Heart Check

Me: "Mmmmm, those look tasty...."

Her: "The burgers or the waitresses?"

Me: "Yes!"

This past summer, I did quite a bit of traveling, visiting friends and family and couch surfing in several States on the West Coast of USA Inc. What I observed in various places troubled me. But it wasn't all visions of apocalypse.

On one of those trips, I finally paid a visit to an establishment I saw featured on the Tell-A-Vision a couple of years ago - The Heart Attack Grill. Love that place. It is the only burger joint for which I've eaten at in the past 4 years or so. It was quite the entertaining dining experience, and one for which I enjoyed completely.

As I'm the guy well known for doling out the dietary advice (when asked), and for being strict in abstaining from so many foods (FEED), the group I was with was shocked at my enthusiasm for the whole experience.

"Wait, isn't this the guy telling all of us we should quit eating at McDonalds, Burger King and Jack in the Box?"

Yup, that would be me. But this place? I love the entire theme. It essentially sticks the middle finger at the conventional wisdom of the modern health and medial fields entire set of dietary guidelines THEY would have us all follow.

PRAISE THE LARD!

Freedom fries, deep fried in lard, like they typically used to be before the federally subsidized, Big Ag's round up ready vegetable and grain oils became ubiquitous? YESSSS!

A quadruple bypass burger stacked with 4 1/4 lbs. patties of beef, tomatoes, onions, bacon, and cheddar cheese? Oh yeeeeaaaah baby!!

Heart Attack? Not from the food...

I broke the whole mound apart and ate everything except for the bun, Atkins-diet style (not because I wanted to eat low carb, but rather because I know that most commercially baked hamburger bun products are made with white flour and hydrogenated vegetable oils -- aka margarine).

Unless the lard used to make the french fries was hydrogenated, I am almost certain that the hamburger bun was probably the only truly unhealthy component of the whole meal.

I even finished it all off with a WHOLE FAT chocolate milkshake with a chunk of butter thrown on top for good measure. Hey, if I'm going to "cheat" on my normally strict diet standards, I'm going all in!

It was the most memorable restaurant meal of my summer, that's for sure.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, "So what is the point of this blog post?"

A dining review for The Heart Attack Grill?

Or is it simply an opportunity to gratuitously post pictures of the hawt H.A.G. waitresses (Look! An antonym-acronym!)  serving up the goods?

Yes.

Of course, those are not the only reasons.

Ever since that meal in that fine, MAndrosphere-appropriate themed restaurant several months ago, the idea for this blog post has been resting in the back of my mind, waiting for the right inspiration to bring it forth.

Sadly, the impetus for that one was the recent news I received of an acquaintance who passed away of a heart attack at the age of 31. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?

This person I met several times (a friend of a friend) was a victim. A victim of lies, propaganda and misinformation, that resulted in literally eating to death. As Author Michael Crichton once lamented, "We believe what were told. My father suffered a life filled with margarine, before he died of a heart attack anyway."

Go ask Googliath about the Heart Attack Grill. Big Brother G will show you a list of links reporting on instances where obese, malnourished Wal-Martians died of heart attacks while eating there. Which is it? Correlation? Causation? Take your pick.

Fact is, a very sick, obese person with clogged arteries and struggling with hypertension and diabetes is susceptible to suffering a heart attack within an hour or two of overeating a heavy meal.

Of course, the mainstream media reporting on the Heart Attack Grill stories, all take the slant that the meal itself killed 'em right on the spot! It really IS a HEART ATTACK causing restaurant!

Correlation or Causation?

Yes.

Ok, the joke is getting old. All apologies. When I first said it while we were waiting to be seated at the H.A.G., it made my entire group laugh uproariously. Such moments of social triumph are too good to let go so easily....


What I tried to explain to them all after we were seated was that I believed if the H.A.G. made some slight modifications to their menu, such as gluten-free hamburger buns made with butter or some other healthy source of fat, used 100% grass-fed/free range beef for their burgers, and got the lard for their fries from free range pigs, it would actually be a Paleo-styled Health food restaurant!

Of course, this didn't really register with them. They had a hard time comprehending my previous announcement that lard fries are actually good for you. At that point, I think I triggered the cognitive dissonance effect in their minds, interrupting their regularly scheduled programming, causing a processor shut down. Ah well. The meal was still enjoyed by all. They just all thought they were eating really unhealthy, while I was relishing every last gloriously greasy, healthy bite!

Anyways, back to the oh so serious topic at hand.

The entire raison d'etre of the H.A.G. is to flaunt the dietary health and nutrition recommendations of the establishment. It's the literal manifestation of some of the more intense Western allopathic medicine detractors: Go to the Doctor's, listen to their recommendations, than go home and do the exact opposite.

That's not to far off from the truth.



So what's supposedly so bad about the Heart Attack Grill? All the cholesterol and saturated fats can lead to heart disease, right? Lets see what the establishment's foremost authority on heart health, the American Heart Association has to say about fats and how they relate to your heart health:

The "bad” fats are saturated and trans fats.

Saturated:  Saturated fats occur naturally in many foods.  The majority we eat come mainly from animal sources, meat and dairy (milk fat) such as fatty beef, lamb, pork, poultry with skin, beef fat (tallow), lard and cream, butter, cheese, and other dairy products made from whole or reduced-fat (2%) milk.  These foods also contain cholesterol.  Many baked goods and fried foods can also contain high levels of saturated fats. Some plant foods, such as palm oil, palm kernel oil, and coconut oil, also contain primarily saturated fats, but do not contain cholesterol.

Trans:  Trans fats are found in many foods.  About 20–25 percent come from animal fat and 75–80 percent come from partially hydrogenated fat – especially in commercial baked goods (pastries, biscuits, muffins, cakes, pie crusts, doughnuts and cookies) and fried foods (French fries, fried chicken, breaded chicken nuggets and breaded fish), snack foods (popcorn, crackers), and other foods made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, traditional vegetable shortening or stick margarine.  (Soft margarines typically contain very low levels of trans fats.)

Saturated Fats and Trans Fats...the BAD fats. So should we eliminate both from our diets to ensure heart health?

Very small amounts of trans fats occur naturally in some meat and dairy products, so eliminating trans fats to zero is impractical.

Yes, impractical....and unprofitable for Big Ag Feed Products! See, the Big Ag Sheeple Feed Industry (aka Processed Food Industry), needs to have trans fats because they extend shelf life of their products, allowing them to be made in a central processing facility, packaged, shipped and stored all across the globe, with minimal spoilage and loss of unit sales.

So what's to be done? Oh, here we go, since a very small amount of Trans Fats occurs naturally, than we'll allow small amounts of it in the feed supply - whether it's natural or not. After all, Trans fats are trans fats, right? Not so fast.

Most of the trans fats we eat -- by far -- come from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, produced from liquid oils by industrial processing to create a firmer fat. Others occur naturally in milk products, formed in the rumen (or first stomach) of ruminant animals such as cows, goats, sheep and yaks when they're fed a grass-rich diet.

Several studies of large populations have looked at the link between trans fatty acid intake and risk of developing atherosclerosis, and all have shown that the risk goes up only with the intake of "industrial" trans fatty acids, not the natural ones.

Aha! But since natural trans fats occur in some meat and dairy products, the AHA considers it "impractical" to eliminate Trans fats entirely. Why not just ban artificial trans fats completely? That would lead to too much good health.

Follow the money.

The following 0 grams trans fat products are listed by percentage of saturated fat, from lowest to highest.  Choose the product with lowest saturated fat that works for your menu item.  The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fat to less than 7 percent and trans fat to less than 1 percent of total daily calories.

Note the names of the producers of the approved products that are considered "Heart Healthy."

Unilever Food Solutions, ConAgra, Mid-Atlantic Vegetable Company, Ventura Foods, ADM. All produce variations of butter substitutes, recommended by the AHA as "heart healthy, because they're low in saturated fat.

Thanks AHA. Glad you're looking out for the health of all those people who's bottom line depends on selling these poisons to we the sheeple. GFY, I'll stick to my highly saturated fat-rich butter and coconut oil.

Oh, but wait....those are the recommendations for restaurants. What about the average consumer? Why, the AHA gives us a recommended shopping list! Go read it! Look at all those heart healthy whole grains, lean meat products and butter and dairy substitute products! Why, this list contains all the right foods to make sure you adhere to the USDA food pyramid recommendations!

The answer is quite clear. The AHA is nothing more than the snake Big Ag oil and Processed Food Industry marketing department, and steady supplier of heart disease case work for the cardiology industry. Those AHA web pages show the connection between Big Ag food corporations and the establishment health care industry. They are just two arms of the same beast.

The medical and nutritional establishments, agribusinesses and industrial food processors, mainstream media and the Government - all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in the current nutritional disaster and state of obesity and ill health. They are all part and parcel to the system of Concentrated Sheeple Feedlot Management. And the last thing THEY want, is for any of us to escape the feedlot.


As J. Stanton over at Gnolls.org concluded a while ago:

Simply by eating a paleo diet, we have made ourselves enemies of the establishment, and will be treated henceforth as dangerous radicals.

This is not a conspiracy theory. By eschewing commodity crops and advocating the consumption of grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and local produce, we are making several very, very powerful enemies.

The medical and nutritional establishments hate paleo, because we’re exposing the fact that they’ve been wrong for decades and have killed millions of people with their bad advice.

The agribusinesses and industrial food processors hate paleo, because we’re hurting their business by not buying their highly profitable grain- and soy-based products.

The mainstream media hates paleo, because they profit handsomely from advertising those grain- and soy-based products.

The government hates paleo, because they’re the enforcement arm of big agribusinesses, industrial food processors, and mainstream media—and because their subsidy programs create mountains of surplus grain that must be consumed somehow.

Is anyone surprised that a government which spends billions of dollars subsidizing the production of corn, soy, and wheat, would issue nutritional recommendations emphasizing the consumption of corn, soy, and wheat?

So remember sheeple, when you go shopping for your feed, look for the Heart Check Marker on your processed feed packaging! The processed food manufacturers pay donate good money to the AHA for their stamp of approval on their feed products!

And for Heaven's sake, don't eat at a place like the Heart Attack Grill, they use LARD... stick to an establishment that uses a Big Ag produced, AHA approved soybean or canola oil for frying, since those oils have 0 grams trans fat per serving! 

Seriously. Your choice of fats is the most important decision you can make when it comes to your food choices. Your heart health depends on it.