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GP8July:  Red-Blooded Americans Again?

Moldy Quality.  A half century ago we stayed overnight at a Springfield, Massachusetts hotel—could it have been the St. James?—not because of the accommodations, but in anticipation of the dining room below.  There was served the tenderest beef known to man, far from cattle country, but several notches above prime.  As our meal cooked, my host rounded up the manager so we could get a look at the doings in the kitchen.  The biggest thrill was the tour of the meat locker where great carcasses, hung about hooks, aged gracefully in the coolish air, mold decorating the sincere red marbled slabs we contemplated.  The mold, you see, added tenderness and flavor, a conspirator in the battle to create texture and bouquet.  This was in the pre-antibiotic, pre-hormone days of beef cattle when Massachusetts still believed in meat, free as it was of politically correct police. 

Beef is Back?  Remember the missing beef Wendy’s talked about in its advertisements?  A quarter of a century ago doctors and government meddlers took it off our plates, saying that beef and fat were the source of our fattening bellies, cholesterol, heart attacks, and most anything else that might be wrong with us.  The Framingham (Massachusetts again) studies, about which some smart physicians have long had questions, said cholesterol kills, and the potentates of medicine said fat and meat make cholesterol.   

Now, we read, the scorned Dr. Atkins may be getting his own.  His high protein diet has, up to now, been dismissed as a dangerous fad by nutrition experts.  Carbohydrates (e.g. bread, etc.) may be the real culprit in obesity, and a low carb, reasonable fat diet may cut pounds and cholesterol.  Read more in “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie” by Gary Taubes, the New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002, p. 22ff. 

Obesity Balloon in View.  The New York Times’ article is just one in a growing series of articles on the huge, growing global epidemic of obesity.  It is our worse disease.  And suddenly, it has gotten the deserved attention of almost everybody.  Apparently obesity rates in the U.S. began to skyrocket in the 1980s, just when the medical establishment weaned us off meat, followed later by the almost promiscuous prescription of lipid-control drugs (i.e., statins), big business for the pharmaceuticals.  A few think that maybe the docs unwittingly elevated our lipid profiles, and then, alarmed, rushed in with the drugs.  For this you cannot blame them.  The Medocrats in both Cambridge and on the Potomac verbally scorched any heretics who expressed faint doubts about the cholesterol/low fat/heavy statin trinity that has ruled obesity thinking for so long. 

Even if Atkins is right, we will have a hard time making a switch to a better-founded diet.  The medical community requires 10 years of studies in hand to give up a devoutly worshipped belief—a very long time for those with compulsive weight problems.  And, of course, our meats are now so full of chemicals, they’re often hardly worth the eating.  The biggest near-term outcome of  these fat thoughts will surely be to make us pregnant with doubts about the whole healthcare system, which is awfully long on costs and short on results.  It is not clear that the present system develops well thought out medical doctrine or publicly efficacious medical procedure.  Meanwhile, we ourselves are still pinko salmon eaters and can say the salmon diet really works.

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