(Or make your own, like in the olden days?)

To your health!

I’ll check out the book you recommend!

“The Liberation Diet: Setting America Free from the Bondage of Health Mis-information,”
by Kevin Brown and Annette Presley, which is a pretty easy read, among other great reads like the “Good Calories, Bad Calories” mentioned above.

I invite you to distinguish oils in terms of their processing. Old-fashioned fats / oils have been processed very little–I mean butter, olive oil, coconut oil, cream, even farm-made lard, and beef tallow. The modern processed oils are primarily rancid–soybean oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil–these are all modern fabrications requiring high temperatures and other high-stress processes. I find the old-fashioned oils are very satisfying and quieting and healing to my system, rather than heedlessly increasing my desire for them. Coconut macaroon, anyone?

After all my readings about diet, I think the culprit in this “hyper-palatability” story are modern foods, not old-fashioned fats, natural sugars (like maple syrup or raw honey), or unrefined sea salt. It is the refining that strips the foods of their delicate nutrients and adds funky things like MSG (a neurotoxin) and HFCS. It is the refining that brings us foods that fail to nourish us.

We need to distinguish between old-fashioned foods and modern foods. If we don’t, we are liable to get our science all screwed up!!

There are cultures / cuisines which include very high levels of old-fashioned fat and sustain high levels of health, like that of the Eskimo (who traditionally ate very little vegetable or grain or fruit foods, and ate mostly protein and fat, often raw). Beautiful, Irish butter from cows eating their proper food–green grass–is a nourishing food, a primo nourishing food. Probably one of the most “sattvic” foods in the Ayurvedic paradigm, in the form of ghee. The Indian culture has revered ghee as a life- and health-promoting substance for a very long time. We have so many fat receptors because old-fashioned forms of fat were vital sources of key nutrients in the form of fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, and K. Without those vitamins, we are poorly nourished people. Old-fashioned fatty foods have nourished people for centuries, if not millennia. Has anyone heard of the “French paradox” wherein French people eat lots of (old-fashioned) fatty foods and have lower rates of heart disease than many other countries? This is not a paradox but a fundamental truth about what foods nourish and what foods deprive. Nourishing diets will always include a source of old-fashioned saturated fat, like butter, ghee, coconut oil, eggs, cream, beef, and so on, among other nutrient-dense, real, whole foods.