From Nick Nilsson
Author and Publisher of BetterU News
http://www.fitness-ebooks.com

Ok, I had such a good response from the article I sent out
yesterday about calorie-free foods, I figured I'd open things up
a little with a few rants on nutrition and supplements that I've
been stewing about for years...let me know what you think after
reading these...

---

Rant #1 - Why Does Everything Makes Us Fat Or Causes Cancer?

It seems like we can't eat or drink anything these days without
being told it'll make us fat or cause cancer.

We try to eat canned tuna to eat less fat and we get mercury
poisoning. We eat fruit and vegetables for the vitamins and fiber
and the pesticides give us tumors. We eat chicken and we get mad
chicken disease and now farm-raised salmon will give you swine
flu. Wine is either good or bad for you depending on whether you
eat it with cheese or with crackers!

What ever happened to the good old days when we got fat from
eating too much pie and we got sick from eating too much paint
off the walls? Now I hear you can get cancer from worrying about
getting cancer.

---

Rant #2 - Low-Carb Beer

Do beer companies seriously believe that they can get people to
believe that they're selling diet beer? With all their talk about
who has 1 gram less carbs in a tablespoon than the other, they
seem to forget that it's actually the ALCOHOL in their product
that makes you fat!

Not only does alcohol basically snuff out your fat-burning
enzymes, it's also preferentially stored as fat and seriously
messes up your body's production of muscle-building hormones such
as testosterone.

I guess saying "low-carb" does sound better than saying
"watered-down." Next they'll be adding caffeine and Gatorade to
it and be calling it "high-performance beer."

---

Rant #3 - "Nutrient of the Week" Bandwagon Marketing

Did you hear? Froot Loops are now healthy because they contain
added calcium and fiber! They contain added calcium because
someone dropped a big bag of chalk to the sugary goop they make
it out of...and they contain fiber because somebody shredded up
some cardboard boxes and dumped the sawdust in the vat. You can
now feed it to your sugar-crazed A.D.D. kids with a clear
conscience because it's now healthy for them because it has
CALCIUM and FIBER. So much better than vegetables...

I'm waiting for the day when a clever marketer takes a piece of
plain blackboard chalk and sells it as a "Calcium Stir Stick" for
your coffee for 10 times the price.

---

Rant #4 - Trying to Pass Unhealthy Foods Off As Healthy

Pork Rinds Lite - now with 25% less fat, sodium, cholesterol,
lead and cyanide.

Even if you take some token percentage of the bad stuff out of a
bad food, it's still going to be a bad food. It's like buying
reduced fat lard - it's still lard. It just has a nicer name now
and serving size is smaller. It's just so easy to reduce the fat
in a serving by making the serving smaller, but what's the point?
Who's going to sit down and eat just 3 cheesey poofs?

When I eat a food I know is bad, I know it's bad but sometimes
I'm just going to eat it anyway. I'm not an idiot. I'm not going
to sue you for making unhealthy food. Nobody is putting a gun to
my head to eat it. I don't believe for a second that slightly
reducing the "perceived naughtiness" of a food somehow now makes
it "healthy." So please don't try and sugarcoat this delicious
garbage unless it's for flavor.

---

Rant #5 - Expensive Urine and Other Supplement Bashing

There are doctors even to this day who believe that taking
vitamins will only result in expensive urine. They believe that
you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need in a balanced
diet. Unfortunately, the only balanced diet some people get is
when they're trying to carry 3 dishes to the table in one hand
without dropping everything.

Jumping straight to prescribing costly drugs to mask symptoms to
people who are probably just desperately in need of basic
nutrition is the EPITOME of expensive urine, in my opinion.

And then there's creatine. You may remember the buzz a few years
ago when some of the "don't-confuse-us-with-the-facts" media
jumped on a story about the deaths of some high school wrestlers.
They were taking creatine to improve their performance so
obviously it must have killed them. It certainly wasn't because
they were taking long steam baths in rubber suits and exercising
intensely without drinking adequate water in order to desperately
make weight for a wrestling meet. It must have been the horrible
supplement that did it because nobody has ever died from
catastrophic dehydration or heat stroke, right?

Let me clarify - there is nothing dangerous about creatine. It's
a natural substance already found in your body in quantity. It's
found in every piece of meat that you eat. The only way creatine
could hurt you is if someone drops a bucket of it on your foot.

Supplements only seem to make the news when somebody has
something bad to say about them, regardless of whether it's true
or not.

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Rant #6 - Weight-Loss-Due-To-Illness Envy

Ok, this one isn't really about nutrition or supplements but
have you ever been really, really REALLY sick, dropped 10 or 20
pounds in a week, then had some knucklehead come up to you
afterward and say "I wish I could get sick like you so I could
lose weight." Start with the fat in your head! How come these
people never get their wish?

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Rant #7 - Food That's Only 10% Real

How can a juice call itself a juice if it's only got 10% real
juice? Can I pay for the juice with 10% real money?

---

Rant #8 - "Eat Whatever You Want And Still Lose Weight" Fat Loss
Pills and Carb Blockers

What a wonderful message to send to the millions of people out
there trying to lose weight. You don't need to watch what you eat
or exercise...just take this little pill and you can eat frosted
Twinkies stuffed with hot dogs and not gain a pound.

Never mind what all this terrible stuff is doing to your
insides, there's also the vicious cycle of loss and regain that
diet pill manufacturers build their entire businesses on: you eat
like crap so you get fat then you take a pill so you can keep
eating like crap while losing weight. When you don't take the
pill and continue to eat like crap, you get fat and depressed and
need to take the pills again. What better way to sell something
than to create a physical and emotional dependence on it!

Now I'm not saying the general population shouldn't know better
than to fall for this but there is a reason that toothpicks and
shampoo come with instructions on the back and why hair dryers
come with warning not to operate while standing in a pool of
water.

Here's a thought, and pardon me if I'm out of line, if you can't
eat it unless you take a pill to stop it from being digested by
your body, perhaps maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be eating it
in the first place...

---

That's pretty much everything I can think of for now. Thanks for
listening...I need to go...my Tater Tot levels are getting
dangerously low...

Nick

P.S. As I mentioned yesterday as well, if you're interested in
some REAL nutritional info, my friend and colleague Mike Geary,
to celebrate his 34th birthday, is having a half-price sale on
his book "The Fat Burning Kitchen" - it's just 20 bucks right now
and the book has a TON of great nutritional tips and information.

Really useful stuff....as opposed to everything I was ranting
about above :)

==> http://www.fitstep.com/goto/fat-burning-kitchen.htm


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