I opened an account on X. It's been...interesting, but it hasn't helped my bottom line as a writer at all. Mostly what it has done has helped ME.
How?
It helped me figure out something that's improved my quality of life: I don't tolerate vegetable oils/seed oils.
There's a specific account that got me started thinking and trying it. He's a power-lifter coach that endorses a carnivore diet, and points out that the majority of modern medical maladies began after industrial waste started being refined and sold as food.
Yeah, folks, that's exactly what he said. And fact checking says he's not wrong, even if it's a little over-simplified for some things.* Corn oil, soybean, cottonseed oil, canola--it's almost all of it rooted in industrial waste.
(Note that I didn't include olive oil in that...or sesame, peanut, or sunflower seed. Those are slightly different, and are best used without heat applied. When heat is applied...they become toxic. Especially the fumes from them.)
Canola, though...that's a bit different. It wasn't industrial waste, it was lubricant. Specifically, wet-navy lubricant, because it didn't wash off the engine parts in salt-water-heavy atmospheric conditions. It actually took a lot of fiddling to make it (quasi) food safe.
So, I've dumped vegetable oils from my diet.** As much as I can, I've replaced them with the things humans have eaten throughout history: butter, tallow, lard. Some things are just as good made with melted lard as they are with vegetable oil. Some things are better.
I have had over a decade of increasing levels of joint pain. Ankles, knees, hips, and hands. Over a decade of my pain levels jacking up past my ability to tolerate over winters, weather changes, and just because my body decides to be an asshole.
Last night and this morning, we had a front moving through. This time last year, daily pain levels would have been around a 4 to a 5, daily. Weather like last night's and this mornings would have sent it higher. I'd have had to have a double bourbon to be able to go to sleep because my pain levels seated under a heat pad would have been around a 7, spiking to graying out my vision when I stood up to move. This year, after six months of minimal seed oils? Went from a daily 3 to a 5. Spiking to a 7 when I stood up to do something.
Yeah, you heard that right: six months of majority animal fats have dropped my daily pain levels by at least a full point on GOOD days. Even if my bad days are still cruddy, the worst ones aren't as bad as they used to be.
I can close my hands all the way. Before, the joints where index and middle fingers meet palms were too stiff to do that. Pinkies screamed.
I haven't had as much trouble with gallbladder attacks, either. Not that I have no trouble, just less.
Last, but not least...I've been having some real issues with GERD. That's also tamed down somewhat. There's still some problems, but I've reduced my OTC 12-hour acid blocker intake to overnight only, and any heartburn during the day comes when I get hungry...and a piece of gum deals handily with that when I'm in my no-food-before-thyroid meds window.
Overall, this guy's done me a lot of good; however...
...he's got some really weird blind spots.
Or maybe I have some really weird blind spots.
He's got this thing, where he assumes that any attempt at keeping people from eating pigs is because the nobility didn't want the peasantry to have anything like what showed up on their table. Granted, that was probably true for Britain*** but not true for the Children of Israel. He looks at their dietary laws and thinks power tripping nobility because of the fucking Normans and how they treated the native Anglo-Saxon population that they were trying to pacify. Points out that nobody knew about the parasites in pig flesh, and how undercooked pork meant that those passed to humans and did awful things to them.
He is, actually, not incorrect on that point. He's also not really correct, because Someone did. I'm not sure if it's just because the guy's British, or because most of Europe in general is a bit anti-religion, he completely misses that most of the dietary laws set forth in the Old Testament have actual food-safety and health reasons behind them (even though some of those laws are actually intended to change how the people thought about life, death, birth, and parenthood. "Thou shalt not boil the young of any clean beast in the milk of its mother" was exactly that...and it was intended to be a separation from the rather nasty pagan cultures that Israel was meant to replace).
Shellfish are filters, go rancid really fast, and on top of that, certain segments are deathly allergic to them. Not that they knew that, because Himself set rules to keep them alive and healthy.
Pork falls under the same rules: unclean not because it wallowed in mud, but because if it's not cooked and preserved correctly (which they didn't have either the knowledge or technology to do) it killed people slowly, in really nasty ways.
I believe in the Divine. I believe that God exists, that He loves us, and that He wants us to be healthy and happy. I believe that the Bible wasn't just Divinely inspired but an attempt to keep unwashed, illiterate desert dwellers healthy, and to rewrite their culture toward something that would, in time, bring about the world we have today, where His people aren't starving or enslaved, for the most part. And, in this country, with a few outliers, His people aren't slaughtered just for being His.
That's the main point where the writer on X falls short: by assuming that the prohibition on eating pork and shellfish is a class thing, simply because we didn't know why it was there until recently.
That may be his blind spot...or it may be mine because I don't acknowledge a different class's rights to tell me what I can and cannot eat, because I was raised a free citizen, in a culture of "anything not forbidden by law is permitted," rather than a subject in a culture of "anything not permitted by law--which may change without warning or notice--is forbidden."
*Coconut and palm oils, the worst he has to say is that they're harvested via animal abuse. They're not unhealthy, though. Not like the ones that are factory made with industrial solvents. No, I don't eat things that use them, but that's because I seem to be allergic to both--they break me out.
**There's been a LOT of label reading. And a lot more cooking from scratch. SO many things use vegetable oil as a first ingredient that it's not even funny. Still looking for some sauce substitutes for things that use mayo as an ingredient...
***Fucking William the Bastard slaughtered the majority of the Anglo-Saxon gentry. Then imposed French culture from the top down, including ignoring rights that the Saxons had had from before the kingdoms united under Alfred the Great. When the Saxons protested losing the rights to gather things their families needed, the kings responded by removing more of their ability to
