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My Ramblings Today

Yeah, what should I write about today? Maybe about the Malaysian economy? Yesterday, I saw on the news that it is projected to grow in 2010. Huh? Really? At the snail pace we are experiencing, any type of GDP growth will be most welcomed. Prices of consumer goods had been spiralling in 2009 like nobody's business. Thousands had been laid off and this fact had been keep quiet by the Malaysian National Front government. I plan to jump into the work force some time next year and, frankly-speaking, I would be very lucky if I would be called by a few decent companies for interviews. With many years of working experience behind my back, I am sure I would be hard-pressed to land a decent paying job. Not to be too pessimistic, I am sure that greedy employers out there are only too willing to pay entry-level basic pay for fresh graduates, or even less. One cannot be too choosy now days. This reminds me of my lady friend who graduated from a local university in electronics engineering and could only land a job as a factory worker. Come on! More jobs must be made available to all. Or else, what is the point of churning out university graduates by the thousands. Even though I do not have a university scroll, I know what it is like to be in an employed environment. When I was a banker, working life seemed like a breeze. But, this is not so these days. Oh God! Please get me employment as soon as I am ready for it. Ameen!

Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings

By Joe Bageant, AlterNet.

A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:

"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.

"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."

My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.

I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.

For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.

The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.

For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.

Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.

DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"

"I am the Son of God."

"Grab a cross on the way out."

On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...

Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?

Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.

The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.

With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.

Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.

High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.

"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.

During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.

Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!

For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.

You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.

Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.

Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.

Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!

Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...

Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.

Rent a Life, Inc.

(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.

Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.

Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.

Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.

The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"

Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.

Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).

Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"

Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?

How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?

"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."

I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.

Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.

After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.

Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.

Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."

Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.

More Than $740,000 Paid. Since February 2007.

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Canaries Flying High!

After a disastrous start to the 2009-2010 season, losing 1-7 to Colchester at Carrow Road, Norwich City faithfuls must be delighted with the rise of the Canaries to third place in the Coca-Cola League One in England in recent matches. The arrival of new manager Paul Lambert had been a blessing with the Canaries chalking up win after win. As it is now, Grant Holt is the joint leading scorer in League One. Holt, together with Wes Hoolahan and Chris Martin have contributed more than 50 goals to the Norwich City cause. Being a supporter since 1975, I hope and I pray that my team will bounce back and get promoted to the Championship League at the very first attempt. While not one player could be singled out for the Canaries' success, much has to be said about how the players churn out outstanding performances in the past matches. Norwich City is only a few points behind the automatic promotion places and I do not want my team to suffer from a defeat from promotion play-offs. An automatic promotion place is what we should aim for and hopefully, this will materialize. Kudos to all players and staff of Norwich City, and not forgetting the loyal fans and supporters. You can do it, Canaries!

How Eating Steak, Cake and Butter Can Make You Live Longer

For more than three decades, we've been told that fatty foods are deadly. But new research suggests that fat can be good for you. Jenny Matthau stands in front of hundreds of students at the Natural Gourmet School and speaks heresy. The New York City culinary program specializes in "health-supportive, whole-foods cuisine" with a "plant-based curriculum." Beef and pork aren’t on the syllabus, to say nothing of veal -- and the school’s alumni run kitchens at health spas and work in restaurants with names like Organic Planet. So when Matthau, who’s president of the school and teaches the core nutrition class, delivers her lecture in praise of fat, students are often surprised.

"A lot of students expect to hear just what the government is saying: You have your good fats and your bad fats, and you should try to eat a very low-fat diet," Matthau says. "And we don’t agree."

Instead, Matthau’s lecture includes a long section on why we need fats of all kinds in our diets, much more than we’ve been led to believe. She points out societies like the Maasai, a Kenyan tribe that counts meat, blood and whole milk among its dietary staples, yet has low rates of heart disease and obesity. She praises fat’s capacity to add flavor to a dish and make people feel full. "Fat makes things taste great, period," Matthau says. "I’m a big fan." Even so, sometimes it feels like a losing battle. "Students still want alternatives to butter."

For more than three decades, we’ve been told that fatty foods are deadly, to blame for a full menu of health hazards, from heart disease to obesity to cancer. Regularly described as the nutritional equivalent of cigarettes, fat has been the target of public-service campaigns and municipal bans aimed at keeping us slender and healthy. But a growing body of international research suggests our obsessive fear of fat may be misplaced. A high-fat diet won’t necessarily make us sick or fat; a low-fat diet may not make us healthy or slim.

Even the American Heart Association (AHA), a leader in the campaign against dietary fat, recently revised its nutritional guidelines, increasing the daily recommendations for fat. "The science just wasn’t there," acknowledges Robert Eckel, president of the AHA and a professor of endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Not only that, but our myopic aversion to fat may be doing more damage than an order of steak frites ever could. In our effort to avoid the demon lipids at all costs, we’re forever tinkering with our diets -- substituting Snackwells for Oreos, dry toast and a glass of orange juice for a plate of bacon and eggs -- in hopes it will keep us skinny almost effortlessly. But these dietary contortions often have unintended consequences. They inspire us to eat more food, for starters. And the food we eat more of? It contains more chemicals, starches and sugar. These ingredients "are more harmful than the much-feared animal fats," says Irina Baumbach, secretary of the Association for Nutritional Medicine and Dietetics in Aachen, Germany

It’s a shame, really. Because as it happens, experts now recognize fat can be good for you. Aside from the beneficial effects some fats can have on cholesterol -- unsaturated fats, like olive oil, tend to raise levels of good cholesterol and lower levels of the bad stuff -- fats help deliver vitamins, build cells and regulate hormones. Unsaturated fat also has antioxidant properties, which may help fight cancer; so does meat from grass-fed animals. The oft-repeated hypothesis that links a high-fat diet to breast cancer has never been proved. And when it comes to appetite, hunger and obesity, fats -- along with protein, green vegetables and whole grains -- take more time to digest, making people feel full longer.

Even critics of high-fat diets acknowledge that people on them tend to eat less because they aren’t as hungry. And according to studies published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), many people even have a type of fat -- known as brown adipose tissue, or brown fat -- that burns calories rather than piling them on.

Finally, fatty food appears to be shedding its stigma. Restaurants are featuring ever-fattier cuts of meat; cookbooks extol the virtues of lard. And the more scientists and nutritionists learn, the more they’re willing to concede that vilifying fat isn’t the solution. Says Jennifer Lovejoy, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington School of Public Health: "When people are eating whole food, real food diets, obesity is not a problem."

At a time when weight loss has become prime-time entertainment, a civic responsibility and a multibillion-dollar global industry, it’s easy to forget that for centuries, doctors worried about malnutrition, starvation and underweight children, points out Gary Taubes. A science journalist, Taubes has been beating the drum in favor of fat for almost a decade. His book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage), spends 500 pages dismantling the prevailing ideas about fat, weight gain and health. It hasn’t made him popular.

There was a time, though, when a low-fat diet was just as controversial. Fat -- on the plate or the hips -- didn’t trigger health concerns until the late 20th century. As recently as the 1970s, dietary guidelines included plenty of fats and protein, because they helped people feel sated, preventing overeating. And obesity wasn’t considered a serious problem in Europe or the U.S.; high-carbohydrate meals were associated with weight gain, and academic articles linked obesity in Africa and the Caribbean with starchy diets.

But heart disease was a growing public health concern. By the mid-1900s, it was a leading cause of death in the U.S., with the rest of the West catching up quickly. Led by University of Minnesota physiologist Ancel Keys, scientists linked heart disease to cholesterol, and made the leap to fatty foods. While critics of Keys’ research abounded, the U.S. Congress wasn’t among them. In the late 1970s, a Senate committee issued broad dietary guidelines encouraging Americans to eat less fat. Today, we take it for granted that one too many bacon double-cheeseburgers will give us a heart attack for sure.

It’s hardly that simple. While the West started avoiding fats at all costs, researchers continued to study what causes heart disease. As they discovered more about the effects of different kinds of fats -- saturated, trans, mono- and poly-unsaturated -- on different kinds of cholesterol -- HDL ("good") and LDL ("bad") -- the weaker the link between dietary fats and heart disease became. Unsaturated fats, like those in nuts, fish, olive oil and avocado, are fluid at room temperature; they reduce LDL, which causes buildup in the arteries. Saturated fats, found in meat and dairy, chocolate and palm oil are solid at room temperature and their effects on cholesterol is more complicated. Coconut oil, for example, has been shown to raise both good and bad cholesterol levels, whereas some of the fats in dark chocolate and beef have a neutral effect.

In other words, as Taubes puts it, when it comes to cholesterol, food high in saturated fats may be, at worst, a wash. "If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease," he wrote in 2002. These days, he says he sees evidence of the conventional wisdom everywhere, from low-fat products on the shelves to the customers at his local bagel shop ordering soy cream cheese and skim lattes. "I always want to ask them why," he says. "There’s this overarching idea that fat is bad for you -- that something has to be the problem with our diets, because we die of heart disease and we get fat."

Increasingly, researchers and nutrition experts are starting to come around. "I have been in this business for 35 years and I have never been one of those who maintain that fat is bad," says Daan Kromhout, a professor of public health at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. "We don’t even know whether the two things -- fat and [being] overweight -- have anything to do with each other. The fat issue is much more complicated than it was once thought to be." Moreover, Kromhout says, stating only the amount of fat in a food product is misleading, since "you have to specify what type of fat is included -- saturated, unsaturated, trans-fat -- because if you don’t, people will just cut down on all fats, the good ones included."

Dutch pediatricians were so alarmed by the low-fat trend that they urged parents to ensure that their children receive the essential nutrients only fat can bring. "Children under the age of 6 need fat," said Elise Buiting, president of the Dutch Youth Service Medical Association, in an interview with a Dutch newspaper this year. "We recommend full-fat margarine with unsaturated fatty acids, for example. Children who are given the same ‘light’ products as their parents do not get enough."

As for the connection between fatty foods and weight, it’s controversial as well. Obesity was never the target of Congress’ efforts, although the low-fat recommendations were instituted to help people manage their weight. They haven’t. Since the guidelines were adopted, Americans have indisputably gotten fatter. "In the early 1990s, we ate low-fat everything and we didn’t get thinner," says Alice Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. "There’s your proof."

In the 1960s and ’70s, roughly 14 percent of Americans was obese. Today, more than 30 percent is, with another 30 percent classified as "overweight." Same goes in Europe, where consumption of fat has dropped and obesity rates have risen. In the U.K., obesity rates have tripled since 1980. In the Netherlands, the percentage of moderately overweight adults increased from 28 in 1981 to almost 36 in 2008, according to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics. The percentage of obese people more than doubled, from 5.1 percent to 11.2 percent, in the same period. According to the Society for the Study of Obesity, roughly half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese.

In three decades, while scientists have learned more about what eating fat will and won’t do, consumers have wholeheartedly embraced the "low-fat" doctrine. In the 1990s, more than 1,000 reduced- or low-fat foods were introduced each year, according to the AHA. By the end of the decade, more than 90 percent of the population reported consuming low-fat products. According to one survey, two out of three adults believed "a need exists for food ingredients that can replace the fat in food products," and one out of every two saw the appeal in food advertised as "reduced in both fat and calories." In other words, given the chance to replace fat with something else, we opened wide.

So given the blanket condemnation of fat, what did we eat instead? If we cut fat out of our diets, we have to get calories from somewhere. When food companies offer reduced-fat versions of cookies, salad dressings and sauces, sugar and carbohydrates generally make up the difference. When we consciously reduce the fat in our diets, we don’t typically eat fewer calories; we eat more rice and pasta, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And low-fat products have their own problems. "If you reduce the fat, you have to replace it with something," says Samuel Klein, a professor of medicine and nutrition in the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "So it’s sugar." It’s true: Either for taste, or to replace fat’s richness and moistness, the food industry began using sugar.

But as researchers studied fat and weight, they learned more about the effects of sugar, which as it turns out may inspire more weight gain than fat does. When we eat sugar -- or refined carbohydrates, which break down into sugar -- the body produces insulin to transport the sugar to the muscles and organs that burn it as fuel. Insulin, though, also regulates fat metabolism, and when insulin levels are high, the body stores fat rather than burning it. The issues and consequences of producing too much insulin are still open to debate, but many researchers believe that replacing fats with sugars and carbohydrates has the potential to wreak havoc on your metabolism. And ironically, even sugar substitutes, like aspartame, the sweetener in NutraSweet and Equal, have been linked to weight gain. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they seem to encourage people to eat more, or disrupt energy expenditures.

Sugar substitutes work well for baked goods, salad dressings and processed meats. But they can’t be fried, making them useless in potato chips, which account for 35 percent of the $46 billion global market for savory snacks, according to the research firm Datamonitor. So food scientists developed an indigestible fat, sucrose polyester -- more commonly known by its brand name, Olestra. Researchers found Olestra inhibits the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and other important nutrients.

Overall, as Americans replaced regular foods with low-fat products, nutrition sometimes suffered. One study found that women who used fat-modified products weren’t getting enough vitamin E or zinc, prompting the authors to recommend "additional dietary guidance."

Study after study found that people who said they ate low-fat diets didn’t eat any less than people who kept eating fat. The government’s message had perhaps worked too well. People thought fat, not quantity or quality of food, was the villain. The Food Marketing Institute in Virginia reported that buying food products labeled "low-fat" was the most common way people improved their diets. According to Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink, marketing professors at INSEAD in France and New York’s Cornell University respectively, subsequent studies showed that "low-fat labels lead all consumers -- particularly those who are overweight -- to overeat snack foods." After all, a reduced-fat version of a cookie often has just as many calories as its "original" counterpart (not to mention more sugar). Chandon and Wansink extended their theory to fast-food restaurants that claim to be healthy. When foods are perceived to be good for you people eat too much of them.

Fortunately, the tyranny of the low-fat diet seems to be waning. Three years ago, Toronto-based chef and food writer Jennifer McLagan struggled to drum up interest for her idea for a cookbook about animal fat. Her 2005 effort, Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore, had won a James Beard Award, annually conferred on the best chefs, cookbook authors and restaurateurs in North America. Even with that pedigree, fat, apparently, was pushing it. Polite publishers told her the concept was too contrarian. Others flat-out called it "disgusting."

She eventually found a taker, and her book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, is unapologetic. It’s adamant in its defense of fat’s benefits; the cooking instructions range from how to render your own pork fat to recipes for Brown Butter Ice Cream and Bacon Baklava. And McLagan is winning followers. Pork belly and marrow are common on menus; barbeque has gathered legions of fans outside its native South; it seems in every major city you can find at least one restaurant willing to roast a whole pig for a hungry party. And guess what? In May, Fat too won a James Beard Award.

As the obesity epidemic was later to arrive in Europe, the pro-fat backlash isn’t yet in full swing there, but signs are emerging. A recent study in the NEJM fingering total calories, not fats or carbs, as responsible for weight loss, made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. And anecdotes abound. British celebrity chef Anthony Worrall Thompson has been blatant about using lard in his restaurants. In Norway, sausage consumption is up.

Even mainstream nutritional experts have recanted. The blanket message that "fat is bad for you" has few remaining adherents. The AHA, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the American Council on Science and Health have all modified the message, from their original admission that unsaturated fats are good for you to the grudging acknowledgement that even trans fats may not be as bad as they’ve been portrayed to be. "We should apologize for making people think about ‘percentage of calories,’" says the AHA’s Eckel, adding that the focus should be on total calories. "You want to eat steak? That’s fine. Just make it six ounces rather than 16."

To undo decades of fat-phobia, it’s going to take a more rousing endorsement. And for that, it’s necessary to leave the realm of science and enter the kitchen, where it’s easier to consider the possibilities. Take guacamole, or the pat of butter that finishes a risotto or a chocolate pudding. McLagan includes fat in everything from salad to dessert, with recipes for grilled steak and red wine sauce topped with bone marrow. For a sweet, try salty bacon brittle with pork cracklings. These are beyond rich -- the animal fats give the dishes depth and an almost medieval earthiness -- and they’re delicious, enough to make even confirmed skeptics salivate.

"Go ahead," McLagan says. "It won’t kill you."

This story has reporting by Ursula Sautter.

This article was originally published on OdeMagazine.com. Click here to request a free issue.

10th Anniversary

Today is the 10th anniversary of my father's passing away, Allahyarham Tuan Haji Mohamad Bin Anas (2 December 1927 ~ 2 December 1999). Daddy, as I fondly called him, died of old age on his 72nd birthday at Taman Kesang Jaya, Jasin, Melaka in West Malaysia. I could vividly recall his last moments and when he breathed his last, I just could not believe that he had gone forever. I recall daddy as a kind and gentle person who always liked to pamper his children. I loved him through and through. Although daddy divorced my mum in 1973, when I was eight, I never faulted him for the breakup. Daddy loved me and all my siblings. May God reward my daddy for all his kind deeds and may he rest in peace. Al-Fatihah.

Five Foods You Shouldn't Eat Raw

This article was reprinted from The Faster Times. Faster. Smarter. Funnier: Go to TheFasterTimes.com for the latest in News, Politics, Science, Arts, Health, Nonsense, and everything else.

Consumer safety articles, such as mine, often report how something seemingly innocuous will actually kill you, or at the very least, leave you maimed and crippled. In deference to this great modern media tradition, here’s my hysteria-inducing list:

1. Cookie dough (and anything else containing raw eggs): In addition to the risk of E. coli discussed in the article, eating egg-containing dough prior to baking it puts you at risk for Salmonella.

2. Fish: Sushi, sashimi, and ceviche can carry multiple parasites. My favorite is Diphyllobothrium latum, an intestinal tapeworm transmitted by freshwater fish such as salmon, which can grow 30 feet long and live 20 years.

3. Sprouts: Alfalfa, bean, and other sprouts carry Salmonella, E. coli, and Bacillus bacteria due to the warm, humid environments in which they’re grown. Washing the surface of the sprouts does not eliminate the chance of illness, as the bacteria can live internally. Raw sprouts are not recommended for children, the elderly, or people with weakened immune systems.

4. Beef and pork: Avoiding raw meat is a no-brainer, until you see it on the menu with an appetizing name like tartare or carpaccio. There’s a long list of diseases you could get from raw meat, so I’ll mention only one: neurocysticercosis, a parasite from undercooked pork that crawls from your intestine up to your brain, where it can live for years and cause seizures.

…and finally, no “Everybody Panic!” list is complete without at least one way you might inadvertently kill your child:

5. Honey: Honey contains bacterial spores that cause botulism, a disease that’s usually fatal if untreated. While adults and children have high stomach acid levels that kill the spores in honey, infants do not. Children less than a year old should not eat honey.

Link to the original article -- Five Foods You Shouldn't Eat Raw