One of the cornerstones of faith in the low-fat diet for a long time has been the low prevalence of heart disease among Japanese people.  Way back when Ancel Keys did his famous Seven Countries study, and picked seven countries out of a bunch more that supported his thesis, one that stuck out was Japan.  Traditional Japanese at the time ate a high-carb, fairly low-fat diet based on a ton of rice and some fish, and they didn’t have much heart disease, and they got more of it when they moved to America.  Keys jumped on this as proof that fat causes heart disease, and we’ve been repeating it ever since.  You’ve probably heard it many times, maybe even repeated it yourself: if you want to be healthy and thin, eat broiled fish and rice like the Japanese.  (The reasoning behind the Mediterranean diet is much the same.) Read more »

Here’s a great talk by Gary Taubes called “Why We Get Fat.”  I really can’t recommend it enough.  If you don’t have the time or the inclination to read his long, scholarly tome Good Calories, Bad Calories, do yourself a favor and watch this instead.  He sums up the weight gain/loss part of his book in less time than a TV drama, and there are no commercials.

Read more »

When I wrote about my cholesterol numbers a while back, I looked around for a graph showing studies correlating deaths to cholesterol levels.  I thought I’d seen one somewhere, but couldn’t find it, and didn’t have the time to build one from the numbers myself.  Well, I found one at Hyperlipid, in a very good post on the way the study results were slanted to give us the cholesterol myths and billion-dollar anti-cholesterol drug business we have now.  I cropped out the graph:

Deaths and CHD "events" versus total cholesterol

Read more »

Now that I’ve written my position paper on raw milk, I can move on to the article I had in mind in the first place: making raw milk yogurt.  (As Bill Cosby said in Buck Buck/Fat Albert, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one.”)  If you’re still not sure about using raw milk, or only have pasteurized milk from the store, you can still use this recipe; just watch for a special note in part 2. Read more »