I wrote the following email to you in December, 2018:
Dear Dr. Stordalen,
I read about your personal story and health condition, and watched your TED presentation, in which you said that there is no cure for your health condition.
As an autoimmune disease, there is a strong chance that there is a way to at least place the condition into remission. I found an article for you that was a case study on a health condition–like yours–from 1932, which was completely cured by ketosis.
I provide the link here to the article and also attach it: https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(32)80002-8/abstract
I know that the ketogenic diet is against your principles. In particular, the reversing effects materialize most from autophagy, which starts at about 16 hours of not eating. The entire immune system replaces at 48-hour mark of not eating. These are based on modern research–much from Longo et al., and others. I don’t want to bore you with a list, in case you are not interested.
I hope this email reaches you. Please feel free to ask me any questions, I am glad to help.
Yours truly,
Angela
However, I received the following response from info@eatforum.org:
Dear Angela,
On behalf of Dr. Stordalen I would like to thank you for your kind email and thoughtfulness.
Dr. Stordalen is weekly contacted by people that want to help. We look at suggestions we receive, but it is impossible to give concrete feedback to everyone.
All the best,
Person X
Office of Founder & Executive Chair, Dr. Gunhild Stordalen
EAT
Kongens gate 11, 0153 Oslo, Norway
+47 992 51 382
eatforum.org
So this means you will never receive my email. Fair enough, so I write you one here:
Your Misguided Dream
Up until a couple of weeks ago I never heard of you, the billionaire Gunhild Stordalen. This all changed when the Eat-Lancet Commission published in The Lancet and I decided to look into who this person is who plans to turn the world upside down and why you are doing that. At first, I just wrote about the Eat-Lancet Commission, like many other scientists and concerned citizens did, see mine here. I searched for more information about what your plans are and then I found this TED video, that explained to the world that you have a terminal autoimmune condition (note terminal and autoimmune are sort of oxymoron, since we now understand that autoimmune implies that the condition can be reversed, or at least put to remission). You stated that because you have such short life on this planet, you want to leave a legacy of making the planet healthy by making it vegan and sustainable.
In your thinking, a vegan world is a great world: animals are saved, people fill their tummies with lots of great veggies and grains, they are healthy—like you (pun intended)—and we live forever after. It is a lovely dream, but it isn’t true. You gave a lecture titled Food Can Fix It! In Stockholm, in 2017, saying: you don’t actually care about food; you care more about people, human rights, equal opportunity no matter where you are. You care about creating a brighter future for everyone. Food leads to sustainable development. Some of the other speakers discussed topics such as “How Can We End Malnutrition” (Dr. Demaio) or “Can Palm Oil Ever Be Sustainable? (Professor Shankar)
Damages To Nature
If you truly care about people, human rights, equal opportunity, and want to create a brighter future for everyone, please spend your billions on something other than turning the planet vegan. The vegan world has already destroyed a large percent of our soil by industrial level spraying, tilling, and annuals that destroy the top soil layer and convert it to sand. Here is an introduction of what happens to lands used for agriculture close to your home (in Norway)—this is happening in Denmark, where the Danish Centre for Food and Agriculture explains why the planting of annuals to grow food crops causes soil erosion.
Scientists suggest that the earth has already lost a third of its arable land to soil erosion as a result of mass agriculture. The Land Institute suggests that the damage that annual food crops make can only be reversed by the growing of perennials that are maintained by grazing animals, such as cattle, sheep, bison, and others—all of which can be used as human food for sustenance. Allan Savory details step by step what it takes to help the soil recover: it needs perennials and grazing animals.
Water used by crop fields with pesticides get filled with toxins and as they seep into the ground or get washed away by rain into rivers, creeks, lakes, and the oceans, they contaminate our drinking water. Where I live, in California, all of our waters are already contaminated everywhere. We have caused much damage to our fish supply in rivers, lakes, and oceans with all the pesticide-laden wash offs after rains.
The Damage to People
The vegan diet is considered by many to be a superior diet to any other. Why that is believed is no mystery. The Seventh-day Adventist church’s influence reaches even the American Diabetic Association’s pocketbook. Read a perfect summary here. When people talk about carbohydrates, such as plants, fruits, nuts, seeds, and grains (herewith referred to as “plant matter”), what exactly do they refer to as nutrients? Plant matter provides mostly carbohydrates, some protein—type of protein matters—and some fats—type of fats matter. The carbohydrates that plant matter provides are not essential to the human diet. Neither is fiber, labeled as a form of carbohydrate; it provides no glucose as energy. Plant matters do provide vitamins, however, with the amount of chemicals in them that block the absorption of those nutrients, question remains: what exactly is plant matter good for? Certainly not a necessary food that all humans should be placed on.
Plant Proteins
Examining the protein in plant matters is important. Most literature look at total protein content though all are well aware that there are two main types of proteins: essential and nonessential. If something has a high amount of protein, it doesn’t automatically mean that such protein is essential and good “protein value”. Take soy, for example, the vegan-equivalent of high protein. I summarized in an article how to evaluate protein by quality. Essential protein ratio to nonessential is the most critical ratio. Foods with higher essential protein ratio are preferred. In my article I show that the ratio of essential to nonessential amino acids in soy is about equivalent to brown rice, 0.70 and 0.69, respectively, whereas in Atlantic salmon it is 0.93, in steak, lamb, whole milk, eggs it is 0.91. The sum of essential amino acids in 100 gr (3.5 oz) soy is 17.68 gr, whereas the nonessential amino acids in the same, all of which convert to glucose, is 25.33 gr. That is, 58% of soy protein converts to glucose, and this is in addition to 30.16 gr carbs, all of which convert to glucose, all of which is nonessential, so we don’t need it. The total glucose value of 100 gr soy is 55.49 gr in 100 gr soy bean. The biological value of soy is sub-optimal. The biological value of the protein in dairy, eggs, lamb, beef, or Atlantic salmon outweigh that of soy by a large margin.
Since protein quality in plant matter is substandard to protein quality in fish and animal matter, it is important to draw a distinction here: eating only plant matter proteins may cause malnutrition—one of the very thing you fight against.
You have been misled.
Plant fatty Acids
Fatty acids in plants are very minimal. The human brain is over 60% fat. Fatty acids are essential nutrients, meaning we must eat them—we cannot create them. All fatty acids are essential, especially DHA omega 3 fatty acids. The human brain is made from DHA. There is no DHA fatty acid in plant matter. Plant mater has ALA form of omega 3. ALA is a precursor, which is absorbed very poorly by humans—we lack the proper process to efficiently convert ALA to DHA. So only a very small percent of ALA converts to DHA.
Furthermore, we are also familiar with plant matters being completely void of some other nutrients, such as B12, an essential vitamin for neuronal and blood health. Calcium doesn’t absorb from plants well—calcium is fat soluble, and plants have little fat and way too much of the absorption is blocked. It would take 5.5 cups of kale to equal the amount of calcium in 1 cup of whole milk, or 5 cups of red beans to equal the calcium in 1 cup of whole milk. It would take 1lb black beans (3.5 cups) to get as much protein as from a small 3 oz slice of steak. So, based on this volume increase necessary to meet nutritional needs, is living on plant matters alone really sustainable?
You have also been misled about greenhouse emission.
What Really Causes the Greenhouse Gas Emission?
Most of the emission that is responsible for the greenhouse gases actually comes from the industrial production of plant matter for commercial use. Furthermore, while cows most certainly emit methane, they are herbivores after all, they do so in excess for two completely correctable reasons:
- They are not fed the food their digestive system is designed for. If we stopped to feed them soy and corn and let them graze on grasses as they would naturally do, their indigestion would stop and much less gas would leave their digestive systems
- Healthy soil full of organic matter and bacteria actually remove some of these gases, convert them into soil nutrients, and pull them back into the soil. Except that cows have no room to roam the fields because of the mass production of plant matters and they are restricted to unhealthy feedlots, where there is no bacteria in the soil and they are fed food that is not meant for them. So yeah—they have indigestion and are driven by anxiety. We all would emit more gases under those conditions
The irony is that humans lack the digestive tract that would allow us to digest the plant matters you are forcing on us and as a result, human waste products are piled up in heaps. Did you know that an average vegan has at least 3 huge bowel movements a day? At the same time, a carnivorous human has, on average, one small bowel movement a day.
We most certainly have to incorporate the human waste products into our evaluation of a healthy planet! Don’t you agree? If the whole world becomes vegan, there will be three times as much human waste and human methane gases produced. In effect, humans will replace the cows in greenhouse gas production. Is that a great business model?
Where You Should Spend Your Billions of $ Instead
Given that over 40% of all plant matter produced goes to waste, I recommend the following action instead of making the world vegan. Please spend your money and buy up the land where the 40% plant matter was produced that went to trash. Replace all plant matter growth with perennial grasses and meadows and place cows and other herbivores to feed on them to recover the soil. The animals on those lands will provide dairy, eggs, and other strongly needed essential protein and fatty acid rich foods to people around the world. It is much more desirable, more sustainable, and will truly create a healthy world.
The fact that you are vegan and because you believe that eating animals is unethical, should remain your business.
After all, you said that you support freedom for all people! So let them be free to choose what they want to eat rather than what you tell them to eat! That’s not freedom for all! It is ignorance of the science available about your health condition that makes you into a sacrificial lamb, while bringing fame for you.
Best wishes,
Angela
Comments are welcome and are moderated for appropriateness
Clueless Doctors & Scientists 
What a wonderful and insightful article.
It’s ironic how a person can be dying of an “ incurable disease” which is brought on by her way of eating , then wants the whole world to eat like she does.
Her staff guards her replies so she’ll never know she could have saved her life by changing her diet to something more practical to her needs.
Meanwhile her billions of $ will go to making the world a worse place forcing all to be vegan. Sad.
Liz N.
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Thanks Liz, I completely agree with you. It’s selfish and she is totally getting rich and famous on her condition. That’s her goal and not global health and wellness at all.
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Makes total sense.
And Vegans are not even into real plant food. They seem to eat just about any junk or fake food or invented junk the commercial food industry whips out of their chemical labs, as long as not coming from an animal. They have no idea about health and healthy eating or even the requirements of our organism’s biology. I really don’t understand where it all started because it’s simply insane and actually very unscientific (as opposed to medical research, as the medical field only goes after any artificial junk and calls that science and healing🙄). 1st order of business is to not to listen to medical research bc they have censored research on nature, for all they think is “synthetic chemicals” and now genes, instead of how organisms and nature work
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Very true being1111. I can tell you where it all started in the US. It started with the Seventh-day Adventist group, and specifically Kellogg (the cereal giant who first designed Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. His story is written up in many places. He started the vegetarian diet with special restrictions in order to tame his sexual urges! Apparently he never in his life had sex and went through hellish experimentations to reduce his sexual urges. He found his solution in the vegetarian diet.
I got my doctorate close to Loma Linda, the headquarters of the original Seventh-day Adventist movement, and I spent some time in the Loma Linda hospital doing some research. Even mustard is prohibited because it is “excitatory”. Everything is made from plants, including the burgers–this is way before all the fake meats of today.
Of course, there is also a very large Indian population that is vegetarian, but they drink milk and eat dairy. So some semblance of a semi-normal way of eating, so they have remained relatively heathy even with that diet. And many eat eggs and some even fish.
The vegan movement is completely without foundation. There have never been any human tribes that lived off of plants alone in the history of human kind. With this said and done, my opinion is this: as long as they leave me alone, I will leave them alone. Don’t try to change me and my way of eating. If they do–like the Eat Lancet is trying to change the whole world to vegetarian–then we are in it for a fight. 😉 I will never ever be a vegetarian. In fact, I don’t eat vegetables at all–I eat some minimal fruits but not veggies.
And so, I support vegetarians and vegans in what they do: they eat what I don’t eat and I eat what they don’t eat. That’s great. We don’t compete and guess who will be healthier. 🙂
Cheers,
Angela
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Today (Sunday June 20, 2019) I came across an interview (in Dutch) with Michael Mosley. Quite interesting I must say. So I checked him out a bit, and noticed he wrote this book:
“The Clever Guts Diet – How to revolutionise your body from the inside out” (2017). Ever heard about this guy? If so, any thoughts on his ideas?
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Yeah.. he is a fake. He is part of the “What the Health” vegan propaganda movie. Full of lies.
(Sorry for the posting delay; I just got back from vacation).
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Wow, congratulations. A superb measured and comprehensive analysis of human and environmental (and soil) health. Thank you.
It is such a shame that the wisdom of Sir Robert McCarrison, John Boyd Orr and Dr Walter Yellowlees etc are not acknowledged today by people like Dr Stordalen.
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Thanks Michael!
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These guys did a pretty good job
Transforming the
livestock sector through
the Sustainable Development Goals
Click to access ca1201en.pdf
228 pages so it took a while to read but it is a much more balanced and nuanced look at animal agriculture. The vegans/Seventh Day Adventists have infiltrated the top levels of the WHO and UN along with most mainstream media, including Wikipedia, and of course Harvard and Oxford and The Lancet but they appear to have missed the FAO.
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Damn… 228 pages.. yes, the vegans have missed a few and I think the vegan story is starting to unravel. With freedom of information, the truth is coming to the surface and more and more people are turning their backs on veganism. I spent a day yesterday watching videos of ex-vegans on YouTube. I am hoping they will totally fall apart still in my lifetime. I hope the new generation (my grand-kids age) will be smart enough to dump the whole ideology.
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I don’t mind people being vegan, as long as they do it properly – all the more meat for me! I DO mind when they want to control what everyone else eats. One of the more clueless vegan doctors on Twitter was boasting about his vegan dog . . .and they claim to be against animal abuse . . .
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😦 Poor dog… I feel very sorry about helpless creatures in the care of clueless people. My cat is now getting some raw stuff. She has been ruined before I realized what junk she was getting.. at least I could put her on grain free but she has become a devoted fish eater and a carboholic with her treats. So some carbs do get in there unfortunately. I didn’t know any better 10 years ago.
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Yes and there are now so many obese and diabetic pets since they started manufacturing petfood based on grains. Just like the people. Farmers have told me that overfeeding grains, especially wheat, to cows and chickens makes them ill too. See pate de foie gras for details . . .
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Yes indeed. I read somewhere that they can only feed grains (corn specifically) to cows for 6 weeks else they die… not sure where I read this and it may or may not be true… but I know that standard pet foods are poison for pets. My older son has several pets, 2 are cats. One drinks a whole large bowl of water every day.. that is one diabetic cat for sure! I now even put a little salt into my cat’s water! She is like a kitten again playing all day long–I also changed her diet to a more fish-based though she is still crazy about her carb treats.. oh well…
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Just a slight correction……………you can feed grain to a cow/bovine for as long as you care to pay for it………..as long as you do not feed too much. Cows do quite well being fed grain and do not die. IF you feed too much grain at a time or too much for an extended period of time…….it can cause them problems.
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Thanks for the correction. Perhaps what I read–whatever I read since I don’t remember where–is that they were feeding them grains only. I honestly don’t know.
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My farmer neighbour, now retired (well he still owns the land but employs contractors to work it) was a fan of “Barley beef” because he preferred the colour of the fat (probably because it was full of omega 6) but made the point that you could only grain feed for so long, and the barley beef was killed early compared to the others fed on haylage/silage. Some of the old breeds can stay out in winter as long as the land is suitable but most go indoors for several months. At most they may be supplemented with barley or other grains but in proportion to the grass, and some farmers use corn as whole crop silage – it appears that the grains aren’t a problem when they are sufficiently diluted with fibrous vegetation. After all they would have evolved eating the grass seeds and all when it was ripe, just not more than that and not all year.
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Grass seeds were may or may not have been part of their diet since they moved on to younger grasses. We will never know how much seeds they would eat in nature. Most grazing animals move off the patch when it is overly ripe and head for the fresh new growth. Not sure much seed was consumed. I think seeds were pretty much left for the birds to eat and carry away precisely to drop it in my yard. 😉
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Under Damages to Nature; “..grazing animals, such as kettle, sheep, bison, and others”
Did you mean cattle?
Great points in the article.I do appreciate the efforts people who understand nature are making against these Utopianists.
Thank you.
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Oops! Thanks for catching the typo! Amazing. I must have read this paper 20 times! 😦 Thanks!
Angela
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So good! Very clear and thorough, hitting all the right points. I will share it as much as I can. The pernicious effect of the 7th Day Adventists on all of this is truly terrifying and, I hope, something that starts to be more widely known.
Where are the billionaire carnivores, dammit! They need to get involved.
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Thanks PaleoJuan! Indeed! We need some carnivore (or at least keto) billionaires! 🙂
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The vast majority of billionaires ARE carnivores…….just that for most of them……..their passion is directed elsewhere. For billionaire vegans/vegetarians……..being so passionate about challenging people’s food choices ……is likely due to their compromised mental and emotional health……..ironically due to their food choices.
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Good points Paul!
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Agreed! Then their intellectual integrity is also challenged which they also fail to notice. Then there’s all the money from all their sponsors. If I was on Twitter I would write
Tim Noakes changes his mind when faced with better evidence. Walt Willett changes his mind when faced with better money.
The sponsors of FRESH have been listed on Twitter and are as expected. Meat and dairy don’t have nearly as much profit to spend on dogma. Then the Seventh Day Adventists are lurking in the background.
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Agreed to all points. Tim Noakes is the only real scientist in the bunch you mentioned. In fact, most scientists–even those not influenced by money–will not do what Tim did, because it can be a career damaging step–it petty much became for Tim.
I don’t like to talk to my trainer too much (I weight lift) about nutrition because he is a CICO guy and just too green behind the ears to understand the laws of thermodynamics, let alone apply them, but as little as he knows, he can go on about Tim of how critical the industry is against him because of his mistake of switching and how wrong Tim is and how the journals attacked his article.. blah blah blah…
Tim clearly risked his reputation by changing his mind, though eventually it will come up as his benefit, but much later. My trainer is just 30 years old and if all he can do, at this young age, is yap about CICO, we have a few decades to go before Tim regains his image in the industry.
Have I mentioned to you the professor I proved wrong a few years ago? He was a very famous guy based on a particular theory on risk. I was working on my doctorate at the time (I got my doctorate late in my life), and was in Corsica for a special training for I think 2 weeks at the University of Paris or whatever that was but on a Corsica campus. There, each student was working one-on-one with their choice of faculty, and all faculty were world famous big names. So I chose this guy because his work I wanted to challenge all through my studies.
After this training was finished and we all returned to our homes–he is in California as well only north and me south–I decided to prove mathematically that his biggest work was incorrect. I totally proved it and sent him my mathematical proof. His response: “you are totally correct but don’t tell anyone!” A few years later he got his Nobel Prize in Economics… for the very thing I proved wrong. When I sent him an email of congratulation, he didn’t even write “thank you”… Ego is more powerful than money. 🙂
On the flip side though, he will go to his grave knowing that he got the Nobel for something I proved wrong. 😉
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Angela! Thank you for your fabulous summary of the issues.
You’ve put it all together in such a readable, comprehensible, logical way that I can’t imagine would-be vegans or vegetarians not understanding the error of their choices. This is like a condensed version of Lierre Kieth’s Vegetarian Myth. (http://www.lierrekeith.com/)
A wonderful and valuable post!
Thank you.
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Fantastic, thanks for the link! I was looking for this but could not recall the name. 🙂
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This is fascinating. In the UK fibre is being heavily pushed but you write:
“The carbohydrates that plant matter provides are not essential to the human diet. Neither is fiber, labeled as a form of carbohydrate; it provides no glucose as energy”
Do you encourage or discourage or see-not-much-point of eating fibre?
Thank you
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There are multiple views on this Christopher–and I also have multiple views. It always depends on the person.
On the one hand, I discourage insoluble fiber because it is basically “bark” and it scratches the intestinal walls, causing harm for many people. Probably not all people, but for those for whom it is harmful, I would discourage fiber.
I would also suggest that fiber has value in certain categories.
For example, if someone is in ketosis (by any means, not just the ketogenic diet), eating fiber may be completely useless and irrelevant. That is because fiber is digested by the gut flora, and they provide us butyrate in exchange. Butyrate is a short chain fatty acid, a ketone precursor. If one is in ketosis, the person makes plenty of beta-hydroxybutyrate, the ketone form of butyrate. So there is no need to get the bacteria to make it. Might as well fill up our tummies with thing we can digest.
I would also envision, in some circumstances at least, that eating fiber can be beneficial. Some genetic conditions may make it difficult for someone to digest food, particularly fat, in which case that butyrate created by the gut flora from fiber can come in handy and can provide nutrition for those who cannot make it otherwise.
But to say that fiber is essential… no. It is not essential. If carbohydrate is not essential–and is is not–then fiber, a carbohydrate, is also not essential. For the average person on the Western diet fiber is probably essential because of all the junk they eat. Short chain fatty acids are essential for health and their diets lack it completely. For people who studied up on diets and are familiar with the alternatives, such as keto and particularly carnivore, fiber is quite meaningless.
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I suspect fibre is probably a good thing if you eat a diet high in “dense acellular carbohydrates” because it dilutes them and (slightly) reduces the glucose and insulin spikes. Otherwise it’s not such a good plan. I obviously get more than enough with the veggies I use to dilute my meat, fish, poultry and game. I gave up wheat specifically because I found massive glucose spikes, and then discovered it was also responsible for my GERD and farting. Very common. Even wheat bran did this. I blame wheat germ agglutinin and probably other antinutrients.
Here;s interesting, recently I cut my thumb quite badly, first time I’ve injured myself for a long time. I am watching with amazement how quickly it is healing and how it hasn’t become infected. Since low carb/keto I almost never get colds let alone any of the other infections that used to plague me. I realise now I spent over fifty years with an immune system that never worked right and now fourteen years when it worked properly. I ponder how many autoimmune diseases have also become so common along with the known metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes, only since high carb low fat was invented. Apart from the glucose spikes my money is on wheat gluten causing gut permeability even in non-celiacs, and a lack of fat soluble nutrients.
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Oh totally true Chris. One of the roles of insoluble fiber is to reduce the glucose spike. Some glucose stays stuck to the fiber and so a bit less glucose hits the system as well and also, more importantly, fructose needs insoluble fiber to get to the lower intestines, where some of it can be converted by glucose by our body and the remaining fructose is food for the bacteria. This way fructose doesn’t hit the liver, like it does when we eat fructose without fiber–such as in juices or most modern fruits, where fiber is reduced and sweetness is increased–fiber makes fruits and veggies rot so the less fiber, the better in terms of commercial business.
So clearly, if one is a vegan or eats a SAD or heavily plant-based diet, including vegetarian and even Paleo and keto to some extent, insoluble fiber is an important thing–albeit not healthy. And we need to make the distinction between important and healthy. It becomes important when we are not eating the healthiest and most optimal human diet. I am sure there are individuals–probably geography-based–who have evolved to eat lots f plant matter. Countries closer to the equator where plants are available year around but not animals, people there are likely more adapted to eating plants. Although, even there, there are tribes that don’t eat plants even today. Coming to the Northern Hemisphere though, where plants are seasonal and only certain kinds survive, people are less likely to have adapted to eating carbohydrates.
I also noticed that 1) I don’t get sick at all 2) I don’t bruise like I used to; 3) when I get a blood test, my veins don’t pop like they used to (I used to look like a druggie after a blood test), and 4) I test my blood glucose and blood ketones daily at least 3 times. I heal very fast so hitting the same spot twice in a row is no issue.
I think that eating grains, our immune system was on live duty all the time, 24/7 and the autoimmune conditions that we all ended up with are the results of this constant fight. Once we stopped eating–at least for me, I can clearly tell the rested immune system. The most amazing time for me is after a fast. Once I reach about 18-20 hours, my body feels 10 years younger. I usually go for 22-24 hours on days like this. I don’t plan only on some days I just don’t have time to eat and it turns into a drinking water and salt only day. I feel amazing on a fasting day. Complete immune system rest day. 🙂
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Oh yes, it’s hard to tell which of my improvements came from low carb obliterating the glucose and insulin spikes and how much are down to eliminating wheat and industrially produced omega 6 oils. I remembered another one, I used to get patches of eczema mainly on my left elbow and sometimes on the right one, also gone. I forgot about the bruising too, it can still happen but much less than it used to.
Initially I tested my blood glucose a lot until I have the pattern down and how to improve it. Now I mostly rely on my nose – if my pee smells of ketones first thing in the morning but not so much the rest of the day then I am probably generating them at about the rate I am using them. I’d be interested in seeing the output from a GCM, I think there is a strong financial case for ALL diabetics to get one on loan for a month or two as soon as they are diagnosed. “Prediabetics” too. Now doctors are permitted to believe in diabetes “reversal” or control other than with increasing quantities of drugs, they would long term save a LOT more money than they cost.
I remember someone being told completely straight faced by a nurse
“If you test your blood glucose you will damage your fingers and then you won’t be able to read Braille when you go blind!” yet strangely I know of very few people who had any problems at all. Of course diabetics know to use the sides of the fingers, only nurses go for the middle of the pad.
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OMG you made me fall off the chair with the nurse’s comment on the finger!!! lol..
I have patients (migraine) who wear the GCM. It is very god BUT one needs to know where the blood glucose is being measured. Most units measure it in the interstitial space and often (more often than not) glucose levels there are different from the capillary. So one of my patients would keep on getting these sugar crash alerts when in her capillaries (finger test) her bg was still just fine and not even close to crashing lows–she is in the UK.
After a months of being on the GCM, she gave up on it because I switched her to carnivore (from keto), so there is no point of wearing one any longer. Most of the people I now work with would actually benefit from such a meter for beta hydroxybutyrate instead of glucose. Migraineurs, in particular, end up with runaway ketones and that leads to migraines… they have completely different physiology from other people.
I check my bg and bk several times a day most every day, primarily to keep records of what I do and how I respond to different foods. I keep a diary with it and also if I work out, how intense, what I ate and when… Over 1800 data points so far 🙂
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I had a friend – a Professor now retired – who succeeded in controlling his diabetes quite spectacularly. As an engineer what he would do was once a month or so eat a standardised meal and test his glucose every fifteen minutes, then compare the graph with previous results to see if anything had got worse, or better. A CGM would be ideal for this.
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I do the same in my migraine groups. I ask everyone to run a 5-hour long blood glucose test, every 30 minutes take a sample–also blood ketones–and I created a “normal” curve of what it should look like and we compare it to that. I also check off the trend line. It works really well. 🙂
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Terrific……..thank you.
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Vegan morality, is just an extension of the prevalent view of modern times. Humans are just another animal. So killing an animal any animal is just as wrong as killing a human. If god created man in his image and was the crown of his creation and animals were put on earth for him, that will present a very different world view. With the current view of humanity is easy to see how they come to their twisted ethics.
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I agree Chasam. I must add that this represents blatant ignorance on the part of vegans. Plants are also alive, can plan ahead, need sleep, plan attacks on other plants (and animals), have memory, have a CNS (albeit smaller than ours), plants can feel pain, and can communicate that pain and other danger as well. Plants are alive when people eat them raw and feel the pain–at least animals get the honor of being killed before being eaten, so they don’t feel it. It is also ignorant to think that by growing plants, animals don’t get killed. Lots of them do and they go to the vultures, foxes, etc..
I would like to see a vegan work on his/her produce field for mass production and collect the dead animals after the plow machine went through, the road kill by the trucks that deliver the food, count the many birds and insects they kill as a result of spraying pesticides… I read about a vegan couple that bought land and removed all cows. In 2 years the land completely died, all birds moved elsewhere as well. They realized that nature is a harmonious state of animals and plants and that they need each other to be healthy. They repopulated their pastures with leased cows each growing season–better than nothing.
Veganism is a religion that just needs to stop at the door of the vegan temple and not bother people with other beliefs.
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Many of our arable farmers use animal manure – they spread it after the harvest and dig it in. You can tell which fields have been manured each year – they are the ones where the gulls circle and drop down on the worms and other insects that are abundant there. Unmanured fields, not so much.
This year the back field is down to rape and I predict that in late spring after the slug pellets are scattered I will find another dead hedgehog on my lawn. I heard a story a few years back following a damp summer – the farmer’s wife was combining rape when the machine started to malfunction. She was unable to retune it so rang her husband to come out with the toolkit. They discovered that the entire inside of the machine was clogged with the squished bodies of millions of slugs and snails,and it had to go back to the yard to be steam cleaned. You don’t get that sort of slaughter in the cow, sheep or pig fields.
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Exactly. How sad how many animals they kill and they consider themselves to be saints.. Shameful. 😦 I have not smelled any cow manure for at least 20 years! And, as a migraineur with my nose being the most sensitive, and I can even smell T2D and bacterial disease, no cow manure… I bet it is all synthetic stuff that is engineered to kill all life
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You wouldn’t like the autumn here,we get huge piles of cow, pig and digested human ordure which are spread on the stubbles and then cultivated in prior to sowing. Beans often don’t make a profit but are worth growing as they fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. Peas do the same, and they are generally profitable too. This saves hugely on the cost of synthetics and improves the soil structure and species diversity. They often produce huge clouds of flies which of course wouldn’t live in Veganworld, nor would the birds that eat them. Nature is very different from their beliefs.
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I totally agree!
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As opposed to your ethics, presumably derived from fairy tales of a magic man in the sky.
What precisely is it that is so twisted about valuing all life, particularly sentient life, not to mention the preservation of the Earth’s ecosystems?
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Dear James,
I quote from your comment:
1) “valuing all life, particularly sentient life, particularly preserving earth’s ecosystem”
2) you are opposed to my ethics, which is “presumably derived from fairy tales of a magic man in the sky”
So let me address your points. Point 1 has 3 parts: a) valuing all life b) particularly sentient life c) preserving earth’s ecosystem
a) Valuing all life
Last I looked, plants were alive and sentient. So if I choose to eat a leaf from a lettuce or a slice of steak from a cow, I pretty much kill both. I see no difference between a lettuce leaf or cow. I had discussions before with vegans who set up all kinds of rules about what “life” and “sentient” means and how it is defined, such as “plants don’t think” (they do), “plants don’t feel” (they do), “plants have no blood” (define blood–theirs is green), “plants have no nervous system” (they do), etc. The list goes on.
Based on your incorrect belief, you kill the plants you eat as a vegan.
WHERE ARE YOUR MORALS?
b) Particularly sentient life
The definition of “sentient”
sen·tient Dictionary result for sentient
/ˈsen(t)SH(ē)ənt/Submit
adjective
able to perceive or feel things.
synonyms: feeling, capable of feeling, living, live
I just showed in point a) that plants are sentient. You eat plants?
WHERE ARE YOUR MORALS?
c) Preserving earth’s ecosystem
Interesting. Have you read the article you are commenting on? After all, it is talking a ton about the saving of the ecosystem… or are plants not part of your ecosystem? Poor plants.
WHERE ARE YOUR MORALS?
2) Ethics that are derived from the “fairy tales of a magic man in the sky”
If you are referring to God with your comment, even though I am not religious, I object to your tone of calling God “fairy tales of a magic man in the sky” because it is rude and may cause distress to those who believe in God and follow his guide. In case you are not familiar with the Bible, God created animals to be eaten by humans–and plants were not to be eaten. In ancient times, human sacrifices and gifts to their God was fatty meat, and not plants and fruits.
I think you need to read past your fairy tales. Given the amount of soil erosion and destruction commercial farming causes, petty soon you will need to learn to survive eating sand if we follow the wishes of vegans, like yours. It will take some adaptation… go for it, start early!
Best wishes,
Angela
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You know, they almost get a few things right in their paper, but then turn away at the last minute. They actually do mention animal manure along with all the synthetic fertilisers. They talk rightly about species extinctions and reductions but fail to note these occur on CROPLAND and are worst in grain and oilseed monocultures such as they recommend we all eat.
Where I live I see it for myself, and fortunately there is plenty of science looking at soil improvement and increasing ecology on grazing land.
They are pretty clueless about the water cycle too, here they pump water from the rivers into reservoirs to use for irrigation principally on sugar beet and vegetables like onions and carrots. A lot of the water makes it back into the rivers again. Cows, pigs and especially sheep have low actual requirements for water and guess what, they piss. You’d almost believe the water they drink is lost forever.Instead it goes to improving the soils where they graze. Some of our free range pig farmers put the pigs on land for a year or three, then rotate it into crops. Just like the “mixed farming” of my youth.
It’s like Animal Farm in reverse,,four legs bad, leaves good.
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I wish the US was as clever as Europe is. I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was fascinating. I should have kept the link open… in it is was explained that in the US, farmers and ranchers MUST purchase grains. If they don;t purchase grains they are penalized. There was no mention what the penalty is, but they force grains on all ranchers, even those that don;t feed grains to their animals.
I am not sure how ranching and farming go hand in hand here in general. I only see animals jammed int feedlots, or organic ranchers with animals feeding on grasslands that are never used for crops. It seems the two hands don’t ever share the same brain.
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Bad info…….absolutely NO requirement for ranchers to purchase grains…….other than clever/misleading advertising.
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Hi Paul,
I was on a podcast interview of Sally Fallon Morell. It was an apple podcast–cannot find it again. I listened to it yesterday. ohhh. here is a write-up on it: https://player.fm/series/peak-human-unbiased-nutrition-info-for-optimum-health-fitness-living/part-27-sally-fallon-morell-on-the-wise-traditions-of-our-ancestors-weston-a-price
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