Thread: Alternative Diets

Not diet in terms of losing weight but rather more healthy eating (which will actually lead to weight loss anyway). For years I've accepted the government supported recommendations on the food pyramid, saturated fats, fibre, 5 a day, cholesterol etc. and laughed at the various 'fad' diets such as Atkins, South Sea, Dukan, Mediterranean etc.

This year I've become more interested in some of the alternatives as I've seen the seesaw effect of official recommendations. I think eggs were the first issue, where they first recommended only a couple a week and had people eating egg white omelets then decided that eggs had 'good' cholesterol but still told you to limit consumption to 1-2 a day for no obvious reason. Oils were the next where butter is condemned and margarines have been pushed on us, except they originally used hydrogenation to make the oils solid and the trans fats proved to be very unhealthy. They now have another process which is looking even riskier long term.

It dawned on me that a lot of the fad diets were simply low carb diets and if you strip away all the stupid quirks which let them sell a book as a unique diet they are basically the same. The site I prefer is Primal Blueprint 101 | Mark's Daily Apple but there are a lot of other sites backing him up.

You can find all sorts of weird ideas supported on the internet of course, so you might want to stick to what your government advise, the UK have consulted with experts in nutrition to help formulate their latest policies see McDonald's and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy | Politics | The Guardian

You should be aware that most diet related research is sponsored by big multinationals (ie. Kellogs, McDonalds, PepsiCo) and that many scientific papers are written by the research departments of multinationals and given to eminent academics to put their name to it. They are paid fees as consultants etc. but in reality they just proof read the research and put their name to it.

There is an old and very lengthy article by Gary Taubes in the New York Times entitled 'What if its been a Big Fat Lie?'. This explains where the government recommendations on a healthy diet come from and why they are wrong. It is very interesting reading from one of the leading proponents of low carbohydrate eating.

Guinness n grapefruit diet thats the one for me.

I try to stick to 'real' food and forgo the shit from the large multinationals.

Dead animal, dead vegetable and dairy is all one needs.

If I want to eat processed food (such as bread), I prefer to make it at home as it tastes 1000 times better and is healthier.

It's hard to be 100% successful though as the missus is Thai.

A U.S. geneticist is thought to have discovered the secret to a long life, full of health and energy. And the answer might be as simple as cutting down on carbohydrates.

Professor Cynthia Kenyon, whom many experts believe should win the Nobel Prize for her research into ageing, has discovered that the carbohydrates we eat — from bananas and potatoes to bread, pasta, biscuits and cakes — directly affect two key genes that govern youthfulness and longevity.


Read more: Can cutting Carbohydrates from your diet make you live longer? | Mail Online

Every 'new' piece of 'research' has to be taken with many bags of salt.

Saw a program a while back stating that dairy will bind the fat taken in - via other foods - preventing it's uptake by the body, instead allowing it to be expelled.

No idea if it's just another piece of marketing.

Many Americans aim to eat low-fat foods but there is strong evidence that replacing fat with carbohydrates could be harmful to health, according to nutrition experts at the ADA conference in Boston last week.



Recommendations to reduce saturated fat intake are largely based on the notion that high levels increase risk of cardiovascular disease, but unless saturated fat is replaced with other fats, many studies have suggested that fat reduction could increase risk of heart disease.

During a symposium called “The Great Fat Debate: Is There Validity In the Age-Old Dietary Guidance?” at the American Dietetic Association’s (ADA) Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo,four leading experts presented evidence suggesting that low fat diets may be less healthy than those containing at least a moderate amount of fat. In particular, all four agreed that replacing saturated fat with carbohydrates – as has been widely recommended in the United States – is likely to raise the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The low fat message

Director of the cardiovascular health laboratory at Tufts University Dr. Alice Lichtenstein said dietary advice to adhere to a low fat diet is based on an oversimplification of recommendations.

“The emphasis should be on displacing saturated fat and trans fat with unsaturated fat because that is where the data is,” she said. “…‘Displace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat’ was simplified to ‘low fat’. Then ‘low fat’ became ‘low calorie’. The low fat message is still very pervasive, especially in the lay press.”

‘Massive distraction’

Chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department Dr. Walter Willett takes this even further.

“If anything, the literature shows a slight advantage of the high fat diet,” he said. “The focus on fat in dietary guidelines has been a massive distraction…We should remove total fat from nutrition facts panels on the back of packs.”

He added that while the pervasive dietary guidance given to consumers has been to eat fats sparingly, to load up on starch and eat non-fat products, “the food industry quickly realized sugar was cheaper than fat and laughed all the way to the bank.”


Low fat diets could increase heart disease risk, say nutrition experts

An article that states a ketone inducing diet (ie. low carb at Atkins induction level) is the best option for some diabetes patients, beating drugs, and may also reduce cancers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/ma...nted=1&_r=1&hp

With a federal court overturning Ohio's ban on 'rBGH-free' labels on dairy products, raw dairy producers and consumers can again bask in new hope. This ruling means that companies that want to clearly state that their products are "rBGH free," "rBST free," or "artificial hormone free" are now allowed to do so.

This federal verdict opens the door not only to use rBGH-free labels; it also opens the back door, so to speak, for consumer groups to push for labeling of NON-GM salmon, should the FDA again decide the altered salmon does not need to carry a GM label.

The recombinant (genetically engineered) bovine growth hormone (rBGH), is used to significantly increase milk production in cows. Treated cows can produce as much as 15-25 percent more milk.One 1998 survey by Family Farm Defenders found that mortality rates for rBGH-injected cows on factory dairy farms in Wisconsin were about 40 percent per year. In other words, after two and a half years of rBGH injections most of these drugged and supercharged cows were dead. The typical lifespan of a happy, healthy dairy cow (read: organically-raised) is 15 to 20 years.

Monsanto does not have to declare the use of rBGH due to an FSA ruling, with several FSA decision makers being ex employees of Monsanto. They had been trying to prevent other companies advertising their products as rBGH free, but the whole case could now backfire on them.

Full article here: Finally Huge Victory Against Monsanto Milk

PS. I think this thread fits more into Health, Fitness and Hospitals in Thailand - TeakDoor.com - The Thailand Forum rather than The Kitchen, can it be moved please?

I initially thought that fish oil supplements were good for you as the ratio of omega-6 and omega-3 intake is supposed to be important. A ratio of 1:1 is good, a typical American ratio is 30:1 because of all the corn oil and grain fed cattle.

This article explains that oxidized omega-3 is dangerous in the longer term and that fish oil is a highly unstable oil which oxidizes very easily.

It cites lots of research showing the harmful effects but fish oil has become a multi-billion dollar industry so it is heavily promoted for the short term anti-inflammatory benefits.

Full article here: The Great Fish Oil Experiment

From Zeroing In On Health – The Blog!


Many people find it hard to believe that most of us on all-meat diets do not use vitamins or supplements of any kind. I find the notion that one can get complete nutrition from pills to be utterly absurd. And further, the idea that food needs supplementation is even more absurd than the first. Food did a good job on its on for millions of years before the creation of these synthetic and so-called “natural” concoctions.
As is so common in the medical industry, the medical community comes up with a hypothesis that they believe will save lives. They propose a study and the National Institutes of Health puts it on. Unfortunately, the studies take several years to complete. In the interim, the zeal of the medical practitioners take hold and they begin to recommend the intervention long before the study results come out. Once they come out, they generally show no benefit from the proposed intervention. Such is the case here, according to a new report by a panel of experts at the prestigious Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences. They have reported that there’s no proof that megadoses of the “sunshine vitamin” prevent cancer, diabetes or other conditions.
While some people will need a bit more vitamin D than they’re already getting, some studies suggest that too much could actually cause some kinds of cancer.
In typical fashion, the medical experts examine the vitamin levels of healthy individuals and then, without evidence, assume that a person with a lower level should supplement to achieve the health and levels of the healthy person. There is no proof that this is the case.
There is a very dangerous and foolish notion out there that we humans scour the earth looking for the latest and greatest nutrients when in fact, this is not the case. Our bodies are able to synthesize whatever they need, even though they are not included in the diet. For example, I am not deficient in vitamin C even though there is no obvious source of it in my diet.
There are several fundamental truths that need to be understood. First, dietary fat does NOT significantly affect fat in the body. Dietary cholesterol does NOT significantly affect cholesterol in the body. Dietary salt does not significantly affect body sodium content. And finally, dietary nutrients do NOT significantly affect the levels of nutrients in the body. These nutrient levels are regulated by the body and attempts to influence these levels only go so far, often with diminishing returns.
Carbohydrates affect the body’s ability to regulate and synthesize these nutrients. Indeed, they cause the body to lose nutrients as is widely known, thus the recommendation for vitamin supplementation to begin with. If you stop eating carbohydrates, you will have no need for supplementation.
Vitamin D is the latest supplement to have been heavily touted based on animal studies and observations in humans and failed to live up to expectations during rigorous testing. For example, vitamins C and E, beta carotene and lycopene were believed to prevent cancer or heart disease, but didn’t pan out, and sometimes caused harm, when tested.
Stay tuned: To help settle the issue, a government-funded study will recruit 20,000 healthy older Americans to test whether taking 2,000 IUs of vitamin D really will lower their risk for heart disease, a stroke or certain cancers.
As hard as it is to wait for the results, they really should prior to advising people to take these vitamins. Many foods are already “fortified” with these vitamins so it’s difficult to monitor how much vitamin D is already being ingested. Going into the study, many people already believe that the study will merely back up what they already believe. That is not science. Science is not about confirmation; rather, it’s about proving or disproving a hypothesis and no action should be taken until the results are in.
Preventive medicine is a fool’s paradise especially when they have no idea how to cure the maladies in question. Their assessment of risk really has no meaning since it clearly does not protect from the disease. Just because a person skips the disease, that doesn’t mean they won’t get something else within the parameters of metabolic syndrome. This should not surprise anyone who has studied what happens when an isolated population undergoes a nutrition transition.
Once they are exposed to Western foods, the diseases of civilization all appear at the same time. But not everyone comes down with the same thing. Some get cancer, some get diabetes, some get fat, some get Alzheimer’s, etc. So the risk factors are irrelevant. Metabolic syndrome has but one risk factor and that is, whether or not a person eats carbohydrates at a rate of over 70 pounds per year, which is extremely easy to do.

Just take yabba and go to walking street everynight !

From Gary Taubes, the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories:

My new book is coming out at the end of the month. It’s called Why We Get Fat and the subtitle is What To Do About it. The book concentrates more on the first because once you understand why we get fat, the what to do about it part is pretty obvious. And the problem is that the conventional wisdom on why we get fat is almost incomprehensibly naïve and wrong-headed.
My goals in writing the book, as I explain in an author’s letter, are to push the issue (I keep wanting to use the cliché, “throw down the gauntlet,” but as I get older I notice I keep wanting to use more and more clichés, and it’s a bad sign for a writer) on this nonsensical notion that we get fat because of overeating and sedentary behavior, and to distill down and extend some of the arguments from my previous book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, into a book that can easily be airplane reading on any flight covering more than one time zone.
In this blog, if it goes as planned, I hope to ask questions as much as provide answers. Over the past decade, as I’ve read more than a century’s worth of literature on obesity and nutrition and chronic disease, I’ve been consistently amazed at the ability of researchers, learned commentators (and the far greater ranks of unlearned commentators), physicians and public health authorities to accept some of the rote ideas about these excruciatingly important subjects without seemingly giving it any conscious thought whatsoever, or without wanting to ask the kinds of questions that a reasonably smart junior high school student should ask if given the opportunity. To this date, I don’t understand this failure of intellect, although I’ll almost assuredly be returning to it regularly in future blogs.
So what do I mean about overeating being a nonsensical explanations for why we get fat? I was just reading Jonah Lehrer’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal–“The Real Culprit in Overeating.”
Now Lehrer is one of the most talented science writers working today. I’m tempted to say one of the brightest young science writers, but that would be to do him a disservice. He’s as good as any of us at any age. But in this column he falls short, as he’s working outside his area of expertise. (A common problem with most science and health writers is that we often write about a different subject every week or month, so if we’re being fed nonsense by the local experts in any particular field we will typically pass that nonsense along to the readers because we don’t know enough not do otherwise.) The underlying assumption of Lehrer’s column is that we get obese because we overeat, and evidence of the fact that Americans eat too much is that a third of us are obese. Okay, so let’s take a look at this concept from a less than conventional perspective and see what questions we might naturally ask.
First, obese people tend to be weight stable for long periods of their life, just like lean people. So when they’re weight stable, the obese and overweight are obviously in energy balance. They’re not overeating during these periods of stable weight. They’re eating to match their expenditure, doing exactly what the lean do (and get copious credit for). So one obvious question is why the overweight and obese are only in energy balance when they’re carrying 10, 20, 30 or maybe 100 pounds of excess fat, and lean people are in energy balance without the excess? What’s the culprit for that? Because the problem isn’t that the obese overeat when they’re obese, it’s that they overeat when they’re lean and they continue to overeat until they become obese.
Second, let’s say you’re carrying around 40 pounds of excess fat and you put on that 40 pounds over the course of 20 years, as many of us do. When you’re in your late 20s, say, you’re still lean, and then, lo and behold, you celebrate your fiftieth birthday and you’re obese and your doctor is lecturing you on eating less and getting to the gym regularly (and probably writing you a prescription for Lipitor, as well). Now, if you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every two years. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned – roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called “The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.”)
So now the question: if all you have to do to become obese is store 20 extra calories each day on average in your fat tissue — 20 calories that you don’t mobilize and burn — what does overeating have to do with it? And why aren’t we all fat? Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, a swallow or two of soda or fruit juice or milk or beer. It is an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, but to store as fat instead. Does anyone – even Jonah Lehrer or the neuroscientists he consults – think that the brain, perhaps in cohort with the gut, is making decisions about how much we should eat, on how long we stay hungry and when we get full, so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent. (We consume, on average, about 2700 calories a day, so matching energy in to energy out and not overshooting by 20 calories requires better than one percent accuracy.) And, of course, if we only overshoot by ten calories a day on average, we’re still going to put on 20 pounds of excess fat in 20 years. So really when we talk about being in energy balance – or practicing energy balance, as the experts now like to say – we actually have to be perfect in our matching of intake to expenditure or we’re going to get inexorably fatter (or leaner, if we err on the side of going hungry), or at least we have to average perfection over decades.
One way to get around this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on end and then we realize we’ve put on five or ten pounds – maybe our clothes no longer fit well or we’ve had to let out the belt a notch or two – and then we decide to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it. So now we walk away from the table hungry until all is back to leanness. But then how do animals do it? They don’t have mirrors or clothes to tell them they’re getting fat, and the world is full of animals that have plenty of food available all year round, plenty of opportunity to overeat if they want to and do so long enough to get chubby. And yet the only animals that get chronically obese are those that get their food directly from humans – in the laboratory, in the home or the zoo, or at the dinner table, since humans happen to be animals, too.
Considering the fact that not getting fatter year in and year out means literally matching energy in to energy expended without error for years on end, do we really think that this job is done by the brain, by either conscious behavior, or some system that listens to signals from the body and then puts a halt on eating behavior when it decides enough food has come in that the amount so far expended or likely to be expended in the near future is about to be exceeded? Here’s the idea: your gut is sending signals to this monitoring system in the brain and that monitoring system is tallying up calories consumed until it finally senses that it’s near the limit of intake. Uh oh, it’s thinking, that last bite of that hamburger is not going to be expended, abort abort! Put down the fork! Walk away from the table!
If you were designing an organism that didn’t accumulate excess fat in the fat tissue (in other words, any organism that isn’t human or isn’t getting fed by humans, directly or indirectly) would you leave it up to a different organ entirely, an organ off-site so to speak (the brain), to assure that calories consumed matched calories expended, so that no excess energy managed to somehow sneak into the fat tissue, without the fat tissue having any say in the matter? Or would you give the regulation to the fat tissue itself and let it do the job?
The reason people believe we get fat because of overeating and sedentary behavior is because they believe the laws of thermodynamics somehow dictate this to be true. In particular the first law, which tells us that energy is conserved, so if a system takes in more energy than it expends, the energy contained in the system has to increase. If that system happens to be our fat tissue, than the fat tissue accumulates fat. That’s the logic. So if we eat more than we expend, we get fatter and the logic turns this around to say that we get fat because we eat more than we expend. And so, overeating and sedentary behavior are the causes. This is the logic that leads virtually every government health agency and independent health organization (the AHA, the AMA, you name it) to have some variation of this World Health Organization statement on its website or in its promotional material: “The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed on one hand, and calories expended on the other hand.”
But now imagine that instead of talking about why we get fat, we’re talking about a different system entirely. This kind of gedanken (thought) experiment is always a good way to examine the viability of your assumptions about any particular problem. Say instead of talking about why fat tissue accumulates too much energy, we want to know why a particular restaurant gets so crowded. Now the energy we’re talking about is contained in entire people rather than just the fat in their fat tissue. Ten people contain so much energy; eleven people contain more, etc.. So what we want to know is why this restaurant is crowded and so over-stuffed with energy (i.e., people) and maybe why some other restaurant down the block has remained relatively empty — lean.
If you asked me this question — why did this restaurant get crowded? — and I said, well, the restaurant got crowded (it got overstuffed with energy) because more people entered the restaurant than left it, you’d probably think I was being a wise guy or an idiot. (If I worked for the World Health Organization, I’d tell you that “the fundamental cause of the crowded restaurant is an energy imbalance between people entering on one hand, and people exiting on the other hand.”) Of course, more people entered than left, you’d say. That’s obvious. But why? And, in fact, saying that a restaurant gets crowded because more people are entering than leaving it is redundant –saying the same thing in two different ways – and so meaningless.
Now, borrowing the logic of the conventional wisdom of obesity, I want to clarify this point. So I say, listen, those restaurants that have more people enter them then leave them will become more crowded. There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics. You’d still say, yes, but so what? Or at least I hope you would, because I still haven’t given you any causal information. I’m just repeating the obvious.
This is what happens when the laws of physics (thermodynamics) are used to defend the belief that overeating makes us fat. Thermodynamics tells us that if we get fatter and heavier, more energy enters our body than leaves it. Overeating means we’re consuming more energy than we’re expending. It’s saying the same thing in a different way. (In 1954, the soon-to-be-famous — and often misguided, although not in this case — nutritionist Jean Mayer said that to explain obesity by overeating was about as meaningful as explaining alcoholism by overdrinking, and merely reaffirmed, quite unnecessarily, the fact that the person saying it believed in the laws of thermodynamics.) Neither happens to answer the question why. Why do we take in more energy than we expend? Why do we get fatter?
Answering the “why” question speaks to actual causes. In the restaurant analogy, okay, maybe this restaurant has particularly great food, or it’s happy hour; the drinks are cheap. Maybe it’s pouring outside so a lot of people ran into the restaurant to stay dry. Maybe every other restaurant in the neighborhood, including our lean restaurant down the block, was recently closed by the local health bureau and this is the only one that didn’t have cockroaches in the kitchen and so remained open. Maybe it’s in the theater district and the shows just got out and now every restaurant in the neighborhood is packed with the post-theater crowd. Maybe the word has spread that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie frequent this restaurant regularly, or Oprah, and this attracted a crowd hoping for a glimpse of celebrity.
All these would be valid answers to the question we asked. Some speak to the conditions inside the restaurant (the quality of the food, the price of the drinks, celebrity customers); some speak to conditions immediately outside (a rain storm, no competition, the theater schedule). They all provide the causal information we’re seeking. They answer the “why” question. That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t.
Some obesity experts are intuitively aware of this problem, which is why they’ll say, as the National Institutes of Health does on its website, that “Obesity occurs when a person consumes more calories from food than he or she burns.” By using the word occurs, they’re not actually saying that overeating is the cause, only a necessary condition. (It’s like saying “a crowded restaurant occurs when more people enter than leave.”) They’re just saying that when one thing happened – obesity –the other thing also happened – consuming more calories from food than we expend. And now it’s up to us to say, okay, so what? Aren’t you going to tell us why obesity occurs? Rather than tell us what else happens when it does occur.
As for the great majority of experts who say (and apparently believe) that we get fat because we overeat or we get fat as a result of overeating, they’re the ones making the junior-high-school-science-class mistake: they’re taking a law of nature that says absolutely nothing about why we get fat and assuming it says all that needs to be said. This was a common error in the first half of the 20th century. It’s become ubiquitous since.
If the experts had ever been open to a little skeptical thinking from others or had they been appropriately skeptical themselves, this might never have happened. What’s been needed (and still is) was for someone (a reasonably smart 14-year-old would suffice) to ask the obvious questions and then insist on intelligent answers. Here’s how such a dialog might go:
The experts: Obesity is caused by over-eating, by consuming more calories than are expended. There’s no getting around the first law of thermodynamics.
Us: But all that law says is that if somebody gets fat, they have to consume more calories then they expend. So why do they do that?
The experts: Because they do.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer.
The experts: Well, maybe they can’t help themselves.
Us: Why can’t they help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer either.
The experts: Because the food industry makes them do it. There’s so much good food around and it’s so tasty, they can’t help but eat it.
Us: But obviously some of us can, because we don’t all get fat. Why is it only some people can’t help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: Try again.
The experts: Well, it’s complicated.
Us: What do you mean complicated? We thought it was easy. Just this eating-too-much, exercising-too-little, calories-in-calories-out, thermodynamics thing.
The experts: Okay, how about this? [Now quoting from an NIH report published in 2000.] “Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from an interaction of genotype and the environment. Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”
Us: So what do all those have to do with eating too much and the laws of thermodynamics?
Experts: They contribute to making fat people overeat.
Us: How do they do that?
The experts: We don’t know. It’s complicated.
Us: Then maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear — to you anyway — to be kind of lazy. We’re compensating for the loss of calories into our fat.
The experts: Yeah, well, maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.


from his blog: The Inanity of Overeating | Gary Taubes

I'm pretty much with MtheD on this - keep it natural as much as possible. Nobody in my family is or has ever been overweight, so nobody has ever tried a diet. But, just in the interest of eating healthy food that tastes good, we stay away from processed food. My wife makes pasta, pizza, bread and cakes for the kids, we grow most of our own vegetables, her brothers send up huge ice chests full of fresh fish, squid, shells and crabs by bus every few weeks, and pork and chicken are straight from the farms a few miles down the road. We eat almost no beef, other than occasionally splurging on an Aussie roast beef from the deli when I get the urge. Keep the kids away from fast food. Drink lots of water and quality booze. Seems to work pretty well. Don't even have to work very hard to keep the twins away from the fast food joints, as they have never really acquired a taste for the stuff that passes for food in them. If they do go to one, they almost always order chicken and rice (their choice) rather than burgers and fries. Almost forgot, keeping up a good exercise regime is extremely important.

I have diabetes and heart problems. About 18 years ago I had a double by pass. Why? All of my life I had lived in the USA and except for the last five years there I ate an American Diet. A good way to kill yourself. For the last 20 years I have been eating only steamed or raw vegetables. Limited amounts of fruit because of sugar content and fish. No salt, msg, oil (except for small amts of olive oil]. I do eat small amounts of chicken but no pork, beef, shell fish. I only drink water and no smoking. I feel great at 72 and am planning on making it to 105. As Davis Knowlton said in the above post, eat fresh health food. Forget diets and fads.

^^^
Sounds like your really living a healthy and balanced life,Fair play to you.
I quit smoking over a month ago and have increased excercise to everyday and have never felt healthier by eating all the local sea food.

Im guessing your choice of only drinking water is health related but do you ever crave a beer or whatever your previous tipple was ? I think what you have done
in regards to lifestyle of great but I think I would go crazy knowing I could not
have some Jack Daniels at the weekend.

Originally Posted by KOBRIEN

^^^
Sounds like your really living a healthy and balanced life,Fair play to you.
I quit smoking over a month ago and have increased excercise to everyday and have never felt healthier by eating all the local sea food.

Im guessing your choice of only drinking water is health related but do you ever crave a beer or whatever your previous tipple was ? I think what you have done
in regards to lifestyle of great but I think I would go crazy knowing I could not
have some Jack Daniels at the weekend.

I was never much of a drinker as I was raised by an alcoholic father. However I did drink some. About age 35 I just decided to quite altogether. None since. No I never craved it, I just drank when young to go along with the crowd. I can't do rough hard exercise/sports any longer but I do some in slow motion to keep limbered up and for light exercise. When younger I would rather play judo or karate then eat. One thing I do crave since becoming diabetic is ICE CREAM. BEST FOOD IN THE WORLD. BUT, I can no longer eat it or my sugar level goes thru the roof.

Ah man your not even aloud ice cream.... My heart goes out to ya ! Im 29 and had been on the smokes for 15 years and thought id never pack them in but the Allen Carr book really did the trick.

I just cant imagine a world were I was not drinking atleast once a week,I need some vices but im sure if I quit the drinking aswell my life would be better for it.

Without sounding like im taking the mick what do you do for fun with these restrictions to your diet ?

And what were the the effects on your body once you stopped drinking ? (apart from no hangovers)

Originally Posted by BigRed

From Gary Taubes, the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories:

Good read, thanks. But really it does not say much with so many words.

At least part of the root cause must be the easy availability of food while our consumption through manual exercise was reduced.

I also do not see processed food bad for health as such. It just often contains more calories than we anticipate and contributes to weight gain this way.

I do agree though that the emphasis on reducing fat may be wrong, for some if not all people.
My own experience was ever increasing speed of weight gain despite best efforts on reducing fat. I finally was able to control and at least partly reverse the weight gain without going hugry by introducing more fat and reducing carbo hydrates along with more exercise. No idea if the same would work for all, works for me.

Originally Posted by BigRed

Food did a good job on its on for millions of years before the creation of these synthetic and so-called “natural” concoctions.

I really don't like that argument and disagree. For millions of years we were mostly living only 40 to 50 years if that long.

Originally Posted by Takeovers

I really don't like that argument and disagree. For millions of years we were mostly living only 40 to 50 years if that long.

There is no reliable measure of that. Age is normally estimated by bone density, but this is less accurate in adults than it is in children and relies a lot on external factors. A lack of vitamin D causes density to reduce but hunter-gatherers would be exposed to much more sunlight than modern man and thus ensure sufficient vitamin D. There is an argument that if you look at modern isolated tribes they can be expected to match the life expectancy of the cavemen. This research paper does just that, but it's heavy going:
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gur...lan2007pdr.pdf

In summary, they find that once you remove factors such as battle wounds and infectious respiratory diseases such as pneumonia they have an average life expectancy of 72. This is despite not having access to the modern medicines such as statins, insulin, antibiotics, antihistamines etc. In the middle ages the life expectancy plummeted to around the figures you quote. This could be because of increased exposure to contagious diseases as the population grew or because of the change of diet from being primarily meat to relying on grains.

Just arguing the point here, I'm not entrenched in my views, just looking at the other side of the argument.

As other people have said, stick to home grown food, ignore all the propaganda from the big agricultural groups. Humans have lived on saturated fat from animals, meat and vegetables for 1000s of years, grain is relatively recent and is proving to be a long term health risk, sugars are acknowledged by all sides as being bad but are still being added to everything to substitute flavour lost by removing the fat.

Hi BigRed

Agree, just arguing, no problems.

You made an interesting point about life expectancy. I have not yet read the article in your link. As I understand it refers to hunter-gatherers. True they did not have grains and limited root crops. But grain cultivation started with the switch to the agricultural society. That would be 10000 years ago in the Middle East and 7000 years ago in Europe. That would be recent in the total history of man, for me a long time ago.



But even with agriculture and food storage for winter in the european climate the foodsupply during winter was poor in quality and quantity reducing the average life span for the average people. I believe better availability and quality of food plays a major role in the recent increase of our life span.

Originally Posted by BigRed

sugars are acknowledged by all sides as being bad but are still being added to everything to substitute flavour lost by removing the fat.

Totally agree with this. The advertising of low fat processed food with increased sugar is bad. I am glad the EU is now advocating a clear declaration of contents for food where you can see what you get. Consumer groups favor a green/yellow/red labeling instead, assuming (maybe correctly) that the consumer is too stupid to read.

I'm pretty impressed by this acid/ alkaline balance stuff when it comes to diet, but at the end of the day it tells you pretty much the same as dear old Mum. Eat more veges.

The less added sugar you consume, the better. From diabetes to cancer to obesity, refined sugar is heavily implicated in most of the western worlds dietary and health problems.

Although sugar is bad, HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is even worse. See Princeton University - A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
and Missing link between fructose, insulin resistance found and http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/r...ngPotFeb09.pdf
These basically say that HFCS is alien to the body and so promote generation of fat without kicking in the regulators that detect high calorie consumption.

Originally Posted by BigRed

HFCS is alien to the body

Fructose is not alien to the body. It is contained in fruit and very much in honey. Making it from corn instead using honey does not make it different.

By that I don't mean to say using fructose is ok, there is plenty of evidence it is not. But that means replacing sugar with honey is a bad idea healthwise.

I was commenting on High Fructose Corn Syrup, not fructose itself. From the first link I provided:

High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are both compounds that contain the simple sugars fructose and glucose, but there at least two clear differences between them. First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars -- it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose -- but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.