Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, and the Power of Government Influence
By Monica @ 7:37 AM   
I point you to four posts by Richard Nikoley of Free the Animal that just might revolutionize the way you think about the sun, and perhaps even change the course of your life:
Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D
Vitamin D and Type I Diabetes
Sunscreen
Vitamin D Deficiency and Cancer
Another great site with hours of reading on Vitamin D is the Vitamin D Council. After reading these you'll truly believe fact is stranger than fiction when it comes to the government's public service announcements.
Dr. Eades has advised a much more rational approach toward sunscreen as well. In short, it may be very wise for you to revisit your relationship with the sun considering humans' evolutionary relationship with it. This doesn't mean you should sit around all day in the sun and get a severe sunburn. It means you need to understand the difference between UVA and UVB, which one is correlated to melanoma, which one is correlated to the prevention of all diseases of civilization, and which rays the sunscreens are actually blocking.
In a timely and related post, Stephan of Whole Health Source charts the consumption of butter and margarine with heart disease mortality over the past 100 years. Real butter also contains vitamins D and K2, both fat-soluble vitamins. The entire post with charts should not be missed, but I can't help posting a good portion of the prose here:
Was the shift from butter to margarine involved in the CHD epidemic? We can't make any firm conclusions from these data, because they're purely correlations. But there are nevertheless mechanisms that support a protective role for butter, and a detrimental one for margarine. Butter from pastured cows is one of the richest known sources of vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 plays a central role in protecting against arterial calcification, which is an integral part of arterial plaque and the best single predictor of cardiovascular death risk. In the early 20th century, butter was typically from pastured cows.
(There's very old, as in 70 year old, evidence for this and its correlation to seasonal mortality from heart disease in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Mortality is highest in the winter when both of these vitamins, D and K2, are low in humans.) Stephan continues:
Margarine is a major source of trans fat. Trans fat is typically found in vegetable oil that has been hydrogenated, rendering it solid at room temperature. Hydrogenation is a chemical reaction that is truly disgusting. It involves heat, oil, hydrogen gas and a metal catalyst. I hope you give a wide berth to any food that says "hydrogenated" anywhere in the ingredients. Some modern margarine is supposedly free of trans fats, but in the U.S., less than 0.5 grams per serving can be rounded down so the nutrition label is not a reliable guide. Only by looking at the ingredients can you be sure that the oils haven't been hydrogenated. Even if they aren't, I still don't recommend margarine, which is an industrially processed pseudo-food. One of the strongest explanations of CHD is the oxidized LDL hypothesis. The idea is that LDL lipoprotein particles ("LDL cholesterol") become oxidized and stick to the vessel walls, creating an inflammatory cascade that results in plaque formation.... Several things influence the amount of oxidized LDL in the blood, including the total amount of LDL in the blood, the antioxidant content of the particle, the polyunsaturated fat content of LDL (more PUFA = more oxidation), and the size of the LDL particles. Small LDL is considered more easily oxidized than large LDL. Small LDL is also associated with elevated CHD mortality. Trans fat shrinks your LDL compared to butter. In my opinion, it's likely that both the decrease in butter consumption and the increase in trans fat consumption contributed to the massive incidence of CHD seen in the U.S. and other industrial nations today. I think it's worth noting that France has the highest per-capita dairy fat consumption of any industrial nation, along with a comparatively low intake of hydrogenated fat, and also has the second-lowest rate of CHD, behind Japan.
Funny, I thought it was the socialized healthcare system of the Japanese and the French that increased their lifespans (joking).
Connect the dots. Diet is king. Not only do the French get lots of K2 and D in their dairy, which is raised more on grass than grain, but the Japanese have an intake of a different form of K2 in natto.
The reasons for the health of foreigners with socialized medical systems has never been a secret to those "in the know" about nutrition. There is no paradox, let alone a "French paradox." Imagine how long they could live with a free market healthcare system that provided them with the best technology in a timely manner. Imagine how long Americans could live with our mixed economy healthcare system if it hadn't been for us getting a steady stream of nutritional information from the government for the past 40 years.
Our government has been pumping out faulty nutritional advice to medical professional organizations and the public for decades, and it's worked hand in glove with farm policy. Our agricultural system is largely based on subsidized commodity wheat, corn and soy (and canola and cotton), thanks in part to the government's "public service" when it comes to nutrition, coupled with USDA farm "support" programs. The corn and soy don't even feed humans outside of providing some corn oil, high fructose corn syrup, soy oil, and some limited soy protein for tofu and baby formulas. Instead it is almost all fed to animals (with the exception of wheat. There goes the "feeding the world" myth -- are you seeing yet how this all fits together?). Is it any wonder that the government has been telling people to eat more vegetable oils (cottonseed, corn, soy, canola) and soy for "heart health"? They have to sell the stuff somehow.
I've given you just a snippet of the reams of information available on the internet when it comes to these two vitamins and their crucial role in human health. Experts on vitamin D agree that the RDA for vitamin D (400 IU daily) is ten times too low and should be up around 5000 IU in wintertime -- echoing what Weston Price only told us in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration 70 years ago. Vitamin K2 is all but unknown to the medical community. As for the government propaganda that led to the ubiquity of those "heart healthy" margarines in our stores -- devoid of either fat soluble vitamin but full of trans fats originally promoted by George McGovern's dietary committee and Center for Science in the Public Interest, you can read all about the history here. The best I can say is that it's made butter in the stores dirt cheap, which is good for me. The grass-fed butter that Stephan talks about is only available from a farmer whose cows are fed on grass in summertime (I get this cream in the summertime and make butter with it). This butter is not even available in a store anymore because all the butter is made from grain-fed cows by an industrial process. It would be the highest source of vitamin K2 for those not eating fish eggs.
It's nothing short of revolting that the government nutritional propaganda that has been fed to Americans in a steady diet stream of "public service" announcements has been shortening peoples' lifespans by the millions. Even worse, the end of such advice is nowhere in sight.
And to think some folks want to nationalize it.Labels: Conventional Wisdom, Government Idiocy, Nutritional Guidelines, Subsidies, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2
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3 Comments:
Thanks for the shout, Monica.
BTW, foie gras is absolutely HUGE in K2 (MK-4):
http://www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/vitamin-k2.html#fig4
I bet. I have no idea where I'd get it, though... any ideas? Whole Foods, maybe?
I do eat quite a bit of liver in the form of pate (chicken and pork livers), beef liver, and sometimes chicken livers on their own. These days I try to get my hands on as much liver as possible. Beef calf liver is pretty cheap, so are chicken livers. Guess taht happens when a product is not in high demand, just like butter. The puppy dog loves liver, too. :)
I've never actually had foie gras. I hear it's delicious. If you have any advice on where to find it I'd love a tip.
oh, man. Google it. Tona available, and the least expensive is the whole livers frozen.
Probably the best place is Markys:
http://www.markys.com/caviar/customer/home.php
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