This morning's smoothie has only sugar from lemon juice and blueberries, and protein from Naked Whey & Greek yogurt with healthy fats.

40g protein, 20g carbs

I know which one I'd rather feed my grandparent. In a sane world, this would be the goto, but people "want to" only open a plastic package and throw it away. It's all negative benefits!

I've been very very sick and I can still keep up with making a smoothie, and all I need to wash is the Ninja blender mug and a spatula. If someone can't manage that, they probably can't be unsupervised, either.

They are NOT getting nutrition from Boost, except in the most rudimentary of all ways.

I can also add that this only makes sense when we discover so many ailments are the result of, or triggered by, poor nutrition. The quest for health cannot be so commercialized it undermines people's health... yet, here we are.

This really only works for someone who is either living independently or is being cared for by someone who knows better than to just follow the officially recommended low fat/high carb nutrition information.

Facilities such as nursing homes, and hospitals are pretty much required to follow the official DGAs, or as close as they can for the individual patient's condition. They can't just cut carbs to the bone (not even for diabetic patients) or double up on protein, or switch to all animal fats without risking lawsuits because they don't follow the official feeding guidelines.

If you're independent or personally providing care for someone who is ill or elderly, you can always feed them a much better diet.

But even that still requires some kind of working knowledge of what constitutes a better diet, as well as how to tweak it to your own personal needs, and that is very sadly lacking in most cases these days. I would say the public has been brainwashed, but the vast majority of the US population grew up with the low fat high carb diet (as well as more and more fast foods and UPFs) so they really don't know any different.

And the part that is protein is mostly soy protein, inflammatory and gas-producing in many.

And lower bioavailability. I think Diet Doctor had an article advising people they need to eat 30% more of plant protein sources to get the same amount of protein as animal sources.

Since they don't tell us the percentages, we don't know what the actual protein is in that carton. Except that it is less than what is on the label.

Which got me thinking about fast food. Maybe on paper they offer nutrition, but we don't know the percentages of each ingredient. A lot of finagling can go on under the ingredient order, I'm thinking.

This is true of all foods that have a label with a list of ingredients.

Flour has a small amount of protein in it, same with green vegetables, potatoes, and of course all kinds of beans - well pretty much all plant origin ingredients have at least a tiny amount of protein, even fruit.

About the only plant origin ingredients that don't contain proteins are oils.

The nutrition label accounts for all the tiny bits of protein from all the plant origin ingredients, without separating them from the animal origin protein.

About the only thing that gives you a clue as to how much of the protein in one of those Boost drinks is from dairy and how much is from soy would be the order of those ingredients on the label, since ingredients need to be listed in order by weight, which gives some idea of how much of the protein is from milk, and how much is from soy.

You can look up the ingredient lists from different types of Boost - here's the list from Chocolate Boost Plus:



In that list, the highest weight source of protein is from milk protein concentrate. They've been helpful with how much of the protein is coming from soy by listing it after the "less than 2%" section, so even though it's a protein isolate, there's far less soy protein isolate than there is of milk protein concentrate... at least by weight. But there is a difference in the protein content of a concentrate (as little as 25%, but could be as high as 89%) vs an isolate (90%). So that still doesn't tell us all that much. Could be that it really is mostly milk protein, could be evenly split between the 2, could be mostly soy.

Looks like we need to campaign to have the next generation of nutrition labels state how many grams of the total protein content are from plant sources. (Pretty sure that vegans would love for protein source to be expressed that way - and for us LC'ers it would be no different than calculating net carbs by subtracting fiber from total carbs)

Are ingredients listed by order of weight? If so, a "milk protein concentrate" (usually liquid) could contain less protein than a lower-weight soy protein isolate (usually in powder form). It is as if they use every trick to avoid telling us what we want to know.

One nice thing about reading ingredient lists is that the sight of those liquid "vegetable oils" in a milky drink makes me slightly nauseous, not tempted at all to even take a sip!

Yep, ingredients are required to be listed by weight, starting with the highest weight.

Pretty sure the milk concentrate provides a lot less of the protein than the soy isolate, even if they're both powdered the concentrate can be as little as 25% protein, and the isolate is 90% protein. With all the liquid ingredients listed before you get to the list of what constitutes 2% or less of the product, yeah, most likely it's liquid milk protein concentrate.

Either way, it doesn't sound like real food.

I left out the long list of vitamins and minerals that are added to it.

I realize that it was designed as a way to get some kind of nutrients into patients who aren't able to eat normal food, or not able to take in enough real food, which is why everything is concentrated in that little can or bottle. That's also part of the reason it's so sweet - because they'll usually sip something sweet, even if they can't bring themselves to eat actual food.

Most of the time the patients they're giving Boost to are painfully thin from long term illness but they certainly can't just actively let them starve or dehydrate. (often they're terminal - it's rare for someone in a nursing home to be discharged back to normal life. They usually only leave through the morgue.) If they're in the hospital, it's considered a step in returning to normal food, or a supplement if they don't have much appetite.

It's just terrible that it's being promoted as healthy supplement or meal substitute for people who are not in the final stages of life, when it's clearly nothing more than a sugar and chemical stew.

The early "miracle drugs," like sulfa and antibiotics, were miracles. People died from shaving cuts or a pimple. Now, people with sepsis could be saved, which was miraculous science in action.

It was all about 120 years ago. And we haven't had such dramatic results, since. But the pharmaceutical company, as we know it, was born then. Only, we haven't gotten miracles in a long time.

Improvement across the board! Anesthesia is a LOT better, for instance. Our ability to intervene and patch up, in acute conditions, is still amazing. But our approach to the most common chronic conditions -- the lifestyle ones, BTW -- are failures.

Gary Taubes latest book on diabetes outlines how Type I's care declined after the discovery of insulin. And how it was another miracle drug, at least in hormone discovery, and how that devolved into making diabetes into a chronic condition, with all the side effects. Because, back in the day, people adapted to the animal diet or they died. No time for decades of suffering.

And this is where public health, which has been battered by these money concerns, needs to assert itself again, as it used to. Creating laws about sewers and drinking water, caring for the victims of epidemics, and preventing them. NYC passed public health laws, based on a village who devoted half their housing to TB patients. Their doctors had created a model law. (And a reminder you don't see TB anymore, except in rare cases. Antibiotics. It was the White Plague, and people know the Black Death better these days.)

Incredible profits in miracle drugs. Especially if they are distributed to the whole of the population on a daily basis! Every middle aged person on the planet was once targeted for statins, and now it's the semaglutide. All that mice mayhem, and for nothing. These drugs don't cure and go away. They are molded into lifetime investment, are they not?

And it's all the FOOD. This has the potential to crater the entire economy as artificial food takes hold across the globe. This truth is what is dangerous to them. That's why they overwhelm the world with marketing.

Once alerted to Google's bias towards veganism, I think it was page 20 or so of the results when I started seeing what I'd consider good advice. Who goes that deep? We start thinking "wisdom of crowds" when it's artificlal.

TB is not common in the US, but it is also not as rare as one might think. The only reason I know this because when DH was downsized from his job back in the 00's, when he finally found a new job it was as "public outreach" person at the county's Dept of Health office. Every day, he was tasked with taking TB meds to TB patients in this county, and observing as they took their meds to assure they took them as prescribed.

In the US, it's mostly among those who have visited countries where TB is still a serious problem, or else among those who lived for years (sometimes decades) in refugee camps in those countries before emigrating to the US.

Still, there were also those who needed to be treated for TB despite the complete lack of any connection to anyone who was from a country where TB is common, nor had they ever visited one of those countries. (in one case that I know of it involved a child. But also back in the 60's, one of my aunts - who had never lived anywhere except the US - had TB.)

The only reason it's not a widespread problem in the US is that they still attempt to isolate and treat TB patients aggressively.

I say attempt to isolate them because when they have been living in a refugee camp for years or even decades, they've long since applied to emigrate to any country that will accept them, but they have no idea which country they might end up in, or when. They find out which country they're going to very shortly before they're relocated. Could be the US, could be one of many European countries, and since it takes years to learn a new language, but they don't find out until weeks or even days before they leave the refugee camp where they're going to be going, there's no time to learn the language of that country before they're settled in an apartment in the host country. So getting the meds to them and making sure they take them - that's just a matter of the public outreach person putting on an N-95, taking their meds to them and observing as they take the med. Helping them understand that they are very ill, just how serious TB is (especially when it was so common in the refugee camp) and that they need to remain isolated until all testing shows the disease to have been cleared to avoid spreading it to others can be a bit more difficult.

Also - TB is not just the lung disease we normally think of as TB. The bacteria can exist in almost any part of the body - the spine, the brain, etc. Those patients needed to be treated too.

My mother's parents both died of TB in 1930 when she was orphaned at 3. She later was in nursing school and tested positive for TB exposure, but it wasn't clear if she got it while nursing or when she was a kid (w/no symptoms). It wasn't until she was ~80, got pneumonia and a chest Xray that showed a "spot" of TB. Apparently the lungs can encapsulate it and it just needed to be watched to see if the spot changed. It didn't.

What a terrible blow for your mother. It was sadly so common that I knew I would be writing about it.

I'm a big reader, but until living in an area once dominated by TB sanitariums, I had no idea how giant the problem really was. From WW II all the way back to antiquity.

But I think spread in big cities was due to all the time people were spending indoors, in offices and factories. We now know that would reduce everyone's D!

I have already read Dr. Ede's own story (and followed her on Twitter back when it was fun) and she improved her own mental health by focusing on animal foods, and allowing few plants.

But this was part of what convinced me to try, and stick with, carnivore, which turned my health around. I spent 2019 healing from a huge autoimmune flare and losing an unexpected 25 additional pounds. Which also helped me with fatigue, sleep problems, and stress handling. By the end of 2019 I felt I was really at some kind of peak. Which was good, because we have all been severely tested, since.

I was nervous, actually, and I've always loved meat dishes, it wasn't that. It simply seemed a radical leap. But it is the best elimination diet, and that was how I thought of it. It turned into something with a lot of advantages. But the story of my healing is realizing I should give up a certain food, and then I do I swear, taste buds shift and now my treat is blue cheese on my burger.

Still, applying food to our mental state is very new to most people. Who still see a lot of mental illness as something you can take a pill for and why aren't you? And we are back at Magical Pill Thinking, which is true for only a select group of prescription drugs.

But there is no question in my mind that my anxiety receded when I began Atkins, and while I have been dealing with highly anxiety-inducing things, I am managing. I don't think I would have been able to. My past self was all hormone storms and blood sugar swings. It would have been messier and there were times I worry I wouldn't have had the margin.

At this point, avoiding any kind of health breakdown, in me or my partner, really is a win. This is what I am sharing with my friends, most younger than me. I really would like to be the raft guide that gets them through the rapids

Bit surprising she doesn't exclude spinach due to its high oxalate content. She does exclude star-fruit due to oxalates but, according to this paper , it only has a quarter of the oxalates spinach does (114 vs 490 mg/100g).

I'm going to continue avoiding it to be on the safe side.

I have reached the point that I can tell. Was a dinner party where they wrapped the meat in spinach and I foolishly just didn't eat the spinach part.

Sick for a few days!

Before I discovered Sally K Norton I was having symptoms on meat only, too. Now I'm getting rid of the OLD oxalate and it's amazing.