Mike Fenster - The Fallacy of the Calorie: Why the Modern Western Diet Is Killing Us and How to Stop It

Dr. Mikes previous book:
Eating Well, Living Better

Everyone loves to eat. And everyone wants to be healthy. But how do we navigate between todays extremesbetween those offering us gastronomic gluttony and the siren song of convenient junk food and those preaching salvation only through deprivation and boring food choices? Dr. Michael Fenster draws upon his expertise and training as an interventional cardiologist and as a chef to forge a path through this wilderness to offer readers a middle path that endorses both fine dining and health eating. As a chef and foodie, and someone who has battled the bulge himself, he knows that if the food doesnt taste great, no one will sustain any program for a lifetime. This is a culinary survival guide for every kitchen.

Michael S. Fenster, MD

Americas Culinary Interventionalist and Author of Eating Well, Living Better: A Grassroots Gourmet Approach to Good Health and Great Food

The Fallacy of The Calorie

by Dr. Mike Fenster

Copyright 2014 by Dr. Mike Fenster

ISBN 978-1-94019-289-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

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Dedicated to Jennifer,
The Queen of The Stones

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

~ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN

M any so-called food and health experts arent. Our relationship with food is complex and most approaches are simply an oversimplification. Eat food high in cholesterol and it raises your blood cholesterol. High blood cholesterol leads to blockages in your heart arteries or coronary atherosclerosis. Blockages lead to heart attacks and death. Such lovely, simple, straightforward and linear observations are what led to the outcry against consuming eggs, and in particular, yolks. It is wonderful, unpretentious, and elegantexcept that its wrong. Your dietary cholesterol has little-to-no impact on what your blood cholesterol levels are let alone defining the complex relationship between good cholesterol (HDL cholesterol), bad cholesterol (LDL cholesterol) and a myriad of other lipoproteins.

Eggs from free-range chickens consuming their natural diet, including the yolk, are among natures most healthful foods. After the initial front-page fire-and-brimstone damnation, no one bothers to read the official retraction on the back page. Commercials still abound and store shelves remain stacked with healthy breakfast sandwich options made with egg whites or synthetic pseudo-egg stuff and some sort of bread product loaded with preservatives, modern wheat, yoga mat ingredients, and sweeteners. The ingredients in the processed cheese food (whatever, by God, that actually is) and meat-like substance wont be found in Mother Natures pantry. Parsimony is a great guide, but oversimplification and simple reduction can be more dangerous than exaggeration. You can end up using Occams razor to slit your own throat.

Food is part necessity; we need food to live. We need proper nutrition. Our bond to food is part hardwired into our physiology and part subject to our psychology. We crave certain things at an instinctive, unconscious level; but what we choose to eat is a conscious decision. Food is part of our social fabric, part pleasure and experience. It is also big business. Without an understanding and appreciation for each of these aspects, the so-called experts are like the blind men in the room with the elephant. Each mistakes his limited experience for the entire animal. And the ones at the rectum always seem to preach loudest.

These days it seems as if everybody has an opinion about food and health. People watch Dr. Oz, tune in to the Food Network, or read some anecdotal diatribe on the Internet and all of a sudden theyre full of expert opinions and analysis. A purported health and wellness network recently re-circulated an ongoing Internet meme about how people should eat bananas to prevent cancer because, according to the post, ripe bananas contain high levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Firstly, the original study was performed in mice and the mice did not eat bananas, they had banana pure injected into their bellies. The immune response of the mice was then observed. The study never actually evaluated whether there was any TNF in the bananas. Considering that TNF is produced by the human immune system, something lacking in a normal banana, the take-home message may be to avoid consuming Franken-nanas with human parts.

Elevated levels of TNF are associated with autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurativa, refractory asthma, and congestive heart failure. So even if Mister Tallyman tallied you eight bunches of GMO bananas and they were stacked with TNF until the morning comes, eating them to excess may just make you terribly ill; BS comes and me wanna go home.

Chances are you have come across, or know, someone who claims to be an expert about food and health. Chances are most of these self-proclaimed experts have no training in food preparation or any kind of health-related or medical background. They have grandiose made-up titles like wellness enthusiast, lifestyle coach, the Duke of Diet, or something equally ridiculous.

The story about our relationship with food and our health is very intricate and continually evolves. And make no mistake, it is a story. It has a beginning, a history, and the tale to date. Many people do not take the time to get to the heart of the matter or evaluate data. But if you are calling yourself an expert and advising others about such intimate and powerful decisions as food and health, you need to. Stories like the banana and other unsubstantiated bits taken as conventional wisdom get circulated about long enough that they can become accepted as fact.

Many of the so-called experts lack the requisite training or experience in the realms of food and healthor any related training at all. Working out in a gym, starring in a movie or your own YouTube production doesnt make you qualified. It also doesnt mean these are bad people trying to run a scamalthough many of them are. The road to bypass surgery is paved with good intentions. Less than seventy-five years ago, Lucky Strike cigarettes were The Doctors Choice. And The Doctors Choice became Americas Choice. Women were advised that smoking Lucky Strikes would help them to stay slim, since they could Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. The road to bypass surgery is also paved with goodly profits.