Sometimes I read an article that interests or amuses me so much, that I just have to include it here at DietHobby. 

    Here is one such article: 

How I lost 40 lbs doing everything wrong
             by Erik Davis. 11/14/12

I’ve been on a quest to lose weight over the last 6 months. It had been a long time coming, and I’d put it off for too many years. But while I have been achieving my goals, it’s got to be a statistical fluke, because I’ve done just about everything wrong!

1. I ate wheat!

Apparently, I didn’t get the message that my “addiction to wheat” is making me “fat and unhealthy”, because I kept right on eating it. Wheat breads, pita, even the dreaded enriched-flour pasta — all of these remained part of my diet. What a dolt I was! If only I’d bought a copy of William Davis’ best-selling book Wheat Belly, I’d have known that 100 million Americans (and presumably ~10M Canadians) experience some form of adverse health effect from eating wheat — from minor rashes to high blood sugar to unattractive stomach bulges. Or I could have listened to any of the countless nutritionists and alt-health gurus recommending gluten-free diets for non-celiac sufferers like me.

But I guess I was living under a rock. Really dodged a bullet there.

2.  I ate other carbs too!

“You’ve lost weight,” friends would say. “What have you been doing — cutting out carbs?” It was a question I kept hearing over and over again, yet somehow I never clued in that I should have been on a low-carb diet. After all, everyone knows carbs are what make us fat. Yet I kept on eating them — starchy tubers, rice of all colours and hues, gluten-laden rye breads and barley. In fact, carbs made up over half of my calories — and two-thirds of my food by weight!

Had I never heard of Robert Atkins or The Zone? This cat has far more than nine lives, let me tell you.

3. I used artificial sweeteners!

Boy should I have listened to Dr. Oz — he says that artificial sweeteners are the #1 habit making me fat! He recommends “natural alternatives” like honey, agave and coconut sap syrup. Yet stupid me, I figured that because those alternatives were largely comprised of glucose and fructose, they were just as bad as sugar — I completely forgot they were natural!

4.  I didn’t cleanse!

Stayed downright dirty. Little did I know that Vitalife Clinic in Toronto says it can help me shed pounds through the magic of hydrotherapy, as does Toronto Colonics, D’avignon Digestive Health Cente, and dozens of other “wellness” clinics throughout the city.

Or that Total Cleanse — also right here in Toronto! — sells pre-made juice cleanse products with healthy-sounding names like “Green Energy”. And they all come with a promise to help me lose weight!

Such amazing resources within arm’s reach — and all so reasonably priced — yet I did not avail myself of any of them. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

5.  I skipped the superfoods and supplements

I could have taken 13 acai berries, 2 tbsp of mango seed fiber, a jigger of extra virgin coconut oil, 4g of bitter orange, half a sheet of dried seaweed, a pinch of cayenne, and a cup of green tea, blended it all into a delicious smoothie, and used it to wash down my Glucomannan, which Dr. Oz assures me is the best diet pill on the market.

Or I could have tried any of the other really sciency sounding OTC weight loss pills like Lipocal, Lipoclen, Lipovox, Slimvox, Slimquick, Ambislim, Anoretix, Stimuretix, Colonetix or Colonoxy, which would have melted my pounds away by reducing hunger, speeding my metabolism, improving my digestive function, stopping carb absorption, adjusting my hormonal balance, purifying and revitalizing my body, helping me sleep better, and/or hijacking my hypothalamus, allowing me to see results twice as fast! three times as fast! seven times as fast! all without diet or exercise!

But not me. I always do things the hard way.

How did I get so turned around?

I guess my mistake was listening to the science.

Take diet composition for example. The best studies continue to say that all diets work equally well at taking off weight to the extent they reduce calories, and that macro-nutrient composition (carbs vs. protein vs. fat) doesn’t matter for weight loss. So I just got a calorie tracker app for my phone, focused on achieving a steady targeted reduction every day, and ate what I wanted until I hit the mark. Well, that’s not totally true — I did spend some time trying to understand which foods made me feel fuller for the fewest calories, and as a result focused on foods that:

• had more fibre, which I found more filling. So while I still ate some refined flour and sweets, most of my carbs came from whole grain foods.
  

• were less nutritionally dense, i.e. lower calories by volume, which again I found more filling. In practice, this meant a lot more fruits and vegetables.
  

• included protein, because many obesity researchers and clinicians believe that regular hits of protein throughout the day aid satiety.

I figured that since all of this was consistent with what every public health agency and lifestyle-disease organization recommends anyway, it was a pretty safe bet. I didn’t know I might end up being the thinnest wheat belly sufferer on record!

Or take artificial sweeteners. I listened to the solid science showing that sweetened beverages don’t affect satiety, and thus add calories without making us feel fuller — so much so that juice and pop became the only things I cut out of my diet entirely. But would I listen to the weakly-controlled, low-powered studies that found artificial sweeteners confuse the body’s regulatory system and make us eat more? Dr. Oz certainly did, but I was far too arrogant to listen! Instead, I took the advice of less-famous-and-therefore-certainly-less-trustworthy obesity clinicians like Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, who states that:

"For many, liquid calories, are the low hanging fruit of weight management – easy to reduce and consequently, I think it’s certainly worth your own personal exploration of liquid calories, and if indeed you’re drinking huge amounts of them, especially sugar sweetened ones, as a step-down strategy if you think you can use artificially sweetened beverages as you reduce the sweet drinks overall, I say go for it."

Even so, I should have been scared off by the commonly-heard refrain that artificial sweeteners are dangerous. But I figured that after decades of widespread use, the failure to show they caused any particular health problem was enough to give them a qualified pass. I mean, sure, I agree that water is probably a healthier choice than Coke Zero, but the enjoyment I got from it made it easier to stick to my calorie goals, so I kept drinking. So shortsighted!

Now as for cleanses, I blame skepticism for my myopia here. One of the first skeptical articles I ever read was the Skeptoid episode on cleanses, and it’s biased me against them ever since. I also figured that any weight that came off that easily was likely to go back on just as easily. Not sure how a jewish atheist like me developed such a firmly protestant outlook, but I do indeed value a work ethic.

I guess that was my problem with superfoods and supplements too — just too easy. After all, I couldn’t prove that none of them work — it’s impossible to keep up with all the new products on the market each year. I just knew that (barring ephedra, which has a terrible safety profile) I’d never seen any that had been shown to work. Some pretty clearly didn’t — even the NCCAM, hardly a skeptic organization, said that there was no reason to believe that acai berries or green tea could help me lose weight. Bitter orange might, but it contains a similar active ingredient to ephedra, and is likely just as risky. And I’ve looked into coconut oil before and found no evidence it’s useful for much of anything other than deep frying spring rolls.

I was also persuaded, so foolishly, by a 2004 systematic review of weight loss supplements conducted by Edzard Ernst and Max Pittler. It concluded that “the evidence for most dietary supplements as aids in reducing body weight is not convincing. None of the reviewed dietary supplements can be recommended for over-the-counter use.” Another review in the same year at Harvard Medical School came to similar conclusions.

What about Dr. Oz’s favorite supplement Glucomannan? To be honest, it’s not the craziest thing he’s recommended — glucomannan is a fibre supplement, and fibre does seem to aid satiety as I mentioned. But researchers consistently find that beneficial nutrients in food don’t often convey the same benefits in supplement form. And since Glucomannan was evaluated in the reviews linked above that recommended no supplementation, I let the science be my guide. Reckless, I know.

In the end, I was lucky — none of these mistakes stopped me from achieving my weight loss goals. But it’s not a path I’d recommend — after all, can you really expect science to look after your interests? It doesn’t even have anything to sell you!

                       Erik Davis is a technology professional based in Toronto. 
                                    www . skepticnorth.com

 
Here's a Reminder

In Defense of Food” (2009) was written by Michael Pollan who is a Professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley. Pollan is not a doctor, a scientist, or a nutritionist - he’s a journalist.

Pollan's message is:

Go back to nature, eat whole foods. Don’t diet.
Don't overeat; instead eat slowly, and enjoy your meals.
Our curse is processed food.
Artificially 'improved' foods and natural foods have very little in common..

The best-selling, "In Defense of Food" provides a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of "nutritionism" in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. It then works as a hard-sell for the “real food” movement.   Pollan's arguments are basically:

• High-fructose corn syrup is the devil's brew. It must be removed from one’s diet.
  
  
• Avoid any food product that makes health claims, these mean it's probably not really food.
  
  
• In a supermarket, don't shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can't rot, anything with an ingredient you can't pronounce.
  
  
• "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does." Avoid buying foods sold at mini-markets.
  
  
• "You are what you eat eats too." One must pay attention to what is fed to one’s food.
  
  
• "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting. Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.
   
• In short: Kiss the Western diet goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Trust your gut. Literally.

 In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. He says that the government is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of the processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another, and calories that provide "virtually nothing but energy." Politicians are terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when "doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital".

Pollan is a not a scientist,  and doesn't seem to find it very important to ground his assertions with unimpeachable facts. His book is based on notions of a romanticized past, and his advice can sometimes be contradictory ("don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize" but "eat tofu" - - If your grandmother didn't come from Asia, it's doubtful she would recognize anything made of bean curd) and he tends to cite sources that he likes, rather than sources he's really investigated.

For example, Pollan would never list a dairy-industry pamphlet as one of his sources, but he gleefully quotes some rather doubtful statements from an organic-food-industry pamphlet, and apparently didn't bother to ask even one secondary source to verify them.

He writes a compelling essay showing that nutrition and dietary habits are incredibly difficult for scientists to study, and implies that any information based on nutritional studies is flawed, yet quotes certain studies as if they are somehow immune to this problem. Pollan maintains that the American government's health-education programs are a major cause of the obesity epidemic, yet his descriptions of these programs contain many inaccuracies. 

 Pollan's tone appears occasionally condescending. He seems overly impressed with some of his own statements, such as his claim that humans are the only animals that turn to experts to tell them what to eat. Even if one accepts that this is true, humans do a lot of things that animals don't do, and in many cases, we should be glad of it.

Some people seem to reverence this book like the Bible.  Personally, I found it an interesting book, but one that needs be read critically, taking Pollen’s "facts" with a grain of salt. I, personally, didn't actually find the book insightful. He made a lot of scientific claims, but failed to support them. A great many readers seem to greatly care about Pollan's personal opinions, however, I’m not one of them.

Clearly the grandmothers with which Pollan is familiar were different from my own. I’m over 65 years old, and my own grandmothers, who were both born in the late 1800s, spent a lot of time processing and preserving their food, and most everything they cooked, including vegetables, contained a great deal of added saturated fat, sugar and/or white flour and other starchy foods. Pollan’s “real” food arguments, and his assumptions about the eating histories of our ancestors, seemed a bit naïve; and his opinions appeared to be strongly influenced by his own personal educational, economic, and cultural biases.

 I found the following food and health expert’s critique to be rather refreshing.

A Critique of Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food”
         by Mike Gibney, 4/23/2012
                      Professor of Food & Health at University College in Dublin, Ireland.

Michael Pollan’s book “In Defense of Food’ has been a global best seller within the genre of books on food and health. It appears to be extremely popular among journalists since it bashes conventional wisdom on food. Twice, correspondents for the Irish Times chose to feature this book and marvel at its wisdom. Pollan’s book is peppered with half-truths, circular arguments and highly selective supporting material. His fundamental point is that we should focus our dietary choice on foods and not bother too much, if at all, with all of this nutritional advice that abounds today.

Pollen’s belief that health is the driver of food choice in the modern era is a cornerstone of his argument. Take for example the statement he makes: “That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new, and I think, destructive idea”.

The interest in healthy eating is as old as civilization and this obsession is the pursuit of a relatively minor section of society. The vast majority chooses food that they plan to enjoy and, in making those choices, take care to get some level of balance as regards to their personal health. Every study that has examined the drivers of food choice have come away with the conclusion that the “go – no go” part of food choice is whether the consumer likes the food.

Pollan’s assumption that it is the pursuit of health that drives food choice is an opinion based his personal reflections and observations. However, our own research, published in peer-reviewed journals shows the opposite. In a survey of over 14,000 consumers across the EU, some 71% either ‘agreed strongly’ or ‘agreed’ with the statement: “I do not need to make changes to my diet as my diet is already healthy enough”. Figure that Mr. Pollan!

The putative obsession with food and health of modern consumers that Pollan puts forward arises from the dogmatism and doctrine, which he calls “nutritionism”. He argues that nutrition has reduced the food and health issue to nutrients. In his view, nutritionists see foods solely as purveyors of nutrients and summarizes their view thus: “Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts”. He quotes his fellow food saviour and author Marion Nestle who says of nutrition: “…it takes the nutrient out of the food, the food out of the diet and the diet out of the lifestyle”.

Eloquent, but utter baloney! This needs to rebutted along several lines. In 1996, I chaired a joint WHO-FAO committee that issued a report entitled “Preparation and use of food-based dietary guidelines”. The notion behind this was that many developing countries did not have detailed data on the nutrient content of their food supply, that they didn’t have nutritional surveys and that we should encourage the development of healthy eating advice in terms that consumers can understand. Indeed, statistical techniques such as cluster analysis are widely used to study food intake patterns and moreover, there are many examples of systems that score food choice for their nutritional quality. To write a book based on the impression that nutritionists see foods solely in terms of nutrients is simply daft.

Let me go a little further with this. Take the disease spina bifida, which is one of several forms of neural tube defects (NTD) that occur early in pregnancy. Extensive human intervention studies have shown that an increased intake of the B vitamin, folic acid, will significantly reduce the re-occurrence of an NTD birth in women who have previously had a child with this condition. This research has led to a threshold value of folic acid in blood above which this reduction occurs and the research shows that in human intervention studies, it is not possible to attain this threshold with normal foods, naturally rich in folate. Such folate has a rather low bioavailability and the threshold can only be reached if the volunteers consumed foods fortified with synthetic folic acid. This has led to the mandatory fortification of flour in the US with folic acid leading to a dramatic reduction in the incidence of new cases of spina bifida.

What is laughable about Pollan’s approach is that he himself engages in his so-called reductionism because he devotes at least almost 11 pages to the argument for and against the polyunsaturated fats from plants (omega-6 variety) and the polyunsaturated fats from fish (omega-3 variety), ultimately favouring the latter and then ends up with the statement: ”Could it be that the problem with the Western diet is a gross deficiency in this nutrient?” Now Michael you can’t have it both ways. You can’t decry nutritionists for studying individual nutrients in relation to health and then proceed to do so yourself! And remarkably, this champion of foods over nutrients goes on to argue that older persons should take multivitamins. Don’t take a bow Michael. Just stop doing summersaults.

The final piece in his jigsaw is to dismiss the modern processed food, as though bread, cheese, yogurt, pasta, wine, chocolate, coffee and the like are not processed. Their processing details were worked out long ago and so they don’t qualify for the derogatory tag of “processed”. The first sugar refinery was built in Crete in 1000 AD and that the Arabic name for Crete, Qandi, gave rise to what we today call “candy”. This process requires the sugar can to be pulped in water, the water filtered through muslin and the water evaporated in the searing heat of the Crete sunshine, which is why Crete was chosen and not Cork. And Pollan makes the inevitable mistake of the agricultural romanticist that organic food is nutritionally superior to conventionally farmed food, which is palpably untrue.

Pollan is a California food-head, and among the world’s few privileged elite.  Most of the other High Priests of “Healthy Eating” and their “real food” followers tend to give great respect to his unsubstantiated opinions. Pollan’s best-seller status demonstrates that he has been very successful at “preaching to the choir”.

Although a fellow Californian, I am not a “real food” person, nor a Michael Pollan fan.
There are many different ways to look at the world,   and I see a great deal of cultural bias involved in the way that Pollan views it.  As a well-known Journalist, Pollan’s writings have great appeal for educated, white, middle-class, environmentalists, … especially for organic-whole-food-“health-nut” people … many of whom are also employed by the media.

  
This picture shows a parent in the act of physically disciplining a child, and one’s individual emotional reaction to this behavior will depend, in part, on one’s own cultural bias.

What is meant by the term: “Cultural Bias”?

BIAS is a preconception that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation.

CULTURE is a rough label for a set of characteristics (beliefs, practices, and values) that a group of people tend to have in common. There are also cultures within cultures. For example, the American Culture is a subgroup of the Western Culture, and there are many cultural subgroups within the American Culture.

Cultural differences exist even within subgroups of middle-class Americans.
Some of these subgroups are different due to locational or environmental differences such as northerners, southerners, easterners, westerners, or country, city, suburban; some of these subgroups are different because of educational, economic, religious or political differences; some subgroups are different because of the race or the nationality of one’s ancestors, etc. etc. etc.

Cultural values, attitudes and behaviors prominently influence how a given group of people view, understand, process, communicate, and manage data, information, and knowledge.

CULTURE been defined as a kind of collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group from another. In essence, the content of culture consists of a set of underlying norms and values of behavior, shared by a group of people who are tied together by powerful affiliations or bonds.

Cultural differences can be understood as CULTURAL BIAS, a bias so deeply ingrained that it is unconscious, unless explicitly examined.

The term CULTURAL BIAS is defined as interpreting and judging things in terms particular to one's own culture, which includes attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and social practices.

 Cultural bias occurs when people of one culture make assumptions, because they interpret and judge things by their own cultural standards.

Cultural Bias means that a culture’s views are in fact different from, and in conflict with, another culture’s views. Cultural bias involves a prejudice in viewpoint because of a preference of one’s own culture over another. Difference does not imply unfairness. It would be stupid to deny that all people are subject to cultural bias. Cultural bias is simply the tendency to interpret and judge things by standards inherent in one's own culture. We all do it to some extent. It's a given.

Ethnocentrism is a the belief that ones own cultural group is superior. That one’s own cultural beliefs etc. are normal and that others are abnormal.

Ethnocentrism leads us to make false assumptions about cultural differences.  We are ethnocentric when we use our cultural norms to make generalizations about other people’s cultures and customs. Such generalizations ─ often made without a conscious awareness that we've used our culture as a universal yardstick ─ can be very inaccurate and cause us to misjudge other people’s culture and customs. Ethnocentrism also distorts communication between human beings.

We often (incorrectly) assume that other cultural groups share our view of what is ‘normal’, e.g. in terms of accepted methods in areas such as those of conflict resolution, child discipline, dating behaviors, eating behaviors, manners, including table manners, and age-appropriate activities.

One large example of cultural bias is that mainstream Western culture values individualism and sees the individual as the basic unit. However, many other cultural groups operate on a more communal paradigm and hence family expectations and family loyalties may override individual needs. Similarly, mainstream Western culture assumes that independence is desirable and that dependence is undesirable; hence psychological “experts” may even tend to view family life in some cultural groups as being ‘enmeshed and pathological’.

Here in the United States, the issue of cultural bias often goes unrecognized and unacknowledged. People in positions of power, such as  Judges, Educators, Psychologists, Healthcare Professionals, Politicians, Law Enforcement, and the Media  often belong to cultural subgroups which have very different values than the cultural subgroups over which their power is exercised. They tend to push their own values on those subgroups, forcing others to follow the rules of behavior that they set forth. Frequently this happens with the best of intentions, similar to the way Western Missionaries brought “Civilization” to the “Savages”, which included requiring the native women to wear more clothing.

Cultural bias exists everywhere.
It is  something that a person needs to be aware of, and to watch for,
when one is interested in trying to be as objective as possible, 

“We cannot actually say on the basis of truly conclusive evidence what specific dietary pattern is best for human health, because definitive head-to-head comparison trials have not been done, and almost certainly won’t be.

Would you sign up to be randomly assigned to a specific dietary pattern for the next several decades? Only if thousands were to answer “yes” would such a trial be feasible – with the enormous costs and daunting logistics still standing in the way.”

This is an insightful statement by Dr. Kantz, who is one of the current High Priests of “Healthful Eating”. However, just like the rest of them … despite the lack of such conclusive evidence,… Dr. Kantz chooses to form his own “expert” opinions and to share them with as many as possible, as often as possible.

Recently he spoke out about his own position concerning GMOs.
GMOs is a term for genetically modified organisms. Those who are strongly opposed to them have coined the term: “Frankenfoods”, to negatively describe them. The term is based on the novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818 by Mary Shelley about a creature produced by an unorthodox scientific experiment

Although I'm personally not a "fan" of Dr. Kantz, he seemed to take a Thoughtful and Balanced approach to the issue of GMOs, so I’ve decided to share his article here at DietHobby.

Seeking Perspective on Genetically Modified Foods
          by David Katz, M. D. , 
                          Director, Yale Prevention Research Center.

The topic of genetically modified foods is buffeted by deep passions from the one side, and deep profits from the other.

Images of scientists inserting eye-of-newt genes into escarole, or wool-of-bat genes into walnuts, stalk the nightmares of pure food proponents, and up to a point, rightly so. Even if the intentions of those tinkering with foods are good -- such as putting antifreeze genes from amphibians into oranges so they are not destroyed by an early frost -- the law of unintended consequences pertains. There is ample reason, in principle, to be wary of Frankenfoods.

There may be reason in epidemiology as well. We are substantially uncertain about why rates of gluten intolerance and celiac disease are rising; genetic modification of food may be a factor. Some go so far as to declare modern wheat a "poison," lest sugar get all that negative attention! Genetic modification may be a factor, as well, in everything from food allergies, to irritable bowel syndrome, to behavioral and cognitive disorders occurring with increasing frequency in our children.

I feel we need a more balanced perspective on this topic.

Genetic modification is not all bad. There, I've said it.

Without it, we would not have broccoli or navel oranges. We would not have pink grapefruits. We would not have amaranth or quinoa. And for that that matter, we would not have our dogs, our tea roses, or -- arguably -- our children.

Opposition to genetic modification comes easy in principle, but is a slippery, treacherous, obstacle-strewn slope in practice. If we consider sexual reproduction a form of genetic modification, and in literal terms it certainly is, then we have been in the practice since before our species was a species. Natural selection is a process of genetic modification.
If we limit the definition to willful manipulation of gene combinations to produce specific, intentional effects -- we have still been at it since the very dawn of agriculture and the domestication of the wolf.

Virtually none of the produce that now constitutes the most nutritious part of our diets existed before the dawn of agriculture only 12,000 or so years ago. Whole grains, which are a mainstay ingredient for some of the companies most adamantly opposed to GMOs, did not exist in their current form and were not part of the human diet prior to that same, recent revolution.

To some extent, arguments against all genetic modification represent a longing for an elusive kind of food purity. But arguments for such purity tend to dissolve under scrutiny. To paraphrase, one proponent's purity is another's contamination.

Some purists argue that our grains should all be unrefined, and free of genetic modification. But another band of purists points out that our Stone Age ancestors did not eat grains at all. And, furthermore, the grains we consume today are all a product of genetic modification of the selective type. We didn't tinker with genomes in test tubes until recently -- but we did it in the dirt long before.

If we adopt the most restrictive definition of genetic modification and say it refers only to combining genes from different breeds that would not normally mingle in nature, we have still been at it for millennia, in the form of horticultural grafting -- which is said to have begun around 2000 B.C. in China. Monsanto had no shareholders at the time.
If the basic objection here is to bringing genes together in an "artificial" manner, then the same objection should apply to in vitro fertilization, and dog breeding.

Our dogs are products of willful genetic modification. It wasn't done in test tubes -- it was done in the wombs of bitches. But it is genetic modification just the same. Frankly, I'm glad for it. Two of my best friends on the planet -- Zouzou, our Yorkie, and Bramble, our Sheltie -- are products of it. They don't much resemble wolves, and genetic modification is the reason.

Perhaps the fundamental objection is to mingling genes from different species. But almost anything in a nursery that says "hybrid," such as hybrid tea roses, indicates that different plants were mated to create a "blended" offspring with the desirable traits of both parents. We have this to thank for many of the wines we drink, the diverse colors of roses and tulips that grace our gardens, and so on.

Our own bodies are a mix of genes from different species Normal human physiology is a product of native DNA, and the DNA of innumerable foreign bacteria that populate our inner and outer surfaces. We can take the argument a step further than that, a step inside our own cells, where our mitochondria reside. Mitochondria are the energy generators of our bodies. They are a fixed, essential part of us -- but they have a distinct set of genes. They are, emphatically, the insertion of genes from one species into another. That is classically genetic modification.

Admittedly, it is naturally occurring. But tempting though that tack may be, it quickly degenerates into the contention that nature is good, and science is bad. That, of course, is just silly.

Science can go badly awry, of course, and certainly has. But it can do -- and has done -- enormous good. Nature can be bountiful and beneficent. But anyone paying attention must concede she can at times also be downright nasty.

Smallpox virus is a product of nature; smallpox vaccine, a product of science. Ditto for rabies, and polio.

Genetic modification is a product of both. Nature modified our genes to protect us from malaria, for instance. And, just as it can be with human-mediated genetic modification, the law of unintended consequences was invoked. We wound up with the misery of sickle cell anemia.

There are other forces to consider here. Anyone opposed to GMOs should be donating routinely to Planned Parenthood, because we can't feed 10 billion of us, or 12, without crop yields buoyed by genetic modification. Population growth, unfettered, will give Monsanto several billion more reasons to make fortunes.

So will climate change, as the planet becomes ever less hospitable to the crops we know and love. And, frankly, so will eating animal products -- since that is vastly less efficient use of the sun's energy than eating plants directly.

Genetic modifications can increase yields, reduce use of chemical pesticides, lower costs, and/or foster tolerance of drought, heat, or frost. If the matter is on trial, both prosecution and defense arguments are warranted before a rational verdict can be reached.

Good and bad can result from the machinations of both nature and science, and from the genetic modifications endowed by each. The right effort is directed not at carte blanche endorsement, or stem-to-stern renunciation, but at distinguishing the bad from the good.

Our great big Homo sapien brains are themselves a product of genetic modification, albeit of a naturally occurring variety. We need them to get past passions and profiteering alike, to balance, and the innumerable practical advantages of genetically modified... perspective.

                www . davidkatzmd.com

Dr. Kantz, is a medical doctor (M.D), with a Masters in Public Health, (MPH), is a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine (FACPM), and a Fellow in the American College of Physicians (FACP). Dr. Katz is active in many health organizations; is a leading voice in medical media; is quoted almost daily in major news publications; and appears routinely on national TV.

Dr Kantz has authored:
“The Way to Eat” (2004) which recommends using healthy snacking to keep hormones in line, and control hunger by limiting one’s variety of food flavors at one sitting.

“The Flavor Point Diet “ (2005)  weight-loss by combining the right flavors at the right time.

“The Flavor Full Diet” (2007) a Mediterranean inspired food plan.

Dr. Kantz is listed as a co-author of:
“The Plant Powered Diet” (2012) in the Forward, he writes that he agrees with Michael Pollan’s recommendation to “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” says that “the dietary sweet spot .. is loving food that loves us back.” whether it be plant-based vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous diets; and that we need to “consider sustainability” and the effect on the planet as a feature of any diet competing to be ‘best’.

Dr. Kantz is considered one of the top diet “experts” at the current time. I agree with some of his opinions; disagree with some of his opinions; and have NO personal opinion about some of his opinions.

I’ve read a few of his books and found them interesting. My own personal experimentation with Dr. Kantz’s diet recommendations left me unimpressed with his methods and results. However, it is not a one-size-fits-all world, and every diet works for someone.