Or else you'll be funkee

I picked up this book in the bookstore the other day called "The Okinawa Diet: Live Forever" or something like that, and read a couple pages out of curiosity (what do Okinawans eat? Do they really live forever? Could I live forever if I ate lots of funny sounding melons, imported Central American root vegetables and obscure Japanese variants of cabbage?)... turns out they eat lots of fruit, vegetables, fish, rice, and pasta, with the occasional red meat, frying oil and dairy. Revolutionary, isn't it? (OK, so they do eat a lot of obscure fruits and vegetables, including daikon, which I find interesting because I bought one at the grocery store a couple months ago because it looked fresh and edible, but I couldn't find any recipes suggesting what to do with it, so it rotted in the produce drawer... turns out it is a "watery root vegetable" that likes to be simmered in its own juices.)

Back to the beef fat and pig fat diet:

I'm a little worried (and when I say a little, I mean, a little -- this doesn't exactly weigh on my mind all day, except perhaps when I'm looking at health insurance rates or busy finding things to do at work that don't involve telemarketing) that we're permitting the profit-driven low-carb industry to convince us (as a society -- personally, I'd rather eat fried earthworms than any of those processed low-carb substances they're marketing as "Atkins-friendly" "food") to eat even worse than we already do.

Side Note: I find it intolerable when people throw out terms like "profit driven" and "corporate" as if that proved the evil of everyone and anyone involved with the noun thereby modified, a la Michael Moore. When I tack profit-driven onto the noun industry, I use it to indicate that the profit motive will be brought back up later on, not to indicate that all things profitable are bad. Profit motives produce lots of great things. Like electricity. But sometimes they make bad things. Like NASCAR.

Useless Analogy: It's like convincing a man who's smoked a pack a day his whole life that switching to abusing alcohol will keep him from getting lung cancer. First off, its not very likely too ward off lung cancer and, second, its likely to get him into a completely different set of problems. Like adding even more heart diseased patients to our already-strained healthcare system's burdens. So well-intentioned people are getting sucked into this, by the rather unproven assertion that Atkins is healthy, and will be the victims: people who just wanted to be a little healthier, to lose a bit of extra weight. There's nothing wrong with that desire, either -- let's just hope it doesn't get us into a lot of financial trouble (when all the beef fat dieters start dying of heart disease), courtesy of some large food manufacturers.

Lesson Learned: Companies aren't asking "Is low-carb food good for people?" Companies are asking "Will low-carb foods make us a lot of money?" The answer is yes to the second, which unfortunately compels them to try and convince people that the answer to the first question is yes, irregardless of whether the answer to that question is actually yes or no. Enter lobbyists and corporately-funded scientists stage right.

And that's why I think the market must be regulated. Where, by whom, how much, etc. will not be resolved at this time.