Of Vegetable Oils and Instant Pimples (and other reasons why society cannot continue on like this)
Canadian truckers and farmers, and the widespread problem of glyphosate and vegetable oils
Brave Truckers
Don’t get me wrong. I really like the Canadian truckers and farmers… the very brave men and women who peacefully converged on an ever-increasingly totalitarian government in Ottawa during the worst massive formation psychosis hysteria that humans have experienced in a very long time (since the world wars, really).
I attended some of the general protests in AB and SK, and it was a delightfully fun time. The solidarity and friendliness of the truckers and the people in general was such a breathe of fresh air. The voluntary kindness and good will of people is something that a lot of us won’t forget any time soon, especially because of the backdrop of distancing and masking rules which were of coursed designed to break people down psychologically and turn us all into shells of the former people that we used to be.
What a contrast those large scale protests were, and how so very much they increased a general sense of solidarity and good will among many Canadians (however antagonized their detractors were).
I have great respect for the courage of the truckers and organizers, and especially those who are still yet suffering unjust consequences for their involvement.
So this article is no knee-jerk hit piece, it comes from a genuine place of good will and solidarity with courageous Canadians.
But all that being said…
I’ve learned too much over the past decade or two to just unequivocally garnish unending praise and glory onto Canadian truckers and farmers (and the people of Canada in general), as if the societal situation is as cut and dried as “government bad, people good”. Yes, I’ve very much learned the hard way that the truth is usually more complicated than that.
Again though, that’s not to minimize the truckers and their remarkable efforts. I remain grateful (and quite happily surprised).
But we are far past time now to start thinking more deeply about things generally, and about the way we live… and if the tyranny coming naturally from Ottawa can also, on top of being something that we come together to unite against, be taken as a sign of something… a sign that maybe as a people we have been losing our way.
In my biblical series “The Vital Villain”, I have been discussing the social, cultural, and political context of the Bible, and a major part of my thesis is that the enemies of Israel were often sent to Israel, by Israel’s God, Jehovah, in order to punish and chasten Israel, and to compel her to change her ways and become more resilient.
Yes, Israel’s enemies were sometimes intended as a sort of “refining fire”, meant for Israel herself and her benefit.
And so I wonder…
Could this situation with Ottawa (and all western governments, really, including the US) be taken by us as a sign that, we as a people, need to change our ways?
Have we maybe all become too complacent, lazy, and dependent as a people? Could this whole covid debacle in general simply be a signal that things now have to change? And indeed, could 2030 itself be a signal of this?
Instant Pimples
The other day I was doing some shopping and came across a candy brand that I used to love eating as a kid, and even though I don’t usually buy a lot of candy, I succumbed to the nostalgia, and picked up a box of it on sale.
And of course I gobbled a lot of it down that night.
And a interesting thing happened...
Literally no later than 5 minutes after I started consuming the candies, about 4 or 5 new pimples sprouted on my forehead (after being generally clear for quite a while). Yes, it was almost instantaneous. It was quite remarkable.
You see, I’m in my 40s now, and my acne problem isn’t as bad as it used to be (I’ve made a lot of diet changes). But throughout much of my youth and into my 20s and 30s, I quite regularly had severe ance. In my teens it got so bad, that I actually remember a friend looking at me with shock and actually stopping me to inform me how bad it was (as if I didn’t have access to a mirror to figure it out on my own, LOL).
Yes, it had been a problem for decades, and it really perplexed me for a long time as to why… Maybe it was just stress?
Vegetable Oils (and other things that probably shouldn’t exist)
But as it turns out, the problem wasn’t me so much. Yes, despite the fact that I was going through a ton of stress through my 20s from a failed marriage and a pretty brutal personal spiritual struggle for decades… yes, despite all that, regarding my acne (and my weight gain and other things) the issue still really wasn’t me (in the sense that it wasn’t because I was fundamentally lazy or gluttonous as a person or something like that).
How do I know that?
Because of the ever-increasing new science being revealed about how how our global food supply is really, if we are honest, pretty frickin terrible.
There are many things that I could talk about here (and I won’t bother to get into detail about how bad it was that food companies used to put trans fats into their products). But instead, I will use one example of something that I was thinking about last fall…
..and that is, the beautiful fields of Canola that a huge number of farmers plant every year here in Canada. Seeing all these fields blossom every year is a beauty to behold, and one has to really respect the extent of the process which has brought about these endless fields of yellow throughout the prairies.
Such a beauty, eh? And I can’t deny, as you drive through the prairies at the right time of year, it is quite nice. And no doubt, the farmers must have to work their asses off to get such plentiful fields of yellow.
But…
Beautiful Fields of Death
I really don’t mean to be mean.
After all, I am a Canadian… and so that means I’m super nice and kind, eh? Lets grab our Timmies double-double and maybe pick up a 2-4 and just giv’er down a dirt road and get to the boys hockey tournament, eh bud? ;-)
Yeah... All that good old Canadian stuff makes me smile still. Believe it or not, I do appreciate a lot about Canadian culture, or what we sometimes call “Canadiana”. And I do indeed respect the general hard working Canadian ethos. I myself, culturally speaking (because at this point, who cares about actual citizenship), will always be a Canadian in my heart and personality.
HOWEVER…
After decades of struggling with my weight, with acne, and many other health issues.. and despite having a temperament that doesn’t naturally want to be this critical, the time has come to be honest.
These endless yellow flowers are beautiful fields of death.
They are killing people.
Slowly.
These “freedom-minded” farmers (and truckers who deliver their products) create products (en masse) that are toxic.
They have been slowly ruining lives for decades (not to mention ruining the soil), and it is just simply literally impossible to continue on this way.
Like, really.
It will have to f*cking stop at some point.
Vegetable Oils and Glyphosate
But aside from the specific toxic effects of any particular oils, it also just begs the question of fats in general, and how the ratios are way out of whack.
Contrary to the low-fat diet that took over the world decades ago and ended up really ruining many peoples’ health (and has now been understood to be a massive clusterf*ck), fats are really important in the human diet. And not just saturated fats (as science has been showing over and over again lately), but a balance of other fats.
And what I have in mind specifically is the RATIO of Omega 6 to Omega 3, (poly-unsaturated fats) which, if you know anything about nutrition at all, needs to be balanced out in the human diet.
And so this isn’t a condemnation of Omega 6 (and the endless fields of canola per se, although as the video mentioned above discusses, “vegetable” like canola are really bad for you), but rather an indictment of our food supply which is massively out of balance. Omega 6 fats are literally IN EVERYTHING in the grocery store (and next to zero Omega 3s). And it’s slowly killing us.
It’s a massive inflammatory imbalance that is at the root of most diseases (among other things).
And the whole damn thing is incentivized from top to bottom (by industry and government), to be that way.
And our good Canadian farmers who work their asses off to supply grocery stores all over Canada with this inflammatory disease-making machine, are inextricably caught up with it. They are inadvertent cogs in this terrible machine of disease.
But it’s not just this fats imbalance.
It’s also this thing called “glyphosate”.
If there’s anything that makes crops grow, it’s glyphosate (“round-up”, whatever). It’s a miracle-grower! (it’s a dessicant)
But there’s a problem.
It ruins your gut microbiome (and other things), and then inadvertently contributes to cancer. As articles like this get into (and at this point, there’s so many articles, you don’t need to just read that one, just do a search yourself on gut microbiome and glyphosate and welcome to the rabbit hole), glyphosate is a slow-kill product that is slowly destroying the health of ourselves and future generations.
And yes, it is turning into a unmitigated health disaster (and of course, this doesn’t even touch on the huge problem of sugar).
It turns out that I had a severe problem with acne and other health issues all those years (decades) for reasons other than just my own laziness or foolishness.
Really, if myself and my family had a foolishness, it would be a foolishness that our whole community shared… namely: that we ate food from the grocery store.
And now, the grocery store products are worse than ever.
Freedom?
You’ll have to forgive me. I guess you could say I’ve lost some faith in the banner of “freedom” that Canadians bravely waved during the protests of 2022. Although I am extremely grateful for that time, and for all the community that organically happened there, it’s more apparent to me now that our idea of “freedom” needs an upgrade.
I myself am no model of self-sufficiency or rugged individualism growing all my own food on my own farm or backyard or whatever. And I have my doubts about the sustainability about some situations that “freedom-minded” people advocate for.
But regardless, one thing now seems obvious to me (of which my situation with vegetable oils and acne are just a tiny symptom):
As a people, the way we have been living is not sustainable.
It’s not healthy, and we can’t continue on this way. We weren’t meant to eat this processed food with all it’s imbalanced and unnatural ingredients.
We don’t have a choice anymore.
And maybe the tyranny coming from Ottawa (and every other government in the western world) should be taken as a SIGN FROM GOD that we need to re-think the most basic of things:
How we live.
So right about our processed food dangers. And yes, getting artificial sugar out of diet is important. But please fully consider the necessary role of whole food carbohydrates. You might enjoy watching the videos of Dr. John McDougall, as he has one on acne (especially the story of two teen sisters under his care). What he says about the role of fats in our diet is important.
There is some very interesting information in this documentary the Magic Pill it talks about how farming techniques today are not sustainable. The answer to this problem is to go back to her older farming techniques before modern man began mass farming. It’s on Amazon prime but I have also seen it on other platforms.
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Pill-Pete-Evans/dp/B078H4J7G1