Fat-eating Swedish babes, the superiority of dairy, and the cause of the freshman 15

* Is Sweden experiencing a low-carb trend? Of course, we had one of those here too: it rose in 2002, peaked in 2004, and had burned out by 2006. Hopefully it will become fixed in Sweden, since it's more in line with their love of dairy products. We here never really had a special spot for dairy -- just those "Milk: It does a body good" commercials.

I've never been won over by them, but Swedish girls have robbed the heart of many a man, both for their looks and demeanor. Their traditionally high-fat diet probably has something to do with their greater femininity, especially compared to their fellow Northerners in England, who have given up most red meat and fat like we have here.

* Speaking of milk doing a body good, here's a news item on dairy being better for your bones than calcium carbonate, a typical supplement. It's odd that they found better absorption of calcium even when the milk was non-fat -- surely would've been even better with whole milk, whose fat would've allowed better absorption of fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D. So, there's something unique to milk, not just fat, that does the trick.

By the way, if you have ever been lactose-intolerant, you might want to go off of gluten for awhile and see if you're not merely gluten-intolerant. Eating gluten-containing foods when you can't process them will damage the part of your intestine that absorbs nutrients, so lactose-intolerance may just be a special case of this. I've been having 4 oz or more per day of heavy whipping cream, and I haven't had any bad symptoms like I used to, although it is lower in lactose than yoghurt. We'll see if I get around to testing milk.

* On the topic of vitamin D, here's a news item on lower vitamin D levels among the sick, something that you may have already known about. The easiest way to get more is to get 20 minutes of sunlight. If you take supplements, remember to take them with a fat source.

* I recently wrote here that the "freshman 15" (i.e., the extra pounds you suddenly pack on in college) is probably due to eating a shit-load more carbs than you used to in high school -- pizza, fries, pasta, rice, bread, cereal, sweets, etc., abound in college dining halls as well as the pantries of students off meal plan. When did people start noticing this, though?

I did a Lexis-Nexis search for "freshman 15" or "freshman fifteen," and the first article in U.S. newspapers is from the Sept. 27, 1987 edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. However, the tone makes it sound like everyone already knew about the phenomenon, so it may have tripped students' "wtf?" detectors several years earlier. That certainly coincides with the beginning of the mainstream anti-fat hysteria starting in the early 1980s. It probably didn't take long for the anti-fat weirdos to take over college meal plans -- it's one of the first places they'd get to re-vamp with no questions asked.

Here are some quotes from the article that suggest strongly that it's all the carbs that students are eating that's making them fatter, especially pizza (which is mostly a bunch of refined flour).

"We ate pizza nearly every night. And if somebody brought something around at 11 p.m., we'd eat it whether we were hungry or not."

Well, obviously you were hungry, since you can't stuff yourself with pizza if you're not. This is an example of how a high-carb diet leaves you hungry, while a high-fat one satiates you.

" ... I'd have breakfast in my room, then go down to the cafeteria and have toast. Plus everyone was into being vegetarians, and vegetarian food wasn't very sophisticated then 10 years ago . There was no such thing as fresh vegetables in the winter, so we'd eat big bowls of soybeans, peanut butter and wheat bread. Everybody gained weight."

Vegetarian diets -- is it any wonder that she suffered from "loneliness and depression"?

A Hot Springs native who was graduated from Hendrix College at Conway said the food served on campus was "awful, at least when I first went there in 1980; we counted 13 different ways that potatoes were served, plus there were different meats that we swore were cut out with cookie cutters from the same animal but had different names _veal, chicken _ all disguised by frying. So we'd eat off-campus, lots of fast foods and pizzas, especially late at night when we were studying."

Mmmm, 13 different ways to serve potatoes. They don't taste like anything by themselves, unlike meat, so you've got to get really creative about how to re-package the little starch bombs. Again, note the reference to pizza.

A food service director claims:

" There are no longer just starchy foods. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner from recipes created in a test kitchen in Eau Claire, Wis. , which are tested for nutrient and salt content. "

So he's admitting that not long ago, they were feeding their students what starving agricultural peasants -- SAPs -- would have eaten: a bunch of starch. How did that work out for the Spaniards who subsisted on corn? And sure enough, we see that meal plans in 1987 had begun to come from food labs, undoubtedly staffed by anti-fat numbnuts. What's replaced the all-starch diet?

things like lasagna, chicken and dumplings, roast beef; casserole items. Plus we have a baked item every day, such as fish or chicken. There's a salad bar with fresh fruit, and fresh chicken and tuna salad made with a minimal amount of salad dressing. We have desserts, too, but they're not the biggest sellers.

Lots of chicken, fish, no dressing, etc. -- clearly a low-fat diet. Unfortunately, nowadays (at least as early as 1999 when I began my fall semester of freshman year), the desserts are free -- all you can eat.

" By the end of the month there was no money for pizzas, so we'd cook heavy things like rice with butter and sugar and eat bunches of it. "

Dude, no money for pizzas! Our staple! Obviously they weren't eating lots of butter, since this stuff must have consisted mostly of the rice. The added sugar is a nice touch. I wonder if they polished the rice and got beri-beri like the Japanese navy did.

Listen to what a school psychologist says about counting calories (note that a psychologist is considered the expert on nutrition):

But [students] had a lot of misconceptions. They thought there were "good' calories and "bad' calories. They didn't realize that 1,200 calories are just that whether they come from chocolate cake or vegetables.

Hey, those students knew more about nutrition than a psychologist -- good for them! Read that again: 1,200 calories worth of chocolate cake is the same as 1,200 calories from vegetables. Satire is pointless when they do it to themselves.

The next article is from a 1988 edition of the Dallas Morning News, and it basically says the same thing -- freshmen are eating pizza like nobody's business in the evening, obviously because they didn't get much satiating fat during dinner. They also snacked on potato chips, M&Ms, and donuts -- now, what do those have in common? They should emulate Europeans, who aren't fat, and have a snack of salami and pepperoni (better if spread with butter), cheese, almonds in olive oil, and olives.

And as expected, the know-nothing experts all advised students to eat pizza with no meat and little cheese, baked potatoes with no cream or butter, etc. -- again, pretend you're a SAP who can't afford any animal products whatsoever, and gorge on starch. How did that diet work out for them back then?

More to the point -- how is it working out for students today? College freshmen didn't instantly pack on a bunch of weight during the 1950s. Sometime during the early or mid 1980s, right when the anti-fat hysteria had gone mainstream, people start talking about the freshman 15. And still do. The low-fat diets that the experts have been cramming down the students' throats haven't prevented the weight gain -- indeed, they are clearly the cause of it.