Those of you who follow the meanderings of our government and its monetary policy know that things are not well with our country politically and economically speaking. The dollar is now on the verge of losing reserve currency status and that will make things even worse. True unemployment is a lot higher than the government is reporting. You don’t have to be an economist to figure this stuff out. People are uneasy and it shows in their economic behavior.
Whether this is the big enchilada I don’t know, but America is truly at a crossroads and for many of us life potentially will never be the same again. If you track the numbers you know we are in the midst of what one writer has called the greatest depression. Despite what many talking heads are saying things are not getting better. Never before in the history of the world have so many governments all at once engaged in the practice of fiat money, a practice which has without exception always led to economic and political disaster. If you don’t know what fiat money is I suggest you check my post out on ending the Federal Reserve titled $10,000,000 For A Loaf Of Bread.
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The practical and potentially devastating aspect about this is that here in America (and increasingly so around the world) most of us are accustomed to “just in time” shopping. We buy enough food for a week or so. We expect when we go to the store what we need will be on the shelf. The thought of a shortage or a crisis is the farthest thing from our mind. After all, the food truck(s) for Whole Foods show up every morning at 2:00 am right on schedule, so why should I be worried?
If you have been fortunate enough to be shut in because of inclement weather, or lived in an area affected by a trucker’s strike, or lived where there was a predicted shortage of a particular item (like toilet paper), then you know there is reason to worry. I say fortunate because that experience may have taught you how tenuous your life line to food really is – a boycott, a natural disaster, inclement weather – and all of a sudden the food stops rolling and for those who are unprepared it can be a very unpleasant experience.
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How and why Americans got away from the farming mentality of saving during the summer for the upcoming winter, or saving during good times for the inevitable bad times, is a story for another occasion. We who for the most part do not garden or produce our own food are extremely vulnerable to any kind of disruption in the market place – be it a trucking strike, getting snowed in, losing our job, or God forbid, a hyperinflation.
In light of the current economic woes, storing food has become very popular. The problem for traditional foodies (for whom lack of animal fats is not an option), is that there isn’t a lot of choices available in terms of what to eat. One of the basic principles of food storage is store what you eat, since an abrupt change in circumstances is likely to be exacerbated by the need to consume strange foods that you and your family wouldn’t normally be eating.
I think this principle is sound for short term crises although I don’t think it bears any relation to reality if one were involved in a long term breakdown. The greatest sauce in the world is hunger, and otherwise strange food can become pretty tasty when there is nothing else available. This is what Stefansson had to say regarding his Adventures in Diet:
During the first few months of my first year in the Arctic, I acquired, though I did not at the time fully realize it, the munitions of fact and experience which have within my own mind defeated those views of dietetics reviewed at the beginning of this article. I could be healthy on a diet of fish and water. The longer I followed it the better I liked it, which meant, at least inferentially and provisionally, that you never become tired of your food if you have only one thing to eat.”
Let us hope none of us ever find ourselves involuntarily in a situation where we are forced to eat only one thing. Stefansson further adds in relation to the men who journeyed with him:
Still, as just implied, the verdict depends on how long you have been on the diet. If at the end of the first ten days our men could have been miraculously rescued from the seal and brought back to their varied foods, most of them would have sworn forever after that they were about to die when rescued, and they would have vowed never to taste seal again – vows which would have been easy to keep for no doubt in such cases the thought of seal, even years later, would have been accompanied by a feeling of revulsion. If a man has been on meat exclusively for only three or four months he may or may not be reluctant to go back to it again. But if the period has been six months or over, I remember no one who was unwilling to go back to meat. Moreover, those who have gone without vegetables for an aggregate of several years usually thereafter eat a larger percentage of meat than your average citizen, if they can afford it.
For a traditional foodie there is currently little to store if you are out of electricity for a week and you do not have a generator to keep your electrical items running. Unless you normally eat canned meats or other canned animal products it won’t be a pretty picture. The one item that is really needed under duress for cognitive awareness is fat, and not just any old fat, but saturated fat. Going around the blogosphere is a recent excerpt from the authors of Protein Power, Michael and Mary Dan Eades, who have written The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast!, on the necessity of saturated fat:
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1) Improved cardiovascular risk factors
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Though you may not have heard of it on the front pages of your local newspaper, online news source, or local television or radio news program, saturated fat plays a couple of key roles in cardiovascular health. The addition of saturated fat to the diet reduces the levels of a substance called lipoprotein (a) – pronounced “lipoprotein little a” and abbreviated Lp(a) – that correlates strongly with risk for heart disease. Currently there are no medications to lower this substance and the only dietary means of lowering Lp(a) is eating saturated fat. Bet you didn’t hear that on the nightly news. Moreover, eating saturated (and other) fats also raises the level of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol. Lastly, research has shown that when women diet, those eating the greatest percentage of the total fat in their diets as saturated fat lose the most weight.
Editor’s note: Those of you who have read the series on this site called Slaying the Low Carb Dragon know that the same is true for men. The Kitavans, where saturated fat intake was 80% or more of the fat they consumed, were free of obesity, heart disease, and other degenerative diseases that plague the west. By the way, the Kitavans eat a high carbohydrate diet (69% by calories), although the Eades in their various bestselling books preach a low carbohydrate lifestyle. It is worth noting that the Kitavans apparently don’t need a 6 week cure for the middle aged middle. 🙂
2) Stronger bones
In middle age, as bone mass begins to decline, an important goal (particularly for women) is to build strong bones. You can’t turn on the television without being told you need calcium for your bones, but do you recall ever hearing that saturated fat is required for calcium to be effectively incorporated into bone?
According to one of the foremost research experts in dietary fats and human health, Mary Enig, Ph.D., there's a case to be made for having as much as 50 percent of the fats in your diet as saturated fats for this reason. That's a far cry from the 7 to 10 percent suggested by mainstream institutions.
October 20, 2009
