🖨️ Print post
The Worst Ingredient in the World – Interview with Dr. Chris Knobbe
Dr. Eric Berg
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MuYvGyNXvPk
It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.
A lot of people are sure they know Mark Twain wrote or said that somewhere. Ironically, no one can prove it, and no one seems to be sure who originated that quip. Here’s another one most people would assume is true. From 1922 to 1987, sugar consumption skyrocketed. Well, according to the USDA Economic Research Service, average sugar consumption went from four hundred seventy-three calories per day in 1922 to four hundred ninety-seven calories per day in 1987. Not much of a rocket in that sky. Meanwhile, obesity skyrocketed over 500 percent over that time period and diabetes around 2000 percent. The correlation between obesity or diabetes and sugar is weak. No one is defending sugar as a harmless or nutrient-dense food, but there is a much more likely villain in this case. As shown in a key chart from the video, that would be seed oils.
Dr. Chris Knobbe explains that unsaturated fats in seed oils can be used as energy by mitochondria, but doing so damages the mitochondria so that they work much less efficiently or not at all. Then your energy levels go down because that is where energy comes from. Then you get hungry and eat more, trying to obtain more energy. This cycle also destroys your ability to assimilate vitamins A, D and K2. Everything snowballs from there.
He gives us some interesting details about the history of seed oils. Back, back, back in the mid-1800s, cottonseed oil was used as machine oil, lamp oil and other things. We ate no seed oils. When food companies first tried to convince their customers to use cottonseed oil, that didn’t sell too well. It would be like trying to get us today to consume 10W30 motor oil. Yum. They eventually found a way to make cottonseed oil look like lard (Crisco), and then it started to take off. Seed oils got a further boost when they started demonizing saturated fats.
Why would they do this? Why do corporations do anything ($$$)? Eighty grams of soy oil costs less than six cents. The same amount of butter costs thirty-six cents. The math is pretty simple. They can charge dollars for pop tarts that cost pennies to make. That’s a nice racket if you have no conscience. One further point: it takes an obscene amount of corn to make one tablespoon of corn oil, and the field corn used to make this oil is not something any human would want to eat, but in a world where food supply is increasingly a concern, using land and labor resources for something that is slowly killing us seems a tremendous waste. Some might call it a crime against humanity.
Knobbe briefly summarizes what kind of food we should eat. The best stuff is food that doesn’t have a label—meat, eggs, fruit and dairy that hasn’t been corrupted (sadly, most ice cream would not qualify). Contrary to what food and pharmaceutical corporations might want you to think, we are not machines that need to be lubed up with machine oil. The thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2024
🖨️ Print post
Leave a Reply