Is 'Light' really light? Ancel Keys, The Liar

Do you know who actually said that the fat is bad? No? Never heard about this guy? Why am I not surprised...

His name is Ancel Keys. He is a professor of the University of Minnesota who became a star in the domain of medicine. The medicine nowadays is still based on his research. He managed to change everything that was seen before as something healthy into something toxic.

Because the fat is very important for our bodies. It was always considered as  something valuable for us. And then he managed to make us think that the fat is harmful – not only normal people, like me and you, changed their opinion, but also the specialists in nutrition. We listen to them and try to accord our diet to what they recommend. And that's how he changed our daily way of eating. Did avoiding fat make us slimmer and healthier? No, the opposite – fatter and sicker.

How is it possible that he got so succesful with this big lie? He based his theory on a research. It was called the Seven Countries Study, that was published in 1980 – the first study that related diet with health, especially with the cardiovascular disease. He believed that the more fat people eat, the higher is the risk of heart diseases.

The problem is that this study is based only on data from seven countries. In total he examined people from 22 countries. Why is it called then the Seven Countries Study? Because Mr Keys didn't want to show the results that hadn't proven his hypothesis! Here is the diagram:

So what is really harmful and why? I'm going to tell you the next time.

Calories, fat and sugar

Let's shock you today! I'm going to share with you something controversial. Get ready for it!

Calories have nothing to do nor with overweight, neither with obesity. Counting calories is very popular and multiple diets are based on it. And that's why the diets don't work like they should. So far everyone thought: 'I'm getting fat when I eat more calories that I burn'. In fact it's not so simple.

If you count calories you judge food by its caloric value. It's stupid because with this method you don't pay attention to the quality of the food and it's clear that cookies has different importance for your body than a banana or a fish. This method doesn't take in cosideration the role of the food in your body.

According to that, the scientists came to a conclusion that fat is worse than sugar – fat contains 9 kcal/g and sugar 4 kcal/g. That's why sugar is only half as bad as fat. But they didn't think that sugar is the cause of getting overweight and fat can even stabilize our weight and help us lose it.

So what makes us fat? Sugar, artificial flavouring and food additives like glutamat.

Overweight and obesity

In Great Britain 60% of adults and over 30% of children are overweight or obese. The problem of obesity grows quickly all around the world. The scientist are particulary concerned about children and they estimate that if kids will keep getting fat as fast as now, they will die even before their parents.

I'm sure that many of you at least once tried to be on a diet. Did it really work? Did your body stayed slim for long? Why the diets don't always work?

When you go on a diet your brain gets a message: „There will be no energy delivery! You have to get ready to survive! Red alert!” And you know that the brain controls the whole body. Is it possible that your brain gets wrong messages, that it is manipulated, that it sends you no message if you are full or still hungry?

The study by Achim Peters shows that it's also the stress that makes us fat. When we are stressed, in our body are produced some hormons that make us eat more. But stress might be caused not only by a situation in our life, the cause might be in food that we eat. Robert Lustig says that the industrial food and so-called 'Western diet' are killing us. Nowadays no one cares if we can digest easily the product or if it is good for us. The most important for the producers is that it survives the transport, it's cheap and non-perishable. And to make it so, it has to contain some chemical aid – preservatives and/or artificial additives. And they are the factor that makes our brain confused and we get overweight.

Based on: Hans-Ulrich Grimm, Die Kalorienlüge: Wie uns die Nahrungsindustrie dick macht, Knaur Taschenbuch Verlag, München, 2007, p. 16-26.

New focus point on my blog

Hello everyone!

This semester I decided to write you about something that I'm interested in. FOOD! :D

But it's not going to by as simple as you think. I will write you about problems with our new factory-fresh industrial foods.

Get ready to learn some things and have fun!

A horror book

I was going to visit my parents. I planned to go in the evening. When I got home after classes, I checked the schedule and I discovered that there's a train one hour earlier than I thought. I was feeling bad and I wanted to stay in bed. That's why I packed very fast and run to the station before I decide not to go anywhere. I got to the station, bought the ticket and I still had about 15-20 minutes. I went to a bookstore because I forgot to take anything to read during the trip, the trip takes 1 hour and a half so I would have died. I decided spontaneously to buy a book of a Polish writer. I didn't expect much. But when I started reading I was positively surprised. The book was very good and I read it in about 5 hours. I just couldn't stop reading.

This book was Domofon of Zygmunt Miłoszewski. It tells us the story about life of people in a tower block in Warsaw. One day, a young couple moves in. In the moment when they want to carry their furniture up to the apartment, the police stops them because someone died – his head was cut by a moving elevator when he wanted to get out of it. Strange and horrible situations multiply. In the culminate moment occupants can't get out of the building or contact with the world. Some dark power keeps them inside and doesn't let them out.

I recommend the book very much. If you like horrors, you will love it!

Getting old and blind...

I planned the longer weekend of 11th November long time ago. I thought it would be a nice idea to go home for longer than just two days, especially that it's not so cheap (I live in Cottbus in Germany). My sister wanted to go with me because she studies German philology and she was interested in the film festival that was taking place there.

Two days before we went, we got to know about strikes in Germany from Wednesday to Monaday. So, of course, there were no direct trains between Frankfurt (Oder) and Cottbus and we had to go through Berlin. The trains were going only once an hour. So when the train was approaching Frankfurt, I was standing by the door to be ready to run and buy the tickets that we didn't have. The next train was leaving in 7 minutes. I bought the tickets without any problems and all happy run to my sister who was going to the platform with our luggage. We met there a girl and she didn't have the ticket so I proposed her to go with us (we had a group one – for max. 5 persons). We started talking and were waiting for the train. Then we heard a noise behind our backs. We turned around and we saw our train leaving... Could you ever believe that!? The train was so short, was standing on the other sector of the platform and we didn't notice it. We all coded that the train should be annouced first and arrive.

So we waited for one hour.

And we spent some more hours in the train talking like best friends so it was a very positive experience. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Let's colour!

The colours are such a normal thing in our life that sometimes we even don't pay attention to their presence. We can not only see them but also feel them by feeling their temperature. On average a human can see 16 million colours but women are better at recognizing them - the statistics say that 8% of men and only 0.5% of women have problems distinguishing colours. The perception and recognition is only the first step to say that we know some colours because we also use them to describe characteristics of other things so we have to know how they are called. This is where the game begins!

In daily talks we name the colours intuitively saying that they are warm or cold, bright or dark, intensive or pale. We use the references to the objects we know, for example we say: That book has the same colour as your new jacket. Besides a few (comparing to 16 millions) colours that everyone can easily name, like red, blue, black or orange, there are colours with more complicated names that are no so evident to all of us, f.ex. celadon, turquoise, sienna, cyan or crimson.

There are situations where we can't omit giving names to colours because there is a real need to distinguish one concrete tone of blue between ten of them. I want to show you how funny solutions can be. Recently I was skimming over a catalogue with cosmetics and I realized that many colours of nail polishes have ridiculous names.

There are some that still contain a name of colour and give an idea of how they may look like. You still might not know what is the shade of Orange You Quick but it tells you that it is some kind of orange. The same thing is with On Point Blue, Twilight blue, Fast Time Teal, Divine Lime or All Khakied Out. All of them work on your imagination and you almost can say if you would like them on your nails or not. Now try to guess what colours theese can be: Swift Sherbet, Vamp it, Lure, Enchanted Siren, Naked truth, Untamed, Lioness, Peek A Boo, Vixen or my two favourites - Shipwreck and Barely There. Any ideas?