Sin taxes on fat and sugar? It seems several states are looking with interest at chipping away at your rights as a US citizen to decide what you eat. Or, as they the politicians put it, encouraging you to make better choices. States are so interested in your health they want to tax foods containing sugar and fat in order to steer you into a more healthy choice. Politicians want to use pricing strategies to influence what you purchase. However, they’re not sure whether subsidies or punitive taxes work best. Shall we control people by making healthier foods cheaper or unhealthy foods more expensive?

The question shouldn’t be how best can the government control our choices, but does the government have the right to do it in the first place. What else are they going to try to influence? Who decides what’s unhealthy? We see what the FDA, AMA, and food industries have already done to our food supply. Is some politician going to get a hair up his ass about sports, thinking the average American needs to start saving their money, and make sporting events tickets so expensive the average person won’t buy them? How about the type of car you drive, even though the global warming issue has been proven a scam.

This is a slippery slope and is as UN-American as progressivism. This issue has been fought for over 300 years. People fled Europe to what is now the US to get from under the control of the governments there. In the US we have a right endowed by are creator to pursue health. The Government doesn’t have the right to make that choice, or to “encourage”, for us.

An interesting, but not surprising study was performed to see which strategy, subsidies or taxes, works best as though it’s even a choice. No matter where you stand on this topic to see how human behavior can be influenced is very interesting

Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, “stocked” with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers — all mothers — were given laboratory “money” to shop for a week’s groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5%, and then by 25%; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

The results, just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that taxes were more effective in reducing calories purchased over subsides. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calories purchased, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbohydrates and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries.

By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food actually increased overall calories purchased without changing the nutritional value at all. It appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to less healthy alternatives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from less healthy to healthier choices. ScienceDaily.com

Today in the United States one person will die from CVD every 37 seconds. This year in the U.S. over 1.2 million people will have a heart attack and just short of half will die. Approximately 80,000,000 people or roughly 25% of The U.S. has cardiovascular disease(CVD). It became our number one killer in the 1950’s and has not slowed down.(1)

Do you believe consuming saturated fat and cholesterol cause CVD? Do you believe eating polyunsaturated oils like canola and corn oil are not only good for you but lower your risk of CVD. If you answered yes to both of these questions, you are among the 10’s of millions who need to be enlightened by reading my article “Fats, Cholesterol and the Lipd Hypothesis”.

The truth is, saturated fat and cholesterol have nothing to do with your risk of cardiovascular disease. As a matter of fact there are many studies that show that people who have heart attacks do not eat anymore saturated fat than people who don’t have heart attacks. More-over the degree of atherosclerosis at autopsy, in heart attack victims, is unrelated to diet. It is also interesting to note that half of all heart attack victims do not have “clogged” arteries.

I have personally witnessed and cared for many patients who were experiencing (the big one) massive heart attacks in the emergency room. The degree of blockage had a wide range with the most common seemingly being between 80, 90 percent. But the interesting thing was, some people literally had no plaque what-so-ever according to cath lab reports. It was during my time working in emergency department, because of so many discrepancies, that I became very curious about what actually caused CVD.

Looking for a snack to kill that between meal hunger? Try almonds. 28g, aproximatey 20 – 25 alomonds provides 5.9g of protein, 13.8g of fat, and 6.1g of carbohydrates. Don’t be alarmed by the fat content. The fat is what will suppress your appetite, and 62% of the fat found in almonds is oleic acid. In comparison, olive oil contains 71% oleic acid. This fatty acid has strong anti-inflammatory properties and is what gives olive oil it’s outstanding reputation. 7% of the fat content is palmitic acid and 2 percent is stearic acid. Both of these saturated fatty acids are the preferred energy source of the heart, which is why the fat surrounding the heart is highly saturated.

Unfortunately, up to 30% of the fat found in almonds is the polyunsaturated fat linoleic acid. This is a double unsaturated omega 6 fatty acid that has been shown to be pro-inflammatory, immuno-suppressive, and shown to cause weight gain. Thankfully, almonds have enough of the good fats to compensate for the bad polyunsaturated fats.

A good source of fiber 20 -25 almonds contain 3.4g. Also Rich in minerals, almonds contain good amounts of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc. So if your feeling hungry and you need something to munch on to hold you till the next meal, give almonds a try.

Nutritionaldata.com
Westonaprice.com
Enig,Mary. Know Your Fats. Silver Spring: Bethesda Press, 2000

The best advice I can give concerning fat consumption is to increase your intake of omega 3s, like EPA and DHA found in fish oil, and reduce your consumption of polyunsaturated fats like vegetable oil.  Polyunsaturated fats contain high amounts of omega 6 fatty acids, which in excess are detrimental to our health. Probably most importantly however, is to eliminate trans fats if your like most Americans who consume processed foods. By switching the fats one consumes you can increase your overall health, prevent heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, ulcerative colitis, depression, Alzheimer’s, and a host of other diseases..

These two types of fat, omega-3 and omega-6, are both essential for human health. However, the typical American consumes far too many omega-6 fats in their diet while consuming very low levels of omega-3. America’s consumption of vegetable oil has increased by 437% in the past 80 years.  We evolved on a fairly high fat diet. The problem is that the types of fats we were eating back in the Paleolithic days were quite a bit different from the fats we eat now.

In the Paleolithic era, our ratio of omega 6s to omega 3s was very close to 1:1. We ate like this for millions of years. These days it has been suggested that this ratio is 30:1 up to 50:1! So why should we be concerned? The change in the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 plays a role in pretty much every major disease that’s killing us in Western civilization. The primary sources of omega-6 are corn, soy, canola, safflower and sunflower oil. These oils are overabundant in the typical diet, which explains our excess omega-6 levels. Avoid or limit these oils. Omega-3, meanwhile, is typically found in flaxseed oil, walnut oil and some fish. 

By far, the best source of omega-3 fats are those found in wild fish. Wild caught fish like salmon is high in two omega-3 fatty acids crucial to human health, DHA and EPA. These two fatty acids are pivotal in preventing diseases as mentioned earlier. The human brain is also highly dependent on DHA. Low DHA levels have been linked to depression, schizophrenia, memory loss and a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Eat more salmon

Fat is it friend or foe? Well if you ask most, including health care professionals, they’ll say foe. It’s time for people to wake up! The current ways of eating aren’t working. Just a few years ago, for the first time in history the top six books on the New York Times Best Seller list, were about the same subject: diets low in carbs, moderate to high protein, high in fibrous carbs (vegetable), and moderate fat. Why is this topic so popular? They work!

One of the biggest reasons protein diets work is the consumption of fat. That is, fat minus the abundance of carbs. Fat has many functions outside of being used as an energy source, and certain fatty acids are essential. Without eating them you’d literally get sick and die.

But how does fat help our diet? Well, fat satiates the appetite, and helps to stop the cravings for sugar. And probably most importantly, fat when combined with a low sugar intake actually aids in burning fat as fuel. That’s right, fat helps burn fat. When fat is restricted, our bodies have a defense mechanism built in through evolution for survival. Our bodies will actually stop using fat as fuel in an effort to preserve our stores for future use.

Bodybuilders have known this for years through trial and error, while dieting for shows, they would reach a certain body fat percentage and suddenly plateau for no apparent reason. We found that by adding fat to the diet like olive oil, or coconut oil, would jump-start the body to burn body fat. It’s not the amount of food you consume that is the problem. It’s the types of food you’re consuming.

Sounds bizarre doesn’t it.

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates are good, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. With seven years of research, Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) ”via their dramatic effect on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation”and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the numbers. There are good calories, and bad ones. Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960’s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then”wrongly”were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

Good Calories Bad Calories is the end of the debate about the foods we consume and their effects on us.