Renaissancemen.org

I’ve been up since 2:15 AM, so another coffee-induced inspired writing. This time, I’d like to tell you how losing 175 pounds also got me linked in with gold.

1970s inflation. And it’s about to repeat with 2020s inflation. Please read below to see the links and how we can potentially prevent millions more dying like the 1970s caused.

Background

I was born in 1975, but have no real recollection of the 1970s, other than getting swept out of the house evacuating due to Three Mile Island. At the time, it was over an hour from where I grew up. Now, it’s 7 miles away and I can see it pretty easily on my hiking days. From what I remember as a child, they talked about the gas lines and how budgets were tight. My dad was a steel worker and my mother was a real estate agent during 20% interest rates – how do you think this panned out for my childhood?

Two obese parents who were smokers and fought about money every day. Both, sadly, died way early due to cancer. Both had eventually found some form of weight loss later in life, like I did. But the key for me was going back in time.

Let’s go back to the 1970s and inflation – but I’d like to start by focusing on food.

What they came up with was something called the food pyramid. You see, during crazy, rampant inflation, things cost more. Especially protein. That steak you love, well, it goes up in price every week, it seems. The solution to feed our potentially starving population is to get them a unit called calories to get them their sustenance. However, we are going to change the makeup of these calories to feed a population much cheaper.

Little did anyone know at the time that this would lead to rampant obesity 40-50 years later.

Let’s review some science for the audience. You do not need carbohydrates to live, but you need fats and protein. Please, re-read that sentence. Again.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the food pyramid.

So essentially they say you can have 11 servings of grains and 4 servings of fruits. This is how I grew up. Let’s not forget the vegetables I’d eat: corn, potatoes, peas, and lima beans. Add on top of that, that the culture I lived in also said you need to avoid fats. There were tons of “fat free” products out then. Cheeses, milks, hot dogs – you name it, they had a fat-free version. Funny thing – when you take the fat out of food, the flavor goes with it. So they add sugar. We were also told the cholesterol in eggs were deadly, so we avoided them. On top of that, the butter we were using was bad, so we had margarine all the time. The “heart healthy” vegetable oil was used in cooking.

So, because of SCIENCE, I grew up essentially eating 80% carbs in my diet, and anyone looking back on my upbringing can understand why my parents left this earth too early and how I had gotten to nearly 400 pounds (372 to be exact).

What that number doesn’t tell you is the amount of sports I played my whole life, nor does it reflect the dozens of times I tried to lose weight and would run, run, run. Or bike. Or weight train.

This was science, after all, and if I just ate 2,000 calories a day, I’d lose weight.

Every single time, I’d lose 10-20 pounds, run for weeks on end, and end up with an injury or near exhaustion.

It wasn’t me. There was something wrong with the script I was given. And this is also how I found gold and silver.

When I did a lot of research on the 1970s and inflation, you then learn that the food pyramid was never really tested. You learn that a government set this up, in good faith, to try and feed their people in a situation where most people would have less spending power in their paychecks.

The same is about to happen in this decade. So, it’s worth revisiting because if you have a family you want to protect, you are not only protecting them financially, but you also want to protect their health.

I could go on and on about the food pyramid, but I want you to take a lesson away from this. Today, this is “survival food” that is being sold everywhere.

If you look closely, you see this is all carbs. All of it. And what are they selling? 2,000 calories a day. Where have I seen this script before?

Don’t fall for these. I know they are providing a service, and the persons running these companies mean zero harm. It’s quite possible they have zero knowledge of what I wrote above, so don’t hate on them.

My point is that to survive, you need proteins (full proteins), and fats. You could literally go the rest of your life without carbs and suffer no ill effects. This is medical fact.

Now, above you saw “4 fruits”. If you watch Dr. Lustig on YouTube, he discusses how children have Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) as early as 8 from drinking sodas with high fructose (fructose is fruit sugar) and junk food. Essentially, you learn that your liver can digest about 1 serving of fruit per day, and the rest is stored as fat near the liver.

Right now, I am having soccer moms all over the country screaming at their computers about “healthy fruit sugar” in orange wedges.

Hint. There is no such thing as “healthy fruit sugar”. There’s sucrose, lactose, fructose, and a million other sugars that are….sugars. and before you lecture me about fruit, please understand fruit as you and I know it didn’t exist a few hundred years ago. They genetically engineered fruits to be sweeter and less fibrous.

This is watermelon 300 years ago.

And these are bananas 100 years ago

Then, we could go on about genetically modified corn for hours, but they modified it over hundreds and thousands of years to feed populations.

The point is, some big bad people in charge have tried desperately to feed the masses – with good intentions, but a severe lack of science.

One of the people I followed on my journey was Gary Taubes, an author who essentially has written many anti-sugar books. He got a bachelors in physics from Harvard and a masters in journalism, and wrote about science in the 1980s. He would tear apart bad science. Then, one of his friends turned him on to how bad food science was, and his books talk about how terrible any of these studies were. Long story short, he goes over the history of food much like Mike Maloney goes over the history of money.

What you find, the more you research, is lack of faith in large institutions anymore.

To top it all off, the food recommendations we were provided in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s led to rampant obesity, diabetes, cancer, alzheimers (some are now calling type 3 diabetes), and heart disease.

That gif only tells the story up until 2013….let me catch you up.

What you find with this type of eating is that if you aren’t working out 20 hours a week, you gain insidious weight.

They also told you “fat was bad”. No. Not really. Look at the QUALITY of the fat, and for this, take a look at omega 6:3 ratios. Your body needs both types. 6 is for inflammation (think clotting to not die) and 3 is for reduction in inflammation. Our ancestors lived near oceans and ate lots of fish. The people above are mostly landlocked, so access to ocean fish isn’t plentiful.

But take a cow, for instance. BEFORE inflation, and many years ago, cows would roam the grasslands and led to slaughter. Grass fed/grass finished. Now, to feed massively growing populations at less cost, cows are given “feed”.

One website put this out as a recipe for “feed”.

So let me get this straight. A cow, over millions of years, evolved to eat grass. And we then feed them…..grains? Why? Because it fattens them up. “grass fed beef” is “too lean”.

The FATS produced by these cows are significantly higher in OMEGA 6 fatty acids. This causes significant inflammation in those who eat it. Let’s then put this beef on bread, which is carbs we don’t need.

Here’s another pretty chart…

Sugars and these omega 6s are a raging inferno inside of your body. And it can cause tiny little cuts.

Activate cholesterol. something your body produces in MASS quantities, before you eat eggs, and the cholesterol acts like a spackle on your artery walls. This causes build up and heart disease.

Now, instead of taking that shitty cow meat and slapping it on a bun, just try eating grass fed/finished beef without the bun. Yeah. No inflammation. Your body allows cholesterol to pass harmlessly through you.

Rather than addressing this root cause, it’s now a multi-billion dollar industry to then have pills that “reduce your cholesterol”.

With inflation – remember I told you things are about to repeat? The last 40-50 years of medical science to help people has been a direct result of our people getting sicker and sicker. Just like our debt problem.

That inflation I talked about that is not reported in the CPI – I call “dinner table inflation”. Think about how many people in your life have gotten cancer, heart disease, etc. Both my parents died of cancer. One of lung cancer at 57, the other of pancreatic cancer at 66. Would it surprise you to know that in 1890, 1 in 30 people got cancer and today it’s one in 3? Did you know in 1890, type 2 diabetes was an extremely rare disease, and now it is estimated a majority of the US population over 45 has some form of it? This disease is a metabolic disease, which is sort of the canary in the coal mine for other diseases yet to come. My mother’s pancreatic cancer was pre-empted by years of fighting type 2 diabetes. Yet her “weight lookers” program she was in would constantly tell her she could eat all of the fruit she wanted.

Your body needs zero grams of this, yet sugars/carbs are peddled to the populace as the staple of our food supply?

These medical bills add up. Fancy technologies. Expensive CAT scans and MRIs. Lawsuits. Every year in my 20s and 30s, my medical insurance would go up 8-10%. They would cover less and less. With my wife, who covers our insurance, any raise she gets from her county job is swallowed up by the cost of our insurance increases.

History is about to repeat the 1970s inflation.

Survival

Our government is focused on trying to get people 2,000 calories a day. I get it. But Taubes will tell you, not all calories are created equal. What do you NEED to survive? As mentioned, protein and fats. Your fats are used to create hormones. Many don’t realize that your body gets sunshine and creates Vitamin D. This is essentially tied to your immune system. So, to have a healthy immune system, we need sunshine and fats to survive. Not shitty fats. Fats from good sources.

In my NON-MEDICAL ADVICE OPINION, this below is what we SHOULD be eating, and this was a key to me losing 175 pounds.

So, essentially, flip the food pyramid upside down and you get what you SHOULD be eating.

For more on some of this, one guy I follow is closer to a mainstream figure: Mark Sisson. He has a book called
“The primal blueprint” and it talks about a keto induction for about 3 weeks, then low carb living for most of your life. Most see “keto” and think pounds of bacon. No. This is more like my keto living…

The below is kind of a benchmark he uses when evaluating carbs. Most people can eat 300g of carbs per day without blinking. Most don’t get that for 2+ years, I usually at one meal a day and was very happy with it. They feel they need to graze and snack all day for “energy”. No, you are a dope fiend needing a fix.

This is what Mark Sisson looks like in his 60s. He was an ironman competitor and marathon runner, and he suffered all of the talk about carb loading for performance in the 1980s.

Do you want any kind of explanation how they are trying to get you to eat junk carbs on the cheap because eating “healthy” food could break the system…

But only if we could force feed our messages through only a few media outlets?

THIS is how you survive the 2020s. How?

1. Question mass media messages. All of them. Do your own research. Start with Gary Taubes. I have 134 previous posts here on health and fitness, and probably have 100 people to research on those pages.
2. Reduction in inflammation. Stop the fires. You can stop the wildfires today.
3. Having adequate fats and proteins. Skip unnecessary carbs.
4. Eating carbs sparsely for vitamins, minerals, fibers, enjoyment of food, and quick energy (sprinting, hard labor). Essentially, if you are at an office job and do no exercise in your life, you have zero need for carbs. The more athletic and more hard you push your body, the more you may need to add some items on the top of the pyramid.
5. By taking care of your body, you will lose weight, and avoid type 2 diabetes. By removing the gateway disease, you reduce risk for many other diseases.
6. By getting sunshine and adequate fats, you then also promote a healthy immune system
7. Your role in this reduces medical costs for the nation. It helps fight inflationary medical costs on all.
8. Indulge occasionally. You are human. Enjoy life. But don’t treat every day or every weekend like it’s your birthday.

By creating a pantry and stocking your freezer with healthy meats and veggies, you can potentially survive any kind of food crisis. At least for 6-12 months? I started in Dec 2019 when my hair got on fire with the repo madness. My research with the repo all led me back to the same 1970s shit storm that caused obesity. The below I started WELL before COVID, so when everyone was panicking about toilet paper, I was 2 months early on that 🙂

People also say, “Nate, you can’t eat silver or gold”. Very true. If there’s any kind of real issue in the next few years, the very start of these types of things will be a barter-like system. I have crackers, can I get tuna? I have vodka, do you have smokes? I get this. But over time, it will be inefficient to barter and a medium of exchange will once again be called for with any new monetary system.

I think the USD is in trouble, and I think the world is potentially going to reject a digital currency in which the government can track everything you buy. Lots of turmoil ahead.

But if you want to survive, and perhaps thrive, in the 2020s, one has to look back at the 1970s and learn lessons. Would you have been smart in the 1970s to have bought gold and silver at the onset of the decade? Would you have been smart to buy food cheaper today than next week – and buy healthier food to avoid cancers down the road?

I like to keep showing this chart – over and over – as it shows you how inflation eats the purchasing power at the “dinner table” level. While you may have very smart people talking about a 40 year deflation, they obviously didn’t grow up in a situation like myself with food security issues. Where we were fed a diet of carbs.

That red line is your purchasing power over the last 40 years when you take into account a 5% inflation rate and a 3% cost of living wage increase every year.

Anyone reading this has either read my financial blogs and can get this, or they read my health blogs and get this. Either way, I am writing this to show root causes of both. Inflation has led to policies that take from the people over time. Not only their wealth, but their health.