You are NOT rational

Addictions affect our ability to think rationally; they prejudice our judgment in favor of maintaining the addiction. That is why it is so difficult even to decide to change, much less actually change. Those addicted to rich, heart attack-causing foods are more than happy to believe the lie that a low cholesterol level is not desirable and readily parrot high-protein enthusiasts who spread the myth that low cholesterol is dangerous. Many people addicted to animal foods would embrace the belief that the earth is flat if they could use it to justify their consumption of fatty meats, butter, and cheese.—Joel Fuhrman, Eat to Live, 167

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Truth!
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Once more, round the 'Net

Not sure where to start this week. Maybe let's start with this, from Bicycling, on how social media affects, wait for it. . . what you eat! Yep. According to this article, "new research shows you’re more likely to consume the types of food you see most while scrolling on the ’gram." Not only are you what you eat, but you eat what you see. I guess placement ads must work for the same reason. There's a theological lesson there, isn't there. Something about fixing our eyes on Jesus.

But how about the mouth? Well, for you word of faith people, Andrew Gabriel, an Assembly of God theologian, so no cessationist, says it's overblown:

When I point out that there is no verse in the Bible where anyone ever says, “I decree and declare X over my life,” one question Christians sometimes raise is, “But don’t you believe the Bible when it says there is power in the tongue?”

Yes, I do. But we have to ask, what does the Bible mean when it refers to the power of the tongue?

Some Christians claim that because we are created in the image of God, we, like God, have the power in our tongues to speak things into being.

This is poor reasoning. God spoke the world into being literally out of nothing. No human has ever done that. And this is why no theologian in church history has ever suggested that being created in the image of God means that human words have creative power. Well…this, plus the fact that this idea has no biblical support.

But, as he does not hesitate to point out, the tongue does have real power to hurt and to heal, a theme that Ron Sider takes up via a guest post. Final two paragraphs:

We are speaking and hearing creatures. We live by words spoken and heard, words addressed and answered. In Finally Comes the Poet, Walter Brueggemann writes, “How we speak matters enormously…because the shape and power of everything else is put at risk and made possible by our speech with each other.”

Given our current situation, we have an option. Obama didn’t walk on water, but we have in him something far better in presidential rhetoric than what we’ve heard over the past three years. It seems worth talking about the difference words make and voting for something better in November.

Speaking of which, Heather Cox Richardson posted this Feb 23:

Ukraine journalist Marko Suprun and Russian-born foreign policy journalist Julia Ioffe said something interesting this morning on CNN. They were pointing out that observers often make the mistake of thinking that Russian disinformation is designed to pit the American left against the American right to sow chaos. But, in fact, they pointed out, Russian disinformation is designed to pit the American left and the American right against the American center, because it is in the great American center that democracy lives.

And David Fitch has this to say about reconciliation (part 2 to follow next week):

The “enemy-making machine” is my label for how antagonisms work in a society that lives in autonomy from God. Using observations taken from the field of “critique of ideology” (or “critical theory”), I’ve noticed several repeatable patterns to how antagonisms work in our culture and even in our churches. There are several elements to it that can help us ask the right questions, diagnose what is happening, and resist entering into the enemy-making machine. I contend if we can resist its temptation, we can open space for the presence of the living God to unwind the antagonism and make way for grace, forgiveness, and healing.

He follows that with some solid advice; read it!

On a darker side of things, this op-ed says that maybe it's just a dark comedy

I’m sorry not sorry to be a Cassandra about this — and I sure hope I’m wrong. But confronted with this reality, it is staggering to me that anyone can say we should chill. The nature of Trump’s instinctual tyranny is that it never stops by itself. And, like any psychological disorder, it never rests. It has an energy all its own. Each new beachhead of power is simply a means to acquire more of it in an ever-more ambitious and dynamic form. This is not a comedy; it’s a tragedy we want to believe is a comedy. Because the alternative is too nightmarish. A Kierkegaard quote, of all things, popped on Twitter this week that seemed to capture the dynamic beautifully: “A fire broke out behind stage at a theater. The clown walked out to warn the public and they thought it was a joke and they applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s exactly how the world will end: to generous applause from wits who think it’s a joke.”

Or maybe, this whole thing is because we have a warped view of masculinity.

The gospel of Jesus is not a gospel of proving yourself or measuring up. It’s a gospel of acceptance. Proving yourself is unnecessary. Before you can make your case that you belong, the Father places his signet ring on your finger and calls you “son.” Your title, your place, your identity has been secured by an act of love. Not a show of strength.

This one is compliments of Jim E. (who says he got it from James E.). David Bentley Hart looks at what socialism really is, not the imaginary versions that are used as scare tactics, and then proceeds to dismantle a few things that need dismantling. I'll just grab one paragraph, but as always, read the whole thing

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

OK, this is getting long, so a couple on education. First, the situation for adjuncts. Summary: not good. Fix: complicated. And Chris Gehrz asks if your Christian college will close. Hard thoughts, but good ones. And the old curmudgeocrat takes a look at the loss of shared public spaces via technology. Worth a read.

In other news, A.J. takes a look at productivity. BW3 quotes from Volf on divine retribution. Interesting quotation and worth thinking about (chase the link). And Christianity Today talks about identificational repentance.

Daniel was taken into captivity along with thousands of other Israelites during the Babylonian exile. There he was confronted with the complexities of living out his faith in a foreign culture while working for a pagan king. His prayer comes after decades of service to a foreign nation.

You do not have to read very much of the text to recognize the prayer as a confession. Daniel finds just about every way imaginable to ask for forgiveness. And he fully identifies himself with his people: We have sinned. We have rebelled. We have not listened. We have done wrong. We have been wicked. We have transgressed. We have turned away. We have been unfaithful. We have refused to obey. We have not sought the Lord. We have not turned from our sins. We have not given attention to your truth.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive acknowledgment of guilt, which is a little mystifying because, up until this point, Daniel hasn’t exhibited any obvious moral lapses. He’s been the very model of a faithful servant of God.

There’s a disconnect between his exemplary behavior and his humble confession. It makes you want to protest and say, “Daniel, you don’t have to do that. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s those who were unfaithful who should be apologizing!”

Daniel’s approach is so opposite from my own. When it comes to collective sins—whether those of the church, the clergy, or the nation—I want to distance myself from the offense. I want to point out why “they” are not “me.” And I want to denounce what I see “them” doing.

Yep. Here's an encouraging post, via Jim E. again, about a boss who put actions to his words by taking a pay cut back in 2015 and giving that money to his employees. Guess what? It worked. His employees are more productive and less stressed. Whodda thunk, eh? If you're not spending all your energy working 2–3 jobs to make ends meet on minimum wage, maybe you'll have energy to do one job well. Duh, as we used to say.

OK, two final posts on books. Nick Norelli on book gluttony (he should post more often). And the Literary Review of Canada looks at a book about books:

One thing to keep in mind when we talk idealistically about books is that many of the people who work directly with them—publishers, retailers, librarians, and authors alike—generally value one form of paper over all others: money. Publishing, like all other industries, is a profit-minded business, and bottom-line thinking often has ugly consequences for the object itself. Price’s book, for instance, contains a provoking “interleaf”—a section of about eight pages in which you read each line of text from the left-hand page across the gutter of the book to the adjoining right-hand page. It’s a clever game of mise-en-page, driving home visually and phenomenologically how our posture affects our experience of books and how habituated we are to using the material form of a book one page at a time. But the “interleaf” is also a failed experiment, thanks to the sloppiness with which Price’s book was bound up. Not a single one of the eight pages in my copy lines up properly across the gutter, rendering a hands-on study in graphic design just an unreadable, vertiginous nightmare. You should love books, we are told, even when they’ve been assembled with the care usually allowed to a last-minute science project.

Ouch! Wish I could disagree with them, but I can't.

That's it for this week. Hope you found something worth reading and didn't get too mad at me : )

I dare you to prove him wrong!

"No study has ever shown that a diet with a significant amount of animal product-based foods can reverse atherosclerosis—and no study ever will show that. Too much evidence demonstrates the opposite.

"Not even a case series of a small number of individuals on a Paleo, or animal protein-based, diet has ever shown a reversal of advanced heart disease. Even though hundreds of books are written, lots of big words are thrown around, and lots of claims are made to the contrary, it is all just hot air. These meat-based diets are the problem not the solution."—Joel Fuhrman, The End of Heart Disease, 188

Musings on exercise rooms

As you know, I recently returned from the annual AAR/SBL meetings, this year in Atlanta (you can read about my trip there and back again). Over the years, I've noticed a distinct trend in the use of exercise equipment in the conference hotels.

When I first started attending the conference back in 2003, if you didn't get to the exercise room by 6:00 AM, you likely wouldn't get the machine you wanted. In my case, it is the recumbent bicycle. More than likely you would have to take the upright bicycle or an elliptical machine. I started getting up a bit earlier and getting to the room at 5:55. If you waited until 6:15, you likely would stand in line for about 10–15 minutes to get a machine.

Over the years, that has changed. The change was gradual, the lines disappeared with people arriving later. It became less essential to arrive before 6:00, indeed 6:15 became early enough to get whatever machine you wished. The number of pieces of equipment also changed. Where before you would see 1 recumbent bicycle, 2 upright bicycles, 3–4 ellipticals, and 3–4 treadmills, now it is 1 recumbent, 1 upright (or none), 1–2 ellipticals, and 2–3 treadmills.

This year was the most dramatic, perhaps because I haven't attended for 2 years. Every day I arrived in the exercise room between 5:45-6:10 (depending on when my first appointment was). On most days, no one else arrived in the room until 6:15. On no day did more than 2 other people enter the room before I left (usually at 6:40) and on some days, I was the only person in the room.

Meanwhile, the nation has a growing problem with weight. Hmmm...

But, exercise is only half the issue. The other half is diet. At one of the hotels I stayed at, they offered "grab and go" lunches. Basically, a sack lunch. I took one. Here's what it had: 1 white bun with ham and cheese, 1 bag of potato chips, 1 Rice Krispie™ bar, 1 packet of real mayonnaise, and 1 packet of yellow mustard. Basically, the healthiest thing in there was the mustard packet! No fiber, no fruit, no vegetable (potato chips are not a vegetable!). Needless to say, it isn't healthy; even aside from the ham, cheese, and real mayo being animal products, the white bun and Rice Krispie™ bar would cause a pre-diabetic / diabetic's sugar levels to go nuts. But this was passed off with no apparent thought as a normal lunch. Add to that the probability that whoever ate it would grab a can of sugar-laden beverage, be it carbonated or not, and you've exceeded the recommended sugar intake for the day by about 3 times! And that's just one small lunch!

Any wonder we're a nation of obesity?

I don't like this

I just ran across this summation of some bee-related research. Seems the bees are just as good at getting addicted to bad food as we are. That does not bode well for the future...

Neonicotinoid apologists reject these studies, in part because the researchers force-feed neonic-laced food to the bees. The critics say that the most important thing for bees is freedom of choice. Give bees the right to pick their own nectar in the wild, they say, and they will eat a wide variety of foods that best suits their individual needs, mostly avoiding the poisonous plants. It sounds oddly like the talking points of soda manufacturers in soda ban debates: Let consumers “make the choice that’s right for them.”

The journal Nature published two studies today that disprove the “freedom of bee choice” theory. In the first, researchers offered bees two food sources: a pure sugar solution and a sugar solution laced with neonicotinoids. The bees did not avoid the contaminated food—they actually preferred it! The researchers then went a step further, testing the bees’ neural response to the insecticide. (Isn’t science amazing?) Although bee brains have bitter-sensing neurons that help detect poison (humans have them, too), this defense mechanism didn’t respond to neonicotinoids. In the end, the neonic-fed bees died earlier than their health food-eating peers, essentially poisoning themselves with junk.

I should have expected this

This showed up in my inbox this morning:

Last month, “Big Food,” in the form of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), a trade organization that represents more than 300 businesses, sent a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advising that it intends to petition the agency to allow foods containing GMOs to be labeled as “natural.”

Right! But if GMOs are natural, then why this a bit further in the article:

General Mills, Inc., has started producing GMO-free Cheerios. The company expects this new product, which will bear the label, “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients,” to be available to consumers “shortly.” However, this change does not affect other General Mills brands such as Honey Nut Cheerios.

Anything for a quick buck...Lord, deliver us from ourselves!

Where it all goes

Factory-farmed animals on this planet consume more calories than all the humans, by a long shot. Through this lens, the issue of world hunger seems a lot less like a problem of production or distribution and more like a problem with our personal priorities.— Whole (electronic edition), chapter 12

<idle musing>
There was an article in the Atlantic a few years ago discussing the food shortages. The author found that even countries with a chronic food shortage had enough to export food! It was all a case of finances. The food growers could make more money by exporting it, so they did—even though their fellow citizens were starving. It's all a case of greed...it all goes back to Genesis 3.
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An apple is an apple is a pill...

As it turns out, an apple does a lot more inside our bodies than all the known apple nutrients ingested in pill form. The whole apple is far more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the reductionist worldview, however, we don’t really believe the food itself is important. Only the nutrients contained in the food matter.— Whole (electronic edition), chapter 5

<idle musing>
Americans love their pills, though. Eat garbage all day and night and then pop a pill to make everything right again...except it only works on the Jetsons.
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The good, the bad, and the ugly

That pretty much describes a few of my culinary experiments in the last few months (man, time flies!). First the good:

I receive a daily e-mail from Mother Earth News. Sometimes the stuff is great; sometimes the stuff isn't. As with most of life, it is a mixed bag. Back in August/September or thereabouts, there was a link to broccoli chips. Basically, you take the leaves of broccoli plants and bake them. They call for olive oil and other such stuff in the article, but we're avoiding added oils, so I figured I'd give it a try as just leaves.

We had a few broccoli plants that were done; I was going to pull them and compost them anyway. So, I cut off some leaves and cut them into smaller squares. I popped them into the oven at 250°F, stirred after 15 minutes, let them go another 15 minutes and pulled them out.

They were delicious! We scarfed them down and I made another pan. We've had them multiple times since then—until the deep freeze at the beginning of November happened. One piece of advice: make sure to cut them small enough! I tried to make some of them bigger, but when you bite into them, they disintegrate. Crumbs all over the floor...

The bad? Peanut butter granola. I had to try it...it was bad. 'Nuff said.

The ugly? I've made baked corn chips off and on for the last couple of years, with fairly good success. I would mix the cornmeal with whole wheat flour to give it substance. Once we got our grain mill in the fall of 2012, I couldn't get the flour fine enough anymore, so I gave up. Until earlier this week. I decided to try it with straight cornmeal. We currently buy our cornmeal at the Co-op and it is more a combination of corn flour and cornmeal than straight cornmeal. I like it a lot for cornbread, but hadn't tried it for corn chips.

I thought it might hold together better than traditional cornmeal. Well, it did—kinda...it stuck to the counter once I rolled it out. So, I figured I'd use the old wax paper method where you roll it out between two sheets of wax paper and transfer it to the stone. It stuck to the wax paper!

No problem; I'll just use parchment paper, so I thought...if it doesn't come loose, I'll just lay the whole thing on the stone. I figured that the baking would loosen it from the paper. Well, it did—kinda. It tasted good—when you didn't get a bite of parchment paper with it. And it was ugly!

So that's my latest experiments...the broccoli chips are a keeper! And I've tweaked one of my cornbread recipes again. I now like this cornbread better than the milk, eggs, and oil version that I used to make. That's saying a lot, because I grew up on that recipe and had always felt that the plant-based ones didn't quite measure up. Now it does...

A little exercise goes a long ways

I've had this in my drafts folder for a few weeks...it's about the value of exercise.

After only a week, the young men who had not exercised displayed a significant and unhealthy decline in their blood sugar control, and, equally worrying, their biopsied fat cells seemed to have developed a malicious streak. Those cells, examined using sophisticated genetic testing techniques, were now overexpressing various genes that may contribute to unhealthy metabolic changes and underexpressing other genes potentially important for a well-functioning metabolism.

But the volunteers who had exercised once a day, despite comparable energy surpluses, were not similarly afflicted. Their blood sugar control remained robust, and their fat cells exhibited far fewer of the potentially undesirable alterations in gene expression than among the sedentary men.

<idle musing>
This is basically what Covert Bailey has been saying for over 35 years. Exercise doesn't just burn calories (it actually burns very few), it realigns the body's metabolism so that your muscles become "better butter burners" as he puts it.
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And where do you eat?

In 1978, 18 percent of calories were eaten away from home; the figure is now 36 percent. In 1970, Americans ate 6 billion fast-food meals. By 2000, the figure was 110 billion.—Eat to Live, page xviii

<idle musing>
I wonder what the figure is now? It's definitely higher; the economic slump didn't keep people from eating out, it just caused them to transfer it to cheaper places...
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Things that make you go hmmm...

How many baked potatoes do you think you can eat to get the same amount of fat as in 1 teaspoon of olive oil? If you said 70, you are right. Which do you think will make you feel more satisfied, one teaspoon of oil or 70 baked potatoes?— Fasting and Eating for Health, page 189

<idle musing>
Indeed! What's for breakfast? 140 baked potatoes! Or a three egg omelet fried in 2 tablespoons of oil (which is about how much they use in a restaurant—believe me, I was a grill-fry cook!). I'll take the potatoes, myself—but that should feed me for about 4 months of breakfasts...no wonder over half of Americans are overweight.
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People of the lie

The message that people hear is that it is okay to continue with their present diet, as long as they supplement with vitamin pills or other nutritional supplements. This is a powerful lie, but it is attractive because it is what people in general want to believe. However, you cannot achieve optimal wellness as long as present-day dietary habits continue— Fasting and Eating for Health, page 49

Antibiotic use

More than 90 percent of all antibiotics produced are slated for animal administration.— The Pleasure Trap, page 128 (in CAFOs, etc.)

<idle musing>
I read in a more recent book (2012 publication), that the number is above 80 percent, not 90. But, what is more scarey was that the development of "superbugs" is almost totally because of the use on animals...we're killing ourselves by what we choose to eat and how we raise that food...
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Whole? Not likely

Incredibly, less than 2 percent of the wheat products consumed in the U.S. Are “whole wheat.” This means that the majority of plant-based food products we wat have had some or all of their fiber artificially extracted.— The Pleasure Trap, page 78

Count the cost

Modern medical science has given us wonderful gifts, but these gifts have not been free. The astonishing technical capability of medicine, while invaluable in certain areas, has exacted an enormous price from our collective understanding. The medical doctor holds one of the most respected and admired places in our society. But that awe has produced a danger: Most people believe that ingenious medical procedures are likely to save them from any disease process that they may have to face! This belief is absolutely false. The truth is far different and ominous.— The Pleasure Trap, page 37

<idle musing>
Can anyone say "Idolatry!"???? Far too often, I fear, when we say we are thankful that so-and-so got better, we aren't so much thankful to God as to medical science. That's a slap in the face to God...

Lord! Forgive our idolatry and set us free! Open our eyes to the ways we have allowed culture to dictate our way of life instead of your Holy Spirit!
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The power of addiction

..if you give a laboratory rat a choice between cocaine and food, he will choose the cocaine, because cocaine is a more powerful cause of pleasure and thus a stronger signal of success than is food. Incredibly, this will remain true even as death by starvation approaches.— The Pleasure Trap, page 22

The wrong questions

Some people ask if there is any difference between nutrients in 'chemical' or 'organic' form, but that is really asking the wrong question. We should actually be asking how stable and soluble the nutrients are.—How to Grow Winter Vegetables, page 36

<idle musing>
Aren't we always asking the wrong questions, though?
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Taste good?

Our tongue is able to distinguish five tastes: sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and savory. Sugar covers up all four. It covers up salty (trail mix, honey roasted peanuts), sour (the acidity in processed tomato sauce provided by less-than-ripe tomatoes, or lemonade), bitter (milk chocolate). And savory (sweet-and-sour pork). Sugar covers up the inequities of foods, making not-so-tasty food seem like it is worth eating. Bottom line, you can make pretty much anything taste good with enough sugar. And the food industry does.—href=http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101606582,00.html target=”_blank”> Fat Chance, pages 170-171

<idle musing>
Yep! And they do : (
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Food

Micronutrients matter—the biochemistry says so—except they don't work when provided as supplements in clinical trials. How many studies do we need? Now you're ready for the dénouement: Real food, containing endogenous micronutrients, prevents metabolic syndrome. Processed food causes metabolic syndrome. And nutritional supplements can't reverse that which have previously been destroyed.—href=http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101606582,00.html target=”_blank”> Fat Chance, page 156