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You Are What You're Tricked Into Eating
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Two prominent nutrition experts have put forth the theory that the current obesity epidemic is, in large part, the result of processed foods tricking our appetite control mechanisms. They argue that evolution has given humans a delicately balanced system that balances appetite with metabolic needs, and that processed foods trick that system by making foods high in fats and carbohydrates have the gustatory qualities of proteins. As the researchers put it, 'Many people eat far too much fat and carbohydrate in their attempt to consume enough protein.'"
Our diet contains more meat than any other point in history, even before factoring in the abundance of nuts and beans.
While much fast or junk food is low in vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, our protein intake is far from deficient.
Humans are anything but carefully balanced, besides. Living organisms are very adaptable and self-correcting - if they weren't, we'd all be long dead.
The food industry didn't need to conspire for that. It was just that the food that was cheaper while still tasting nearly as good sold better than the high quality one, and with enough processing and flavoring, the cheaper food actually tasted even better. If you want success in the market, you have to offer the prices and the tastes only processed, flavored food can offer. Providers of high quality foods with low processing just got outcompeted. That's the invisible hand of the market, combined with thousands of years of cooking experience: selling shit for food.
It's always amused me, as a vegetarian, how the first thing people often say is "how do you get enough protein" like it's a constant struggle. "How much do I need" I'll ask. They don't know. But, you know, a LOT - enough that they'd worry about it!
"Eat Food. Mainly Plants. Not too much"
catch (ModDownException mde) {post.modUp("Interesting")}
Yes, the parent post is trolling, but it's the best kind of troll - the truth. Too many people want to blame others for their faults. If you want to lose weight, eat less, eat better, and get off your ass more often.
In general, people in the "civilized" countries eat far too much, period. While it's nice to blame food consistency for it, it's just lack of movement and overavailability of food that's totally suitable for explaining the balance between effort and intake
I'm sure that the point of this study isn't that simple. (If I could be bothered to read it, that is) Your point would be pretty obvious for a conclusion, it's probably the starting point that led to that study. Like: WHY are people in "civilized" countries overeating? And why is this happening even more with processed foods? Then that study finds with which bio-chemical stuff the food industry manages to trick our body to accept junk food as "valueable"
bickerdyke
The experiment you mention is irrelevant. The TFA does not discuss how much protein is good for your health. You can surely reduce your protein intake and have no ill effects, as long as your caloric intake/outake are balanced.
The TFA simply says that our bodies are tuned to crave for protein. Overprocessed foods have been tweaked to contain less protein because protein is expensive to produce.
So, if your diet consists of overprocessed foods, you need to consume a disproportionately large amount of calories to satisfy that craving. This led to an obesity epidemic.
A definite no. But then, I was not raised on industrially processed food; you tend to like the sort of food you were raised on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's it. Humans with exactly this strategy were most likely to survive the periods of hunger that were very much normal until a few decades ago.
Of course, this strategy fails completely if food is always available and hunger periods never occur. Constant availability of food is a relatively new phenomenon, too new for humans to have adapted to it.
Plants are an important part of a healthy diet, but they tend to lack in the protein and fat intake we need. Yes, we need fat to live. You can live without carbs for many months, but if you don't eat any fat, you're dead within three months. Even vitamins usually can be abstained from for longer periods of time without you dying. Carbs mess up our blood sugar and are proven to be one of the main contributors to the amount of diabetes type 2 we have today, as well as the enormous amount of obese people ( http://ds9a.nl/new-consensus/ ) . Carbs are addictive (they have bacteria in our guts produce "happy hormones") so even if you can afford to buy food that doesn't have carbs, you most likely don't want to, but you should seriously consider drastically reducing your intake in carbs. You can get your energy from fat and protein, no need for grain products at all.
New mantra: "Don't eat carbs, mainly fat, protein and plants". If you do it that way, the "not too much" will be easy.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The problem seems to be anything but simple, though people seem quite content to advocate simple solutions (kilojoules out > kilojoules out, for example).
Say you eat foods that digest primarily into glucose, but are eating the correct amount of kilojoules for your body composition. That's probably too much glucose, resulting in your body raising insulin levels in the blood to compensate. Over time you get insulin resistance, which leaves you with high blood sugar levels. Then you get leptin resistance, which leaves you feeling hungry even though you have more than enough energy available.
Suppose you're eating foods containing sucrose instead, which is half glucose and half fructose (or high fructose corn syrup, which is 45%/55%). The fructose is digested and results in uric acid, which apparently might be the root cause of hypertension (high blood pressure) and related pre-diabetes symptoms.
So you're consuming the correct amount of energy initially, but the result of leptin resistance causes you to feel hungry. So you eat more - raising blood sugars higher and increasing leptin resistance - which makes it harder for you to feel full.
Guess what the majority of the energy contained withing processed foods digests into, without that pesky fiber getting in the way?
There seems to be other things that may impact the issue as well, such as preservatives; they inhibit bacteria, and most of the digestion in our bodies occurs with the help of bacteria. The whole thing's a bit of a mess, with ongoing research. It's interesting.
what about fruit and vegetable rights. you can just hear them scream as you rip the fruit from tree's. and the sound is soul-curdling as you put potatoes in boiling water.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
After going on a very low carb diet for a few months last year, I discovered that main-stream, "low fat" pushing dieticians really don't know shit about losing weight.
If you've tried all the traditional diets and they haven't worked for you I can highly recommend a ketogenic diet. By eating less than 100g of carbs per day your body will go into ketosis after a few days, and you'll be burning fat like nobodies business. You can eat as much fat as you want on ketosis, but you'll find you won't overeat because the fat in your diet satisfies your hunger. Once your body is using fat as it's energy source it can't store it at the same time. Drink lots of water and the fat will fall off.
That can be good advice for individuals, but as health policy it's terrible. Humans are largely unable to resist their instincts for long by willpower alone - that's why abstinence-only education fails.
Add to that the fact that basically you have the choice of buying raw food, processed food or paying someone to cook for you. Properly cooked food, starting with raw ingredients, without fail tastes better. The problem is either you have money and can dine out or you need the skill to cook. If you where raised, like me, on the concept of buying raw food and cooking it, you will have learnt how to actually cook. But as it turns a good few people's cooking skill stops with scrambled eggs and as a result they buy processed food.
Processed food in itself is not bad and you can buy quite good quality food, but that costs. Competition in the food industry means sacrificing quality for profit/lower price and they will continue to "optimize" until the product stops selling. The interesting bit is that in recent decades there is a gap between the sensory experience of the food and the actual nutritional quality.
If people would realize how easy it actually is to cook...
My comment was more about people's ignorance about protein than about what you like to eat (the latter being rather off-topic).
I actually know a few long term vegans and they take great care to eat sufficient proteins. "how do you get enough protein" sounds like a stupid question, until you talk to people that not do this as a fad but for the rest of their life. It is a real issue they need to consider. They start to eat things, like tofu, that you would not consider part of a normal diet. Becoming a vegan does not mean removing meat, eggs and cheese from your diet, it also means finding substitutes. Vegetarians on the other hand, no big deal, a few chicken eggs and some cheese will do the trick.
It's not even good advice for individuals. On the basis that very few people who are overweight manage to make any lasting change to their weight with that advice.
There is no recommended daily intake for protein.
1-2g/kg. The range from 1 to 2 being dependant on total calorie intake; which is itself decided by calorie consumption, indirectly setting the optimal position between 1 and 2 by daily activity.
... food companies have scientists working 24/7 to hack human tastebuds for profit.
Much of this problem simply comes down to the fact that bad food is engineered to taste better than natural food we found in our environment over evolutionary history. The problem is our bodies aren't designed to deal with this new food environment and hence obesity. The environment that kids are raised in by clueless over stressed parents and shitty school environments doesn't help either.
Last but not least, human beings are not free. Probably one of the biggest myths that go along with the myth of responsibility.
Sam harris on free will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also known as Banting.
The LCHF Paleo Primal Banting community, the people who have been reading Taubes' review of the literature going back pre-war, and so on, and who have tried this stuff for themselves, the basic insight is that it is the carbohydrates that are the problem.
The grain growers wanted to mass produce and sell the stuff, and some politicians liked a "heart healthy" message (despite scientists protesting that more research was needed before jumping to conclusions) and so the whole "heart healthy" movement was born, which emphasised high carb foods like cereals, by demonising fat.
Well after some decades, and people trying it for themselves, people are now realising that it was pretty much completely wrong. And manufacturers, because fatless food tastes of cardboard, knew they had to increase the sugar content to make up for the lack of taste. Low fat yoghurts loaded with sugar. Healthy smoothies, loaded with sugar.
The carbs create cravings, signal the body to store fat, and overwork your insulin production until it breaks.
But dietary fat? Good natural fats are good for you. They are good for the guts, the heart, and the brain. Well, you can read books and various docs on this, and try it for yourself. See if their claims seem to work out. It isn't a short term diet, it is a lifestyle.
what about fruit and vegetable rights. you can just hear them scream as you rip the fruit from tree's. and the sound is soul-curdling as you put potatoes in boiling water.
So reduce plant suffering by not post-processing them into meat before eating them. That way, only about a sixth of the plants die. You could feed six times the humans with the same amount of plants by cutting out the pig in the middle.
The problem for vegetarians (and more especially for vegans) is not getting enough proteins, it's getting all of the required amino acids (for some reason, the term 'a whole protein' is used to mean 'all of the essential amino acids'). For future reference, by the way, you need around 25g of protein per day, but it has to be balanced among 9 amino acids that the human body can't synthesise (the other 11 can be synthesised from those 9). It's not particularly hard to get all of them - in fact, if you're meeting your calorific quota and not starving then you probably are. Unfortunately, a lot of hippy-vegan recipes that seem to be closely associated with vegetarianism have a terrible mix, so you end up with 3-4 times RDA for some amino acids but only a small amount of others. This led to a lot of vegans in the '60s suffering from amino acid deficiencies, which has led to a belief that it's hard for vegetarians to get enough protein.
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They start to eat things, like tofu, that you would not consider part of a normal diet.
What, so it's an abnormal diet? Tofu sounds like a pretty normal thing to me, even if I eat it quite infrequently.
Ezekiel 23:20
They have to actually follow the advice. That's how advice works.
And this one definitely works. Eat less, move more. If that doesn't make you lose fat, apply for Randi's supernatural million-dollar challenge, because you're either creating mass or energy out of nowhere.
The CDC recommends 56g of protein for adult males, and 46 for females. The British Nutrition Foundation's RNI is 0.75g per kilogram of body weight. Proteins in diet provide essential amino acids which cannot be synthesized by our organism. Most people get more than enough protein, but getting too little is very very bad. See also. Now show us what you've been reading.
Give the fatties something else to blame, god knows it's never their fault.
The summary said:
Many people eat far too much fat and carbohydrate in their attempt to consume enough protein.
They could have just left it at:
Many people eat far too much.
Weight control is all about self control. Fat folks simply don't want accept that.
Fat folks have it tough in life, though. If you think about our ancestors as simple hunter and gatherers, who communally shared all the food they had . . . a fat person sticks out as someone in the group who is eating more than his fair share of the rest of the food. That would breed bad feelings in the group towards that person. Maybe that trait has been passed along to us down through evolution . . . ?
On the other hand, when your airplane full of soccer team players crashes in the snow in the Andes . . . that fat person is going to look very tasty to the rest of the group!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I agree, no one should claim that our diet is deficient in protein. But the idea that increasing the proportion of protein in our diet might help with appetite regulation does not sound outlandish.
> It's always amused me, as a vegetarian [...]
That's a contradiction right there.
You also need to live somewhere with access to those ingredients, have a high enough income that you can afford the ingredients, and a high enough income that you can afford to be not-working long enough to cook and eat them. There are thousands upon thousands of people too poor for all three. They don't live anywhere with access to fresh food ("food deserts"), can't afford to travel to where they could buy fresh food, couldn't afford the food itself even if they could get there, can't afford to take the time out of their multiple jobs to go even if they could afford it, and can't afford to to take the time off to cook or eat it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This has been found out over and over again, but the food industry will always lobby against anything which would reduce their market. They even lobby against labels. In the EU, there was an initiative which wanted to color code the amount of fat, sugar, salt and other carbohydrates with (green = low, yellow = medium, and red = high) together with numerical values. It was stopped after massive lobbying. So now these labels are all white or black, require reading, and the values are distorted in different ways.
So this is an uphill battle. What helps, is buying at a local market instead of a supermarket. And do not watch TV adverts.
I said 'can be' good advice. Some people have the self-control for it to work. Many more do not. There's a tendency to shame those who lack control and assume it's a personal weakness, rather than admitting that it is just human nature.
Scientists have addressed this problem years ago by developing plants with no vocal chords.
How does that work? To lose weight from a diet, you need to consumne fewer calories than you use. To stay at the same weight once you've lost enough weight, you need to consume the same amount of calories that you use. These aren't the same thing.
An overweight person would need to make some change to his eating habits, but that change wouldn't consist of making the diet permanent--if he did, he'd just keep losing weight down to nothingness (or at least down to where his body just uses fewer calories because it's thin, which would not be the same as his target weight).
How does that make sense? The soccer players are all lean muscle. How is that not better for survival than pure fat?
Purhaps, you could help me by searching google for me and give me good links?
You want me to Google for links?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
well, the meat that has as much fat as possible
I don't think you understand what processed food is. It's not the same thing as food that's naturally high in fat.
That's basically the deal here: It's way cheaper to squeeze out kibble made of carbs and fat rather than creating something that contains protein. Protein can be found in animal based food (fish, meat, eggs, cheese) or a few vegetables (mainly certain nuts and pulse). And neither of them is easy or cheap to cultivate in large quantity.
It is, though, fairly cheap to produce fat, especially since we found out how to turn dirt cheap crap fat into shortening. And carbohydrates are a staple for pretty much any culture in existence anyway, and we managed to perfect its production.
Fat and carbs, carbs and fat. We excel at producing them and we can do it for cents per ton. Ain't that easy for protein. So processed food will contain as much fat and carbohydrates and as little protein as we can get away with.
But our bodies are not fooled that easily. They know what stuff should be in our diet, and if you don't eat what you're "supposed" to eat, you'll stay hungry. Now the vicious cycle starts because we're hungry, so we eat. The wrong crap again, so we stay hungry.
A solution is probably only possible if we simply forgo processed food and actually start cooking and eating sensibly again. But, and this is the next problem, can we still afford that? You, me, we probably can. We have money to "waste" on internet access, obviously. But how about people who're not as well off? Can they?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's fairly easy to say that, but it gets a bit more complicated when you look at it closely. Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!
And? How well did that work out for your country? You don't have any drug addicts anymore now that you've explained to your people that drugs are bad for them, right?
Of course, we're looking at a different underlying problem here but simply saying "it's their own fault if they're so dumb" is a bit easy and shows very little insight into the core of the problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that we metabolize bread just as fast as sucrose. Even Coca Cola gives less of a 'sugar rush' than bread (because Coke contains fructose).
So, if you are big, fat and lazy, just stop eating wheat, potatoes and rice products and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the result. This is otherwise known as the Caveman diet, Paleo diet, Atkins diet, High Protein diet, or any number of other names. It works and there is no need to buy and read a book about it, though it won't hurt if you do.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's sedentary living. You will never get millions to eat so little that they avoid obesity while watching screens 16 hours a day.
And then again ...
It's true that sitting still in front of a screen all day long means we burn less calories, just as it is true that we get fatter because we eat more than we need. There is a long chain of causes and effects, and perhaps there is no real, fundamental reason; but if we want to fix the problem, I think the best place to start is by removing the very powerful, economic incentive that certain industries have to produce a lifestyle in which everybody are passive consumers of light-weight entertainment and heavy-weight food.
And don't give the tired old crap about "nobody forces you to overeat" etc, because it is hardly the whole truth. You just try to work up an appetite, then go to any average supermarket; what are you most likely to buy? The healthy options, which are generally a bit grey, tasteless and expensive (and difficult to find), or the cheap, sugary and fatty stuff that you can find easily and wrap your face around quickly?
90% or so of what is on offer in most shops is unhealthy, and a lot of the things advertised as healthy are just as unhealthy, so how much of a real choice does the average consumer have? The only real solution is to stop the production of crap food at its source.
Atkins said basically what the article says too: Switch carbs for protein (NOT fat!) and you're golden.
Of course that is NOT cheap. You can't eat cheap crap and expect it to be healthy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your math is true for a balanced diet. If you eat an unbalanced diet, then you can eat much more and still remain thin. That is the magic of Atkins.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm sure the leftists will have us proles all eating insects and vegetables eventually..at least until the aspca gets around to defending insect rights. Of course, the party elite will still be dining on the few cows and fish that are left..
Amusing. Trying to derail a thread about how capitalism is fucking up people's diets by blaming "leftists"?
The problem for vegetarians (and more especially for vegans) is not getting enough proteins, it's getting all of the required amino acids
What problem? Rice and beans in combination contain all the amino acids you need.
The obvious solution is for OP to just stop eating. It can't be that hard, millions of people starve to death of their own free will every year.
... whatever
How many of them have working refrigerators, ovens, or microwaves seems a more relevant question. I'm puzzled why you are asking about cable television?
Cheap storage VM.
So when I eat a fatty steak, I enjoy it because it's processed food?
Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!
Yes, and that campaign was actually quite successful. It was not an overnight panacea, but drug use among teenagers dropped rather significantly over the course of that campaign. This despite the fact that it was routinely reviled in the press and by educators.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well no wonder we don't know the recommendations. The CDC is dabbling in metric.
I eat fast food regularly, I never eat whole wheat, I live at a desk. I'm 5'9", weight 145 pounds and can bench press 175, not great but acceptable. Maybe I have a better metabolism that most everyone else or I just eat when I need to and no more.
Cooking is more a test to your capability of organisation and laziness than having the time.Many meals are simple to cook, or then take your ipad or TV to the kitchen, and cook while you watch idols or Game of thrones. The problem with cooking real food is that many are lazy, and others the parents already didnt do that, and they dont really are not used to do it. The culture of buying everything already made is very pernicious when we are talking about what we eat.
Processed foods, fat and carbs are bad for me? What a revelation!
....used to be made with paper and tobacco leaf. That's it. That is how it was grown and manufactured for hundreds of years.
Today's cigarette contains hundreds of ingredients. And they sure as hell weren't added as flavor enhancers.
Anyone "tricked" over the concept of addictive chemicals being added to fast food that make you want to crave more of their product is rather ignorant of the world we live in, and the greed and corruption that built it.
This is part of a nutritional myth that was widely believed in the 60's. It is true that you need to get 8 essential amino acids (not 9), but in the 60's people believed you had to get 8 amino acids in every meal, so "protein complementarity" was a big deal with vegetarians in the West (not so much in ancient vegetarian cultures). What we now know is that while it's true you need to get your protein from different sources to get the amino acid coverage (other than some complete plant-based proteins like soy), it is not necessary to balance them in each meal. So if you have whole wheat toast (without peanut butter) for breakfast, and peanut butter on apples for lunch, that's a complete protein. Or if you eat red beans for dinner Tuesday and rice noodles for dinner Wednesday, that's also a complete protein. In the 60s you might have been taught that the peanut butter and bread had to be paired into a delicious sandwich or that the rice and beans had to be eaten together or you would risk catastrophic health consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Unless you are a spreadsheet addict, it is a waste of time to study protein complementarity. It turns out if you eat a plant based diet of varied sources (ie not only eating 1 thing all of the time), there is no protein problem whatsoever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
You're a fool. Once I realized that "willpower" is a metabolic state, not moral success or a moral failing, and I learned how to manipulate that metabolic state, I lost 150 lbs.
But go ahead, haters gotta hate!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
and they didn't die of malnutrion as a kid, like a staggering percentage of farm kids did before the evil food industry started putting additives in food
Agreed but let's not forget it was WW2 and parts of Europe such as Holland, France, and Italy were experiencing famines of varying degrees even after the war had ended.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ever cooked food before? Ever ground anything into a powder before doing something else to it before eating it? In either case, congratulations, it's processed. This also includes *any* kind of oil or milk alternative, which are very heavily processed extracts from different kinds of plants. *ANY* kind of soy that is actually edible is also heavily processed.
This whole article is bullshit. I first tried dieting by avoiding processed foods (namely, the kinds that tend to be higher in sodium, carbs, fats, etc) and it didn't work for shit. Know what did work? Just watching the caloric intake. Already lost 60 pounds over the last year, and it mainly just involved getting proper perspective on what an actual serving is. I still eat fast food, indeed all kinds of junk foods. I've also lowered my cholesterol and triglycerides in the process, while eating burgers, fries, and pizza no less. The trick is eating portion sizes that an actual human would eat instead of what a rhinoceros would eat.
A plain old hamburger at mcdonalds has about 360 calories. Contrary to popular belief, these hamburgers have been around since way before the obesity epidemic. Know what hasn't? Big triple stacked burgers globbed with mayo and ranch dressing. Another thing that hasn't is eating cereal in the large quantities most people do, which is actually primarily a result of the vegetarian movement (before that happened around the 60's, most people used to eat what we today call a "heavy" breakfast, e.g. eggs, bacon, which IS mostly protein and possibly small amounts of grits or toast.
Cereal (any variety) is mostly carbohydrates on the other hand and you also tend to crave higher amounts of calories worth of vegetarian breakfasts than you do traditional breakfasts; note how cereal bowls used to be tiny, and now they're about three times the size of what they started at mere decades ago.) The following is unscientific, but when I watch most people eat breakfast, I typically see most of them eat 750 calories in the cereal alone (that's typically 5 oz of cereal; it's uncommon to find cereals with less than 150 calories per 1 oz serving.) In fact to be honest, I'm pretty sure the whole vegetarian movement is bunk:
http://www.cholesterol-and-hea...
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Yes. If we have been tricked, it is that we think we need so much protein. Meat consumption in the rest of the world is a luxury, and if you look at the places that eat less meat, they have way less chronic metabolic diseases than we do. I'm not saying they have no disease, I'm saying they have less.
We have also been tricked into thinking that carbs are bad...when in fact, lots of places in the world eat carbs all their life and are still healthier than we are. The difference is that there carbs are way less processed.
We have been tricked into thinking that soy is good for us, when the way they eat soy in the rest of the world is way different than the highly processed soy crap that we eat here.
We have been tricked into thinking that milk is good for us, when in fact it is not (but may help if you have a really crappy diet).
Yes, we have been tricked, all right! If you want to live, take a world map and throw a dart at it. Anywhere it lands outside of the US, adopt their diet. You will live longer and healthier than we do here in the US.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
A lot of the pro-organic crowd doesn't seem to realize that the "evil megacorps" also provide what they buy as well, only they sell organic at a much higher profit margin. People who go out of their way to buy organic food are really quite uneducated and gullible, to be honest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Actual non-diet industry research using tests with mice has shown it is heavily processed foods with about equal amounts of sugars and fats that cause issues. You can live quite easily and not get huge on high fat foods that are not processed. You can also live on a high sugar diet on foods that are not processed. Though either one is not a good long term choice. Our bodies are designed to eat certain amounts of both.
Tests on rats shows they will nearly OD on something like cheese cake and yet high sugar foods are simply nibbled on and high fat foods are eaten in moderation.
So no. Eating 'lard' itself is not going to do you severe harm.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
You do want the fat. Studies have found that people who eat fat, are not fat, while the people who don't eat fat are fat. They also looked at young children as they first started drinking milk. The children that drank non-fat milk got fat even when they weren't fat to start with, and the children that drank full-fat milk did not.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
You'd have six times the mass of food, but you're not going to be too healthy if all you eat is pig feed.
This, a thousand times this!
The biggest scam that the weight loss industry has ever managed to perpetuate is to redefine the word "diet" from meaning "what you eat, on average" to meaning "a temporary restriction in your usual regime of eating whatever you want."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
....but it's clear to me, having been born in 1967, that the 'obesity epidemic' largely coincided with the obsession to eliminate fat from our lives.
In particular, for Americans who eat a significant amount of meals outside the home, when restaurants were compelled (I don't know if it had the force of law, or just lots of government pressure) to abandon animal fats in cooking in favor of the hydrogenated vegetable oils. That's where I really personally remember thinking "wow, was everyone really this fat before?"
Personally, I try to eat a moderate amount of all sorts of 'unhealthy' foods according to the government - eggs, coffee, bacon, and use lard for cooking - and I personally don't have a weight problem. Coincidence or genetics could surely be the answer, of course; then again, it might not.
-Styopa
Properly cooked food, starting with raw ingredients, without fail tastes better.
Flour, sugar, stock, milk, butter, baking soda, baking powder, cheese,... require processing to make. While I agree that fresh foods taste better then the same out of a can it's complete and utter nonsense to think that only using raw ingredients will yield a better meal.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
A study last year found that in many American counties, especially in the deep South, life expectancy is lower than in Algeria, Nicaragua or Bangladesh.
http://www.pophealthmetrics.co...
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of the overconsumption of a single macronutrient, but from a skewing of the proportion of each macronutrient in our diet - notably the dwindling quantity of protein in processed food products. The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake.
Reminds me of' Sable / Famine's pre-apocalyptic fast food business in 'Good Omens':
"Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW(TM). CHOW(TM) contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman...MEALS(TM) was Sable's latest brainwave. MEALS(TM) was CHOW(TM) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS(TM) you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition. The paradox delighted Sable."
...is also a major culprit in this story, in part due to the "low-fat" orthodoxy that developed in the 1970s. When you take out the fat, you lose a lot of the flavor, so sugar was used to make processed foods more appealing. Even worse, hydrogenated vegetable oil was used as a fat replacement. (Turns out that saturated fats are not as bad as they thought back then.) Another problem with processed foods is that they contain far less fiber, since removing the fiber is an easy way to extend shelf life. But this affects the way they are digested and absorbed, exacerbating the bad side effects.
Dr. Robert Lustig has an excellent lecture about sugar and how it is the single most important change in our diet in the last few decades, and the chief cause of rising obesity and diabetes rates. (The above link is a TED Talk, he also has several long format lectures available on YouTube.)
The author Michael Pollan has a simple set of 3 rules for managing your nutrition: 1. Eat food*; 2. Not too much; 3. Mostly plants.
* What he means by this is "real" food, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that constitute the bulk of the American diet. He has a simple rule for identifying real food: If you've ever seen it advertised on TV, it's probably not real food. Also, for various reasons, there is an inverse relationship between the "realness" of food and the distance it travels from its source to your plate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
tree's
This made me scream.
And how many of those "poor" people have cable television?
And how many of them have, *gasp*, refrigerators? Imagine some of these *poor* people having computers!!!!
That was sarcasm by the way.
See, the thing is, some might have, but many do not. I know I didn't for the first 15 years of my life in this country. Similarly, a lot of people live in rental communities that already come with a cable bundle that you cannot opt out.
Say "oh well, they could live somewhere cheaper?" Yeah, they can live in a trailer on in a dilapidated ghetto. Certain utilities that might look like luxuries to you are non-optional. And the cost of having cable or a TV is peanuts compared to the cost of eating healthy.
I mean, shit, my wife and I spend a lot of money in getting organic foods for our family, our children. Then there is the processing that comes with it.
Although were are in above the 10% household income bracket, with significant savings and pretty much free of debt, we are very, very frugal. We aim to spend no more than $200 a week in eating (pretty much we don't eat out, it is just pure food-stock shopping).
We have done the math and we could slash by possibly half per week if we didn't buy organic/health food. That is $100 a week of taxable income (whereas the *cable* non-opt-out fee on a condominium, at least in the region I live, is about $30 to $40 a month
Meaning, your ZOMG-poor-people-has-cable non-sequitur is approximately a 10th of what people would spend on organic food.
Read that again. $100 a week of non-taxable income. $400 a moth. $4800 a year. At least! That is $4800 a year that you gobble when trying to feed your family healthy and organically. Money that you burn... and that you get taxed on when IRS time comes.
Yes, you get your default deduction tables, but we are talking cash flow here, on a week by week basis. I can take that.
People that can afford to eat health can take that.
The poor people that you tried to vilify with your cable comment, they cannot take that.
Here, have a read and educate yourself: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
While I largely agree with you, I don't think a good counter-argument to "poor people don't have time to cook" is to tell them to simply "take [their] ipad to the kitchen"...
One can argue for increased protein, but the frequent claim that this represents a better, more "natural" way of living is suspect. We have to come to terms with the fact that humanity's natural state is technological. We cannot even survive in most of the climates in which we live without clothing, which is a basic form of technology. The protests against processed food are, in a sense, highly dishonest, because (1) they delude themselves into thinking that the technological aspect of our food is the problem, rather than any issue of self-control, and (2) especially for Americans the call for government regulation shows that while we pretend that the market itself can regulate everything and set the terms of value, we are uneasy with the results, which tend to devalue human life and well-being for the sake of profit.
Besides, I certainly don't need to go to the freezer section to buy unhealthy, fatty food. Some of my favorite homemade meals, such as traditional Mexican enchiladas, are bad enough for me.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
No, the medical establishment (who still have unconscious roots in medieval moralism, mind you) will eventually decree that the only healthy diet is cardboard and sewer water. This will start off as a recommendation, and when people refuse to go along, will start to creep into law. First they'll seek to ban all non-cardboard entrees in schools. They they'll use our taxpayer dollars to fund an expensive "Sewer Water is for Kool Kids!" ad campaign in the school. Then they'll put pressure on the FDA to ban all non-cardboard, non-sewer foods altogether.
All part of the medical establishment's underlying "If it's fun or enjoyable, it's bad for you" mentality.
Because dude, sorry, lots of 3rd world countries, ex soviet countries have open markets, with fresh food sellers everywhere.
Who cant get fresh food? People in tip of alaska?
Heres a tip of Mericans, go to your local asian or ethnic food store to get fresh food or snap frozen goodies.
Cant cook? Ask google or youtube.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Nothing is "tricking" me into eating McRibs. I do it because I like the taste!
all you need is a big pot or pan with fire, cheap gas burners are well.. cheap, or just burn some wood like the old says, are you a cave man? jeez, what poor are we talking about? average walmart workers, or refugees in african camps, which btw do cook.
So who are these noncookers ? Gen Z facebookers? Homeless ? If you are THAT poor, you are probably thin from starvation.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
A lot of meal are simple to cook, like pasta and stuff, but if you want to eat healthy, then you will spend time : 1) buy fresh vegetables and fruit on regular basis 2) wash it 3) cut it and prepare it for a family and by the time you are finished, you are an hour out and the rest of your todo list is nowhere finished.
This has always been my experience. I see recipes that list themselves as "10 minutes preparation time!", and I have to think that they're either assuming my onions are starting out already chopped, or everyone else is much faster in the kitchen than I am.
So you think that the food industry completely changing our food chain, replacing simple foods with complex processed foods that are worse for us (full of salt, sugar, hydrogenated oils, etc.) and spending $billions to engineer food that makes people fat and aggressively market it, and people them buying what they're being sold, is entirely the buyer's fault? Really? How far does a corporation have to go to before it is responsible for its actions? Or can corporations do absolutely anything, and it's people's fault for believe what they're told?
For perspective, in 2009, $4.2B was spent marketing fast food, while the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (which is responsible for "nutrition research, education, and promotion programs for the American public") had a $144M total budget, a fraction of which of which went to marketing health eating.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
This was back when it was still not widely accepted and scoffed at as a fad. I lost about 40-45 lbs on it in a very short period of time and noticed how little I wanted/needed to eat. I was in the best health of my life IMO at that period of time. Everyone badmouthed it back then from friends with nutrition degrees to physical trainers.
The only problem with Atkins is cost and convenience. It can be extremely difficult to stick to meals that are veggies and proteins, but it's much better now that even fast food restaurants offer salads with grilled chicken.
Agreed. If all you had to do was walk 4 hours a day, you could handle many more calories.
Plus we don't need as much protein as people eat either. I probably eat double the amount of required protein over half the time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I was not talking about industrially processed food at all, I was talking about processed food in general. And I bet, that many of the tastes you are so fond of are indeed the product of food processing. Adding spices for instance is processing. Fermenting is processing. Grinding to flour is processing. And even cooking, frying and baking are processing.
I've read similar information.
Sugar- not so bad if you are not diabetic.
Fat- not so bad.
Sugar + Fat - pretty bad in your blood stream when both there at the same time in large quantities.
When I dropped sugar a decade ago, I raised my fat intake. My weight went down by 10 pounds and has stayed down.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No kidding, it takes me 10 minutes to get the damn onion, peel off the crud outside, and chop it into suitably consistent pieces without including my fingers in said chopping.
My first job was behind a meat counter, and I did that for over a year. I'm not exactly clumsy or lacking in experience handling knives, either. That shit takes too long.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Since you're the only one to hit on it at all, I'm gonna respond to you. Advertising is 95% of the problem. We pretend we're completely responsible for our own actions, then at the same time ignore pervasive placement of mind control tactics throughout our society. If advertisement didn't change behaviors from people would find most rational for themselves, it wouldn't exist.
And the most advertised things are among the worst in the ways this article outlines.
You are correct. It literally takes 10 minutes to season a chicken breast and throw it on a grill while you steam some fresh broccoli and make a little pasta for a side. There you go, fresh and healthy dinner for less than $5/plate.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
There is an excellent book about this: http://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sug...
The modern processed food industry, OK the American processed food industry, works hard to make processed foods appetizing by tweaking formulations and experimenting with salt/sugar/fat ratios.
I think the book does a balanced job of presenting the info without blaming the industry (too much). They do make the point the food industry targets convenience and cost, which consumers respond to. It isn't all the food companies fault that their customer base is kinda lazy.
The food industry has tried a few times to make their stuff healthier by reducing additive amounts, trying new tech - one very interesting thing for example is trying to use a different salt crystal, one ground into a different shape that absorbs quicker. It gives the same "pop" with less, due to its different shape. That's pretty cool!
Does posting as AC make one stupid, or do otherwise intelligent people decide to post stupid things and tick the AC box?
No-one is suggest a carnivorous diet where we eat only meat, but people are suggesting vegetarianism where we eat no meat at all...
But there are still people who get addicted. Why's that? By now everyone should know with some certainty that it's probably not the best idea to push some H.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How do you get enough B12? You know you need that for blood cell production and mylenation, right?
Oh... and you can't it from plants or fungi. It works it's way into the food chain from microbes and, as stated, doesn't make it's way up said chain via plants of fungi. ... now, some folks (myself included) have to take sublingual* supplements of cyanocobalamin anyway, but if you don't eat even a little bit of meat now and then you don't have a choice (unless things like permanent neurological damage and anemia appeal to you)
Please don't make your diet out to be as simple as that, because it's not. We are omnivores. We have been omnivores for a very long time. There are things that we require for normal function that you can't get without being an omnivore, or using something our technology gives us (such as cyanocobalamin). Granted, a healthy human liver has several years worth of the stuff saved away, but go vegan for a few decades without taking care of this and you will have an issue.
* - pills do not work well, nearly all of what you take in that way will be destroyed by your upper GI before it's possible to absorb it. you need either sublingual or intravenous supplementation if diet alone doesn't cut it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Amusing. Trying to derail a thread about how capitalism is fucking up people's diets by blaming "leftists"?
THAT is what this thread is about? :)
I guess to a hammer, every problem is a nail... and to a sickle, every problem is a stalk of wheat.
Dark Reflection
Doesn't contain much cobalamin...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
No, the medical establishment (who still have unconscious roots in medieval moralism, mind you) will eventually decree that the only healthy diet is cardboard and sewer water. This will start off as a recommendation, and when people refuse to go along, will start to creep into law. First they'll seek to ban all non-cardboard entrees in schools. They they'll use our taxpayer dollars to fund an expensive "Sewer Water is for Kool Kids!" ad campaign in the school. Then they'll put pressure on the FDA to ban all non-cardboard, non-sewer foods altogether.
All part of the medical establishment's underlying "If it's fun or enjoyable, it's bad for you" mentality.
The food industry has far more say over what you eat than scientific/medical establishment, and industry is far better at and spend much more money on influencing your individual behaviour (those 'choices' that you think you are making) than governments or public bodies can.
Sometimes people make decisions that are not in their best interest, not everyone makes the wisest decisions. Of course, sometimes people decide that they do not consider the negatives of addiction greater than what they consider the positives of drug use (or whatever else they become addicted to). I may disagree, but that is their decision to make. Few of the people who become drug addicts did not know what they were doing when they started down that path. Some of them lied to themselves about where they were headed, and a few truly did not.
However, the "Just Say No" campaign did a good job of making sure that people knew that drug addiction was likely if you went down that road, and made it harder for people to lie to themselves about the likely consequences of doing drugs. The best part about it was that it relied less on false horror stories about doing drugs and relied more on creating negative peer pressure towards drug use.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So faux news puts on cooking shows? Cspan does reviews of the latest grastomic delights? Or Playboy goes hunting? Well maybe the last does. But as above, cable vs food, connection? There are parts of the world where you get a basic service by the tax dollar. Or the ability is there to obtain for little cost. But food is a necessity,no revolution, no procreation, no next week without food. Same with water and air, price it where the few are only able to afford it, and you get the Bundies controlling part of it. When crazies control part of your supply chain, can it be safe?.
I think in addition there is the pull of the market. Cooking is feasible for the poor with a little planning, but people don't understand how awful fast food and processed food is. The amount of fat and sodium in prepared frozen food is absurd. Much better to cook up a pan of anything you've got, freeze or refrigerate it for later use. It's more effort to cook it up, but just dishing and nuking are just as quick if not quicker than standing in line at BK. So not only is the tastiness fooling us, it's the weight of our consumer culture. Eating healthy is "weird".
Tests on rats shows they will nearly OD on something like cheese cake and yet high sugar foods are simply nibbled on and high fat foods are eaten in moderation.
But you said cheesecake. Mmmm.. so cheeeeeesy and sweeeeeeet... aaahhhghghhhh..
>When I dropped sugar a decade ago, I raised my fat intake. My weight went down by 10 pounds and has stayed down.
It's only been a couple of years for me, but I did the same, lost 35lbs, and feel fantastic. Sugar was VERY bad for me.
Chop ends of onion off, chop onion in half, peel off outer layer, dice. It takes like two minutes, tops.
Great points. I've gone through similar processes essentially balancing calories-in vs. calories-out. It's easier today using any number of apps for my phone.
What's most shocking about selecting the proper foods is portion sizes.
I had a meal last night that was lean pork loin (6 oz/168 grams), green peas (1 cup) and about 3 cups of potatoes. It felt like a huge serving to me. That meal had significantly fewer calories (556) than my 1/2 of a fast food meal my wife and I shared the day before while we were driving across Arizona.
I now look at food as expensive or cheap based on calories provided rather than dollars. My wife will ask me if I want a particular item to eat and I might respond, "No thanks, that's too expensive," meaning that I'll spend too many of my day's allotted calories on that particular food.
One can still eat at a fast food restaurant by getting a grilled chicken sandwich (relatively cheap calorie wise) vs. a fried chicken sandwich (very expensive calorie wise). If one is careful then one can eat a larger volume of food and feel fuller while getting fewer calories and better nutrition.
It does require, however, a certain level of personal responsibility and ownership.
'Organic' food is a rippoff for consumers who don't know better. The non-descript items are just as good if not better.
How does that work? To lose weight from a diet, you need to consumne fewer calories than you use. To stay at the same weight once you've lost enough weight, you need to consume the same amount of calories that you use. These aren't the same thing.
Your logic fails because you think of the human body as a constant system. But that's not true, particularly when dieting. It's not a simple "Take in X calories per day, and burn Y calories per day" where X and Y are constant.
Fat tissue requires energy to stay alive (not a lot, but nonzero). If you lose weight, your basic metabolic needs will go down. Muscle tissue requires more energy than fat tissue to stay alive. Obese people also tend to have large muscles to allow them to get around, and these will often shrink a bit too (even with increased exercise) if someone loses a lot of weight. That also pushes down basic metabolic needs.
Also, the body can adjust metabolism -- burn off more energy in body heat after eating a big meal with excess calories, for example. Or be more efficient in using calories when there's a lower intake. It's probably not a large effect (though there is generally a lot of disagreement about the numbers here), but it too can lower the number of calories you need as your weight changes.
Basically, it is absolutely possible that your body could require 2500 calories per day just to maintain basic functionality when you're obese, but that requirement could decrease to 1750 per day at a normal weight. Or something even more extreme for very obese people (particularly active ones).
If you went on a diet that kept you down to 1500 calories per day, with an occasional "cheat day" or something, it's quite possible that your "diet" would absolutely need to become permanent if you want to maintain your weight at the end.
(Note here that I'm talking about reasonable "diets" that are likely to lead to sustainable weight loss, which would involve a calorie deficit leading to only a loss of a couple pounds per week. "Crash diets" that involve starving yourself and taking in extremely low numbers of calories are not only obviously unsustainable, but potentially unhealthy and occasionally dangerous.)
An overweight person would need to make some change to his eating habits, but that change wouldn't consist of making the diet permanent--if he did, he'd just keep losing weight down to nothingness
Obviously not, if intake was at all positive.
(or at least down to where his body just uses fewer calories because it's thin, which would not be the same as his target weight).
Why not? Most people who aren't pregnant or have some larger medical problem don't gain more than a few pounds per year. They may be 50 or 75 pounds overweight, but that weight was often accumulated over decades.
And then they expect to lose it all in a couple months. Not only is this quite difficult (and even impossible) to do, but it is also very hard on your internal systems.
What if this person simply started eating what his/her body required when it was 75 pounds lighter? The diet was adjusted not by adopting some sort of crazy "crash diet" extreme method (only eat food X! never eat carbs/fats/meat/whatever! etc.), but instead by choosing alternative foods that are tasty and sustainably balanced and nutritious?
Weight loss would immediately commence, though the loss would probably be at a healthy rate of a couple pounds per week, rather than something unsustainable. Eventually, to maintain the loss rate, some modifications might be necessary -- but the target from the start should be to make adjustments in the diet that could be sustainable PERMANENTLY. Unless an obese person transitions into a body builder (rather unusual), there's simply no way for required intake to remain the same.
Recent studies seem to show that our bodies get fixated on some weight "set point" over time, and if you've bee
The most basic cable packages are like $20/month. or like 4 hours of work at minumum wage a month. $20 isnt going to buy healthful food for a family of 4 for more than a couple days a month. Most people are going to look at it as something like "I can have two or three days of healthy meals a month, and still eat crap the other 27 days or so, or I can just stick with my crap food, and actually have something to do between my 3 shitty jobs that leave me so tired I cant do anything but sit on a couch"
what about fruit and vegetable rights.
Plants produce fruit to be eaten, so that the eater will spread the seeds. The fruit wants to be eaten. That is its purpose. So eating an apple is ethically different than eating a carrot, which of course kills the carrot plant. People that eat only fruit are fruitarians.
Supermarkets have a habit of only being where they are are profitable, not where the customers are. Illogical but, is there enough openspace in an urban environment without forcing the customer base to another area? Or does community planning reserve space by community pathways for markets? So 7-11 fills the nitche where a Kroger's cannot afford to be, don't blame a customer for a retailer's fault.
The OP was talking about people who are working 2-3 jobs and dont have time to cook, and your solution is to take their $500 iPAD and watch pay TV while cooking?!? Talk about a lack of perspective.
As someone who has lost a lot of weight, Less Carbs food, larger breakfast, smaller dinners, and increased exercise. You should know that it isn't easy by any means. I find it just as difficult as it was when I took my Masters Degree while working full time. And keeping my weight down is still hard work.
Why?
First a minor change in your lifestyle, can cause weight to sneak in. For me it was when I went to college. Sure I was rather active, but I was fully grown so I didn't need as much food. However College is full of food, so I still ate like I was 16 years old. So after college I put on 50lbs, While in college I tried to do stuff that will help me loose weight, I tried going vegetarian where I ate more carbs, I tried to exercise more where it made me feel more hungry, so I ate the balance. And the college food isn't really the most healthy.
After college I was focusing on getting my career going, so I have been less active working long hours, Combined with going to grad school, I have been eating less and a bit more healthy so it wasn't as rapid as it was in college however I got an other 50lbs after 10 years. During this time I was off and on, figuring I can just use my will power to overcome it. However the problem is when you get fat, is your energy level drops so doing simple exercises drains you, combined with a poor body image of yourself, you are afraid to go out in public and be posted on facebook as that fatty who is running see how silly he looks.
I knew I really needed to take it seriously so I started hitting the gym, And the first few month it was pure hell, my legs felt like jello, sweating up a storm after going 1 mile, and I was really wanting high calorie food to make me feel better, but I needed to fight it, every day. It is hard when there is a company lunch with a bunch of interesting foods to try, or going to a party. However I got most of it off now, and I am still working on getting the rest of it too.
But being callous towards a fat person.
1. Doesn't help: It reinforces their fugitive body image and makes them more timid to go out and try.
2. Doesn't show support and empathy towards the problem they are facing. Most fat people are usually have it on their mind and are trying to loose weight all time. But they are often missing a crucial step in the process, causing them to suffer for no real gain.
3. There is blaming others for their faults, then there is a fact that society has the decks stacked against them. Usually for someone who is gaining unwanted weight, the worst thing they can do, which is also the first thing, is go toward the processed diet foods. It is like saying Poor people just need to go to school and then they can get a better job. Minorities just need to not get in trouble to stay out of jail. The system has been built against them. Sure thre are things they can do. However why can't we realize the faults in the system and fix it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, the medical establishment (who still have unconscious roots in medieval moralism, mind you) will eventually decree that the only healthy diet is cardboard and sewer water.
The food industry has far more say over what you eat than scientific/medical establishment, and industry is far better at and spend much more money on influencing your individual behaviour (those 'choices' that you think you are making) than governments or public bodies can.
I don't know about that - McDonalds, among others, was hurt pretty badly by Spurlock's SuperSize Me film. Also the "pink goo" chicken nuggets, "parts is parts", etc stories/rumors that went around. Or Taco Bell's "it's less than 30% beef" beef taco lawsuit.
Regarding the cardboard being served for lunch at schools, I think that's already been achieved. It's all processed crap, at least locally, I don't think there's even an oven in the "kitchen".
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You're doing it wrong - an onion can be peeled and chopped in less than 5 min, 2 min if you have one of those choppers, but then you're spending at least 3 min putting it together and taking it apart and cleaning it, dishwasher or not.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Repetition is important. You can basically re-write the receptor's in the brain that react to things as "this is what I want" and "this is what I don't want". Forcibly associate things you know are good for you in your brain, and it slowly gets easier and easier.
All I have to do is channel my Catholic upbringing and it is easy to feel guilty about even thinking about ordering pizza.
For the most part, yes. But if it travels such a long distance it's more likely to be picked early and "ripened" in transit. Also, supermarket produce is more likely to be treated with pesticides, herbicides, etc.. Your best bet is either to grow your own or get to know your local farmer.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Wow, it sure is a good thing we have known how to synthesize it for decades and you can buy a 200 count at the pharmacy for $10.
Meat is tasty. I will happily suffer some inefficiencies to eat delicious meat.
You're being funny, but the fact of the matter is that there are websites out there (aimed at kids for fuck's sake) that literally say "dying is the best thing you can do for the planet Earth!" and I don't think they are being funny when they say it. Of course all the tree-hugging ecological extremists all spout crap about how bad us Humans are for the planet and how we should at least give up our technology and civilized ways and go back to nature, then they get in their Prius and drive home to blog about how bad Humans are for the Earth on their Apple Mac and Twitter on their smartphone.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No way.
I live in Uruguay, we grow some fruit here, but also import a lot. Local fruit usually looks like you picked it up from a tree.
Imported fruit looks more uniform, and more colorful, and usually has some kind of wax to protect it. They also have small labels in each piece, some times.
Also, local fruit smells like fruit, imported fruit has no smell, in comparison.
Of course, YMMV, but the closer you are to the source, it's easier to get fresher produce.
The time constraint argument is simply not true for an experienced cook.
I cooked throughout college and could typically prepare a full meal using only a cast iron skillet (which doubled as my plate) long before my roommates' frozen pizza cooked. There is also preparing food in large batches the way my grandmother fed seven children. In an hour, I can prepare enough stew to eat for a fortnight. I might be sick of stew after fourteen days, but hey, I've got fourteen days of healthy stew.
The food desert issue. I have lived in places like that, and that is a much harder one to get over.
It's not about a conspiracy. The facts are in the open, and no one is actually hiding anything. Fat and carbohydrates are cheaper than proteins, thus processing them and adding flavors to trick the metabolic system into taking them as protein ersatz is just the old art of cooking. And we got better and better at it, able to produce and process giant amounts of fat and carbohydrates and refining them into meals that taste to us just as good as a protein rich diet.
Don't equate fat with carb junk food. Fats, except for hydrogenated franken-fats, are really good-for-you food. We really don't need a lot of protein, but we need a lot of fat. Fat without sugar.
The fact is that you burn what you east. Want to burn fat? Eat fat. Want to burn sugar (and store fat)? Eat sugar.
A healthy diet really ain't all that complicated.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Cooking...well the thing about doing stuff yourself is about appreciation. I like coffee and drink copious amounts, usually of very bad coffee. That is because those who brew it do not CARE at all. A simple fare like scrambled eggs can be horrible if done by someone who does not care about it. If the cook appreciates a good plate, i assure you, that whatever it is, it will be decent if not right down delicious.
To those buying organic stuff, well USDA rules for organic are crap plus Monsanto has made it so that most likely even well cared and "organic" food is still contaminated with their crap.
Just try to buy local in season stuff, it may cost a little more at face value but you can usually make a 2 person meal with about $5 of raw ingredients and bit of your time.
The trick is not to see it as a chore and more like your personal moment of zen. Try to cook stuff that you enjoy eating and after a while you won't find anything on the street that can beat your stuff.
My wife hates cooking but due to me living away from home for the work week, she has started cooking. She still likes me to cook but has become rather proficient with stuff that our kids like (no cheesy pasta cuz my kids don’t like it, is rice and beans and other "decent" stuff) She gets by the cooking part by zoning out. She plans it ahead of time and stays in the kitchen just long enough to cook whatever is she decided trying not to think about it.
On the other hand, everyone in my momma’s family cooks. It was (most left for the states or have died but those who still live in Puerto Rico still meet from time to time) traditional to meet over the weekend and cook, eat, drink and play dominos or whatever. So it all rubbed on us children. We love to cook and it is a family and social thing. Is fun and we invent and try to make variations of successful meals all the time.
So all in all, is about learning to appreciate food and liking it. You can get by with fast food if you need to, but it never beats a handmade hamburger at home.
To all those who think that eating out (read at mcds or bbking, etc.) is cheaper or better or faster, a regular combo can hit you around 7$ for a single person. With that I can do rice, beans, chicken and greens meal for my family of four in about 15-20 minutes tops and in the end you know that what you eat will rot if you leave it outside for more than a day, namely it is REAL food meant to be consumed not kept as a museum piece.
Look in YouTube for experiments on McBurgers left to their devices. DAYS pass without signs of spoiling. Nasty
Saludos,
Albert
What? A beutiful butterfly you say? And how exactly are you going to turn into a beutiful butterfly then?
I eat five pieces of raw fruit and five servings of vegetables every single day ("five and five"). Anything goes. My fruits are usually those high in potassium: apricots, plums, bananas... but also apples and oranges. Vegetables are carrots, asparagus, broccoli, spinach, green leafy varieties, and some but not many beans.
I get protein from eating tasty animals and from pasta, which is quite high in protein.
Honestly I sometimes have a hard time eating enough, because the fruits and vegetables are so damn filling. During the summer cycling season my wife has to force-feed me steak to keep me over 170lbs (I'm 6'0).
I would say the first step for anyone to become a "former" obese person (as I am) is to STOP DRINKING LIQUID SUGAR! Jesus christ. It's the dumbest goddamn thing anyone can do. You get the calories, but no signals from your stomach to say you're full. Consuming sugar is not bad, but in nature it's packaged with tons of this wonderful stuff called fiber that makes you feel full after you've had just a little sugar, and the fiber slows the uptake.
Oh, speaking of fiber... eating "five and five" every day will... well... let's just say.... nevermind... you can figure it out.
Wait a minute. If you fit all three of those criteria then you have other problems that need addressed as well.
I have three sons still living at home {five total} I have always tried to stay away from eating out or over processed food because they are more expensive or just plain go through it to quickly. It's always busy around my house, and I work around 50-60 hours a week and so does my wife. Cooking does not have to take as much time as you think it does.
On Sunday I tossed a roast in the oven in about four minutes that cost less than half what I would have spent eating out once. I went outside and did the yearly maintenance on my mower since it's that time of year again. I cleaned up just in time to take the roast out of the oven and eat.
Monday I made stew in about 10 minutes I just cut up the left over roast with carrot and potatoes in big pan tossed in some bouillon and corn starch { a few seasoning} and let it simmer for about an hour.
The CDC recommends 56g of protein for adult males, and 46 for females. The British Nutrition Foundation's RNI is 0.75g per kilogram of body weight.
The CDC is whey off, follow the British standard. Most people do not get enough protein, you know when you've eaten enough protein because your body stops craving food. Without protein intake you die fast, faster then simple calorie starvation, protein is one of the major reasons why your body triggers a hunger response. For a week try intaking 1g/kg of protein a day and you'll understand what I'm saying. The whole point of this article is that processed foods typically exchange protein for fat and carbohydrates, the problem with that is fat and carbohydrates are fuels; protein is a biological building block.
You also need to live somewhere with access to those ingredients, have a high enough income that you can afford the ingredients, and a high enough income that you can afford to be not-working long enough to cook and eat them. There are thousands upon thousands of people too poor for all three.
Yeah, umm, that problem is that if you're really poor, cooking for yourself is actually significantly cheaper. I lived for several years on a very small budget and had friends with even smaller food budgets (on the order of $20/week... yes, that's the entire food budget for the week for a person -- about $1/meal), and we not only survived, but ate rather healthy food that we cooked ourselves. Try living on a $1/meal by eating off the McDonald's Dollar Menu or something -- it's doubtful you could even get enough calories for an adult to survive.
Let's take your objections in turn:
They don't live anywhere with access to fresh food ("food deserts"), can't afford to travel to where they could buy fresh food,
During the years when I had very little income, I lived a couple blocks from the cheapest supermarket in town -- the local newspaper did a study and found that you could literally buy about 40% more groceries at this place, even without taking into account special sales, than almost anywhere else in the area. They just decided to make money off of volume sales rather than jacking up prices like crazy. The store was a zoo most of the time -- food flew off the shelves.
And you know who shopped there? Lower class and poor people, who often came on the bus and took taxi cabs to take their stuff home from that store, because the amount they could save from buying their food their more than made up for the price of a cab ride (obviously, they couldn't afford cars).
You know what else was in this store? Lots of cheap, fresh food. Fresher than almost any other supermarket in town, because it flew off the shelves. Most of the people I knew who had higher salaries refused to step in the door, because the place had a reputation as the "dirty supermarket where poor people shop," but I spent years buying fresh food there, while my friends spent more money to shop for rotting food at the normal supermarkets.
But the thing is -- even if you couldn't afford to buy fresh food there (and my friends on their limited budgets certainly couldn't), they still could buy relatively nutritious options, like big bulk packs of frozen veggies that are on sale, etc.
Everyone is always concerned about the lack of "fresh food" (which usually means lack of a decent produce aisle) in these urban "food deserts," but it's still possible to get nutritious meals from relatively unprocessed ingredients which are frozen or canned or minimally packed in some other way.
The poor people at these stores would not generally be helped very much by a more extensive produce aisle. Instead, they just need to buy less processed (and generally CHEAPER) food that's already available, and then combine it in simple dishes by cooking themselves (and saving money).
couldn't afford the food itself even if they could get there, can't afford to take the time out of their multiple jobs to go even if they could afford it,
Nope. As I noted above, they CAN afford the food -- in fact, it's the ONLY way to live healthy (and in fact sometimes the only way to survive) on a very limited budget. The 2-for-1 special on take-out pizza may sound like a good deal, until you realize you can probably make the same pizza at home with better ingredients for half that sale price. Volume discounts for fast-food places and such only go so far... they still have to pay for labor, equipment, etc. costs, which means you're paying a premium to eat that food over what you could generally do with your own ingredients at home.
Same thing for processed "TV dinners" and frozen pizzas and such. Skip 'em, and buy some simpler ingredie
Nutritional yeast flakes in cooking (a vegetarian staple), marmite spread occasionally, fortified milk and soy milk, cheese, some breakfast cereals, eggs, multivitamins/supplements ...
I've been a vegetarian for 14 years now, and the last time I had a blood test the doctor was like "wow, you're not anemic or anything". And I basically said "because I know what I'm doing".
If you just eat crap and don't take that into account, you might have bad outcomes. In fact, I've known a couple of vegans who still had a carry over as being a fussy eater from being a kid -- and they quite often ate what I'd call junk, but that was animal free. The things people call "vegan egg replacers" are mostly starches I wouldn't go anywhere near, because it's got little nutritional value.
But, in general, very few vegans or vegetarians are actually suffering from a deficiency of B12 if they have a well balanced diet.
Yes, it is true that our physiology makes us omnivores, there's no denying that. But, you can still safely avoid eating meat and still get all the nutrition you need if you so choose.
In general, if you're eating a good balance of fruits and vegetables, legumes, green leafy things, grains and the like ... you will get enough nutrition.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you don't eat the seeds and crap them out somewhere random, in an environment similar to the one the fruit tree was growing in, you're breaking your contract with the tree. Not very ethical.
But if being fat is not evidence of a moral failing, how will I justify looking down on fatsos? And if I can't, then who will I hate?
How do you expect us to feel good about a pecking order if we can't condemn those beneath us as inherently inferior?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
While that is true for many, it is not true for all, otherwise there would be no fruits with thorns or toxins, There are many fruits that are dangerous to eat, which don't "want" to be eaten.
The US seems to be some weird anomaly in terms of eating. Most other places, including the rest of the first world, rich people eat out, including fast food, and poor people have to cook their own. For me, a trip to McDonalds costs about $10. I can make a meal with leftovers for lunch the next day for less than that. Perhaps it's because your labour costs are so low. Here, it costs more for someone to prepare food, hand it to you and take your money than you save by using the cheapest ingredients you can find.
When I was a kid we ate out on special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, Mother's Day. "TV dinners" (highly processed stuff on a cardboard tray) were expensive, emergency rations kept in the freezer and used rarely.
You're a fool. Once I realized that "willpower" is a metabolic state, not moral success or a moral failing, and I learned how to manipulate that metabolic state, I lost 150 lbs.
But go ahead, haters gotta hate!
Hate is a metabolic state.
Its a 'processed' food. Raw meat isn't. Yeah I know I don't care either.
You're doing it wrong - an onion can be peeled and chopped in less than 5 min, 2 min if you have one of those choppers, but then you're spending at least 3 min putting it together and taking it apart and cleaning it, dishwasher or not.
You don't need a "chopper." Look up a few videos on Youtube or something -- there are proper ways to dice onions that you can easily do in under a minute with a sharp knife.
One basic method: (1) slice in half through the root and stem. (2) cut off stem and pull off peel (which is faster if you slice in half first), (3) place sliced side down, (4) slice vertically away from root end toward stem end, not going all the way to root, so onion stays together, (5) if a large onion or if fine dice is desired, place one or two cuts horizontally to work surface while holding onion together, (6) slice at 90 degrees to cuts in step 4, beginning at stem end.
Do this technique a few dozen times, and I guarantee you can dice an onion in a minute or so. But you'll also need to keep your knife sharp. That last thing is a huge problem that slows down many people: if your knife is sharp, it will go through an onion like soft butter. If your knife is dull, it will slip on your onion's outer layers and potentially injure you, while taking 3 times as long to cut up the onion.
Fat hate derives from some old Dikensian greed BS -- fatass eats too much while people starve. That is no longer the case as, in free societies, farmers produce plenty of food so efficiently it is almost free.
There is no "starving" in any real, historical sense, in nations that are free. So there is no fatass-greexy justification. Quite the opposite.
Fat in modern society is due more to lack of activity. If people worked on their feet for 8 hours they'd be a lot thinner.
And almost all evolutionary history has been under need and want, not plentiful. Desire for fats, the most calorie-dense, is the way to go. If anything is wrong with the modern dier, it's poinds of grains you eat every day in the form of bread and pasta and fries and chips. Look at your typical meal if you don't believe me.
It ain't the meat making you fat. It's the 200 calories out of 500 in the bun of a big mac and the fries. Not the meat and cheese. And the sitting at your job. If you have a job.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The food industry has far more say over what you eat than scientific/medical establishment, and industry is far better at and spend much more money on influencing your individual behaviour (those 'choices' that you think you are making) than governments or public bodies can.
That's actually not true. To influence people, they need to trust you. No one these days trusts the government or corporations - but they do trust NGOs. In fact NGOs are the most trusted sources of information all over the world. That's why government bureaucracies (and the US State Department) provide so much funding for NGOs - they use them to get their message out to people.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The problem is all the junk "food" that's been processed to hell (eg cereal, cookies, chips, soda). Among other things, junk food generally has very little fiber which would otherwise make you feel fuller, help remove fat, burn calories from digestion, and regulate sugar absorption. The best thing you can do is eat as much raw plants as you can, instead of processed crap. Just buy a box of bananas, some other fruit for flavor, and whatever veggies you like, then blender it all up!
Side note: Plant juices are better than soda in many ways, but there isn't any fiber to slow down sugar absorption, so it might be just as bad as soda in that aspect.
Fiber: http://www.webmd.com/diet/fibe...
NutritionFacts.org: https://www.youtube.com/channe...
Durianrider: https://www.youtube.com/channe...
Spurlock's SuperSize Me
Except that movie was a bunch of horseshit, as are most of the rumors that float around about fast food ingredients. Eating McDonalds for 30 days will not make you fucking sick. Hell, I lived off Dominoes and Ramen noodles in college for *years* and never got as sick as Spurlock pretended to be to get a distributor for his shitty movie.
Is it WISE to eating nothing but fast food? Fuck no, of course not! But does anyone really need to be told that eating a single type of food for every meal, every day is not particularly healthy? Maybe if they're fucking retarded.
And if you want to just blame McD's food here, I'll tell you what. I'll eat McD's for 30 days and you eating nothing but leafy salads and let's see who feels better at the end.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I didn't know you knew my 2 sister-in-laws. The funniest was when they were both in town and over for dinner with the whole family and cooked up some venison chops without telling them. They wanted to know if the meat was organic, hormone free, antibiotic free, free range, etc and at first were very pleased but after eating a couple of bites and realizing that it wasn't beef asked what it was. They weren't too pleased when they found out it was venison from the deer I shot a few months previous, but liked it up until that point.
Time to offend someone
...in frequencies humans can hear. I remember reading two years ago that plants do emit a very high frequency sound when they are cut. There are studies that support it. Heck, I probably read this on slashdot.
I love meat, but I do have one favorite vegetarian dish.
Corn tortilla flat round shell, spread with refried beans and top with shredded lettuce/tomato or whatever typical taco toppings you like.
Is better when you don't add meat to it.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If you don't eat the seeds and crap them out somewhere random, in an environment similar to the one the fruit tree was growing in, you're breaking your contract with the tree. Not very ethical.
Whereas with livestock, we fulfill our side of the contract by providing them with food, water, protection from predators, and ensuring the survival of their offspring. They fulfill their side by being docile and delicious.
You also need to live somewhere with access to those ingredients, have a high enough income that you can afford the ingredients, and a high enough income that you can afford to be not-working long enough to cook and eat them. There are thousands upon thousands of people too poor for all three.
Anyone in the US that is that poor has access to food stamps (EBT cards). There are 46 million people now in the US that use them. They are supposed to be used to buy ... food. You're not even supposed to buy prepared food - it's better and cheaper to prepare meals yourself, and as pointed out, it's really not much of a time issue.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I find it funny too -- some strew recipes will list a 15 minute prep time with ingredients listed as 2 onions, 2 stalks of celery, 5 carrots, 5 potatos, 2 tomatoes, green beans, couple cloves of garlic, and a roast that all need to be diced, and most cleaned and peeled.. all while keeping the counter clean? Bullshit. Now it doesn't take me 10 minutes to chop an onion, maybe a minute and a half, but a lot of recipes seem to assume you are a 1 star michelin chef for prep time. For my mise en place, I pretty much always double or triple the listed prep time to get a more realistic number
yup same here, I don;t mind the cooking, it's the cleanup that takes just as long as the cooking if not longer.
where the fuck do you live? $10 for a couple of chickens a few pounds of potatos AND raw veggies? Every grocery store around here is $7-10 for a single small-medium sized chicken. Now don't get me wrong I love cooking, but when I go to the meat department and see $8 for a small chicken, and then go to the deli and seem a fully cooked hot rotisserie chicken for $9... I completely understand people getting the premade shit (although at least the deli rotisserie chicken is probably a lot better than other processed frozen box chicken). Sure mine would taste better, but making it myself would cost the same if not more than the deli, and take over an hour of my time, which for me is worth it, but for a lot it isn't.
Completely bullshit. I am sorry, the pineapple I get from the store tastes NOTHING like the pineapple I had fresh picked an hour earlier when I was in Chile. The strawberries I pick fresh from a local farm taste heavenly, the ones I get from a supermarket are extremely bland. It's because they pick the stuff when it isn't ripe (they have to), and it ripens either in delivery or on the shelf of the grocery store. It loses a lot of flavour when it doesn't ripen naturally on a tree. When you go to the produce section and see all green bananas that take a day or two to ripen taste nothing like a banana picked fully ripe off a tree in Ecuador.
This is not "Flamebait", but I think it is a naive view of poverty in the US. Do poor people make poor choices? Yes, naturally. Some make poor choices so often that it could even be the reason that they are poor.
So you can stand there and point at them and blame them for their condition. It's reasonable. You give them healthcare, you give them education (of some sort), you give them food, you give them money - and what do they do? They stay poor, make bad decisions, and raise poor kids who do the exact same thing.
I suggest that you take on a more proactive mindset. These poor people and the poor kids they raise are your problem, too. Poverty drags down the economy, it drags down our schools, and it costs us a fortune. It undermines democracy as you increasingly have an electorate dependent on the government that can vote themselves benefits.
If you want to improve their lives, and thus to some extent your own life, you need to make the better choices more attractive. No, you are under no moral obligation to do so - but I do think it is in your own self interest. That is why I disagree with the point you are bringing up, even if I also disagree with the mods who are not helping in having a constructive discussion about this topic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is an opportunity to be smarter about it. To eat more less carbs and fats and processed foods. To understand why we eat the way we do. This allows everyone to be more healthy. Not just the obese. It may allow us to change as a society.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Dry goods such as rice, beans, lentils, are available pretty much everywhere in the world, and are usually the cheapest thing you could buy, and provide you with everything you need besides a bit of greens. These cheap foods only require water and a bit of heat and don't actually need any supervision.
You just sound like a helpless person.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
*ANY* kind of soy that is actually edible is also heavily processed.
Never heard of edemame? You're literally eating soy beans out of the pod. Are you saying it's not edible, or that it's highly processed? Tempeh is the beans mashed together (most not even breaking open), with bacterial culture added...is that heavily processed? Tofu is literally boiled and mashed soy beans (aka soy milk), but with the solids filtered out, and a coagulant like calcium chloride added...i would define those all as 'minimally processed'.
Glad you had success reducing calories to lose weight, but i'm confused - you say the article is bullshit, but aren't you regurgitating the message in your final paragraph by saying that protein is needed to balance out what we're eating? And that link is dreadful. Simply put: our bodies produce all the cholesterol we need. Yes, there is a lot of bad 'vegetarian' info out there, yes...but what's worse is the bad 'eat meat' info.
Well-said, one day we won't have to say this over and over...
Agree with all your points though, too much.learned helplessness in NA society.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Its more complex than that. People who tend to eat much more processed food also numb their tastebuds, so freshly cooked, mildly flavoured food actually is tasteless to them. The problem is that their tastebuds no longer work. It takes some time for a person to start enjoying home cooked food - their tastebuds have to catch up
The previous post was discussing the problems of not having enough money or time to cook (because you are poor).
You either don't have money, or you don't have time. Rarely will you not have both as a "poor" person.
Unless you are a industrious poor person instead of a lazy poor person. I know the common narrative is that people are poor because they are lazy but in reality a lot of poor people work multiple jobs to make ends meet and work a lot harder than their middle class counterparts. Many are single parents who need to provide for a family on their income alone. I know it may seem to moderately well-off people that they worked hard to get where they are but in the majority of cases it was the circumstances into which you were born that determines your eventual earning power.
Enigma
You're doing it wrong then. Countertop, knife, cutting board and pot/pan. Granted the less skill you have, the more you're indoctrinated to think you need a whole bunch of expensive, poorly designed, hard to clean gadgets.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
One interesting video I found from a University TV tries to explain the diet failure of the last 30 years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Processed food also takes almost all of the work out of eating food. It's made where you bite it and you swallow. That way you eat more.
Because people are brought up only eating this stuff, the only way they can get their greens is by juicing them. The only hamburger they can eat is from a fast food chain.
If food makes you think twice about eating it because of the chewing or the work, IT MEANS YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY.
Obviously he lives in the US. Such horrible city planning I've never seen in any other country. Still, it's all about planning, and some grocery stores have delivery. Not sure how much they'll rape you for that in the US, but here it's cheaper than taking a bus both ways. Even then I'll frequently just trudge the 2-3km laden with 20-30kg, because that's what people who aren't poor-baby whiners do.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
He might have meant chicken pieces. All easily doable for under 10.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
This was a subject of a "Tales of the Unexpected". I won't spoiler the (somewhat lame) ending.
We need better understanding of food science by the average joe, some 'healthy' foods are only healthier for you when properly prepared.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
While that is true for many, it is not true for all, otherwise there would be no fruits with thorns or toxins
They still want to be eaten, they are just picky about who they want to eat them. Some fruits are toxic to mammals, but edible by birds, because birds will spread the seeds much more widely. Sometimes the seeds are toxic, to deter animals from chewing them up, rather than passing them through intact while only digesting the fleshy part of the fruit.
Your food-fu is weak. What are you planning on making with those ingredients anyways? Highly processed unhealthy food?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The author Michael Pollan has a simple set of 3 rules for managing your nutrition: 1. Eat food*; 2. Not too much; 3. Mostly plants.
* What he means by this is "real" food, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that constitute the bulk of the American diet. He has a simple rule for identifying real food: If you've ever seen it advertised on TV, it's probably not real food.
Since I don't watch TV, how do I know what is advertised on TV versus what is "real food"?
Much better that it die from disease or starvation, of course.
Amen. It's not that hard to cook well. A decent meal can usually be put together in 20-30 minutes which is not much longer than it takes to microwave quite a few things and on par with oven-ready stuff.
Unfortunately, rice and beans are seen as poor people food, and the sad fact is that a lot of vegetariens are more concerned with image than actual health(thanks USA for ruining that!)
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I agree that basic cable TV can be a reasonable expense, compared to other entertainment options. Taking a family of four to one movie per month can cost $40, depending on the details. At the same time, the extended packages with the premium sports channels etc. can approach $150/month, at which point it is clearly a luxury.
But if you can feed a family of four on non-organic food for $4800/year, that's 662 hours at minimum wage, or 13 hours/week. I don't take taxes out of that hourly wage, because a family of four that earns minimum wage qualifies for EITC rather than paying federal income taxes.
I would like to know if anyone is aware of a good training/education program (or book) to help folks understand how to cook healthy inexpensive meals that are not too complex (time-consuming) and decently flavorful. I think that would help bridge the gap, and I'd gladly get involved with such a program as my schedule allows.
It does not take long to cut vegetables and if you have someone to work with you, there can be some multitasking happening and it's a nice shared activity and an accomplishment you can share.
Do you write those adverts for those wonder-gizmos (Only 9.99 plus shipping and handling. But wait, there's more...).
Chicken is one of the more affordable sources of animal protein typically. You'll get better at cooking with experience and pasta can be jazzed up with a little pesto, cheese or various tomato options (or just plain butter).
it's uncommon to find cereals with less than 150 calories per 1 oz serving.
Not sure how your math works. At 4 calories per gram for carbs and protein, a 1 oz / 28 gram serving is ~110 calories. It's true for Count Chocula and for Special K both. You can't reach 150 calories unless the cereal contains 8 grams of fat, which is a pretty greasy cereal. More likely you're including the milk in your numbers.
Eat shit.
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That would be for an evening meal I'm thinking. Breakfast and lunch could be done for much cheaper.
The CDC is whey off...
I see what you did there...
Your bit about breakfast is wrong, actually. The traditional american breakfast is coffee and toast and the heavy bacon and egg breakfast was one of PR's first campaigns to change public behavior.
From wiki:
"One of Bernays's favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of "third party authorities" to plead his clients' causes. "If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway." he said. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat heavy breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as an ideal heavy breakfast and superior for health to the then traditional breakfast of tea (or coffee) and toast."
never been to a poor country where they eat mainly carbs eh?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I agree and disagree. I work a management job which requires few more hours to achieve. Combine that with a 2 hours daily commute and I have no time to cook. Add kids home work, making lunches and reading bed time stories and it's 9PM before I've even had the chance to think of cooking a decent meal. Luckily I have a wife that has offset hours and finds the energy to cook.
On the weekends I cook which is proof I'm not lazy. I actually love slicing food and cooking on the BBQ, time just happens to be scarce during the work week.
I am amazed that you were such an idiot as to only be able to make an income that allowed a pathetic $20/week in food, but had the foresight to plan out weekly meals and make ends meet.
Hmm, guess you've never heard of "being a student." It's a common career choice, and it generally leads to higher earnings later (as it did in my case). Also, admittedly, I chose to find a one-bedroom apartment for myself, because I found it more convenient than dealing with roommates -- and in lots of college towns and cities, that's pricey, and on a grad student stipend, it didn't leave a lot extra for daily expenses...but that's okay, because I could actually eat well for $20/week. (I had a friend who cut it down to $12/week or so, and he was struggling....)
Next time get food stamps, dumbass.
You'd be surprised how low your income has to be as a single person to qualify for food stamps. I was earning significantly more than that even on a grad student stipend, but after rent, utilities, school materials, etc., that didn't necessarily leave a lot left over.
Just use a little common sense and you can entirely eliminate some of these issues. For example, if you heat up the water slowly, the potato never screams at all, just sits there contentedly as it boils.
Just about anything you make will have processed ingredients, except a salad with no dressing. How many meals could you make without using a single processed ingredient, my guess is when you start making it you will have to cut out many of the things that enhance the taste.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Indeed, it's often overlooked.
The easiest way to get plenty of B12 is by eating fortified breakfast cereals.
Depending on what you (don't) want to eat there are other, natural sources: eggs, milk/dairy, sea foods (clams, crustaceans), insects, unwashed mushrooms.
btw i can still make lots of tasty food even by your stupid standards. Why, did you even know there's a whole raw food industry?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
um, mixing bowls, measuring spoons (ok maybe you don't need these for a main meal, but you do for baking), actual dinner plates, spilled food onto stove, sweeping floor, multiple knives and cutting boards (I assume you aren't using the same knife and cutting board to cut raw chicken as you do vegetables, unless you are cleaning it between uses). Then if you are cooking multiple things such as a soup, baking a cake, etc.. It is a lot more than just 4 things.
Here I what I experienced. After college I had a live-in Japanese girlfriend, which basically meant I was eating a Japanese diet, along with a job that required some amount of walking. I lost weight below my college weight with NO effort or thought on my part, and I wasn't that heavy in college. Today, years latter and many pounds fatter, I am again able to lose weight but to do so I have to count every calorie on my FitBit and typically walk around hungry all the time, to the point where I have even sat around not eating during extended family meals, and of course I have to dutifully record everything I eat very carefully. So manually overriding my bodies food desires is possible, but the healthy diet choice simpler but not in my case easier. Nuts do seem to help some. This seems to match other research that has shown exposure to US food products result in obesity in nearly identical population along the U.S.-Mexico boarder.
I see the same with some recipes, or even box instructions. Several other replies have focused on the fact that an onion doesn't take 10 minutes to chop, so I'll avoid that. But one of my big cooking pet peeves is that box of pasta that boldly states "ready in 8-10 minutes". Which is true, if you don't count time to boil water in the first place or for it to come back to a boil after adding the box of pasta and dropping the temperature.
Yeah, let's have a look at how young and energetic he feels after 30 days of no protein or carbohydrates.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Spurlock's SuperSize Me
Except that movie was a bunch of horseshit, as are most of the rumors that float around about fast food ingredients.
You missed the part that this was a response to "industry is far better at and spend much more money on influencing your individual behaviour (those 'choices' that you think you are making) than governments or public bodies can", not an argument for/against fast food or anything of the sort.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
There are thousands upon thousands of people too poor for all three. They don't live anywhere with access to fresh food ("food deserts"), can't afford to travel to where they could buy fresh food, couldn't afford the food itself even if they could get there, can't afford to take the time out of their multiple jobs to go even if they could afford it, and can't afford to to take the time off to cook or eat it.
If this was true then only poor people would be obese. I'm not saying that the problems you mention aren't a factor of obesity in poor people, but I do think that being too poor to get at food is the main reason people are obese.
Apple's a fruit, so they're taken care of.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
An apple shipped to Florida from Washington was bred specifically to make that transportation possible. Flavor and texture took a back seat to physical toughness, because a delicious apple is still worthless if it's squashed before it gets to your mouth. Of course, that same apple is just as disgusting back in Washington; it's the genes that make it crappy, not the transportation itself. However, you might be able to find other apples in Washington that are bred to be delicious but are unsuitable for long-haul transportation. You won't find these apples in Florida, because they would never survive the trip. That's why some people are into locally grown produce (for foodie reasons, not environmental ones). Not because it's inherently better, not because transportation somehow makes food taste bad.
I love American-style Italian food. Give me some cheese, tomato sauce, and pasta and I'm in heaven. When I cook, I've been known to go overboard more often than not. I have barely any 10-minute or 30-minute recipes, but a handful of 8-hour or 3-day recipes. I enjoy cooking as a hobby, so when I have time, I like to have fun and strive for perfection. While I've made my own cheeses and my own pasta from scratch, I've spent the last decade focusing on tomato sauce.
If you're a tomato lover, you may have noticed that a majority of tomatoes you see at the supermarket taste like nothing. They have a vague hint of tomato flavor, but they're not exactly something you'd want to sink your teeth into. Some varieties are better than others, particularly the campari which seems to be growing in popularity. In any case, most of these tomatoes are still garbage. Over the last decade or so, I've been growing my own tomatoes for making sauce; it seems that any variety that I choose for the garden has significantly more flavor than what you can buy in stores. I also visit local farms during peak tomato season and find their products are generally much better than what you find in stores as well. Well, why is it that when I grow a tomato it's fine, when someone near by grows a tomato it's fine, but when someone on the other side of the country (or world) grows a tomato, it's garbage?
Selective breeding. Crops are bred for certain desirable traits. One guy may be breeding tomatoes that are as sweet as possible. From each successive generation, he replants seeds from the sweetest tomatoes of the current generation. Eventually, he has very sweet tomatoes. Another guy may be breeding tomatoes that are most resistant to bruising (for less waste during long-haul transportation). From each successive generation, he replants seeds from the hardiest tomatoes of the current generation. Eventually, he has bulletproof tomatoes. Of course, by selecting for one trait, you're necessarily not selecting for other traits. The sweet tomato isn't likely to hold up well for long trips, and the hardy tomato isn't likely to be very sweet. Of course, it's possible (in theory at least) for a tomato to be both sweet and hardy, but breeding it will be more difficult and will take more time. Sure, people are shooting for the perfect tomato, one that is both sweet and capable of being trucked around the world, but perfection is a lofty goal, and instead we have some breeds that are better for transportation and others that are better for eating.
My next batch of sauce will not be made from tomatoes I grew myself. It won't be from locally-grown tomatoes either. It will be from canned tomatoes. Peeled canned tomatoes. You see, when you're growing tomatoes that are just going to be canned anyway, you don't need to worry about how pretty they look, or how well they hold up during transport. You can focus on flavor and flavor alone. Over the years, I've discovered that canned tomatoes can taste really, really amazing. Better than anything I've grown, better than anything I've bought at a farm. I'd imagine these tomatoes destined for the cannery look unsightly and break at the slightest bump. The breeders have the luxury of ignoring c
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
You either don't have money, or you don't have time. Rarely will you not have both as a "poor" person.
Unless you are a industrious poor person instead of a lazy poor person. I know the common narrative is that people are poor because they are lazy but in reality a lot of poor people work multiple jobs to make ends meet and work a lot harder than their middle class counterparts. Many are single parents who need to provide for a family on their income alone. I know it may seem to moderately well-off people that they worked hard to get where they are but in the majority of cases it was the circumstances into which you were born that determines your eventual earning power.
I know the common narrative is that middle class people don't work hard and are married, with 2.5 children
So how to not wind up the poor single parent listed above -
None of that guarantees you won't be poor, but your odds go way up compared to those that don't follow them. That presupposes you don't marry into money, of course. Bad choices have consequences.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
If you are going to include sugar on the processed ingredient list then many other things belong as well like salt. I am simply trying to apply a uniform definition, and not pick and choose which items are "processed". You can have a steak using only unprocessed ingredients and it may be quite tasty but marinating and seasoning it will contain ingredients that are processed and it will be better.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
But the ratios are individual, so doing what the "other guy" did to lose weight, might actually cause you to gain weight. That's part of the problem. The idea that there's "one solution" to the problem. Some people who eat more poop more calories. They won't get fat. Others who eat less have their metabolism go into near-shutdown and gain weight eating less. Fixed eating with increased exercise will almost always result in weight loss, but what do you do about those who the increased burn cause greater hunger?
Your "rules" only work if you ignore hunger. That's neither safe, not practical.
Learn to love Alaska
Works as long as eating isn't a compensation mechanism for guilt.
Sure, and you realize almost all of that is destroyed before you can absorb it? Why do you think the doses are so big?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm a half-ass vegetarian. I don't actively try to eat meat, but I don't have a problem with it, as long as other people have to do the dirty work of killing the meat for food. I'd have a really hard time looking a cow or chicken into the eye, and telling it sorry buddy, you're lunch, as long as there are other things without eyes or a central nervous system to eat, such as chicken eggs for proteins. In dire economic circumstances and heavy hunger it would be easier to look a cow or chicken or deer in the eye and just do it, so one measure of one's luxury is how vegetarian can be afford to be? How much morality can you afford for yourself?Really rich Rajah's in old India could afford to hire people to sweep the ground before them so they don't accidentally step on a bug, and harm another conscious being with eyes and a central nervous system.
Eating fruit is oral sex with plants and if you don't shit out the seeds in fertile ground, it's rape, obviously!
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
"I've been a vegetarian for 14 years now"
"eggs"
?!
The AC has a point. I bought some nice thick steaks from Costco and took them over to my friends place. While I was in the other room, his wife proceeded to season the hell out of them with some nasty package seasoning she bought, put them in the oven for too long and completely ruined them. As they are on food stamps, they never buy steaks, so I'm not really surprised they don't know how to fix them. Usually, they just make hamburger or chicken helper.
The NIH disagrees with you, and I would trust them a little more than a random internet commenter. Oh and the fact that I have been getting B12 from supplements for years with no ill effect, thanks.
To all those who think that eating out (read at mcds or bbking, etc.) is cheaper or better or faster, a regular combo can hit you around 7$ for a single person.
Just FYI: poor people don't buy $7 McD meals, they buy two $1 mcdoubles.
This whole article is bullshit. I first tried dieting by avoiding processed foods (namely, the kinds that tend to be higher in sodium, carbs, fats, etc) and it didn't work for shit. Know what did work? Just watching the caloric intake. Already lost 60 pounds over the last year, and it mainly just involved getting proper perspective on what an actual serving is. I still eat fast food, indeed all kinds of junk foods.
Your anecdote doesn't disprove the article. Humans are extremely diverse and there are a lot of causes for obesity, maybe the cause of your obesity had nothing do to with processed foods.
There's a ton of reasons people overeat, process foods are one of them, but another big one is mental cues. Ever notice how you can not feel hungry a moment before supper then feel ravenous the moment you start eating? You didn't burn a bunch of calories walking up to the table, it's just your mind realizing its time to start eating and acting accordingly. Sometimes if I'm particularly busy I can miss an entire meal and finish the day with a healthy calorie deficit without feelings side effects, when backpacking I routinely lose 0.5 kg / day or more because I'm too preoccupied to feel hungry, the mental portion of the game is huge.
Similarly if you leave a box of doughnuts on your desk all day you're probably going to get really hungry and eat a bunch of extra doughnuts every day. The doughnuts didn't rewire your digestive system, they just sat there looking really yummy and your brain decided it wanted some.
I'm not saying you did anything like that, but it watching caloric intake consistent of preparing slightly smaller plates and moving snacks out of sight, you were probably successful in removing some of those mental stimulus to hunger. It could even be that processed foods are a contributor to whatever weight you have left, but they weren't the biggest ones.
My issue with the paper is with the second part of the abstract:
But this approach misses a fundamental point. The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of the overconsumption of a single macronutrient, but from a skewing of the proportion of each macronutrient in our diet — notably the dwindling quantity of protein in processed food products. The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake.
They basically say the macronutrient ratio is a big part of the problem, but I know there's a bunch of ancestral populations with macronutrient ratios all over the map and they're all pretty thin. It might be a bit of the problem, and processed foods might be a bigger part, but I doubt they're the primary problem as they seem to imply.
I stole this Sig
While I completely agree with your comment, I've had some extremely delicious pineapple from the grocery store in the middle of the U.S. It makes me wonder just how amazingly delicious a fresh ripe pineapple in the tropics can actually be.
TFA concludes with a statement along the lines of (paraphrasing) "diet is complicated and what's wrong with our current diet is more than just one demonized nutrient." People used to blame fat. Then sugar. Now carbs. It seems likely that it's a wee bit more complicated than that.
"1. Eat food*; 2. Not too much; 3. Mostly plants."
Michael Pollan hey? I like the guy already. Those rules (well, the first is a little fuzzy) summarize the scientific evidence pretty well. You could also add "4. Not trans fats".
The problem is that "processed food" is very unspecific. The article uses the term "engineered food" which is better. If the food you're eating is some concoction created in a factory, designed by an engineer, there's a financial incentive for it to have a poor balance of macro-nutrients. Food that is processed, but not engineered (e.g. plain canned foods, waxed fruits, frozen berries) doesn't have that problem.
As you lose weight your caloric requirements will decrease. Your weight is really a state of dynamic equilibrium. If you eat a certain number of calories a day your weight will increase or decrease until your daily requirement matches your daily intake.
You CAN lose weight quickly by greatly reducing your intake, then upping it again when you've lost enough. But that's not particularly good for you, is difficult because your body thinks it's starving (because it is), and the upward adjustment at the end is notoriously hard to get right, even if you do make it to that point.
A much better strategy is to lower your caloric intake (or increase your activity to increase caloric demand) by a reasonable amount that you intend to stick with long term. Your body weight will then adjust to match.
You can do all the name calling you want, but it makes for terrible public health policy. The article is pointing out an interesting mechanism by which anybody who eats engineered food may instinctually consume too many calories in an effort to get a required macronurtient. If true, changing that could solve a worldwide problem that all your self-righteous finger wagging hasn't touched. And all you got out of the article was fat people eat too much. Pity.
Tofu is what you get if you squish beans, pretend they're milk, and scoop off the "curd." It didn't exist until about 2000 years ago. So yes, abnormal.
It's very high in protein and low in everything else though, so it does make a good protein supplement, but it certainly ain't what we evolved to eat.
So, that's why my serum levels were dangerously low despite doing exactly that, and I had to find a sublingual supplement for any respectable improvement to be made?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Buying synthetic amnio acid supplements at the pharmacy isn't exactly part of a "natural" diet. You can certainly be a healthy vegetarian/vegan, but it does require some attention beyond "don't eat anything that had parents." The easy way is to supplement your diet using the products of modern biochemistry. The harder way is to balance your diet using knowledge of modern biochemistry.
Except that the article says to move the proportion of overall macronutrient intake a little towards protein and away from fat and carbohydrates. Atkins, or at least his followers, said to radically cut carbohydrate intake to the point where you're in a ketotic state, more often associated with severe metabolic problems. There's a difference.
Tofu is what you get if you squish beans, pretend they're milk, and scoop off the "curd." It didn't exist until about 2000 years ago. So yes, abnormal.
Sounds like cheese to me. Is cheese abnormal? Even simple milk is abnormal for some people.
Ezekiel 23:20
If I made that food for $5/plate ... I may as well go to a restaurant, where I pay only a bit more and have the whole experience.
For a simple dish like that if your cost is more than $2.50, you're doing something wrong. (West coast of the US retail prices. If you do your shopping at Costco/CashAndCarry/Winco/ethnic supermarket you should be able to get it well under $2/plate.)
Sure, but I wasn't commenting on the health benefits/downsides of vegetarianism, I was pointing out the absurdity of the comparison in
Neither will you be if all you eat is pork.
Of course, the comment before was absurd too, on the face of it. No-one is suggesting eating actual pig-feed, and vegetarian diets are certainly possible, as the existence of vegetarians demonstrates.
I used to (a few decades ago) have one called "The Students' Cookbook". Small paperback, no colour photos or stuff. One neat feature was that there were no weights in the recipes, just volumes, on the assumption that you wouldn't have a set of scales.
There are about 97,000 in print with those words in the title. One of them might be it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It probably wasn't meant to. But it was a pretty good rebuttal to the idiotic assumption that if you aren't earning a lot you must be stupid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While I agree with you in general, admitting that you were a student doesn't help your point.
What point was that? That it's possible to afford decent food even on a limited budget? How does my status as a student take away from that point? Or are you talking about my reply to the other AC, who accused me of being an idiot? I think my reply in that respect was directly on point.
It means you were in a different situation than those who have jobs and families (who may be on food stamps which you didn't qualify for)
I never implied that I had a family or anything at that point in my life.
Being a student has its hardships, and there are certainly students who really have it worse than people in "the real world", but generally that's not the case.
I will freely admit that, as grad student living goes, I did reasonably well. But, as I mentioned, I had friends who didn't have it so well -- who were taking out lots of loans and chose to live on much more extreme budgets than I did. But they still had a more nutrious and balanced diet than most people I know. I also had friends who worked in labs as science or engineering grad students and spent long hours (much more than 40-hour weeks) doing their work. Yet some of them also found time and money to eat reasonable food.
I never claimed to be living the life of a poor stressed worker doing a bunch of minimum wage jobs. But I did live on a very limited budget (and was much busier at times than I've ever been with a "real job" in the "real world"), and yet I still found ways to eat okay.
Regardless, my main point in the original post was countering the ideas eating a balanced diet with better food is somehow pricier and impossible for people with limited resources -- so they're somehow forced to eat junk food. That is decidely not so. I got to know some of the people who would frequent the supermarket I mentioned in my original post: many of them seemed not to be doing very well from a monetary standpoint, but many of them made the trek to the supermarket to buy basic ingredients to feed large families. Others seemed to just leave with carts full of junk food. I know from my own experience pricing foods that the former was actually a cheaper (and healthier) way to live on a budget.
Ferment for a week for best results, or else you're actually 'poisoning' yourself!
Umm, I'm assuming that you're referring to the whole phytic acid myth. All I have to say is: stop believing all the crap you read on those "health food" web sites, and go read some actual science. It's true that phytic acid binds iron, zinc, and other metals that are important as nutrients, but most of it in plant matter is already bound -- so, at worst, if you consume that stuff in your brown rice, you just won't get SOME of the extra nutrients that brown rice has over white rice. It won't "take away" any nutrients already in your body or in other foods, as some people will have you believe. It's certainly not going to "poison" you! In fact, the science on phytic acid in general is decidely mixed -- some studies suggest it is carcinogenic, while others suggest it may prevent cancer. It certainly can act as an antioxidant, removing free radicals in a beneficial way. Some people even take it as a supplement, which seems ridiculous if you're claiming it's a "poison"!
We need better understanding of food science by the average joe, some 'healthy' foods are only healthier for you when properly prepared.
Meh. This is somewhat true of certain foods, but in most cases these claims are way overstated. Eat a raw vegetable, and you'll get certain nutrients that would be destroyed by cooking. Eat the same vegetable cooked, and you'll release some different nutrients but destroy others. All-in-all it's usually best to just eat a variety of foods using a variety of preparation techniques.
Anyhow, you will certainly release certain nutrients from brown rice by sprouting it (something that is also consumed in other countries -- not just white rice), but it's not necessary to get some nutritional benefits. If you're really concerned about phytic acid, you should also be worried about all sorts of dark green vegetables and other "healthy food" as well... brown rice isn't at the top of that list.
Based on Amazon reviews which say they had this book since the 1980s, it is probably this book: "The Starving Students' Cookbook" by Dede Hall. Another option is "The Impoverished Student's Book of Cookery, Drinkery and Housekeepery," available at the Reed College Bookstore online.
Have you ever traveled to a Third World country with a group of Westerners? My experience is that your group will likely be a full head taller and noticeably more muscular than the the locals. Yes, our diet is better than people in the past had available to them, that doesn't make it wrong.
Never been to Africa I take it.
I have, as as well as Asia and the Americas. You have no idea what you're on about.
People in places like Asia or the Caribean are shorter not because of the lack of food (which is a lie, most countries have plenty of food, it's medicine, education and other essential services they lack) but because they've evolved to be shorter. Africa, which has the most famine affected areas tends to have the tallest people.
Now most westerners will be fatter than most people in 3rd world countries.
But seriously, people who live in the poorest areas of the Philippines, Myanmar or the Dominican Republic have enough food. Education, no, food, yes and definitely eat a healthier diet than the overwhelming majority of westerners. These people lack good education, decent housing, a good standard of medical care, stable government and a whole bunch of amenities that we lack, but they aren't hurting for food. The poorest people will be eating food that is grown locally, even those in large towns or cities will be eating food from fresh markets rather than boxed food from supermarkets.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Meat is prepped when purchased. Most of the time I pre-prep my veg as well. This is what pros do.
If cooking multiple things, you're most likely feeding lots of people or you're doing it wrong. Everybody at the very least can wash their own plate.
And don't spill stuff. Accidents on the stove are either poor technique or not paying attention! I've been in kitchens where clean up can take minutes or it can take hours.
Clean as you go, because if you're constantly stirring stuff on the stove you're more likely doing that wrong as well.
Oh, and probably most important of all, don't use toxic non-stick. A well seasoned cast-iron pan takes seconds to clean. Learn how to make pan sauces, acid/water and heat is all that's required to get a clean stainless steel pan/pot and a tasty sauce.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I am reading a lot of comments of tricking you/the metabolic system/whatever not. It goes deeper than that. Many ingredients are there to throw your system out of the balance (or call it slightly sick if you will) and make you want to eat MORE.
Cooking is more a test to your capability of organisation and laziness than having the time.Many meals are simple to cook, or then take your ipad or TV to the kitchen, and cook while you watch idols or Game of thrones. The problem with cooking real food is that many are lazy, and others the parents already didnt do that, and they dont really are not used to do it. The culture of buying everything already made is very pernicious when we are talking about what we eat.
Cooking itself can be a fun and rewarding task itself. I find it quite relaxing way to de-stress after a hard days work behind a glowing screen, to be able to throw stuff around a 3-dimensional space and engage senses of taste, feel and smell. I can crank out a tasty meal from fresh produce quite quickly. It's cheaper than anything out of packet, is going to extend mine and my families live and prevent debilitating disease suffering and death, and I feel pretty ace when I've nailed a new technique.
The major problem is people have become too accustomed to reward for no or little effort. Open a packet, push buttons microwave, ding ding and your done. I ponder if, partly, we over eat portion wise where the food is too accessible, simply because the reward factor of acquiring and preparing the food is missing.
Food just tastes better when you've put some effort and flare in your self. The whole process needn't be a chore at all.
(This perhaps explains why some useless cooks seem to think their own food tastes good to them, despite others not quite agreeing.)
I humbly present the solution: gamification of food.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
+1 If you eat organic food because of the quality you are doing it wrong. Organic was never about the food, but about the environment. The idea that organic food is better is and always was a myth.
2 min?! More like 30s. The longest time is spent finding the onions in fridge. Using a chopper is loosing time, all you need is one good kitchen knife. That solves 95% of you cutting needs. It takes a little practice but that comes naturally as you do it.
Baking also takes long on a total scale, but there is no reason you can't watch a movie while you wait. Simple things like pizza are just the right length for your average youtube video.
5$/plate what extravagance is that? Oh yea, GP added meat. Since apparently we are all eating meat to much, one of the tenants is to reduce the times you eat meat. spagetti genovese will offset you around 2$/plate a mixed salad will offset you around 3$/plate, rice with onion cream sauce will offset you at around 2$.
What is this "no time" argument? Everybody has about the similar time constraint and in most cases people that earn more also work more. You have a fridge and you do not need to go more often than once a week. All it takes is some planing. There a few shortcuts you can take, you can buy frozen vegetables, they actually are better quality, than fresh. They work everywhere where you cook them and you can buy them in larger batches. I have the impression that your food just magically appears at your house, good for you.
By your definition steak is also processed. If you buy the cow alive and slaughter yourself it then we are in business with your definition.
How much tofu is on your or any American/European diet? Exactly almost none, save the occasional Chinese restaurant visit. That is what I mean by deviating from a "normal" diet. An other example, though not for proteins are yest flakes. Yes they are sort of "normal", except outside of the health food isle you will not see them.
Technically raw meat is processed food. Buy a live cow or chicken and then that assumption makes sense. But the term processed foods as meant in the TFA are complete packaged meals. And that is what the colloquial definition is. Yes cheese is processed, but nobody will put it on the same level as frozen pizzas, microwave macaroni and cheese or instant noodles.
I mean abnormal in the sense that it is not part of an average diet. Like fried crickets, you and I would probably not eat them, but that does not lower their nutritional value.
You are aware that vegetables / fruits also have proteins and carbohydrates and can be present in salads?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I was accounting for his assumed lack of coordination and wanting to keep his fingers intact. Some people just never get the knack for rapidly cutting vegetables, and onions are one of the easier things to dice.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Hell, it's pretty much the entire premise of MK Shamalan's The Happening.
what about fruit and vegetable rights. you can just hear them scream as you rip the fruit from tree's. and the sound is soul-curdling as you put potatoes in boiling water.
All I remember is "Bigger it up for 89" And all the POP you can drink for a buck, and.... sports drinks and...
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
What chemicals are added to beef to purify it, like the do with sugar and salt?
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I hate cooking, but I have a far great hate of most processed food and almost all fast food. Yeah, my mom ruined me by being great at cook-from-scratch, and that's pretty much all we ate.
So how do I cope? I've found that nearly every recipe in the "New Betty Crocker Cookbook" translates gracefully to the microwave (with the exceptions of pie crust and cookies). And you can often cheat them into being one-bowl recipes without significant loss of quality. Hence, yes, I make souffles in the microwave, and it takes about two minutes of effort and five minutes of waiting.
Another handy device is the countertop roaster. Throw in a large lump of frozen meat and a few potatoes, carrots, and an onion, dash on some salt and pepper, set at 300F degrees, go away for two hours, and it's food. For variety, cover with a can of stewed tomatoes and/or mushroom soup (or sliced tomatoes and mushrooms). Takes about five minutes to prepare a week's worth of meals.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think the reason you're getting so much argument is because most people today really have NO idea how to shop for food that does indeed extend your dollar -- they =think= they do, but when you really look at what's in their cart and in their fridge -- they don't. I eat much cheaper than most people too, yet I eat better. And my diet revolves around meat. It's amazing what you can get for less than 3 bucks a pound, or under 2 bucks a pound for boneless pork.
I too learned to maximize what I got early on -- first as a student, later because I just couldn't see wasting the money, and preferred from-scratch even tho I hate cooking (most processed/fast food is my idea of a last resort, not a good meal).
Tho I let Costco cook the roast chicken, because it's cheaper than doing it myself, and I especially hate cooking chicken. The stripped carcass becomes soup in due course, a good way to use up odds and ends of all sorts. (I call it "every damn thing in the house soup", and throw in a handful of rice if there's not enough other miscellaneous.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Where the hell are YOU shopping? I just paid $4.99 for a 3 pound roast chicken at Costco, which with costs less than buying the chicken and running the oven to roast it myself. (Walmart has a slightly smaller one for the same price. So do any of the chain groceries.) And I just paid $1.99/lb. for very good pork at the locally-owned grocery (it's labeled 'boneless spare ribs' but it's more like thick-sliced shoulder roast, and there's zero waste). This is in Montana, arse end of the universe. But prices were about the same, or even a little less, in north Los Angeles County, the armpit of SoCal.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Good observation about canning! Yeah, if you're gonna can 'em near the field (rather than across the country) then you don't need to select for transport-hardiness.
Just curious, which canned tomatoes do you find taste best? I like 'em with lots of flavor but not much acid... of what I've tried and can get locally, S&W seem to be best.
Know what's bizarre to grow yourself? Cauliflower. The entire plant is edible and it all tastes the same... there are nodules on the roots that taste just like the part we normally eat, and look similar too, but smaller. (I grew one once. It proved perennial in the desert, and took over the yard. Had roots 10 feet long like living ropes. I finally pulled it up because it was attracting mice.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Or be eaten alive by wolves (who don't always bother to finish killing the deer before tucking into the haunch). That's natural, right?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You'll like the song "Carrot Juice is Murder", by the Arrogant Worms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
actually I over exaggerated pineapple as it actually is alright in the grocery store, but it is still significantly better in chile. I find strawberries, apples, bananas to all be horrible from the grocery store.
So you think that a higher status makes you a better cook? Or that a higher status makes the local supermarket to sell you the unprocessed food cheaper?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Honestly, I haven't really had an opportunity to taste them all yet. I'm so set on switching to canned tomatoes because of an overwhelming tendency in the literature to promote this approach. Most sauce recipes start with canned tomatoes, and most explanations for why this is the case tend to focus on flavor. That being said, the ones I have tried have all been surprisingly good. I'm just nowhere near deciding which is my favorite. I don't think I've seen S&W over here (NJ), but we do get quite a variety of canned tomatoes imported from Italy that are pretty delicious.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I think we got Hunt's at Costco. They are really tasty but rather acidic (add a handful of brown sugar to mitigate that). The best ones for flavor seem to be the small whole slices, not the chunks.
Interesting that literature (I assume you mean stuff chefs would read?) is promoting canned. I can see that as a better route to uniform results.
It's not uniform across time, tho -- frex, canned peaches used to be very tasty (not nearly as good as tree-ripened, but better than picked-green-and-ripened), but in recent years have become bland. :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In the past, my goal has been to make as close to 100% of my sauce from scratch (right down to growing my own veggies and herbs), so I've been using carrots (while I've considered growing sugar beets, I don't know how hard it is to refine the sugar from them) as the primary sweetener in my sauces to great effect. It seems like they also act as an emulsifier, which is incredibly useful when starting with fresh tomatoes, less so with canned.
:P
And no, by the literature, I mean the interwebs (recipes, cooking blogs, etc.). Great way of making oneself not sound as stupid
My girlfriend and I recently made a "quick" sauce from canned tomato (don't remember what brand off-hand). It still feels wrong to me to make a sauce in less than one day, let alone 3 hours, but I'll just say that it was really delicious. I can see why people would argue in favor of canned tomatoes, laziness aside.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I'm not that dedicated. Tho there are a few things that Just Ain't Right without some specific fresh bit... frex, you can't have proper soup without throwing in a peeled and chopped turnip. It disappears entirely, but alters the flavor and texture much for the better.
So my soup tricks you into eating boiled turnips. :D
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
My first thought was "1980s? I'm not that old, you cheeky sod!"
And then I thought "Shit, I am!" Late 1980s though...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Eat a tomato right off the vine, then try saying that again with a straight face. Or crack open a local farm fresh egg and compare its rich color and flavor to the sad pale yolk in the eggs you buy at the supermarket. GP is absolutely correct.
If you haven't seen the movie, "Forks over Knives," it's worth a look. The problem we have is that our culture has evolved to make food quick, convenient, and satisfying –these three together do not equal healthful. I'm particularly sensitive to this issue since I'm going back to work Monday in the later stages of recovering from a quintuple bypass operation.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
My 11 year old son has a friend in the neighborhood from a family with two working parents, both in menial, non-living wage jobs (one is a cashier at Walmart, the other I don't know). He would often eat dinner with us and clear his plate, then eat seconds. His choices at home were limited to the freezer and the microwave. It isn't that the parents are "bad", but they don't have the choices that we do: I can leave work when I choose so that I can cook dinner at home; my wife works from the home or on the road and can often cook at home or count on me to pick up the slack. We buy organic when possible, eat fresh meat and vegetables for all our meals and don't buy anything prepared (as in I make the mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup and chutney and pickles) so our life is quite different from most people's. We also spend about 6 or 7 hours a week watching TV, so there isn't that chasm in our time.
Some of this is choices, some is fate, some is planning, some is just because of who we have become.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.