Yes, I know … I’ve been a bit of an absent landlord lately when it comes to the blog. As someone who’s written a film, speeches, roasts, a few stage shows back in the day, etc., I know that you have to commit to a deadline at some point, or the project will never be finished.
So I set a deadline for a complete first draft of the book project: my birthday, which is a mere 16 days away. We’d like to have this thing available by May, and Chareva needs plenty of lead time to produce a ton of drawings and lay out the pages. The way holiday seasons seem to zip past, I also know that if I don’t have a draft finished by my birthday, it won’t be finished until the new year.
Trying to explain how diet affects health in a fun and kid-friendly way turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected – and I expected it to be challenge. I rewrote the toughest chapter (on why the calories-in/calories-out theory is true but also useless) a dozen times last winter. I finally came up with an analogy that worked, and presented that chapter as a speech on the cruise last May.
But when I began writing subsequent chapters, I decided I didn’t like that analogy so much after all. It worked well as a solo act, but when I moved on to related subjects, I found myself jumping from one analogy to another to explain the concepts. Yee-uck. I like casseroles as food, but not as a writing style.
I shared my writer’s woes with Chareva, and she offered an idea. That took my brain to a another idea and BANG! – I had the AHA! moment writers live for. We spent an hour or so kicking it around, talking about she could illustrate it, how we could use it to explain every topic we want to cover. It all made sense.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that I had to re-imagine everything I’d already written and start again. A whole shootload of Chareva’s drawings will go out the window as well. Totally worth it, mind you. Once we knew this was it, the big idea, the right way to tell the story, the words started flowing. But it’s a lot of words, and I have plenty more to write.
So that’s what I’ve been doing instead of blogging.
I’ve been reading comments, of course, and answering emails. A few days ago, I let myself get dragged into an email debate with an ignoramus who thinks I don’t understand calories, then realized I was violating my rule about not arguing with idiots – especially illogical idiots who seem to love endless arguments. So I invited him to go away and blocked his email address.
Several of you have written to ask if I read Denise Minger’s book-length post on high-carb, very-low-fat diets that successfully treated obesity and diabetes. Yes, I did, and it’s fascinating. If you haven’t read her outstanding book Death by Food Pyramid, she floated some similar ideas there. Ancel Keys insisted fat does the damage, John Yudkin insisted sugar does the damage, they sniped at each other for years. But as Minger wrote in the book, it could be that they were both right and both wrong … perhaps it’s the combination of fat and sugar that does the real damage. Cut either to an extreme, and the damage doesn’t occur. A 15-year-old book I recently read about diet and hormones makes similar points.
Anyway, I’ll probably write more about her post soon … if after my birthday qualifies as “soon.”
Several people also wrote to ask for a reaction to the World Health Organization’s announcement that meat causes cancer. So here’s my reaction:
Head. Bang. On. Desk.
Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised. This wasn’t a scientific decision. It was a political decision. WHO is an idiot step-child of the U.N. – a political organization run by political hacks for the purpose of promoting political agendas. The (ahem) “climate experts” at the U.N. have also declared that raising livestock contributes to global warming – er, “climate change,” now that record-cold winters have put the kibosh on “warming.” They don’t want us to eat meat, period. I certainly don’t put it past the political hacks to cherry-pick observational studies that link meat to cancer as a scare tactic.
As part of the scare campaign, one of the WHO hacks apparently declared that when it comes to cancer risk, sausage is in the same category as plutonium. The always-brilliant Dr. Malcolm Kendrick replied, “OK, I’ll eat the sausages, you eat the plutonium, let’s see who lives longest.”
Zoe Harcombe wrote a nice post about the WHO announcement, complete with analysis of the numbers.
I don’t plan to write a full post about it, because it’s the same old garbage based on the same crappy observational studies, and I’ve already written about those studies here, here, here and here.
I will, however, quote from one study. Remember that in good science, we don’t accept a hypothesis unless the evidence supporting it is consistent. WHO says red meat and processed meats cause bowel cancer. So we’d certainly expect vegetarians to have the lowest rates of bowel cancer, wouldn’t we?
Take a look at the conclusion from this observational study, which I’ve quoted before:
The overall cancer incidence rates of both the vegetarians and the nonvegetarians in this study are low compared with national rates. Within the study, the incidence of all cancers combined was lower among vegetarians than among meat eaters, but the incidence of colorectal cancer was higher in vegetarians than in meat eaters.
No consistency, no scientific validity. If meat causes bowel cancer, vegetarians would have lower rates of bowel cancer, period, no glaring exceptions. WHO doesn’t get to pick and choose. Well, they do, but we get to use our brains and refuse be swayed by cherry-picked garbage.
Another analysis of data from the same study included this conclusion:
Within the study, mortality from circulatory diseases and all causes is not significantly different between vegetarians and meat eaters
“All causes” would include cancer.
Go enjoy your sausage (hold the plutonium), and I’ll get back to working on the book.
