"Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain," is a line that has made the hearts of countless Americans swell with patriotic pride, but David Perlmutter, M.D., whose book Grain Brain instructs people to eliminate all grains from their diet and increase their intake of meat, eggs, oils, and other high-fat foods, has launched a change.org campaign to alter the latter portion of this lyric to "... for ketogenic brain."
"It's time to get grains out of our bodies, our brains, and our anthems," stated Perlmutter. "This minor but significant tweak to 'America the Beautiful' will get things shifting in the right direction."
The ketogenic diet, which was originally conceived as a last-resort treatment for children with severe epilepsy, serves to propel the human body into ketosis, an extreme stress state in which the body's glucose stores are entirely depleted and the body is forced to rely on its emergency stores of fat as its primary fuel. While the diet can offer some short-term health benefits in the form of weight loss and decreased appetite, it comes with a laundry list of risk factors, including increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and sudden death.
In fact, the weight of medical research suggests that what promotes optimal health over the long term, is not the high-protein, high animal fat diet recommended by Dr. Perlumutter (and first popularized by the now-deceased Dr. Robert Atkins) but a whole-food, plant-based (i.e., vegan) diet. Indeed, the only diet ever shown to actually reverse heart disease, which is currently the number-one cause of death in the United States, is a whole-food vegan diet.
Dr. Perlmutter, however, has said that he finds the evidence regarding the health benefits of a plant-based diet unconvincing. "I'm not a fan of fad diets," he explained.
You can sign Dr. Perlmutter's "American the Grain-Brain-Less" petition at www.nationalcattlemensassociation.web.
