bacon love

Of course i love bacon -- duh.  I believe i've heard it claimed that it's the food that most tempts veg*ns back to the "dark side."  Adding some improves the hell out of almost every dish imaginable -- even some desserts. Just don't try to pretend that it's the ultimate healthy choice.

When manufactured from conventionally-raised hogs, the fat in bacon is full of omega-6 that promotes fatty liver and ruins your physiological insulin resistance -- that property of muscle cells that keeps them from taking up more than their share of blood glucose, and therefore making you more hungry on a low-carb diet.

Remember when i wrote before that a very clever study showed that the thyroid works best in the presence of plenty of saturated fat in the diet, and less well as the degree of saturation goes down?  Pork AND poultry NATURALLY contain less saturated fat and more unsaturates even when they're pastured.  Add to this predilection the fact that almost all birds and swine raised for sale get extra feed beyond what they forage, and you can bet the farm that it won't be as good for a weight-loss diet as ruminant meats, especially grass-finished ones.

When CICO-promoters point out that low-carbers frequently still fail to meet their weight-loss goals, and attribute it to "unsustainability" or simply the incorrectness of the philosophy, i think they're on the wrong page.  I believe that the failure is rooted in the insistence upon using Atkins-approved but deleterious dietary choices -- WHICH ARE INDIVIDUAL in applicability.  Yes, Virginia, we ARE unique snowflakes (or as good as unique, in our individual rarity).

Because of genetic predilection, the diets of our mothers and grandmothers before us, our exposure to a huge variety of potential toxins, parasites, viruses and bacterial infections, our history of particular injuries and allergies, our microbiome, and factors we don't even know about yet, our tolerances to diet are all different.  So are the ideal choices for each of us, to promote the best health we can achieve.  These are things we have to discover for ourselves.  BUT...

...Biology is biology.  We KNOW how certain processes work in the body, and even if they're screwed up in some of us, we can logically predict how some things will work -- things like linoleic acid promoting certain biochemical processes, and palmitic tending toward others.  Things like dairy fats being problematic in weight loss even though butyric acid is our friend.

We all make trade-offs that promote quality-of-life over the HEALTHIEST choice:  i have a pretty good idea of how "clean" my diet OUGHT to be, but i choose to use alcohol pretty regularly and to have dairy products, sugar sources, and even gluten grains from time to time.  I KNOW i'd feel better without all of these, but again -- it's a quality-of-life thing.

But tell myself that these foodstuffs are harmless?  Tell myself i can eat all the bacon, cream, nuts, etc that i want, and they're perfectly healthy?  NO.  I may be ignorant of a lot of things, but i ain't stoopid.