[podcast flashvars=”titles: ‘Mackay Rippey Ep. 224′”]http://traffic.libsyn.com/llvlcshow/llvlc224-mackay.mp3[/podcast]
Hello and welcome back to another week of fabulously healthy interviews with the leading voices in the world promoting good nutrition and fitness here at The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore!
In today’s episode, Jimmy talks with Hamilton, New York acupuncturist Mackay Rippey, creator of the Yin Yang Diet. What do you think an acupuncture practitioner would have to say about the healthy low-carb lifestyle? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out, including sharing about the evils of hydrogenated vegetable oils, the ease of consuming simple whole foods and the role of implementing an exercise routine into your life for both health and weight loss.
Listen in for all of this and so much, much MOORE! Be sure to visit Jimmy Moore’s official “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb” web site to see what else he is up to in the wonderful world of low-carb living these days.
LINKS MENTIONED IN EPISODE 224
– Jimmy Moore’s Official “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb” Web Site
– MackayRippey.com
– The Kirkland Weight Loss Project
– Mackay Rippey’s Yin Yang Diet
2-16-09 UPDATE: Special thanks to Mackay Rippey for offering this transcript of his interview. Click on the link below to access the transcript.
Jimmy Moore: Welcome to “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore.” Today we have with us a gentleman by the name of Mackay Rippey. He is an acupuncturist who is living in mid-state New York. He moved to an old farm in Deansboro. He learned a lot about health and the slower way of life through that experience. He graduated from Tai Sophia Institute. He was one of the very first acupuncturists in the country to hold a Master’s degree in acupuncture. He has been helping clients to feel better with 5-Element Acupuncture for the last 17 years. He is an extremely helpful guy whenever you have questions about anything in terms of what he deals with on a daily basis. His blog is mackayrippey.com. We’re so happy to have you today, Mackay.
Mackay Rippey: Thanks Jimmy.
J: So tell us a little bit about yourself. I gave some of your background. How has that background led you into what you’re doing today?
M: I had this college class entitled Society and Technology. We read a book called More Work for Mother. Essentially it said that for every labor saving device that you give your mom, you’re making her do more work because you’re raising expectations. So I’ve always had this in the back of my mind. Technology is wonderful, but you have to look at the big picture.
I grew up in Washington D.C., in a row house. We cut the lawn with little grass hand trimmers. Now I live on 30 acres. We have an old Ford 810 tractor and a Bush Hog. We also raising chickens. My wife was born in South Africa. She lived there with her parents, and they lived a very traditional lifestyle. They would raise rabbits and chickens and slaughter things. My experience was that food was in the supermarket.
I started to see this transition of where food actually comes from, and what’s important for growing healthy food. The difference really opened my eyes. I think it’s just part of the trend. I think this is happening all over the country; it’s not just me. People are really waking up to what exactly is going on. They’re acknowledging the changes that have happened since even the 50’s, here in the states.
J: Your experience sounds a lot like Nina Planck, from Real Food. Have you read her book?
M: I have not. What’s the title?
J: It’s Real Food. The subtitle is “What to Eat and Why.” Nina Planck also grew up on a farm and discovered real food early on in her life. Now she is a huge advocate for getting people to realize that food doesn’t come from grocery stores. A lot of people think it does. Food actually comes from where you grew up, like on a farm. People have lost the sense of where their food has come from. They don’t have an appreciation for it. That’s why they gravitate towards all the crap, all the high-carb junk stuff that is in the middle aisles at most grocery stores.
M: It’s funny because we think of this as a very modern problem. One of my favorite quotes from acupuncture school was from a book that’s about 3 thousand years old. It’s called The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. It’s a conversation between the yellow emperor, a mythical emperor in China, and his physician. Essentially he asks his physician: In the old days, people lived to 100 years old. Today, they only live to 50. What’s up with that?
And essentially his physician says: In the old days, people knew how to live with nature. They knew how to take care of themselves and eat in moderation. They knew how to go to bed at the right times. And this is being written 3000 years ago. What I see happening over time is that as cultures adopt technologies, it creates openings for us. It can be as complex as some of the modern food processing methods, like hydrogenation of vegetable oils. It could also be something as simple as refining grains, learning how to bake breads, or make noodles if you’re Chinese. The technology makes our lives better. Some of them also require that we adjust to them or we get sick. It’s this two edged sword. We have to learn to deal with the back edge of the technology.
J: As an acupuncturist, how do you come to these conclusions about diet? I’m trying to understand the connection between acupuncture and diet. Is it something that you’re just personally interested in, or did they have any kind of dietary or nutritional teachings for you in your schooling for acupuncture?
M: Yes to both. In general, though, the teaching at the school that I went to was fairly fundamental. There’s a whole elaborate system for eating in Chinese medicine. It offers lots of good insights; however, the problem is that it’s Chinese, and it is 2 thousand years old. There are some general guidelines and ideas that you can bring forward, though. There are some things that hold true, but foods change as the technologies change. It’s like what you talked about with Nina Plank and her Real Food.
For example, the beef that I have in my freezer, from the cow that we raised out back eating from our pasture, is different from when we go to the supermarket and buy some hamburger. The mineral contents and nutrient contents are fundamentally different. The levels of fats and the types of fats are also different because they’re not grain fed, confined, and given antibiotics and the whole 9 yards.
The other thing that’s very interesting about acupuncture and eating is, in Chinese medicine, basically the idea is that there’s energy in the body. This energy is this very loose idea that they use in a lot of different ways. The bottom line is how good you feel and how healthy you are. There are three ways to get energy. There’s what you’re parents give to you. Essentially that is your genetic makeup. There’s the energy that you receive through breathing. We kind of put that in the realm of exercise and physical activity. There are benefits of doing that. The last part of where energy comes from is through the food that you eat. It’s a fundamental foundation for your health.
I find, just like you and all the people on your low-carb blog, that what you eat makes a huge difference. I find there are some clients who are stuck with their ability to heal. It’s not because of any great medical problem, nor any great acupuncture problem. It’s because they’re eating the wrong food. If you can find what that is and correct it, they can get better very quickly.
J: Mackay, earlier you mentioned that a lot of the technological advances that have come out to help ‘mom’ have actually added more work to her daily schedule. Talk about that a little more.
M: Coming back to this book that was part of the class 20-some years ago now, (it has been a while) the thesis was that things like washing machines, ovens, even cake mixes raised expectations for ‘mom’.
Back in the old days, you would wash clothes once a week. If clothes got a little bit dirty in between, well, everybody did that. Now with the washing machine, clothes have to be laundered every single day. You can’t show up to work with a slightly stained collar anymore. It’s that type of thing.
It used to be that there was a baker in the neighborhood. If you needed bread, or if you needed a cake made, you would go to the baker. Now that’s done in your home. Now we even have people like Martha Stewart who have raised things to a whole new level. So there’s that type of technology.
There are also fundamental technologies that have become such a part of our life that we don’t even pay attention to them anymore. They’re things like electricity and lights.It’s funny because I’ve been listening to a lot of your podcasts. A lot of this information covered in those podcasts is the same as what I tell my clients. It’s funny to hear them being reinforced by experts that you’re interviewing. It’s really good to see. We’re pulling together just a little different idea that this technology needs to be adjusted for in our lives. Lights haven’t been around that long–Thomas Edison 1879. He separated making light from burning things.
Now that we can stay up with the computer screen, (that’s when I read your blog, when I come home at night) it shifts our internal body clock. So it’s like creating summer all the time. We no longer have short days in the wintertime. Winter is what we’re approaching now here in upstate New York. It’s about 25° outside and the days are getting really short. It’ll be dark here around 5 o’clock. I go home, though, and turn on my lights; I turn on my computer. My body is fooled into thinking it is summertime. It thinks it is summertime until I turn off the lights. It turns out that you don’t need very much light for this to happen. A 100 watt light bulb anywhere in the room where you are is going to reset your body clock. As that happens, we don’t get enough sleep.
We get poor sleep if we have the alarm clock in the room with the bright light on. If you have a cell phone charging in your room, if it lights up, it can wake you up. They’ve even found that your skin is sensitive to light. You can shine light on the back of your knee and your body will recognize that the sun is up and it’s time to wake up. As we know, the lack of sleep creates a sleep debt. You have immediate problems like drowsy driving. It also impairs brain growth, leads to depression, and lowered energy levels. Of course weight gain is a big problem with the lack of sleep. You’re trying to compensate and keep your body stimulated, so you eat more. Long term memory goes; your immune system goes. It becomes really much more of a battle between adrenaline and melatonin in the body where they should be cooperating. That’s one example that we don’t think about very much.
J: We recently got some Blackout Curtains for that very reason. It was getting kind of rough with the sun coming through in the mornings. I never thought about that, that the artificial light inside of our house throws our natural clock off. Wow! As far as the labor saving devices, you make the claim, and it’s a pretty bold claim, that they are killing us. Expand upon that a little bit.
M: Well, it’s a little bit of hyperbole, I’ll admit. The scientists are still up in the air, so the numbers are somewhere between 7.5 and up to 10. This is dependent on the time of year and which scientist you’re talking about. I have clients come in all the time saying “yeah, I get 6 hours of sleep and I feel great, thank you very much.” I say, “Absolutely not!” I ask them, “Do you fall asleep watching television?” They respond, “Well yeah, doesn’t everybody?” I say, “No!” One of the other points here is that when you do begin to relax, your adrenalin comes down. If your sleep deprived, you instantly fall asleep. A big time when this happens is when people are driving. So we get into this White Line Fever. Our minds go away. We relax; we calm down.
Alcohol exacerbates it even more. A lot of these drunk-driving deaths are really sleep-deprivation deaths. People just fall asleep and cross the center line. Then they drive off into trees or something like that. So it can have an immediate impact. Another situation that you talk about in your other blogs, and I know you take vitamin D yourself, is the whole skin cancer scare. We’ve been told that if we’re out in the sun at all and we don’t protect ourselves, we’re going to die very soon of a very horrible cancer. There is some truth to that, but in protecting ourselves from skin cancer, we open the door for a whole range of other health problems. It falls in line with and sounds very similar to a high-carb, insulin- resistant situation. It is heart disease, it is cancers, it is diabetes, and it is immune system problems. It’s amazing how this list of technology-created problems, the back end of the technology, is so similar. They’re the diseases of modern society.
J: One other technological advancement that has happened over the past 50 years was that farming has changed. It’s become big business. The big modern farms are different than they probably were when you were growing up. Tell us a little about the changes. What about the topsoil loss, and what about the nutrient loss that has just occurred in the past few decades?
M: Yeah, there’s a real great book called Dirt. It’s written by David Montgomery. The subtitle is “The Erosion of Civilization.” He gets into the specifics of what’s happening. Do you know Wendell Berry? He’s from Kentucky. He’s more of a philosopher and English professor. He’s definitely a back-to-Nature, back-to-simpler-times type of person. He’s a very interesting critic of modern culture, and he’s in line with what we’re talking about. Anyway, he talks about soil loss, too.
I think this loss of topsoil is more of a problem than global warming, or what could be happening with global warming. We’re moving away from smaller scale farming. We’re using bigger and bigger machinery, and the fields are open fields. The smaller farms had a hedge row or tree row around the farm that would protect it from the winds. Now you have these huge farms and they’re built to be farmed by these big machines. Then you get out into the west where they have hundreds of acres of irrigated land. That’s just factory out there. The soil just happens to be there.
But anyway, with the way they plow and till now, if a strong rain comes along when the ground is not growing anything on it, the topsoil just literally washes away. Even now when we do have some soil coverage, say it’s a crop like corn or soybeans, they put down so many pesticides and herbicides that nothing else grows but the crop that’s usually genetically modified to grow there. So you still have these bare patches.
We’re lucky enough because across the street from us is an organic dairy farmer. He’s got about 30 acres. He rotates his crops. Next to him, up the road, is another farmer who is not organic. You can see the difference in the fields. The corn on the organic farm has weeds in there; it has other things growing. It has things holding the soil in place. The nonorganic farm is completely barren. It’s eerie almost because there should be things growing there, but they’re not. So you literally have nothing physically holding the soil in place.’ Soil isn’t dirt.
The title of the book says dirt, but soil isn’t dirt. It has all kinds of microbes in it. It has all kinds of nutrients in it. It has important organic matter that’s feeding the worms and bacteria. Essentially it’s a compost pile at work. What happens over time with all these herbicides and pesticides is it becomes sterile. Then you have to put back the petrochemicals in there to make sure the corn grows. At that point, however, you’re not getting any of the nutrients. It’s as if you took out your intestines. Our intestines enable us to absorb minerals.
So you’d be taking the earth’s intestines out by taking out the topsoil. So you may have something that at least looks like corn. It’s the same thing if you have a tomato plant out back. If you take care of it by putting a little bit of horse manure on it and maybe some kelp and a little bit of miracle grow, it tastes much different than if you go to the grocery store and get one of those plastic tomatoes. The difference in what you taste and don’t taste is all the nutrition.
J: Or the lack of nutrition. There’s one other area I want to cover before we move on to some of the healthy practices that people should be following. How in the world and why in the world did we ever come up with margarine or Crisco® or any of these fake fats that are somehow better for us? I mean, this doesn’t make sense.
M: Well, that’s because you’re an intelligent, educated man, Jimmy.
J: Thanks to a lot of people, but go ahead.
M: You’ve stepped out of the stream of commercialism. It may seem like I’m bashing technology, or I’m bashing capitalism, but I’m not. However, ‘buyer beware,’ right? You have to know what you’re actually eating. You can’t necessarily trust what you hear. Especially as you’re bringing up right now, they’re choosing who is going to be on the next Food Pyramid Committee. Isn’t that correct?
J: Yeah, they are already chosen. They are coming up with the 2010 dietary recommendations that will become the hallmark for what is healthy in a person’s diet in America. And definitely it has an impact on these different products that come out. These companies will say “The USDA and the HHS both say this is what a healthy diet is. We have foods that fit that mold. Therefore…” It’s kind of a never ending cycle.
M: And you’ve also mentioned that there’s nobody on there that represents the low-carb point of view, or even the low-processed point of view.
J: We’ll be interviewing the main guy behind that real soon, but yeah, definitely it was a lack of concern. It seems that there needed to be someone on the panel who would get that and articulate our point of view. So yeah, it’s very disheartening.
M: You’ve read Omnivore’s Dilemma, of course. If people listening haven’t read that book yet, it specifically focuses on corn, but it’s really an eye-opener to how agribusiness operates. In terms of these processed oils we’re talking about, Crisco® is the quintessential example. Crisco® was invented and marketed by a candle maker, so this was just before the turn of the century. It was this candle maker whose name happened to be William Procter, and a soap maker named James Gamble. Those names should be familiar because it’s a pretty big company now. Procter & Gamble is huge. They were brothers in law.
They had their business, and they were having trouble getting hold of animal fats to make their products. They were trying to figure out what else they could do. In 1905, they began to corner the cotton seed oil market. They wanted to own everything from the growing of it to the manufacturing and processing of it. They ran into a German chemist, E. C. Kayser. This is the man who invented hydrogenation. This is a time where Edison’s really got things going; the light bulb is coming on. Local power companies are being put together so people can have electricity for their light bulbs. Procter and Gamble saw candles were a dying technology.
Now, we talked about sleep before. It’s interesting, light from a candle and even from a gas lamp or an oil lamp isn’t bright enough in color to disturb your sleep. So you go back 100 years, and even though you may have been up reading or whatever, you would get tired. The light wasn’t bright enough to disturb the cycle and fool your body into thinking that it’s summertime. Anyway, they go on and find out about how to make vegetable oil solid at room temperature. Crisco® was introduced into the American market in 1911. Crisco® stands for crystallized cottonseed oil, that’s where the name comes from. Of course they weren’t just good chemists and good manufacturers of oil, they were also brilliant marketers. They gave away cook books, and guess what every recipe in the cookbook had?
J: Crisco®
M: Absolutely. They were also advertising at the time that Crisco® is modern; lard is for your grandma. It’s clean; lard is dirty because it comes from a pig. It’s healthy. They just made that one up out of thin air. They didn’t know any different. The other interesting thing was it was kosher. It didn’t come from animal fats. It was quickly adopted by the Jewish community because they could all of a sudden cook without all the kosher requirements. After that it kind of slid. I remember my mother cooking with Crisco. I think at that point in the 60’s, almost everybody had flipped over. So that’s the story of how that happens.
Now these are huge companies. As soon as the US begins getting into the lipid hypothesis and thinking that the fats are bad for you and vegetable oils are good for you, they start funding that research like crazy. And they’ve got these deep pockets to do it. At that point you’ve got fairly small mom and pop dairy farmers and meat operators. You didn’t have these huge meat factories like you do now. They were just simply outspent and marginalized. Really what we’re doing now is bringing back healthy foods. Do you know Sally Fallon and her book nourishing traditions?
J: From the Weston Price Foundation? Sure.
M: Absolutely. That cookbook Nourishing Traditions is fabulous. It has some of the best dietary advice and basic nutrition information you can find anywhere in the forward. They do a really great job with that cookbook. We’ve come down the pathway toward vegetable oils and away from animal fats. A fundamental thing that has happened because of this is an imbalance between the omega-3 acids and the omega-6 acids. The omega-3 acids are essentially animal acids. There are some present in vegetables, but not really that much. The omega-6, which are present in great amounts in the vegetable oils, have become out of balance. The experts are divided, but the healthy range seems to be anywhere from a 1:1 ratio to a 4:1 ratio. In a modern diet, it’s somewhere between 14:1 and 25:1. That’s in favor of the omega-6 acids.
J: And most people don’t even realize the whole omega equation, mackay. You start talking about omega-3 and omega-6 and their eyes glaze over because they don’t really know what you’re talking about. Tell us a little bit about some of the foods and supplements and things that people can take to help balance out the omega-6’s, which are so prevalent in the American diet? What are the omega-3 sources that people should be on the lookout for?
M: Let me step back, In case somebody’s eyes did glaze over. This is a critical piece here. They’re both essential fatty acids. When we say essential, we mean your body can’t make it. You have to eat it to live. That’s what essential means. The omega-3’s used to be found in your beef and eggs when the cattle and the chickens ate grass. That’s the source of it. Now that they’re all confined and being fed grains to fatten them up quickly and to create as much mass as possible so they can sell these animals, they’re not prevalent anymore. The same has happened with some of the organ meats that we used to eat, as well as some of the traditional foods. There’s no way I’m going to eat some of those traditional foods. Think of the Scottish and haggis. No way! Those types of foods had all these fat soluble nutrients in them, including the omega-3 acids.
Now for the most part, people are swallowing fish oil pills and that’s the main source. You will find some arguments for vegetable based, particularly flax oil. There is a problem, though, with the flax oil. It’s not in the form that the body uses, so the body has to convert it. Men in particular are pretty poor at converting the flax seed oil omega-3 into the fish oil form. We do this at a rate of about 6%. That means if you take in 1000 mg of omega 3 in the form of flaxseed oil, you’re only getting about 50 mg of useable in the body. Women are a little better. They can do about 14%, but still it’s fairly low.
The other thing to do on this is to limit your intake of vegetable oils. If you’re doing a low-carb diet, you’re well on your way to doing that anyway. The last holdout recommendations would be to consume some of the vegetable based salad dressings. But really, Stick to dairy based things and cream based things. Make sure you are getting your good fats from fish, like from salmon. If you have access to grass-fed beef or field-raised chicken eggs then you’re also getting some omega-3, right there, and you don’t have to worry as much about it.
J: Another supplement that is severely lacking in addition to omega-3 is magnesium. Why is the lack of magnesium so bad for us?
M: Magnesium is one of these minerals that every cell in the body is using all the time. Primarily what you really notice if you’re magnesium deficient is you’ll probably tend to be constipated, you’ll have headaches, good chance you’ll have some muscle cramps, you may be a little bit crabby, and may have trouble falling asleep . So you can see again we kind of have these modern diseases and groupings of symptoms that are coming up again. It can be caused by a magnesium deficiency.
This is the type of thing where milk has become so prevalent. I drink milk, and I love milk and cheese but it’s become such a large part of our diet and it’s so easy to get our hands on it. The sources of magnesium in our diet have drifted away. In a way, the processing of milk strips magnesium away. That’s not quite technically accurate, but what’s available is less than normally would be. If you are insulin resistant and have high blood sugar levels, then you really need to stay away from grains. But before this was happening, grains could be mixed into your diet and you wouldn’t fall ill necessarily.
Things, like millet, are higher in magnesium than they are in calcium. We all have biochemical individuality. You’re different than I am. I’m different than my wife. My two identical twin daughters are different from each other. We have different requirements. Some people require significantly more magnesium just to function normally. And unless you have a very extraordinary diet, you’re just not going to find enough in the food that’s available to you. That’s one of those things you may have to supplement. Magnesium balances with calcium, but if you’re eating quite a bit of dairy on top of everything else, you’ll definitely need to supplement with magnesium.
I think it was Dr. James LaValle who recommended about 500 mg a day. I find that’s a pretty good place to start. Depending on how deficient you are, you can up it significantly higher than that. You can consume several grams a day before things begin to get evened out.
J: Mackay, we’re running out of time. I wanted to make sure I asked you about exercise. That does tend to be a controversial subject as well. There are those on the side which says: “Cardiovascular exercise simply makes you hungry. It isn’t really great when it comes to weight loss. It’s definitely great for health, but not for weight loss.” Then there’s the other side that says: “You have to exercise if you truly want to lose weight and keep it off as a permanent lifestyle.” What do you think?
M: I don’t think we’re going to answer that controversy, but I do have a couple comments about it. I think it goes back to what works for you individually. One thing that aerobic exercise will do that the weight lifting won’t do is lift your mood. If you’re depressed some cardiovascular work will help elevate it. They’ve shown fairly conclusively that the weight lifting doesn’t. It makes you less irritable and it helps in some other areas. In terms of lifting your mood, though, it doesn’t do that. In terms of calories, weight lifting boosts your entire metabolism; that’s without a doubt.
The only time that the aerobic will do that is if you’re young and fit. You can really push yourself very, very hard. It’s easier to push your muscles hard anaerobically, while lifting weights, than it is to do it by running or bicycling or sprinting, though. You definitely need to be lifting weights. If you’re also depressed, adding in some cardio is definitely going to help you.
J: In my spin class, I definitely work hard.
M: The studies found that for 19 and 20-year-old people, they had to do 16 to 20 hours a week of high-intensity aerobics to get the lasting metabolism rises that weight lifting does. So, essentially you’re looking at a college type athlete; that type of activity. If you’re that active, you’re going to raise your metabolism. For us normal folk, there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that. Put me on a Nautilus machine.
J: His name is Mackay Rippey. This is his website, mackayrippey.com. It’s been such a pleasure having you with us today Mackay. We really appreciate all the great information you’ve provided. I wish you well as you continue to educate your patients there in Hamilton, New York.
M: Thank you very much, Jimmy.