Thread: Food, Diet, And Nutrition

Originally posted by Never+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Never)</div>

Don&#39;t feel like getting into this one again. To put it short, I think we are closer to chimps than bears; teeth match, bowel length ratio matches, stomach similar, and pepsin and acidic salts in the stomach closely match those of a human. I think even wiki has an article about it, I don&#39;t remember. It&#39;s an ongoing debate it seems. I see your point as well, and I am not a scientist, so ...yeah.[/b]

My interpretation is that chimps are the baseline - but we are no longer chimps, and what separates us from them is an increase in meat-eating characteristics, especially the level of encephalization we display. But I realize it&#39;s a debate that nobody has all the answers to, and you don&#39;t want to get into it, so it&#39;s all good.

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You&#39;ve presented an exceptional case. But do tell me this Spamtek. Where did these nutrients essentially come from? I would also like you to tell me how other animals manage to survive on a relatively low animal consumption (and vitamin B-12 deficient diet -- as you&#39;ve implied).

I love how you say that&#33; I feel like James Bond on the laser table.

Cyanocobalamin / Vitamin B12 is produced exclusively by bacteria and archaea (ripping this from Wikipedia). The only way a living organism gets B12 is by either absorbing it as a byproduct of his own gut flora, or by eating another creature who&#39;s absorbed the stuff by either absorbing it from his own gut flora or by eating another creature who&#39;s... you get the idea.

I have no doubt that humankind&#39;s far-flung primate ancestors got all the B12 they could ever need from their own guts, back when they were much closer to herbivory. As we started picking up meat as a staple diet item, though, two things happened:

1. Our brains got bigger (encephalization). Such an abundant source of extra energy as was provided us by meat allowed us the luxury of evolving freakishly large brains. B12 has a lot of functions, but certainly some of them are intimately tied to the brain. More brain = more needed B12.

2. Since we were eating more meat, we were getting a rich and ready source of B12 in our diet. All evolutionary pressures considered, being able to absorb enough B12 from one&#39;s own gut flora suddenly becomes a moot issue; it&#39;s not selected for and people begin to lose the trait.

Both of these things (mostly the second - I kind of made up the first) have left us dependent on dietary B12 to meet our needs in a way that dyed-in-the-wool herbivores don&#39;t have to worry about. Repeat this argument for other things we need that herbivores don&#39;t have to worry about - like long-chain omega-3 PUFAs.

Originally Posted by Spamtek

I feel like James Bond on the laser table.[/b]

Hey you&#39;re taking this too seriously&#33; (Shouldn&#39;t it be "laser" table? ha).

Anyway, I agree with you that saturated fats are not the poison they are made out to be, as long as you are getting a balance. What do you think about coconut oil? I don&#39;t think it is a paleolithic food; on the other hand some groups of people have been eating it for quite a while, and in it is attributed in those populations with health benefits; on the other hand it is incredibly dense with saturated fat, more so than lean meat by far. I am talking about unprocessed coconut products with the lauric acid and vitamins intact. My cholesterol does go up during times that I eat more of it; with worse ratios.

Just wondering if you had an opinion. I&#39;ve gone back and forth on this depending on the last person&#39;s advice that I read. I don&#39;t know where Cordain is on this. Mercola loves the stuff; CRONies of course hate it and consider him to be a quack.

I&#39;ve been told that meat is BAD and should be avoided. I&#39;ve been told that dairy products are BAD and should be avoided. I saw where Moonbeam said that grains are poisonous and should not be eaten. That&#39;s three of the four food groups right there. The only thing left is the fruit and vegetable group. There are actually people out there called "fruitarians" who refuse to eat vegetables because you have to kill an entire plant to eat a vegetable. They eat fruit because it grows on plants and is not the plant itself. So now we&#39;re down to just fruit. Does anybody have a reason we need to avoid fruit? If so, maybe I will just starve myself.

I love food and eat everything except bleached grains. I don&#39;t eat bleached wheat flour, refined sugar, or polished rice. They make me sick and make my blood sugar go too low. There is a really messed up gimick out there with "wheat bread". A lot of the "wheat bread" sold at the grocery store is really bleached wheat flour that turns a different color when it is mixed with other things. You have to look for either "whole" or "unbleached" before the term "wheat flour". Otherwise, it might be bleached. If it is, it is cheap poison garbage that our bodies did not evolve to handle the right way. Some people handle it better than others. People with hypoglycemia can&#39;t eat it. Whole grains and unbleached wheat flour make me feel really good and give me good energy.

I get really sick when I go without meat. I have to eat it. Too bad for the cows and pigs out there, but it&#39;s either me or them.

Brown rice, beans, home grown organically raised meat bought from local ranchers (or raised yourself with love), garden food (organic of course), sugar snap peas, beats, carrots, and tomatoes. Wild animals from hunting that are properly cleaned and prepared. vegetables should be steamed and not cooked to death. Hot peppers are extremely good for you. Rye is very good. Honey should be used in place of most sugars. Steveia, pure maple syrup or licorice can be used as sweeteners instead of sugars. Celtic salt or mineral salt should be used instead of processed salts. all fruits are good (as long as they are organic) especially lemons and limes. grapes are also excellent.

Most things are healthy in moderation as long as they are not processed, preserved, harmonized, sprayed with pesticide, genetically altered, or changed from their original natural form and cared for properly.

The problem is population control through the poisoning of our food. Perches food at the store and it&#39;s got no value hte good has been striped and you eat dead matter. Processed meats are one of the worse things out there, this dose not mean that all meat is bad for you.

I could go an and on... I just hope (in the USA) that a libertarian gets elected and people are finally told the truth and we become healthy again.

We all work to make money to buy food... well why not work in the garden to make food that you feel good about eating?

Originally Posted by Spamtek

dodobird, I&#39;ve never heard these claims, even by hardcore vegans. Even vegsource has issued a heartfelt plea to vegans to take their B12 supps. Variability of absorption considered, though, you must admit that a diet high in B12 is guaranteed to be more likely to meet your nutritional needs than a diet without any at all.[/b]

If you never heard those claims, maybe you should have looked a little harder I didn&#39;t make this up.
Anyway, like I said, I do take B12 as a supplement, as that is indeed recommended to vegans and vegiterians by most researchers. However, I take very little of it, and that is the only supplement I take, and I&#39;m in excelent health ( knocking on wood )

Originally Posted by Spamtek

Liver concentrates nutrients, liver concentrates toxins. But this isn&#39;t a complaint about meat, it&#39;s a complaint about how meat is raised. Telling me liver is bad for me on that point is like me telling you that apples are inherently bad because they&#39;ve soaked up pesticides and fungicides and vegetable wax. These are complaints to be leveled against mainstream agriculture, not the foods it produces. And if you get to avoid those pitfalls of poisoned produce by going organic or homegrown, why can&#39;t I avoid mine by going local and grass-fed? In such a case these toxins, a result of human meddling and cupidity, are greatly reduced or eliminated entirely.[/b]

Actualy I&#39;m not sure even an organically grown liver is healthy. I am saying this off the top of my head, but common sense implies that eating a whole toxin purification factory - which is what a liver is - is not in your best interest...

Moonbeam: Mercola makes my head hurt. One the one hand he seems to put out a lot of good-sense articles (ways to sleep better, etc.) that I can wholeheartedly agree with, but then he starts raving like a madman (weave a circle round him thrice?) and talking about EFT and coconut oil and making outlandish claims about things he happens to be selling. I can&#39;t tell if he&#39;s being genuine or not, or whether in either case if he&#39;s even right. I trust more the judgment of Cordain and Eades when it comes to stuff like this (Although Eades is kind of a jackass... seriously.), and while I don&#39;t know offhand what Eades thinks coconut oil I suppose Cordain would disagree.

I&#39;m willing to accept sat fat, like I said, when it&#39;s eaten the way we&#39;ve always been eating it. When it comes to oils I&#39;ll stick to ones that have traditions tied to them dating back thousands of years, and clinical and epidemiological evidence to back them up with, like olive oil. Coconut oil, I think, has none of that going for it.


Universal Mind: Fruit has sugar in it, and wouldn&#39;t you know that sugar in any amount is going to kill you (we don&#39;t need sugar, see, the Inuit proved us that). So, yeah, better start up the hunger strike.

You&#39;re right: for any food group, there will be those calling it the cure-all for every disease known to man, and others condemning it as the devil&#39;s nutritive. That&#39;s why I read up on all of them, weigh the complex pros and cons for every argument, and then throw all those considerations out the window and follow a dietary pattern I can actually have faith in: what I evolved to eat. No matter what the dietary battlefield looks like day to day, what it used to look like hundreds of thousands of years ago isn&#39;t going to change, and it&#39;s what it looked like back then that I think is most relevant to consider when thinking about how to eat now. Doing so may not select for every conception of health (longevity, vitality, fecundity, all different aspects of it), but it will at least select for some - which is a lot more than we can be certain we&#39;re doing if we follow the modern nutritional zeitgeist, whatever it happens to be at the moment.


taltho: I&#39;d personally just say don&#39;t use salt at all - those designer salts "blessed by benevolent nature spirits and quarried from the most sacred of salt mines deep in the emerald moors of ancient Ireland" really vex me, and no matter how ephemerally nutritive they are, it&#39;s still a sodium bomb.

What&#39;s harmonizing?


dodobird: Yes, this is valid. But the same argument for nutrient density follows for most organ meats, actually - kidneys, brains, eyes, all remarkably high in bioavailable nutrients that are difficult to get in such abundant quantities from plant sources (though, since you vegans are still kicking, obviously not impossible).

LOL, I know what you mean about Mercola. Some of his advice is really good, other stuff a little wacky. He occasionally mentions lucid dreaming in his e-mail newsletter. I go back and forth on some of the things that he says. Overall I think his advice is more good than bad. His chocolate bars are pretty good--but not only does he put the coconut oil in, which may be OK, he uses cassava flour, like it&#39;s a lot better, and I&#39;m not sure about that at all. They whey he sells is great tho (that&#39;s another thing that he&#39;s talked me into; whey = good. I don&#39;t know for sure, but it is a convenient source of low-fat protein.)

His videos are hilarious; he&#39;s trying to show the ingredients on something and he holds it right up to the camera and it&#39;s all blurry, and he&#39;s yelling "Look, look&#33;". He&#39;s a very excitable man.

What is CRON?

Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition. In every species so far studied, from worms to primates, it has been shown that reducing calorie intake while maintaing all nutritional requirements, results in a dramatic extension of the life-span with a lowered incidence of the chronic diseases of aging. There are groups of people (google CR Society) who are attempting this. The problem is the "optimal nutrition" part is not always agreed upon. There are vegans and vegetarians to paleolithic-eating types.

It is not known if this will work in humans. There are many reasons to think that it will, resulting in an extension from the current maximum 120 year life-span to an approximately 200 year life-span, with more time spent being healthy. Of course this is debatable, but the CRONies are trying to prove it on themselves.

The CRON lists are places to get the latest nutritional info, with opinions from people, some of whom are very knowledgable, others of whom are pretty nutty.

I&#39;ve never heard claims as wild 200 years - I really think that at most CRON will allow people to better achieve the extreme limits of aging we&#39;ve already seen (100-110), more reliably, but if tens of billions of people have, thus far, without a single exception managed to break the 130 barrier, I sincerely doubt that a conscious calorie restriction regimen practiced by a handful of people could manage it. You have to assume that somewhere out in the world, across history, have been scads of people whose circumstances have led them to involuntarily practice CRON their entire lives, yet we don&#39;t hear about the miracle case of Fyodovor Vishensky in the backwoods of Latvia who lives to be 155. We hear miracle cases about people who lived to be 100 or 110... and when we look at those marvelous exceptions, their eating and lifestyle habits are just as often atrocious as they are admirable. Jeanne Calment ate typical French paradox fare, but IIRC the woman second in line for the crown of oldest ever was a strict vegetarian, and the third up was notorious for eating potato chips and fried foods every day of her life.

I&#39;ll bring up IF (Intermittent Fasting) again, too, and the lab studies showing that rats fed twice as many calories as normal every other day showed health benefits rivaling or topping those getting fed a reduced calorie diet daily. I know somewhere in the gabbledegook of CRON is the indisputable notion that less calories in = less oxidative damage = less aging, but I still think that most of the benefits of CRON comes from the starvation response, activation of sirtuins and maintenance mode in the body, all of which you also get from just eating twice as much half as often (IF). And while there are periods of hunger in IF, there are also periods of extreme satiation, which sure as hell beats out the endless endurance test of constant cravings on calorie restriction.

All the same, I do trust CRONies to be up-to-date on all the latest magical nutritional breakthroughs for better health/longer lives, since they do make it their life&#39;s work to cheat death.

You know, I had exactly the same thought as you--if it worked, surely there would have been somebody somewhere just didn&#39;t eat much and accidentally CRONed themselves into a super-long lifespan. Maybe there is, who knows.

A lot of the CRONies use fasting too.

Yes, they say the antioxidants from nutrient dense foods helps slow aging. But I also agree that there are probably more factors that affect the aging process -- factors regarding nutrition.

Eggs are healthy.

I am not on a diet, but yet I don&#39;t eat junk food very much. I don&#39;t like many junk foods.

Wow, so the software change totally sodomized my poll... bummer.

God damnitt, Everything in moderation people, no need for extremes. That's how we're meant to be.

The main focus of my diet is to stay healthy and stay alive. It's been ages since I've eaten for fun (chocolate and other junk food) because I think that that is why people get fat. They enjoy food too much. I was fat when I was younger (probably until I was about 10 or 11) and I remember that I ate whatever I wanted. I don't have the willpower to maintain a diet that is anywhere in the middle, so for me it has to be one extreme or the other.

Personally I don't see the sense in eating anything that is low in nutrients and high in calories if you know just looking at the packaging that is will do you absoloutely no good whatsoever. After you stop eating stuff that's 100% bad for you you stop craving it after a few months anyway and get used to life without it.

Originally Posted by dodobird

Each research shows a different thing, frankly I don't think anybody really knows what healthy and whats not. I am vegan because I care about animals and the enviroment. Some people say that vegan diet is very healthy, well good for me!

lol i could never make it as a vegan. being a vegetarian would be wayy hard enough, but not being able to drink milk or eat cheese? I couldn't tolerate that, lol

Originally Posted by LucidMike14

lol i could never make it as a vegan. being a vegetarian would be wayy hard enough, but not being able to drink milk or eat cheese? I couldn't tolerate that, lol

Personally I find veganism much easier than eating low-carb paleolithically (High-carb, low-fat low-protein versus low-carb, high-fat high-protein: no meat versus no grains, two different ends of the spectrum). My brain's been hardwired to crave nutritionally bankrupt starches much more than it savors juicy cuts of meat or even dairy. My ideal meal is something dry, crunchy, and almost burnt to a crisp... so pretzels, croutons, crackers, all that crap is right up my alley. I stayed constant on a vegan diet for half a year without even thinking about it; avoiding meat was a breeze... trying to survive without carbs, though, and I rarely last more than a few days before cheating.