The age of information is unbelievably amazing to me. I come from the generation where, if you wanted to find out information, you had to go to the local library and “check out” a book (usually an encyclopedia) from their limited supply. If your local library did not have the information you needed, you could order in a book from another library and wait weeks until it arrived. Then, you had to either write down the information right there and then, or take it home and copy all the information you needed using a paper and pen. There were no photocopiers or instant cameras to take a picture of the useful information.
Fast forward to today where any question we want answered is a the tip of our fingers! We have access to information and data wherever we are. With this amazing amount of information comes an amazing amount of confusion. The information often seems contradictory, misinterpreted or even incorrect. How can you know who to trust?
One of the many examples of this in my low carb journey was the question “Is butter healthy for you or not?”.
The answer is both yes and no. And I am only going to give you part of the answer in this post. To truly understand, it is important to know the back story of how it came to be a controversy in the first place. The story is fascinating and shocking. To tell the story, I came across a podcast from one of my literary heros, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.
In sharing the story of an inner challenge between a son and his desire to honour his father’s life work and his father’s memory, Malcolm Gladwell does a fantastic job of subtly uncovering the history behind the controversial research and studies behind whether saturated fat is unhealthy for us or not. Check out this 30 minute podcast that tells an interesting story of a Mayo Clinic Physician and one of the best controlled studies on food ever completed. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/20-the-basement-tapes
Let me know what you think of this! The podcast is only part of the answer. Stay tuned for a future post where I fill you in on another side of the equation.
