A Nugget of Icelandic Wisdom

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

One of my favorite health writers is Kris Gunnars, who runs the website AuthorityNutrition.com.

This site is based in Iceland and run by Icelandic nationals.

Iceland, you may recall, was the only nation that didn’t bail out their big banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, they let them go bust. And they threw fraud-pushing bankers in jail.

Both moves caused short-term pain but long-term prosperity. Now Iceland’s debt-to-GDP ratio and employment rate are the envy of the developed world.

Ancient Icelandic aphorisms reflect the country’s no-nonsense ethos:

• “It is better to be a master in a cottage than a servant in a castle”
• “Sift your speech like beer and get rid of dregs”
• “Talk doesn’t plow the field.”

So whether the subject is finance, politics… or nutrition, Iceland’s frigid climate seems to yield hardheaded people with abundant common sense.

That enviable perspective is on display in this short comment by Gunnars. He perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with most of the mainstream nutrition information we’ve heard for the last few generations:

“Heart disease didn’t become a problem until about a hundred years ago. The obesity epidemic started around 1980 and the Type 2 diabetes epidemic followed soon after. These are the biggest health problems in the world, and it seems pretty clear that diet has a lot to do with them. For some very strange reason, the health authorities started blaming them on foods like red meat, eggs, and butter. But we’ve been eating these natural foods for thousands of years, while these health problems are relatively new. Doesn’t it make more sense to suspect all the new stuff instead? Such as all the processed foods, added sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oils? Blaming new health problems on old foods simply doesn’t make sense.”

Absolutely correct.

Indeed, laid out with characteristic Icelandic candor like this, one wonders how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

Picking up and expanding on the theme, avoiding these three types of modern food will serve you and your family well:

• Those containing added sugar, or any food in which bioavailable sugar content is increased through processing, such as apple juice
• Refined grains, a.k.a. flour, including whole wheat flour, which spikes insulin and drives weight gain nearly as handily as white flour
• Vegetable oils (from corn, canola, soy, or safflower), especially if they have been heated repeatedly, as in a deep fat fryer, which renders them oxidized and highly inflammatory.

Instead, a diet rich in healthy meats, fish, eggs, organic vegetables, and low-sugar fruits will render you as robust as an Icelander, with abundant strength, endurance, and an uncanny talent for coining Stoic aphorisms.

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions