How Your Paradigms Determine Your Beliefs

When reading scientific studies and books, the paradigm with which you approach a subject determines how you will interpret the data. For example, science believes cholesterol causes atherosclerosis because it is present in blocked arteries. If a study group reduces dietary cholesterol and has less heart attacks than a control group, then it’s obvious that reduced dietary cholesterol reduces heart attacks and should be eliminated from the diet.

But if there’s increased mortality in the study group, meaning more people on a reduced cholesterol diet die, well that’s just a fluke that doesn’t get mentioned in the abstract. Or the scientists state at the onset that only the statistics from those surviving the study will be included in the analysis.

Based on this one association–cholesterol and atherosclerosis–foods with cholesterol are placed off limits or severely restricted. Now a paradigm affects your beliefs about what foods are healthy for you. Meat contains cholesterol. Meat bad. Plants don’t have cholesterol, so plants good!

But what if cholesterol is simply a bandaid the body uses for damage caused by something else, akin to plaster smeared in a crack? Then reducing cholesterol in the diet and taking drugs to inhibit the production of cholesterol will be harmful, not to mention the health risks of ingesting pharmaceuticals on a daily basis. You’re basically interfering with the body’s ability to heal itself and poisoning it at the same time. There’s horror for you!

You also move away from foods containing cholesterol, despite the fact that you may have been eating them for a long, long time without heart disease. Butter is bad. Mayonnaise is fattening. Cream is deadly. Coconut oil will kill you dead. Everybody just knows that fat and cholesterol are bad for them. (Well, not everybody, thankfully.)

My Paradigm Led Me Astray for Years

My entire life I’ve heard that saturated fats are bad, and that cholesterol from eggs, for example, is to be avoided for a healthy heart. This belief has so saturated (no pun intended) our society that it closes us off from open-minded inquiry.

Now that I’ve opened myself to the possibility that meat is a healthy food, I find myself starting all over, albeit with a well rounded background from the “other camp,” having been a vegan sympathizer who now thinks that a vegetarian diet is suboptimal–perhaps even harmful over the long term.

(Certainly not harmful to the animals that didn’t have to die to feed us, but then again, they were never bred or born, so I’m not sure how something that never existed can be grateful. Maybe some animals end up in a nonprofit rescue that solicits money from people, so instead of paying farmers for food animals to sustain ourselves, we pay nice animal-loving people to care for animals we will never meet. I guess that’s a possible evolutionary pathway for our species. Eventually we’d stop breeding animals altogether, and the stupid chickens, turkeys, slow-moving cattle and pigs and sheep will all get gobbled up by wolves that will make a comeback since farmer’s won’t be trying to kill them to protect their cattle. Oh my, I could go on forever in this vein.)

So knowing that the fats in meat were bad for my heart, the natural path to follow led to a plant-based diet. Once deciding that plants were healthier than meat, I had to figure out which plants were the best.

Coming from a natural hygiene perspective, raw plants are best (enter Herbert Shelton) because they provide maximum nutrition. So that leaves out grains and pulses entirely unless sprouted (enter Ann Wigmore who brought us wheatgrass). If you’re not willing to choke down wheatgrass, you can add superfoods like blue-green algae and “sacred chocolate” (enter David Wolfe) to make up for deficiencies in the soil. And don’t forget to eat the soil for B12.

Or perhaps you leave out grains and pulses altogether, but now you don’t have enough energy (from starch), so you eat lots of oils and avocados. But if you buy into the paradigm that says fats are bad for you, then you end up 80/10/10ing it (enter Doug Graham) with massive amounts of fruit for calories. At this point you develop a haughty disdain for all raw fooders who don’t eat like you, because you are now pure potentiality–high on a steady stream of fruit sugar.

But eating too little greens can leave you feeling tired after a while from not getting enough minerals, so you start making green smoothies (enter Victoria Boutenko). Or all that fruit might even be really bad for your blood and fruit should be a minimal part of your diet (enter Gabriel Cousens and Robert Young).

Is cooked food really poison? (enter Joe Alexander)

The Data I Didn’t Look At

But what if the paradigm is completely wrong? What if humans have been eating meat for over 2 million years and our bodies have adapted to this dietary? What if the science on which this paradigm is based was just poorly executed by someone trying to prove himself to his colleagues after being humiliated (enter Ancel Keyes)? What if there are meat-eating societies free of cardiovascular disease?

Why, meat becomes a fabulous food. It has all the amino acids your body needs as well as fat, minerals, vitamins, and B12. It doesn’t have to be imported from Equador or Costa Rica. You can survive anywhere you can sharpen a stick.

Naturally raised meat is low in fat but includes healthy omega 3 fats lacking in factory farmed meat. The protein and fat in meat provide a lot of energy and leave you feeling sated for hours. You can eat it raw or cooked.

Cow, chicken, pig, goat, lamb, deer, pheasant, duck, squirrel, grouse, pigeon, rabbit, horse, dog, the sky’s the limit.

If the belief that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you is false, then everything you believe about diet has to be reevaluated. Just when I thought I had arrived…figures.

Meanwhile, this grass-fed, dry-aged, Piedmontese sirloin grown on grass half an hour from my home served as dinner for two nights at only $7.95 a pound. I have never seen a steak with such a deep, rich color. And it tasted pretty good too. My cats approve.