Strong Medicine Part Two

“The main weapons in the prevention and treatment of disease and human carelessness will probably be food and exercise. To my thinking, the greatest advance in recorded medical history is the thirty-minute walk before breakfast. ” (p46 Donaldson)

Now, the continuation of this series is a pseudo-book review about a doctor who solved weight loss by making his patients walk, giving them fatty meat, and monitoring what else they ate. I’ve also broken it up into categories of important things that stuck out to me. To recap, this book was part of the process that helped me to not only change my views on nutrition but in seeing western medicine for what it had become. 

Calorie Counting 

“No! Calorie counting is for the birds. There should be no sensation of hunger in proper weight reduction. You weren’t hungry at any time during the last twenty-one weeks were you?

“No” he admitted.” (p49 Donaldson) 

This quote is from a conversation the author, Blake Donaldson, was having with one of his patients. When it comes to either building muscle or losing weight, counting one’s calories is always the go-to answer from most fitness and nutrition professionals. Given that I have a personal training certification that sort of makes me an expert.

Not really though they just give us waves tops of nutrition information for our studies. Most of it is probably off anyways as the roots of modern dietetics aren’t really based on, “Science.” For me, I’m an observational kind of guy. What works for me, what works for others, what has remained consistent throughout history? 

Counting how many calories go in and come out seems like a recent thing in human history. I say seems because I’ve read up on several of the strongmen and the dudes from Physical Culture which was a time period when in the early 20th century everybody became interested in working out and getting healthier. 

Louis Leers, Earle Liederman, and Alexander Zass

These dudes, and dudets, had impressive bodies for their day and even ours. Keep in mind this was before supplements and steroids. They would talk about what to eat and what not to eat but I haven’t stumbled upon anything in the realm of weighing your food to meet a goal for a weight increase or decrease. They would eat real food until somewhat satiated. Some did intermittent fasting/one meal a day. They also just trained efficiently with their focus on ability and movement over how well they looked. Performance was the primary, and aesthetics was the secondary. 

Maxick, Bernarr Mcfadden, and Joseph Greenstein

This is the approach I choose to take. Constantly measuring my food and putting numbers on the whiteboard to get to a goal weight of mine is no way to live. 

Me when I’m counting my calories

Just get active, go outside, train in a progressive manner, stay away from the processed stuff, and keep a cheerful mind. 

It wasn’t till the coming of the barbell/performance-enhancing drugs(PEDs), the wonderful ingredients that are put in our food, and a sedentary lifestyle over the past few decades that there was any need to count how much enters and exits. 

Because heavy weights in tandem with PEDs allowed humans to attain higher degrees of muscle mass than they had before. You can’t do this just by eating a bread roll every day you have to monitor everything you eat to give your body the necessary amounts of material to build that mass. 

In regards to the ingredients put in our food, some of this stuff caused us to put on undesirable weight which I cover some of it here talking about vegetable-seed oil. The rate at which people were ballooning up in modernity caused people to scramble for a solution. The obvious being that due to the abundance in our society, it was just that people were eating too much. Which, If I was back then I probably would have said the same thing but we have more evidence now. I’ve read so many anecdotes and talked to people who have noticed how food in Western countries tends to balloon them up despite the little difference in portion size. Not only does it cause us to balloon it’s very addictive through the use of taste enhancers¹ like monosodium glutamate, sodium aspartate, disodium inosinate, and disodium adenylate just to name a few so it creates a snowball effect. 

Cholesterol 

“What is all this propaganda about cholesterol anyway?” (p52 Donaldson) 

“People don’t stop to realize that cholesterol is an important constituent of the framework that many life processes proceed. Cholesterol is closely related to vitamin D which prevents rickets and enters into the formation of bile acids and sex hormones…. Cholesterol has been made a whipping boy, which is unjustified.” (p53 Donaldson) 

I seemed to have glossed over this part when I first read it but later came back to this concept through several videos from Good Doctors on youtube that truly questioned the knowledge they had been given. 

I can only speak for myself and I can’t recommend anything to anybody at this stage in life but I know in my bones that the mainstream cholesterol narrative is either built on a house of cards, or extremely myopic. 

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Normie Doctor - “If you get high cholesterol or high enough of the “Bad” cholesterol you will get a heart attack.”

Me - “So lowering my cholesterol will do the opposite?”

Normie Doctor - “Yes”

Me - “Then what about……

This “A survey of the incidence of acute myocardial infarction and the dietary behaviour in railway populations in India showed that the disease was 7 times more common among South Indians as compared with the Punjabis in the North, even though the fat intake of Punjabis was 8-19 times more than that of South Indians, and was chiefly of animal origin.”²

Or This “The serum-cholesterol levels fell in the corn-oil group, but by the end of two years the proportions of patients remaining alive and free of reinfarction (fatal or non-fatal) were 75 %, 57 %, and 52 % in the three groups” respectively.³ 

And This “Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes.” ⁴

Normie Doctor-

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All I’m saying is something ain’t adding up. 

Cholesterol is an important part of the human body. It’s a precursor to testosterone. If the establishment is recommending a low-cholesterol diet it should be no surprise that men’s fertility is tanking these days. Hashtag population control. 

Like all things in big medicine, I believe it's just an excuse to sell more pills. 

Carbohydrates 

“One piece of toast can raise the levels of pyruvic acid and insulin in the blood and stop excess fat from burning. When plenty of fat is eaten with a meal, however, the pituitary hormone that promotes the breakdown of stored fat is stimulated.” (p57 Donaldson) 

Now some context. Carbohydrates break down and turn to sugar and the liver converts it to glycogen also known as, “Animal Starch” which is stored in the liver and muscles. The rest and the majority are converted to fat. Pyruvic Acid is there to break down glycogen into energy. But if it is not converted to energy can become fat. 

This is what's part of this ketogenic diet style of eating. It's a way to ensure that your body is burning and utilizing fat as fuel. Consuming more than the necessary carbohydrates stops this process. Unfortunately, I have a sweet tooth so I’ve never done full keto or full carnivore. But being partially carnivore for a short stint I did get cut up. 

But putting on muscle mass was a huge problem though. Protein isn’t the only thing required for muscle building in terms of nutrition. 

“Any disaster that may overtake him, even to the extent of ground moles getting on his lawn, will be blamed on his “red meat” diet.” (p59 Donaldson) 

Yeah, pretty much. Especially if it control the peasants.

Machines and Tests

“Machine diagnosis is only a small part of the evidence considered by the skilled family physician. He knows that machines can tell lies and laboratory reports be in error.” (p72 Donaldson) 

This quote hits close to home for me. We’re raised to trust doctors and the process through which they find and heal our ailments. Someone’s life, and their family can be turned upside down through the “Discoveries” made and the follow-on procedures to correct that “Discovery.”

Wrap Up

“That implies useful work no matter how humble, and some serenity of mind, and normal weight, and daily outdoor exercise, and enough amino acids in fresh fat meat to do a good job of repair on breaking-down arteries.” (p74 Donaldson) 

Thank you for making it to the end and comments are below.

Until next time…

1. “Evaluation of eight kinds of flavor enhancers of umami taste by an electronic tongue” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.2178#:~:text=Besides%20monosodium%20glutamate%2C%20sodium%20aspartate,flavor%20enhancers%20for%20food%20applications

2. “Geographical aspects of acute myocardial infarction in India with special reference to patterns of diet and eating.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC459155/

3. “Corn Oil in Treatment of Ischaemic Heart Disease” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2166702/

4. “Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73)” https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246