Florian Boschi
Guest Contributor
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following piece by MDI alumnus Florian Boschi – a Master of Science of Oriental Medicine integrating Eastern and Western traditions – does not necessarily reflect the views of MDI or any of its members. As always, consult your personal professionals and your own research before following any specific dietary plans.
When I was asked to write an article about nutrition for the men in the division, I got excited. I had done the Men’s Weekend in 2005 and completed my point program a few months later. The truth is, I was only in the division for two years and my level of commitment to the men was less than ideal. Nevertheless, the San Diego Men’s Division changed my life, and some of the men there have taught me about what it means to be a man and the things that really matter in life. Even though it took many years to integrate some of these precious lessons that I first got exposed to there, I am still close with some of the men from this time. And if there is an opportunity to give something back, hell, I am gonna grab it by its tail.
How can I do this best, I thought? I could write one of those many pieces about nutrition that you can read about over and over in different magazines and online articles, or I could give you the real deal as I know it, raw and without embroidery. And I thought, this is hopefully how I can serve you best, even at the risk of stepping on some toes.
There are really two big health issues for men in the United States as far as I see it.
- Deceptive food and medical awareness, even by the biggest if not all players in media and health care
- A resulting issue with detrimental drawbacks on your life as a man – the “oestrogen” matter\
Before I explain the oestrogen issue, I need to first clarify what I mean by deceptive food and medical awareness. It’s actually pretty simple. Most of us don’t eat as we should, and the industry (no better word for it) is conditioning us to do so. We are nothing more than a commodity for the food and health industry, with the biggest problem being that profits rise the sicker we are. Complicating the matter is that 50 percent of the media income is generated from the pharmaceutical industry, which makes the media pundits willing henchmen for the industry’s interests.
So first, and I mean this most sincerely, don’t expect an honest answer about truly healthy nutrition from any of your health agencies, nor from most media, and many physicians. There are, of course, exceptions, and I have barely ever met a physician who is not earnestly trying to help you to the best of what’s available. The issue lies in what’s available and their training in all nutrition matters.
Ask the average physician – they have spent less than 1 percent of their formal education on good eating habits. They are usually being trained in one thing: pushing pharma drugs. If they haven’t done their own research beyond the widely and deceptively implemented nutrition standards and/or are willing to break out of the educational consensus, you have nothing to gain there. Sounds conspiratorial? It’s not; it’s the raw and honest truth. The industry is controlling the entire health sector, including most of what physicians are being taught, and the industry leaders are, for the most part, wolves in sheep’s clothing that literally want you chronically ill and weak. I can prove it with dozens, if not hundreds, of examples.
Here are three prominent ones:
Proof 1: Statins and Cholesterol
Before the 1980s, a total cholesterol level of up to 250 was still considered healthy, as everyone who cares can easily check in the Merck Manual from 1979. The Merck Manual is a yearly publication that sets the diagnostic and treatment standard for the medical industry, and most issues are available for free on www.Archive.org. In the early 1980s, the age of statins kicked in. Tons were spent on research, and in 1987, Lovastatin, the first of its kind, got its commercial approval. During this time, the medical consensus changed, and in the Merck Manual of 1987, you can read that now, suddenly, total blood cholesterol should be below 200 to be considered healthy.
Why do you think that is? Oh, and just as a side note, statins are the most successful type of medication of all time. They also double the chance for dementia and diabetes for those who take them regularly, which pretty much all patients do. And I bet that every fourth to fifth of you men got a prescription for a statin. It has become nothing less than a badge of honor for the typical US middle-aged man, and it’s a lifelong commitment without any chance of actually healing your metabolism. Quite profitable for them, but not very useful for you, as all-cause mortality statistics show. And, of course, there is the obligatory dose of fear mongering present that you might drop dead of a heart attack any second.
Proof 2: Low saturated fat intake and heart disease
This is my all-time favorite, as all of us got duped for 80-plus years. It all started when Proctor and Gamble needed to expand its market because its candle business plummeted due to increasing electrification in the early 1900s. So they patented a hydrogenation process for plant oils, pushed natural fats like lard and butter off the market, bought themselves a powerful voice, namely the American Heart Association, and funded large-scale studies to coin and skew the public view on saturated fats.
By the 1940s, heart disease was the leading cause of death in the Western world. And when President Dwight Eisenhower had his first heart attack, they created a massive media push against saturated fats, and they won this fight. Through large-scale “philanthropic” efforts, the plant oil industry began to, and still is, controlling medical university curriculums up until this day. Now, our young future cardiologists are still being taught the same garbage about saturated fats as they were 70 years ago. And just as food for thought, before the take over of these highly inflammatory plant oils, heart disease virtually didn’t exist.
Proof 3: Starches and processed sugars
Next time you stand in a men’s circle, look to your left, then to your right. Chances are either you or one of the men, if not both, is suffering from pre-diabetes or diabetes. It’s maybe the fastest rising pandemic in the Western world. So why then are nutritionists all over the country giving their OK to processed sweet and carbohydrate consumption as long as they add the words “in moderation” or “together with a balanced diet” at the end?
Are they anything more than peddlers for highly addictive and toxic substances? Rather than fixing the issue, they are promoting management with medications like Metformin and others, in addition to their pre-chewed nutrition advice, rather than fixing the root cause. None of these meds that they recommend have ever fixed a man’s metabolism.
The latest crowning jewel on the market is Ozempic, widely praised as the solution for obesity. Let me tell you it is not. It has already shown to have detrimental side effects. Men who take it and go off, gain their weight back, and it costs some $20,000 a week. Somehow the medical industry has managed to skew our clear thinking process through years of false messaging to make us think something like this could solve anything. Especially since the real solutions are simple.
Good News
The good news is that every man can start changing his blood markers in a mere three months. All it takes is to stop trusting the fake nutrition narrative, find the right guidance, re-evaluate eating as the most powerful path to true health, and start putting some effort into the right direction.
Our medical system has falsely compartmentalised symptoms rather than addressing the real issue. We go to the gastro-enterologist to fix our digestion, the cardiologist to fix our heart for example by feeding us statins, the endocrinologist to fix our thyroid, the urologist to fix our prostate and the diabetes specialist to fix our blood sugar, when in reality all these issues stem from the same root cause. They all have the same handwriting of chronic metabolic mismanagement, and they can all be fixed by simple lifestyle changes.
“Oestrogen”
This brings us to the “oestrogen” issue that I have mentioned before. The metabolic crisis is a particularly grave matter for us men. Have you heard of andropause? Andropause is the male equivalent to female menopause and describes the process of unwanted hormonal changes in a man. One difference to women is that it doesn’t happen at a certain age, it can even happen to a 20-year-old. Andropause is characterised by a reduction in testosterone levels and an increase in female hormones. It is merely a symptom of the same metabolic disease process that is plaguing the entire Western world. And not surprisingly, it is caused by false eating habits.
The real issue is, these changes literally cost us our manhood. They are robbing us of our spunk, our masculinity, our rigor, our ability to be tough, relentless, and disagreeable when it’s necessary to protect what’s ours. They make us sedentary, uninterested, and depressed. This physiological decline is intrinsic to the great feminisation of men we are witnessing all around the Western world. Here is the best news, though. Unlike menopause, this process can actually be reversed.
Change
So how do we go about it? As often, let’s stand on the shoulders of those who have done it right in the past.
Weston Price, a dentist from the 1920s, had decided to close his dental practice and travel around the world to find out about the value of traditional diets in different tribal communities. To evaluate the level of health, he checked different parameters, and since he was a dentist, he put a big emphasis on observing the healthy development of the jaw during pubescence. He checked for the amount of space available for wisdom teeth to grow naturally and he looked at tooth decay as a parameter of health.
Tooth decay is yet another stepchild of the same metabolic disease processes we have been discussing. He found out that in those cultures that eat traditional diets, tooth decay was virtually non-existent. Surprised by the incredible status of health he found among these tribal communities, he began looking for parallels between their eating habits. And parallels he found. He soon realised that many of these traditional cultures around the world, even though vastly different in terms of their food sources, followed pretty much the same principles of eating.
Do not conflate traditional ethnic diets with what has become known as the “Palaeolithic” or “Paleo” diet. It isn’t the same. What Weston Price was talking about are simply the nutritional commonalities he was able to discover from dissecting various tribal diets. What better way to go than to look at what has been applied successfully for millennia? Especially in the face of hundreds of existing diet fads, the “back to the roots” approach appears increasingly attractive, additional to how well it works and how quickly it restores health of course. It coincidentally also perfectly matches the tribal spirit of men standing together in a circle in the men’s division, bonding, and trying to be at their best for their loved ones and families.
Recommendations
Here are my dietary recommendations based on Weston Price’s tremendous legacy:
1. Cut the crap: Avoid all refined and denatured foods. We were never meant to eat or drink them. This goes for all the typical comfort foods: chips, sweets, most desserts, but even things like protein powders and other supposed health foods. If God wanted you to drink highly processed and denatured protein powder, he would have grown it on trees. Cut the crap also means sodas, fruit juices, diet drinks and even freshly pressed fruit juices. Eating a fruit instead and drinking water goes a long way. Carbonated water is fine.
2. Include animal foods: Don’t buy the 80-year saturated fat industry scam and go for it. Your ancestors fried with lard, baked with butter, and drank raw whole milk. Eat organ meats; they taste great, are flavorful, and you wont find any nutrient richer food than liver. Liver paté is a favorite and super nutritious. Why do you think natives used to eat the raw heart and the liver first thing after their successful hunt? It gave them the strength of the animal. Here is a list of nutritious foods: raw dairy, shellfish, fish liver oils and fish eggs, beef, lamb, game, organ meats, poultry, and eggs from pasture-fed animals. Balance between animal foods from land and sea to balance omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.
3. Eat full-fat milk products from pasture-fed cows: Preferably raw and/or fermented, such as raw milk, whole yogurt, kefir, and stay away from the regular pasteurised supermarket garbage.
4. Eat some animal food raw: Like sushi and beef tartare;
5. Cook most of your plant foods. Eat fresh fruit and vegetables, preferably organic. Use vegetables in salads and soups and lightly steam with butter.
6. Enjoy lacto-fermented condiments and beverages: All these cultures did it, be it in the form of Kombucha, Kimchi, Sauerkraut, homemade yogurt, beer, etc. And, again, stay away from the cheap supermarket crap. Use only unpasteurised wine or beer in moderation with meals.
7. Enjoy saturated fats: Avoid industrial seed oils; they are highly inflammatory killers though widely praised by the health care industry. Use animal fats, such as lard, tallow, egg yolks, cream, and butter liberally. Use only traditional vegetable oils – extra virgin olive oil, expeller-expressed sesame oil, small amounts of expeller-expressed flax oil, and the tropical oils – coconut oil, palm oil, and palm kernel oil. And except for Palm kernel oil and coconut oil, don’t use those for cooking and broiling.
8. Include gelatinous bone broth: Use in soups, stews, gravy, and sauces. It’s got everything you need.
9. Prepare seeds, grains, and nuts properly: Minimise hard-to-digest anti-nutrients and thereby enhance digestibility. Traditional ways to do this are soaking, sprouting, or sour leavening to neutralise phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, and other anti-nutrients. Stay away from soy under any circumstances unless it is fermented. Soy is quite oestrogenic and mostly indigestible for the body anyway. And contrary to common belief, Asian cultures traditionally enjoyed soy only after fermenting it. In short: tofu is a scam.
10. Make your own salad dressing: Use raw vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, and a small amount of expeller-expressed flax oil. Stay away from processed dressings.
11. Use traditional sweeteners in moderation: Such as raw honey, maple syrup, maple sugar, date sugar, dehydrated cane sugar juice, and stevia powder.
12. Take a tablespoon of cod liver oil daily: To provide vitamin A and vitamin D naturally.
13. Use a variety of herbs and spices: For food interest and appetite stimulation. All your receptors will dance, but use natural spices and use them freely.
14. Use unrefined salt freely.
15. Cook only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel.
Don’t tell me you can’t eat really well with those choices!
Still sounds difficult? Yes, you will have to start reading labels. If there is anything in the ingredient list that you have a hard time pronouncing, let it go. Yes, you will have to start putting some thought into what you eat, how you prepare it and where you buy it. You will also have to spend some, not much, more money on high-quality food shopping. Yes, you will likely have to overcome your nagging sugar addiction, which let’s be honest you don’t want anyway. And yes, you won’t be able to devour the birthday cake and the marshmallows at the weekend family gathering. So what?
Instead consider this:
How much time are you spending on checkups, doctor visits, low energy bouts, inability to concentrate, or just plain old exhaustion? And how much money are you losing because of it, not even speaking of your quality of life? And what’s the cost of all this for your manhood and confidence?
A man who feels strong and healthy also feels more confident. While sport and proper movement play a big role, it doesn’t even come close to the role that your food intake plays in terms of your health. I know, I know it seams like I am suggesting a lot. But am I really? All I am asking is to eat how generations of your ancestors ate. And what will you miss out on if you don’t give it an honest shot?
You will start feeling different in a week. In three months, your body weight will start to balance. You will feel more vibrant and energetic. Your blood markers will start to return to a healthy level. Your joint pain will start subsiding, the inflammation in your body will go down. A wise healer knows that the amount of inflammation in your body is indirectly proportionate to your life quality, zest, and rigor in life. After 12 months, your life will have totally changed, and you will once again start feeling like the warrior that has been subdued by tons of processed foods, perpetual misinformation about nutrition and the resulting metabolic imbalance that has befallen the western world.
Change starts now!
Florian Boschi, Master of Science of Oriental Medicine, is the founder of Einheitskraft, creating herbal essences based on classical recipes. His passion for crafting authentic herbal solutions, rooted in traditional principles, has been the cornerstone of his work. With nearly 30 years dedicated to plant wisdom, he integrates Eastern and Western herbal knowledge, exploring combinations that harness the gifts of the plant kingdom. His journey began at the University of Vienna and continued in California, where he studied Traditional Chinese Medicine and became a licensed Chinese medicine practitioner. He advocates for a simple, joyful, and balanced life through the magic of herbs and nature’s wisdom. His website is: www.einheitskraft.com.
Very valuable article Florian, I am in your choir.
Thank you, I appreciate it!