Heart Foundation has me "ticked-off"!

Someone needs to make this organisation accountable! Their latest news release a few weeks ago has me and anyone knowing the truth of the matter, ticked-off. Their silly Media Release, which can be viewed on the URL http://tinyurl.com/3ajvgn3 is entitled "To Avoid Trans Fat, Avoid Butter". It seems they are all in an ill-informed tizzy because popular cooking programs, celebrity chefs and food magazines are all using butter in their recipes and butter sales are up over 9% in the past year. So this Media Release is asking Australians not to eat butter because it has trans and saturated fats and to eat margarine instead. Holy embolism! My blood pressure went right up reading this nonsense.

Those of you who have been following my Blog postings have read my post "Ancel Keyes and his Phony Fat Myth" back in April and you would now know more than this supposed scientific foundation. Their stupid advice to switch from a natural fat to a phony substitute is down right irresponsible. The public needs to know the truth about margarine. From its conception in the 1930's it has had a trans fat percentage of between 14-35% ! The Heart Foundation had given this product (which is just a few molecules away from becoming a plastic) their tick of approval for many decades despite evidence against trans fats since 1978! Their ignorance and attitude makes me believe that the Australian public's health is not in their best interest and we should start to wonder what is behind some of their marketing strategies. Perhaps it is the almighty dollar. I seem to remember McDonald's getting a tick for one of their hamburgers shortly after a $330,000 donation.

In actuality, butter has a small amount of trans fat occurring naturally and reacts in the body differently than chemically produced man-made trans fats, or the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil. Butter also contains saturated fats but these are not the enemy; that was totally misrepresented for 50 years as the Curse of Cholesterol. Fat is important for our health but we must eat the right type -- the good fat. It's really easy. All fats from nature, like nuts, seeds, avocado, olives, eggs, butter, coconut and anything extracted from these foods in a healthy way is good fat. A bad fat is a fat that has been manipulated, changed and contorted in some way in a chemical laboratory.

The Heart Foundation tick of approval adorns foods that aren't even foods, but rather a bunch of chemicals disguised as food but as long as they are low fat, low salt, high fibre, low calorie they get that tick. Just check out the ingredients (not the nutrition label) on the following and see if you really think they are good for your health. Kellogg's Just Right, ProActive margarine, Healthy Choice Meals, Farmers Own Milk, Diet Yoghurts and Birds Eye Chicken & Vegie Patties, just to name a few.

The Way I See It....we need to move away from the old Margarine-is-Better argument and eat real food! With new evidence over the past 7 years steering away from the links between cholesterol and saturated fat and more towards other factors then I think that the Heart Foundation needs to smarten up, jettison 50 years of Junk Science and let the public know or it's reputation will be totally discredited.

Germany's Fraying Welcome Mat

Germany's attempts to create a multicultural society in which people from various cultural backgrounds live together peacefully had failed, Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week. She conceded that "Multikulti", the concept that "we are now living side by side and are happy about it", does not work.

Backing up her rueful admission are surveys showing 35% of Germans believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe the foreigners come to feed off German welfare. Merkel had in mind the Turks who came mainly as "gastarbeiters"(guest workers) in the 1960's. Some 2.5 million now live in Germany, in their densely packed neighborhoods with no desire to return back home to Turkey.

This was very obvious to me as I travelled around Berlin and it's suburbs last year and saw it for myself. The Turkish flag on every street, the strictly Turkish shop signage and not a German seen or voice heard. (see my photo). Recently Arabs and East Europeans have come and the Muslim population is now up to 5 million! This has led Horst Seehofer. from Merkel's party to call for a halt in immigration of "alien cultures". He says, "the Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, not assimilating, not becoming Germans. We are committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one."

The German relatives I visited said they already had a growing sense that their Muslim population was becoming a culture within a culture. A real and shocking awareness of deep differences with their Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam's victory with barrages of fireworks and small rockets. Germans are nervous and are sensing there may be truth to the phrase; "Welcome to Eurarabia!"

The Way I See It....the resurgence of ethnonationalism that is feeding the ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties across Europe and gaining respectability doesn't solve Germany's problem. She is running out of Germans! Yet, if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers. Where are they to come from, if not the Third World. For not one European nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that is not below zero population growth. You see...Baby-Boomer Europe decided in the 1970's and 1980's it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle of children. It made for a sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the bill is the end of their "tribes"and countries as we have known them. Old Europe is dying and the populist and nationalist parties, in the words of Dylan Thomas, are simply "raging against the dying of the light!"