One of my favorite health and low carb blogs is "Weight of the Evidence" by Regina Wilshire. Her recent blog post about a study on the Masai people of Africa points out how entrenched dietary dogma prevents officials from seeing the incredibly obvious.
The Masai have very little heart disease or diabetes despite a diet high in animal fat. Researchers concluded that is because they get a lot of exercise. Of course, once you understand that the energy TO exercise comes from a good, nutritious diet with high fatty acid content and plenty of protein, it is easy to understand that a low carbohydrate diet is what is helping the Masai have all that energy in the first place. So, it isn't the exercise that makes them healthy and energetic , but their natural high fat diet. Of course, the mainstream will never report it this way...so it is a good thing we have Regina around!
"I would contend that while it's ideal to be active, that is not the driving force in 'health' or lack thereof - it's dietary habits that dominate our health outcomes, our level of activity may be important too, but activity in and of itself is no solution to a piss-poor diet.
We need, before activity, a proper diet to enable us to perform phyisical activity, not the other way around! So while the researchers here could not bring themselves to even consider that the habitual diet of the Masai - high-fat and low-carbohydrate - was the driving force in their good health and enabled high levels of activity, I'll say it!"
Weight of the Evidence
The original study (and stupid conclusion) here
1 comment:
I'm a fan of Regina's blog, too, and I really enjoyed this particular post.
The kind of "thinking" behind this study's "stupid conclusion" is beautifully discussed here:
http://sparkofreason.blogspo.com (Sorry, I tried to link and messed it up. It's the kind of thing that makes you just itch to print it out and wave it in the face of most of the MD's out there.
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