Last week one of my patients told me about a documentary on Netflix called The Magic Pill. It is about regular people engaging a ketogenic diet lifestyle and the amazing results it produces in their lives. I was immediately attracted, so Ellen and I watched the show Thursday night. It was excellent on many levels. I highly recommend watching it. It is included on Netflix, but for a few bucks you can also watch it on Youtube.
This show is excellent for many reasons. One big thing I liked is how it is showing that this return to how our ancestors ate is not just a California fad, but a worldwide movement. The program starts with teaching indigenous peoples in Australia to return to the diet of their ancestors to reverse the plague of modern diseases that has beset them ever since they adopted a
western diet style. This shift has been recent enough that people living today remember that their parent’s generation never had diseases like diabetes and heart disease. These diseases have just appeared over the last 50 years, and now most everybody has one or more of them.
Time is spent looking at the science behind ketogenic eating plans, explaining the simplicity that our bodies have only two food sources for everything they do – sugar, mostly from grains and legumes or ketones, from fats. The body runs much more efficiently burning ketones than it does burning sugars. Ketones produce much less inflammation and free radical damage than sugars do. This is the primary energy food humans have used through 99% of our time on this planet. The use of grains and legumes is a very recent fad – over the last 5 to 10 thousand years only. This is a drop in the bucket of the amount of time necessary to adapt to such a huge dietary change.
Even with the introduction of grains and legumes as a food source, the damage they do was compensated to a large degree by the unrefined nature of the grains and the liberal use of animal, tropical, and olive oils. The first heart attack was diagnosed only about 100 years ago in this country. Within 50 years heart attacks were the leading cause of death in America. What happened?
Four things happened – refined grains, abundance of sugar, invention of vegetable oils and shortening, and the chlorination of the water supply. All of these were part of our massive industrialization and urbanization in America. The age of convenience foods was born. This was all seen as the glorious benefit of progress and a huge source of profit for the companies making these cheap carb and sugar-based foods. So when people started freaking out about everyone dying of heart attacks, a scapegoat had to be found. Cholesterol and saturated fats were that scapegoat. Billions of dollars in research and millions of deaths have utterly failed to support this belief that cholesterol and saturated fat are the cause of heart attacks. In fact the research has shown that sugar and vegetable oil are the biggest cause of heart disease, yet somehow this consistent finding keeps getting buried and ignored.
The Magic Pill picked up on the story of several people across the US who decided to do a clean eating keto diet for 10 weeks to see what it would do for them. It included folks with dementia beginning to set in, breast cancer, a family with an autistic little girl, heart disease and diabetes. You watch them going through their pantries and throwing out all the crap food full of sugar and carbs. You watch them trying out their first shopping trips and cooking trials with this new way of cooking and eating. It is very real. What is truly amazing is watching the changes in these people’s health and attitude as the keto diet takes hold. There is no combination of drugs and therapies from traditional medicine that can come close to producing results like these.
This is powerful and moving, but the story is much larger than just health. The film goes into the environmental impact our modern diet has on the planet. More than just the negative stuff such documentaries often dig up, this one delved into how to reverse these environmental devastations through
regenerative farming techniques. I was especially interested in this information. It is easy to say whats wrong with life as it is, but much harder to show how to change it.
If you are ready for the message, this film has the potential to be life changing. This is not a pie-in-the-sky message about everything wonderful you can expect with a simple diet change. This is a very real nuts-and-bolts look at what is involved in making a successful shift in lifestyle. It covers the science behind this and discusses why this information has not been available to us. (The short answer is because nobody with research money wants this information.) It also has a very interesting look at how veganism actually fails to stop animal cruelty because of all the animal products required to grow the crops in the first place – something I did not know. It even looks at the most efficient ways to convert solar energy into food, and it is not the mono-culture farming methods we have embraced. FYI, every drop of energy you consume started as sunshine.
The film is about an hour and a half long and well worth the time invested. Most of the information was not new to me, but the presentation was very well done. A lot of the message presented is stuff you have seen me write about for years, but here you can see it within a worldwide context, not just some wacko ideas put out there by your Chiropractor. It almost makes the whole idea that the food you eat is the biggest driver for your health seem like a real possibility. So if you have the opportunity, check out The magic Pill on Netflix or Youtube.
Take care,
David
Macadamia Avocado Bread
2 cups Macadamia nuts
1 ripe avocado
5 eggs (pastured if possible)
1/4 cup psyllium seed powder or husk
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp real salt unless the macadamias were salted
Process macadamias in a food processor until they become a nut butter. Add the remaining ingredients and process until smooth. Scoop into a greased loaf pan and bake for 35 to 45 minutes at 350 degrees.
For different flavors you can add sweetener like my Double sugar plus cinnamon, or add herbs, or onion and garlic diced up, or nutritional yeast for a cheesy flavor.