Comments by "LancesArmorStriking" (@LancesArmorStriking) on "Ask Adam: Is eating cholesterol actually bad? Why are cold fries so gross? (PODCAST E13)" video.

  1.  @SimuLord  Sorry about that, glad to hear you're doing better now. Maybe try hitting back against the aversion, by painting over the extremely bad memories with extremely good ones? I don't know if any restaurants sell fancy oatmeal dishes, but if it's anywhere, it's definitely in the PNW
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  2. I guess this depends on where you want to draw the line for 'traditional', even within Eurasia there have been botanical developments that bring non-native species to an area that later become 'traditional'. For example, most high-class Western European cuisine following the fall of Rome, was primarily focused on imported spices from the Middle East and China. Very little thought was given to domestic food culture and dishes were often more a display of status (ie peacock's tongue, peaches from China, etc). Russia's quintessential dish, borscht (which likely originates in Ukraine), is made with beetroot- an ingredient that only appeared from the Mediterranean in eastern Europe in 13th-15th centuries. Before that, sorrel or hogweed was used. So even that is not "native", in the same way that tomatoes aren't. Even chicken comes from China- pretty sure that's from Adam himself, in Mandarin it's 'jungle fowl', harkening to where it was originally wild. Apples were originally bred in Central Asia. Buckwheat comes from east Asia. And so on.
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  3. The larger picture is even more interesting, and nefarious: When Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, it galvanized the US public (and scientific community) to eliminate the perceived threat (I won't comment on how warlike and simplistic I think the reaction to this event was). From the emerging research, two major hypothesis sprang: the sugar one, and the fat one. Dr. John Yudkin (in the UK) led the sugar-hypothesis, positing that it was the excess of complex sugars getting processed in our liver, unable to be fully converted, that the body turns into fat cells. Meanwhile Dr. Ancel Keyes, an American physiologist, led the fat-hypothesis, stating that dietary unsaturated fats led to people getting fat. It is worth mentioning that Keys had some... 'help', if I'm not mistaken, from the American Sugar Association, a lobbying group which had vested interests in keeping sugar on grocery shelves. Key among Keys' (ha!) evidence was the famous Seven Countries study.. which was also found to have been tampered with. The original study contained 21 countries, with no association (or correlation) between dietary fat and cholesterol levels, but Keys seems to have cherry-picked his own data. In the end, with the help of the companies, and a huge smear campaign, Yudkin's career ended with him discredited and destitute. Only 40 years later are we discovering that, once again, money interfered in politics... and now, despite the fact that everything is 'fat-free', we have 40% morbidly obese, and another 30% on top of that overweight. This is why I try not to give money to any Western food establishments, good or bad. Bad apples and such.
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