Anyway, if anybody feels that they want to discuss homeopathy, or acupuncture; I suggest you take that discussion to another thread. After I was asked that if I have gotten checked, I don’t want to, and that is a personal choice, I was just telling the story of a 90 year old wise man that saved my life, and it was one of the reasons I became a vegetarian and avoid to go to allopathic doctors. Don’t get me wrong, normal medicine is incredibly useful, I don’t deny that, I’m just saying I avoid taking chemicals in my body.
One of my bosses was formerly a chemist from Europe, who immigrated here decades ago. He is the fittest man of 65 I have ever encountered and when he is at the office we speak about nutrition frequently. He will not buy food without knowing the country of origin and avoids processed food. He eats some chicken, and a bit of pork, lots of fruit, veggies and nuts, and organic whole grain products in moderation. He claims never to have taken medication in his life and has not been ill in the 6 years that I have known him despite frequent air travel and a stressful job with a rigorous schedule. Must have some genetics, lol....he would be a candidate for cloning. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The use of the word "allopathic" is a dead giveaway. Like 'wellness', or 'holistic', it is a word used by people who do not follow scientific medicine. There are only two kinds of therapy. That which is demonstrated to work, and that which, when tested, is only as good as a placebo, or sugar pill. Now, conventional medicine - the stuff that actually works - is also a placebo. So if a patient takes conventional medicine, he/she gets a double curative effect - both placebo and genuine therapy. If a patient gets therapy from naturopath, acupuncturist, or homeopath, the only effect is placebo. This can be, and often is, the difference between cure or not cure. Sometimes the lack of cure can result in someone's death. Quack medicine is harmful. Here is a list of people who died because they relied on homeopathy http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html Similar lists exist for the other forms of quackery. Short message. Do not rely on quack medicines. They do not work, and the lack of curative effect may cause you great harm. Alternative medicines are simply a swindle designed to separate you from your money!
Linked? Of course it is, it's a common feature amongst the vast majority of predators because it's advantageous, but as you say it isn't exclusive, just like most of the stuff in the OP. We're omnivores, it's quite obvious. :shrug:
Yes but our hands, mind & cordinations can be biggest tool for anything. Yes, we should also evaluate whether these things are naturaaly beneficial or harming in real sense. Yes but excess iron can also be much harmful. Somewhat as indicated on following link:- Truth may lie in, how different foods, esp. those which are "natural to us" in quality & quantity? If animals eat meat, then their killing excercises, fasting due to not getting meat & gaps in taking foods- obiously along with their proper digesting constitution, should also be matched in deciding what & how anything is good or bad to us on maintaining our health. Health impactings effects should be first considered in deciding what is good, what is bad--spritually or scientifically. A bread is made from many grains/seeds--many lives.
Our genetic inheritance also plays a large part in what diet is optimum for us. There are many persons who have an intolerance of lactose, gluten and corn, and these three products are to be found in almost all food that is processed. Excessive amounts of yeasts are to be found in numerous foods, both wild yeasts and added, and these yeasts are nourished by the sugars that are ubiquitous in the North American diet, and yeast overgrowth in the body also presents as a number of less common health disorders. Even in suggesting a varied diet of foods minimally cooked and processed as a guideline, it still falls to each individual to learn which foods are best for them. Some foods cause allergies that can be fatal, as in peanuts and shrimp in some, and for persons with extreme allergies, eating out is 'out of the question' and another reason that highly accurate labeling is very important for people to make informed choices when shopping.
I am a vegetarian and I can assure you there is nothing wrong with my anatomy! I am not one of those prosthelysizing vegetarians, however, and so I tend to say to those people who are unable to mind their own damn business and who insist on grilling me: 'Look, this is my personal choice. I can't give you any advice on the matter of diet other than to say if it feels good to you go ahead and eat it.' Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
On the matter of processed foods, people should be aware that industry has invested heavily in flavorings and additives that will make one enjoy and even crave the taste of one product/brand over another. This is extended unto pet foods as well. This 'preference' can even become a near addiction. Just something to remember when you have that irresistible craving for a food that you KNOW would be better for you in moderation. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
LOL...... Chocolate was not the product suggested. Compared to many other processed items, dark chocolate, in moderation, is even purported to have some health benefits. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Hydrolyzed vegetable protein, MSG, corn syrup solids, dextrose, casein, carrageenan,, the list is incredibly long of ingredients that are GRAS, generally regarded as safe, added to enhance the color, texture and flavor of food once it is processed and to length it's shelf life. 'Dead' food, in my opinion. Some of it may be useful to have in the pantry for emergency use, but a steady diet of it seems to be an assault on my digestive system. Certainly not trying to impose my own eating habits on others. Heavens....that might create a scarcity for self of those items that I enjoy. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I like dark chocolate even less than I like ordinary chocolate but funnily enough I like chocolate cake and chocolate ice-cream (in moderation and not at the same time!) I try not to eat any of that c**p! I try to grow my own, er, veg not cr**p! Is your body a temple like mine? Fancy a non hydrogenated fat biscuit?
This argument does not take into account the fact that our evolution is anomalous. We made the transition from a herbivorous diet augmented by the occasional hapless arthropod or other small animal to a carnivorous diet in just a few million years. That isn't enough time for the kinds of changes listed here. The reason is that our evolution is a product of technology, our transcendence over nature. The first flint blades allowed us to scrape the meat off of the bones left by predators. This increase in the protein in our diet allowed the mutation for a larger brain, since brain cells require an enormous amount of protein for maintenance. Larger brains endowed us with more creativity, and eventually we invented weapons that allowed us to be predators rather than mere scavengers--and did so without the anatomical modifications on your list. The only major adaptation we had was higher intelligence, which was more than enough to compensate for our anatomical disadvantages. Eventually, our own species evolved to be the apex predator on the entire planet. Thinking of disagreeing with that? Dude, we eat both bears and sharks! I'd be curious if you have a similar comparison for the panda versus all of the other ursids. It is the only herbivorous species in that family of carnivorans, and I wonder how many adaptations its body has undergone in order to accommodate the backwards transition? Pandas can only digest one type of plant--bamboo--which suggests that they are only just barely capable of living the herbivorous lifestyle. They are also very slow-moving creatures, suggesting that they don't get many calories from their diet. Some of the other herbivores are among the fastest, strongest animals on earth. As I pointed out, our evolution into carnivores began with our invention of tools, so we were no longer limited to activities that could be performed with our bare hands. Huh? Where did you hear that claptrap? There is evidence of hominoids using naturally occurring fires from perhaps a million years ago, but the technology of controlled fire only goes back a couple of hundred thousand years, at the most, and some sources say it's much more recent. Humans were perfectly capable of surviving on raw meat. The only real drawback was the inconvenience. It's been calculated that it took a Paleolithic human three hours to get a day's nutritional ration by chewing raw meat that had not even been cut up into bite-size pieces by the primitive blades of the era. Learning to cook (and inventing better knives) made our lives much easier, but had little effect on our health. Your knowledge of prehistory leaves much to be desired. The first stone tools go back more than two million years, way beyond the emergence of our species, and even of genus Homo. That wasn't the reason. See above. They began eating meat because it's an easier way to get food. Primates (they weren't human yet) are intelligent animals and intelligent animals are always looking for easier ways to do things. Why do that after spending all these millions of years becoming the only species on this planet who is not restricted to what he can do with his hands and teeth? You seem to have no reverence for the utterly unique evolutionary developments that make us human in the first place. It's not vitamins, but protein. And we can obtain protein from grains so long as we cook them. The tricky part is balancing the amino acids in the protein in grains against the amino acids in the protein in nuts, seeds and legumes. Neither one alone has the complete set of amino acids we need. But it's true that before the invention of cooking it was impossible for humans to survive on a herbivorous diet. Our ancient ancestral species had a different digestive system, in transition from that of the chimpanzee to that of the modern human, so they could get by on a herbivorous diet augmented by bugs and frogs. Only mentally healthier. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Imagine those poor people who never get the endorphins generated by the thrill of biting into a good porterhouse steak. Uh... that argument doesn't work. We use much more farmland raising the crops that are used for animal feed. Beef is the most inefficient use of farmland and as prosperity allows people in more countries to eat beef, that has become one of the single greatest causes of deforestation, if not the greatest. Indeed. You get ten times as much nutrition from an acre of pasture if you raise dairy cattle and drink the milk, than if you raise beef cattle and eat the cattle themselves. This is one of the things that helped Europe achieve dominance. Europeans (and western Asians) evolved the ability to generate lactase so they can digest milk, allowing their population to explode. Lactose intolerance is much more common in other parts of the world. In my house chocolate is known as mental health food. (Mrs. Fraggle is a chocolatiere.) Actually, cocoa solids contain theobromine (literally "the food of the gods," those taxonomists knew what they were doing), a stimulant with a different profile of effects than caffeine. It tends to improve your mood without making you want to go out and wrestle a bear.
Those items are not the main health hazard of processed foods. They are almost certainly not a health issue. Not useful nutritionally, but not harmful, either. The issue of processed foods is the saturated fats, the excess salt, the added sugar, and the large amounts of processed starch with fibre removed. Those are your nutritional enemies.
Quite agreed that the items you name and which I have highlighted in blue above are the main culprits. All of the ingredients Generally Regarded As Safe, are not entirely harmless. That they are utilized is ever a matter of politics and profit, based on considerable reading and working in the retail grocery sector. Each person must make their own informed decisions, as each has unique body chemistry and circumstances. There is no one guideline that is best for all and the commercial food industry IS NOT concerned about YOUR health, although they will use it as a marketing strategy. The following is my post from another thread/location, which points out just how bizarre the system is.
Yeah...it's like the mob's making your food or something! "Pay us more or we'll put all this crap in it!"Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Wow, though, still 26% of the RDA of sodium per serving... I can't handle too much salt...I bloat up, get crabby, and have had mild hypertension. @ fraggle...chocolate is one thing I do agree with you on. Cocoa powder seems to be the lowest-fat, lowest calorie way to do that, so I go through much of it.
Saturated fats have been exonerated. Eating saturated fat is only bad for you if you overeat and gain weight, since they may be converted into "bad" cholesterol. Otherwise, if you simply eat your maintenance diet and burn as many calories as you ingest, saturated fat is burned like any other fat and leaves no toxic residue. The problem in processed food is trans-isomer fatty acids, formerly referred to as hydrogenated fats (because of the industrial chemical process used to inhibit rancidity and give unsaturated fats a longer shelf life), and now commonly called transfats. Transfats lower the level of HDL or "good" cholesterol and increase the level of LDL or "bad" cholesterol in your body, even if you burn them and don't store them as fat. But natural fat, whether saturated or unsaturated, is not necessarily bad for you, so long as you: Don't overeat and store fat, increasing your weight, Eat an unbalanced diet with too much fat and too little protein, vitamins, minerals and fiber, and Don't leave unsaturated fat sitting around too long so that it turns rancid. ("Too long" is a function of the type of food: dried meat and many cheeses can last for weeks or even longer at room temperature, other products will last for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator, but some food must be frozen to last more than a few days.) Ironically, the food industry began using transfats as a preservative, to inhibit rancidity. Rancid fat has a bad flavor and smell (although in "gourmet" cheeses it may be desirable), it can reduce the nutritional value of the food, and some sources (but not all) insist that it can be harmful, although I can't find a citation at the moment. I was told (again I can't find a citation because of my office computer's block of "lifestyle" websites) that when transfats were first discovered, American consumers were put off by the unfamiliar "fresh" taste of potato chips and other junk food. So for the first few years after their introduction, the factories had to add "artificial rancid" flavoring until we were weaned off of it.
To Fraggle I am aware that there is a movement dedicated to rehabilitating saturated fats as part of the human diet. While they have some good data to support their claims, it does not yet seem to have caused a change in official diet recommendations. For example : the American National Institute of health still recommends limiting saturate fats. http://old.nhlbi.nih.gov/chd/Tipsheets/satfat.htm Until sufficient data is collected to guide such bodies into changing their recommendations, I think it is probably not responsible to tell people they can eat more saturated fats. I agree with you that transfats are bad. Fortunately, most food suppliers are well aware of this and take measures to reduce this component of food.
What a surprise. "Official" recommendations are products of government agencies and a government (at least in a too-big-for-its-britches country like the USA) is a large, energy-inefficient, slow-moving, insensitive, inward-focused organism. By the time the government gets around to recommending something it may be obsolete. A perfect example. That info must be at least ten years out of date. Much more is known about cholesterol today. For example, all LDL is not equal. There are "fluffy, buoyant" forms of it (as I have often opined, scientists have crappy communication skills) that present no risk, and those make up the majority of the LDL that results from saturated fats in the human diet. Oversize governments react to new data the same way they react to everything else: at glacial speed, if at all. Go ogle "saturated fat LDL" and you'll get an overload of articles from perfectly respectable academic institutions. As far as I can tell, the majority seem to agree that saturated fat has, indeed, been given a pardon and an apology and is now applying for a government job. Kicking and screaming all the way. It was only a year or two ago that Girl Scout Cookies finally came out with no transfats. Nice lesson in responsibility and public service for the kiddies. I haven't been brave enough to read the fine print at McDonalds.
Fraggle, Do you regard the Mayo Clinic in this way? http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/healthy-diet/NU00200 I quote : "Recommendation: Limit saturated fat to no more than 10 percent of your total calories. Lowering calories from saturated fat to 7 percent can further reduce your risk of heart disease. Saturated fat has 9 calories a gram. Based on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, 7 to 10 percent amounts to about 140 to 200 calories a day, or about 16 to 22 grams of saturated fat. Replace saturated fats with healthier monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats, found in olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oils, lean poultry, and unsalted nuts and seeds" Wikipedia suggests saturated fats are probably not good, though it admits some contrary research results. "Cardiovascular diseaseFor conflicting views and detailed discussion, see Saturated fat and cardiovascular disease controversy The mainstream medical, heart-health and government authorities advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD).[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][citation needed] According to this view, fats that are high in saturated fatty acids (including meat fats, milk fat, butter, lard, coconut oil, palm oil and palm kernel oil) are less healthful than fats with a lower proportion of saturated fatty acids and higher proportions of unsaturated fatty acids like olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil, avocados, safflower, corn, sunflower, soy and cottonseed oils.[19] Numerous systematic reviews have examined the relationship between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, with various conclusions: Systematic review Relationship between cardiovascular disease and saturated fatty acids (SFA) Mozaffarian, 2010[20] 19% reduction by substituting polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) Siri-Tarino, 2010[21] insignificant Danaei, 2009[22] 5% additional mortality risk for each 1% calories exchanging PUFA for SFA Mente, 2009[23] insignificant Mozaffarian, 2009[24] Reduced risk associated with monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) and PUFA compared with SFA and trans-fatty acids (TFA) Skeaff, 2009[25] reduced events by substituting PUFA Jakobsen, 2009[26] 5% exchange of SFA for PUFA: 13% decrease events, 26% decrease deaths Van Horn, 2008[27] 25-35% fats but <7% SFA and TFA reduces risk Chanu, 2003[28] significant in longer term Hooper, 2001[29] reducing total fat, SFA or cholesterol intake reduced events by 16% and deaths by 9%. Longer-term trials led to 24% reduction Hu, 1999[30] exchanging SFA for nuts gave 45% reduction Truswell, 1994[31] decrease SFA and cholesterol intake, partial replacement with PUFA: 6% reduced deaths, 13% reduced events While many studies have found substituting saturated fats with polyunsaturated produced more beneficial CVD outcomes, the outcomes from substitution of saturated fats with carbohydrates or monounsaturated fats has been less clear. It has been suggested that high glycemic index carbohydrates, which have been a frequent substitute for saturated fat in recent decades, may be worse than saturated fats by promoting obesity and insulin resistance which are also risk factors for CVD.[32]"
I'd like to see an impartial analysis and peer review of the experimental evidence behind that recommendation, rather than yet another nanny list because we're all too stupid to understand science. I still remember Linus Pauling and Vitamin C.
