Far worse than the biologic damage caused by refined sugar is the molecular havoc caused by processed vegetable oils. Soybean oil in particular has a questionable safety profile for several reasons, and processed foods are positively loaded with it.

Whether partially hydrogenated, organic or genetically modified to be low in linoleic acid, soybean oil can cause dysfunction at a cellular level. Unfortunately, many health authorities have insisted omega-6-rich vegetable oils like soybean oil are healthier than saturated animal fats such as butter and lard, and this myth has been a tough one to dismantle, despite the evidence against it.

An estimated 94% of the soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically engineered (GE) to tolerate herbicides,¹ primarily glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto/Bayer's Roundup), which cannot be washed off. As a result, most soybean-based products are contaminated with glyphosate, which compounds their toxicity.

Soybean Oil Linked to Genetic and Neurological Damage

Most recently, research^2,3,4,5 published in the journal Endocrinology warns soybean oil — the most widely consumed cooking oil in America — can cause neurological and metabolic changes associated with:

The study, done on mice, compared the health effects of diets high in conventional soybean oil, GE soybean oil low in linoleic acid and coconut oil. As reported by Neuroscience News:⁶

"The same UCR research team found in 2015 that soybean oil induces obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, and fatty liver in mice. Then in a 2017 study, the same group learned that if soybean oil is engineered to be low in linoleic acid, it induces less obesity and insulin resistance.

However, in the study released this month, researchers did not find any difference between the modified and unmodified soybean oil's effects on the brain. Specifically, the scientists found pronounced effects of the oil on the hypothalamus, where a number of critical processes take place."

Your hypothalamus⁷ is a key regulator of homeostasis and metabolism in your body, and also plays a role in your stress response and hormone regulation.

According to the authors, the soybean diets (both conventional and GE), caused dysfunction in about 100 different genes in the hypothalamus, including one that is responsible for producing oxytocin, colloquially known as "the love hormone," which has beneficial effects on your heart.

Other dysregulated genes included ones associated with "inflammation, neuroendocrine, neurochemical and insulin signaling." The coconut oil diet had "negligible effect."

The fact that GE soybean oil that is designed to be low in omega-6 linoleic acid had similar effects as conventional high-linolenic acid soybean oil effects suggests linoleic acid isn't the problem, as previously suspected. The study also ruled out another suspected soybean chemical, stigmasterol, as coconut oil enriched in stigmasterol had no ill effects.

The team will continue their investigation in an effort to identify the real culprit behind these genetic effects. In the meantime, co-author Poonamjot Deol, an assistant project scientist at the University of California Riverside, urges people to "reduce consumption of soybean oil."

Unfermented Soy Linked to Many Health Problems

The idea that unfermented soy in general and soybean oil in particular, are healthy is refuted by thousands of studies linking unfermented soy to a wide range of health problems. In her book, "The Whole Soy Story," Dr. Kaayla Daniel details research implicating unfermented soy in the development of:⁸

Fermented organic soy, on the other hand, has a number of important health benefits, and are the only soy products I recommend eating. Healthy options include:

• Tempeh — A fermented soybean cake with a firm texture and nutty, mushroom-like flavor.
• Miso — A fermented soybean paste with a salty, buttery texture (commonly used in miso soup).
• Natto — Fermented soybeans with a sticky texture and strong, cheese-like flavor.
• Soy sauce — Traditionally made by fermenting soybeans, salt and enzymes; beware that many varieties on the market today are made artificially, using a chemical process.

Problematic Components in Soy

While the featured Endocrinology study was unable to identify the exact soy compound responsible for the genetic damage, there are many plant chemicals found in soy that are capable of causing problems, including:

Another Major Hazard of GE Soybeans: Glyphosate

If you need yet another reason to reconsider your consumption of soybean oil, consider this: In addition to having an unhealthier nutritional profile than organic soybeans, Roundup Ready GE soy has been shown to contain high amounts of glyphosate.¹⁵

According to a 2014 study^16,17 published in Food Chemistry, which looked at the compositional differences between various types of soybeans, glyphosate readily accumulates in Roundup Ready soybeans, and GE soybeans contained a mean glyphosate residue level of 3.3 milligrams per kilo. The most contaminated samples contained as much as 8.8 mg of glyphosate per kilo.

Meanwhile, a 2010 study¹⁸ in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology found malformations in frog and chicken embryos occurred at 2.03 mg of glyphosate per kilo. The malformations primarily affected the face, skull, brain and spinal cord. According to this study:

"Organic soybeans showed the healthiest nutritional profile with more sugars, such as glucose, fructose, sucrose and maltose, significantly more total protein, zinc and less fiber than both conventional and GM-soy.

Organic soybeans also contained less total saturated fat and total omega-6 fatty acids than both conventional and GM-soy. GM-soy contained high residues of glyphosate and AMPA ... Conventional and organic soybean batches contained none of these agrochemicals.

Using 35 different nutritional and elemental variables to characterize each soy sample, we were able to discriminate GM, conventional and organic soybeans without exception, demonstrating ''substantial non-equivalence'' in compositional characteristics for 'ready-to-market' soybeans."

It's important to realize that once applied to crops, glyphosate actually becomes integrated into the cells of the plant, so it cannot be washed off. And, while the chemical industry is still defending the safety of glyphosate, mounting research suggests it can harm health in a number of different ways.

Importantly, the chemical has been shown to decimate beneficial gut bacteria. Glyphosate has also been shown to cause DNA damage¹⁹ and to act as an endocrine disruptor.²⁰ For an overview of how glyphosate's impact affects your health, see "Roundup May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Chronic Disease."

Safeguard Your Health by Ditching Vegetable Oils

To recap, there are several potential health hazards of soybean oil to consider, either alone or in combination:

1. The harmful health effects of unfermented soy
2. The potential hazards of GE soy
3. The harm associated with glyphosate contaminated food
4. High amounts of processed omega-6 skewing your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio

If you want to avoid dangerous fats of all kinds, your best bet is to eliminate processed foods from your diet. My comprehensive nutrition plan offers helpful guidance for this process.

When cooking, coconut oil, butter, lard and ghee are healthy options. Also be sure to swap out margarines and vegetable oil spreads for organic butter, preferably made from raw grass fed milk. Butter is a healthy whole food that has received an unwarranted bad rap.

Other healthy fats to include in your diet are avocados, raw dairy products, olive oil, olives, organic pastured eggs and raw nuts. To further balance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio you may also need a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil, if you're not in the habit of eating small, fatty fish such as sardines, anchovies and mackerel, and/or wild caught Alaskan salmon.

Excellent piece in ⁦ @PrivateEyeNews⁩ on how dodgy Russian put their money in EFG Private Bank. When one of EFG’s London employees blew the whistle and tried to stop it, he was fired. It’s no wonder that London is the laundering capital of the world http://www.private-eye.co.uk/in-the-back 

• Our world maps lie to us: North America and Europe aren't really that big and Africa really is much bigger.
• It's all the fault of Mercator: even if the man himself wasn't necessarily Eurocentric, his projection is.
• This interactive map tool reveals countries' true sizes without having to resort to the Peters projection.

Is Texas really bigger than Poland? Does Russia stretch further east to west than Africa does north to south? And how big a chunk of Europe would the U.S. cover? If you're losing sleep over questions like these, you'll find relief at TheTrueSize.com, a web tool designed to provide answers about the relative sizes of countries (and U.S. states).

Created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, the application was inspired by an episode of The West Wing, in which a delegation of the (fictional) Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality (OCSE) asks the White House to get public schools to use world maps that use the Peters projection rather than the traditional Mercator projection.

Cartographers for Social Equality - The West Wing www.youtube.com

Why? On a Mercator map, countries in further north (and south) are shown larger than they are relative to countries closer to the equator. In so doing, one of the OCSE scientists explains, "the Mercator projection has fostered European imperialist attitudes for centuries and created an ethnic bias against the Third World," says one OCSE scientist.

However, her colleagues point out that this was not Mercator's original intent: "(He) designed (the Mercator projection) as a navigational tool for European sailors (…) The map enlarges areas at the poles to create straight lines of constant bearing or geographic direction."

While those straight lines make it easy for sailors to follow directions across oceans, world maps in the Mercator projection distort the relative size of the world's land masses — and increasingly so closer to the poles.

• The classic example, also used in The West Wing scene, is Greenland: on a Mercator world map, it appears roughly the same size as Africa. In fact, the continent is 14 times larger than the island.
• Other examples: on a Mercator map, Europe seems larger than South America; in fact, South America is almost double the size of Europe.
• And, Alaska appears three times as large as Mexico, but Mexico is slightly larger than America's northernmost state.

However, the Peters projection deviates substantially from what many people have come to expect a world map should look like. Or, as one of the presidential aides in The West Wing said, when presented with an example, "What the hell is that?"

This app allows size comparison while avoiding the cartographic Fremdkörper that the Peters projection still is. "We hope teachers will use it to show their students just how big the world actually is," say Talmage and Macniece.

TheTrueSize.com is great fun: move equatorial countries north and see how getting closer to the pole distorts them, as if in a house of mirrors at the carnival. Plonk countries from different latitudes next to each other and see how they're a lot more different in size than you thought. Or a lot less. See countries shrink as you drag them from their positions high up north (or deep down south) closer to the equator.

​Greenland and Africa, Mercator style

​Congo is bigger than Greenland

UK trumps Tanzania

Tanzania swallows the UK

Russia on top

Russia on its head

Poland, TX

Trying Europe on for size

Inflated and deflated states of America

Ten largest countries

Germany in the Midwest

Images taken from The True Size and here from Bored Panda.

Strange Maps #953

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

David Satter on the apartment bombings that brought Putin to power: The free world began at that moment to accept any Russian atrocity and any absurd explanation for it from the Russian government. (Maybe like Sandy Hook for Americans.) #PutinCon

“WHY DO they hate us?”

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

Let’s be clear: there is no doubt that the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) both fear and loathe the United States. Paranoia, resentment and a crude anti-Americanism have been nurtured inside the Hermit Kingdom for decades. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.

“The hate, though,” as long-time North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “ is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”

Forgets as in the “forgotten war.” Yes, the Korean War. Remember that? The one wedged between World War II and the Vietnam War? The first “hot” war of the Cold War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, and which has since been conveniently airbrushed from most discussions and debates about the “crazy” and “insane” regime in Pyongyang? Forgotten despite the fact that this particular war isn’t even over — it was halted by an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty — and despite the fact that the conflict saw the United States engage in numerous war crimes which, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue to shape the way North Koreans view the United States, even if the residents of the United States remain blissfully ignorant of their country’s belligerent past.

For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

Every. Town. More than three million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.

An elderly woman and her grandchild wander among the debris of their wrecked home in the aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang, the Communist capital of North Korea, circa 1950.

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

How many Americans are familiar with the statements of Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas? Rusk, who was a State Department official in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would later admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.”

Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”

How many Americans have ever come across General Douglas MacArthur’s unhinged plan to win the war against North Korea in just 10 days? MacArthur, who led the United Nations Command during the conflict, wanted to drop “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria” that would have “spread behind us … a belt of radioactive cobalt.”

How many Americans have heard of the No Gun Ri massacre, in July 1950, in which hundreds of Koreans were killed by U.S. warplanes and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry regiment as they huddled under a bridge? Details of the massacre emerged in 1999, when the Associated Press interviewed dozens of retired U.S. military personnel. “The hell with all those people,” one American veteran recalled his captain as saying. “Let’s get rid of all of them.”

How many Americans are taught in school about the Bodo League massacre of tens of thousands of suspected communists on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean strongman, President Syngman Rhee, in the summer of 1950? Eyewitness accounts suggest “jeeploads” of U.S. military officers were present and “supervised the butchery.”

Millions of ordinary Americans may suffer from a toxic combination of ignorance and amnesia, but the victims of U.S. coups, invasions and bombing campaigns across the globe tend not to. Ask the Iraqis or the Iranians, ask the Cubans or the Chileans. And, yes, ask the North Koreans.

For the residents of the DPRK, writes Columbia University historian Charles Armstrong in his book “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992,” “the American air war left a deep and lasting impression” and “more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats, that would continue long after the war’s end.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not pretending that Kim’s violent and totalitarian regime would be any less violent or totalitarian today had the U.S. not carpet-bombed North Korea almost 70 years ago. Nor am I expecting Donald Trump, of all presidents, to offer a formal apology to Pyongyang on behalf of the U.S. government for the U.S. war crimes of 1950 through 1953.

But the fact is that inside North Korea, according to leading Korea scholar Kathryn Weathersby, “it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened.”

If another Korean war, a potentially nuclear war, is to be avoided and if, as the Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera famously wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” then ordinary Americans can no longer afford to forget the death, destruction and debilitating legacy of the original Korean War.

Top photo: U.S. troops bring in North Korean prisoners of war, Oct. 7, 1950.

The post Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War. appeared first on The Intercept.