. The so-called ‘experts’, aided by activist front groups, demonized saturated fat, and advised us to eat ‘heart-healthy’ grains and lean proteins. It turns out that this was exactly the wrong strategy.

Yes. And yet they continue to recommend it, and commit massive physical child abuse in Michelle’s school-lunch program.

Evoloterra

Get together with friends and celebrate the 48th anniversary tonight. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM Pacific to discuss it.

[Update a while later]

Here’s what I wrote on the 40th anniversary. It still holds up pretty well, I think.

[Update early afternoon]

There’s a new version of the ceremony on line now.

[Late-afternoon update]

Seeing comments out there on the Interwebs that Nixon canceled Apollo. No, it happened in 1967, by Congress. Before he was elected. For those of you unfamiliar with the post-Apollo history under Nixon, John Logsdon’s latest book is a good read. Funded by Bill Anders, it’s probably the definitive history at this point. He’s currently working on the space history of the Reagan administration, which I wrote about at the time of Reagan’s passing.

[Friday-morning update]

The Space Show we did last night has been archived.

Light Blogging

We woke up this morning to no Internet. The lights on the modem looked fine, but there was no ethernet connection to either my computer or to the mesh router (which was magenta, indicating no Internet). I talked to Frontier, and they agreed that it sounded like a dead LAN port bank. Unfortunately, they won’t get me a new one until tomorrow or Thursday. I’m typing this from my laptop tethered to my phone, but I don’t want to use a lot of bandwidth, so I can’t really scour the web for material as I usually do. The other issue is that I don’t seem to be able to get a wireless connector going on my Fedora desktop, either an old Linksys PCI card or a new Tp-Link USB device; the system doesn’t seem to recognize either one. So I’m stuck on the laptop if I want any Internet at all.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Got the new modem early afternoon, and we’re back on the air.