Today’s post will just be some musings of personal observation.
If you follow any online “health influencers,” you will notice that they often attract a rather passionate set of followers and detractors. For example, you will commonly find influencers in the low-carb community (and their followers) denigrating anybody who disagrees with them as not just wrong, but as stupid or corrupt. I commonly see commentary around such influencers that doctors have “lied to” the public about sugar; that the data linking high cholesterol to heart disease is based on only a few flawed studies from the 1950s; and that Ancel Keys (one of the early leading proponents of reducing saturated fat and cholesterol) made up his research results – none of which is true.
On the vegan side of things, one can find the same tendencies. I’ve seen interview clips of Michael Gregor (a prominent vegan physician and author) for example promoting the idea that a vegan diet is the “only” diet shown to reverse heart disease (it isn’t). And as a resident I once took care of a patient in the hospital who refused to believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that she had had a heart attack, because she was a vegan and “if you don’t eat animal products, you can’t get heart disease.” (In fact, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of all Americans – vegans included).
A recent study out of Northeastern University (just up the road from here, in Boston) makes a point that I harp on a lot: you can go most of the way toward meeting your fitness needs without any gym membership, without any fancy equipment, and without leaving your home.
I’d like to use this post to introduce a very simple, and important, concept that is a key idea to understanding metabolic health: the “personal fat threshold.”
Before doing so, I just want to clarify my point of view about this: I am not suggesting that butter is a health food, nor that you might not be better off eating less of it. The balance of the evidence, for example, strongly suggests that good quality olive oil is much healthier for you than butter. So please don’t read this post and walk away thinking that butter is unambiguously good for you and that the more of it you eat the better, as is promoted by some health influencers on the internet.
Time for some inspiration. Last year there was quite a bit of media coverage about one Richard Morgan, a 93 year old Irish man who is a champion indoor rower. Scientists analyzed Mr. Morgan and found him to have the cardio-respiratory fitness of a man half his age. The reason this is so amazing is that Mr. Morgan didn’t take up any exercise at all until age 73, after he retired from his career as a baker. And while it’s impossible to ever draw broad medical conclusions based on one-single case, his story certainly lends credibility to the idea that it is never too late to start getting into better shape.
In my last post I covered a new line of research about possible post-vaccine harms, and how it has been sensationalized and misrepresented in the media. Today I want to step back and more broadly share some personal thoughts on COVID and on the vaccines.
