well I didn't understand any of that but you sound like you know what you're talking about and you used to be pre-med so I'll forget about the cardiac catheterwhatsit and just ask you if you're just waking up or what. a good night's sleep has got to be important too johnny
Had a heart attack yesterday, other than that happy new year
- Thread starter Rakesh Jacob
- Start date
Rakesh Jacob
Veteran
Thnx, yeah I have three cats and one of them insists I'm awake when he is and usually gets me up around 3-4am. Of course he goes back to sleep by 5 (a--hole)Given my situation I'm gonna try to start going to bed by 9p, maybe 8 if I'm feeling low.
Last edited:
Rakesh Jacob
Veteran
No more meat or dairy! Matter of fact I'm almost vegan, there are a couple things that have milk products in them like the bread I have, but I'll find substitutes soon.
After a couple of months, when I feel I'm "out of the woods" and feeling stronger, I'll probably relax and just focus on being a vegetarian and not get bent out of shape if there's a dairy product here or there but definitely not part of my regular diet.
After a couple of months, when I feel I'm "out of the woods" and feeling stronger, I'll probably relax and just focus on being a vegetarian and not get bent out of shape if there's a dairy product here or there but definitely not part of my regular diet.
Nitsuj
Well-known member
I see you are going to exercise and eat healthy. A little over a year ago me and friends from work decided to do a weight loss competition. We were all computer geeks sitting at our desks all day and had put on a lot of weight. The goal was to see who would lose the most in 18 weeks. All the losers had to get a mohawk. Only 3 people did it because I think they were afraid of the hawk. Well I found this site about this guy named John Stone. His entire life change is in that site.
I decided that I was going to follow exactly what he did and see where it lands me.
http://johnstonefitness.com/
When the competition started I just changed my eating habits and was going to the gym every day after or before work. I had a YMCA right next to my building and that is where I was every day religiously.
I can't recommend enough just following his eating habits and workout plans just to get you started. I eventually got my own workout plans. I even did Bruce Lee's workout plan there for a while and then went on over to Brad Pitt's plan when he did Fight Club. It was tough but I just wanted to win.
After 18 weeks, 32 lbs lighter, I ended up with a mohawk believe it or not. But I learned how to do it and that guy inspired me. But over all that year I lost 47 lbs. That is me on the right.
You can do it.
I decided that I was going to follow exactly what he did and see where it lands me.
http://johnstonefitness.com/
When the competition started I just changed my eating habits and was going to the gym every day after or before work. I had a YMCA right next to my building and that is where I was every day religiously.
I can't recommend enough just following his eating habits and workout plans just to get you started. I eventually got my own workout plans. I even did Bruce Lee's workout plan there for a while and then went on over to Brad Pitt's plan when he did Fight Club. It was tough but I just wanted to win.
After 18 weeks, 32 lbs lighter, I ended up with a mohawk believe it or not. But I learned how to do it and that guy inspired me. But over all that year I lost 47 lbs. That is me on the right.
You can do it.
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
A natural die is a huge subject, but I haven't read a study that proves meat consumption will damage your health. But everything I have read on dairy points to the direction that it's not good food for grown ups and we know for sure too much sugar will damage our health.
In my mind, a natural diet is the diet our species evolved with and in this part of the world this means a few simple things: Lots of fruit (not the most recent versions that are modified or ultra sweet exotic fruit from other parts of the world), seeds of all sorts, some vegetable, some meat, some eggs, zero dairy.
And it makes sense really. There is no way adults or even kids were having any milk or dairy 20,000 years ago, we didn't have modesticated animals. There is no way their diet had so much sugar/carbohydrates besides fruit also, because those were recently introduced (10,000 years perhaps, that's when agricultural communities probably appeared in the medditeranean) and those were ultra primitive forms which were probably far better that what we have today. With agriculture, we stopped gathering fruit and depended more on things we grew ourselves. We started substituting good fruit. Technological progress in processing the grains probably led to too much starch with too low fiber. We substituted excellent carbohydrates with far inferior types. With animal domestication we found a rich source of food (milk) and people started substituting meat with milk and dairy. Judging by the change in the taste of fruit in the past 100 years, even the fruit we eat today is probably too sweet compared to what we gathered in the past. So, our favourite bread + milk is a very recent introduction to our diet. And for this part of the world, stuff some people eat everyday came here only a couple of centuries ago (potatoes, corn consumption, etc). In the 20th century we also added very unnatural sources of fat (margarines) and hundreds of new incredients (preservatives, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavours etc). We are talking stuff entirely alien to the diet of any animal.
The lack of seeds is probably the most important change in the modern diet (besides the sugar content). We certainly got lots of seeds in the past and I'm not sure some modern sweet almonds and olive oil can make up for the lack of those. How often do we eat lentiles and bitter almonds?
And what was the healthy lifestyle in these parts of the world? Gathering fruit and seeds for an hour a day or so (walking with weight for bringing food to other members of the community), some running a couple of times a week (hunting), some climbing (get some eggs, some seeds (rare) and fruit), and that's it. It was certainly not a daily 20km running routine or any intense labour (such as that we get in agriculture). A long walk down the grocery store on foot to gather fruit and vegetable and a visit to the butcher cover the everyday exercise. We can cover the climbing and running by going to the gym two days a week and that's it really.
We have evidence that the human system can take much abuse of modern diet even though it didn't have enough time to evolve around that. There is major statistical evidence that as long as you eat unprocessed food and get regular exercise, fruit, vegetable, meat, olive oil, pulses you will probably leave to be 90 even though your have high sugar and dairy content in your diet. And in many communities, the data is similar even though they use real butter and others animal fats instead of olive oil. It puzzles me how people can still consider meat consumption and animal fat a bad thing. We have been complementing our diet with that for far too long and lack of meat will require major modifications to a diet to compensate, still leaving useful incrediets outside.
In my mind, a natural diet is the diet our species evolved with and in this part of the world this means a few simple things: Lots of fruit (not the most recent versions that are modified or ultra sweet exotic fruit from other parts of the world), seeds of all sorts, some vegetable, some meat, some eggs, zero dairy.
And it makes sense really. There is no way adults or even kids were having any milk or dairy 20,000 years ago, we didn't have modesticated animals. There is no way their diet had so much sugar/carbohydrates besides fruit also, because those were recently introduced (10,000 years perhaps, that's when agricultural communities probably appeared in the medditeranean) and those were ultra primitive forms which were probably far better that what we have today. With agriculture, we stopped gathering fruit and depended more on things we grew ourselves. We started substituting good fruit. Technological progress in processing the grains probably led to too much starch with too low fiber. We substituted excellent carbohydrates with far inferior types. With animal domestication we found a rich source of food (milk) and people started substituting meat with milk and dairy. Judging by the change in the taste of fruit in the past 100 years, even the fruit we eat today is probably too sweet compared to what we gathered in the past. So, our favourite bread + milk is a very recent introduction to our diet. And for this part of the world, stuff some people eat everyday came here only a couple of centuries ago (potatoes, corn consumption, etc). In the 20th century we also added very unnatural sources of fat (margarines) and hundreds of new incredients (preservatives, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavours etc). We are talking stuff entirely alien to the diet of any animal.
The lack of seeds is probably the most important change in the modern diet (besides the sugar content). We certainly got lots of seeds in the past and I'm not sure some modern sweet almonds and olive oil can make up for the lack of those. How often do we eat lentiles and bitter almonds?
And what was the healthy lifestyle in these parts of the world? Gathering fruit and seeds for an hour a day or so (walking with weight for bringing food to other members of the community), some running a couple of times a week (hunting), some climbing (get some eggs, some seeds (rare) and fruit), and that's it. It was certainly not a daily 20km running routine or any intense labour (such as that we get in agriculture). A long walk down the grocery store on foot to gather fruit and vegetable and a visit to the butcher cover the everyday exercise. We can cover the climbing and running by going to the gym two days a week and that's it really.
We have evidence that the human system can take much abuse of modern diet even though it didn't have enough time to evolve around that. There is major statistical evidence that as long as you eat unprocessed food and get regular exercise, fruit, vegetable, meat, olive oil, pulses you will probably leave to be 90 even though your have high sugar and dairy content in your diet. And in many communities, the data is similar even though they use real butter and others animal fats instead of olive oil. It puzzles me how people can still consider meat consumption and animal fat a bad thing. We have been complementing our diet with that for far too long and lack of meat will require major modifications to a diet to compensate, still leaving useful incrediets outside.
VGurcu
Well-known member
Here is a study found that mortality from coronary heart disease was 24% lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians: (There are lots, you just need to look for them)
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/short/70/3/516S?rss=1&ssource=mfc
They do, not only due to potential health benefits, also for conscious & political & environmental reasons. These 9 pages from Cambridge Journal summarize it:
http://journals.cambridge.org/actio...1320&jid=PHN&volumeId=8&issueId=04&aid=582720
From a nutritional point a balanced meat consumption is not a bad thing at all. Excessive amount of meat consumption is the problem.
The American Heart Association recommends max 138 lbs (62kg) meat per person/a year. It means appr. 175 gr meat a day. A half pounder burger has 227 gr of beef (if you can call it healhty meat) alone.
I personally believe moderate organic meat consumption makes nutritional balance easier for individuals. Also, those who choose to grow their kid vegan, better know what they are doing.
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
Pan metron ariston. Moderation.
With general statistics I can prove that 60yo who like watching TV or practice accounting have inferior health but I can't blame TV or accounting because it's not the actual damaging cause. I don't believe than the average vegetarian has the same lifestyle with your average meat eater. Vegetarians are far more conscious and educated about how they handle their lives. The lifestyle difference alone and other diet based differences that exist between these two groups could contribute to a lot more than 20%. But this is just statistics. Is there a study on the actual mechanism that damages health when you eat meat? I have never found one. Statistics are a cheap substitute for actual scientific cause/effect research but I bet they are cheaper and do not require highly trained personnel.
A reasonable meat eater for me is someone who gets about 200gr of meat/fish in about 5-6 meals a week (speaking from personal calculations and according to local tradition in cooking). This is close to the 175gr figure indeed. But what is meat? Is it real meat or some processed product? Cooking alone can produce damage in many ways and I simply can't believe the stuff they put in prepared meat. Where I grew up, meat was a part of an animal, and in the 70s, the ways the animals were handled were not very different from 4000 years ago. Lots of meat came from small producers in small villages and most of it was not even regulated.
People are scared away from meat. I have talked to many doctors and they get practically thousands of young girls that rarely eat meat as part of their modern diets and believe they can survive on fruits and vegetable. Some avoid it because they connect it to being overweight and some because they think it's generally unhealthy. The result is that many young girls end up taking iron and loosing hair due to lack of amino acids. There is a lot of anti-meat propaganda around for decades, and it makes sense, meat is a very low profit item these days compared to all its "subsitutes" and most of the "healthy" food (with materials are cheap as corn, starch, related industry by-products etc). Olive oil and butter also got hit by propaganda when the very cheap substitutes were introduced and the margarine marketing ended up being embedded in our culture. There are many brands of similar branded fats today, operating on insane margin and promising to do marvelous things for your health.
We should treat food with moderation as you mention and that involves eating some meat. Looking at tradition we can tell that it's an ancient habit. Looking at our body it is easy to tell that the design of our digestive system permits it and probably demands it by its organisation, its size and its chemistry. There is no relation to the digestive system of a plant eating animal and that's easy to tell by the problems a human gets when he starts eating like one.
With general statistics I can prove that 60yo who like watching TV or practice accounting have inferior health but I can't blame TV or accounting because it's not the actual damaging cause. I don't believe than the average vegetarian has the same lifestyle with your average meat eater. Vegetarians are far more conscious and educated about how they handle their lives. The lifestyle difference alone and other diet based differences that exist between these two groups could contribute to a lot more than 20%. But this is just statistics. Is there a study on the actual mechanism that damages health when you eat meat? I have never found one. Statistics are a cheap substitute for actual scientific cause/effect research but I bet they are cheaper and do not require highly trained personnel.
A reasonable meat eater for me is someone who gets about 200gr of meat/fish in about 5-6 meals a week (speaking from personal calculations and according to local tradition in cooking). This is close to the 175gr figure indeed. But what is meat? Is it real meat or some processed product? Cooking alone can produce damage in many ways and I simply can't believe the stuff they put in prepared meat. Where I grew up, meat was a part of an animal, and in the 70s, the ways the animals were handled were not very different from 4000 years ago. Lots of meat came from small producers in small villages and most of it was not even regulated.
People are scared away from meat. I have talked to many doctors and they get practically thousands of young girls that rarely eat meat as part of their modern diets and believe they can survive on fruits and vegetable. Some avoid it because they connect it to being overweight and some because they think it's generally unhealthy. The result is that many young girls end up taking iron and loosing hair due to lack of amino acids. There is a lot of anti-meat propaganda around for decades, and it makes sense, meat is a very low profit item these days compared to all its "subsitutes" and most of the "healthy" food (with materials are cheap as corn, starch, related industry by-products etc). Olive oil and butter also got hit by propaganda when the very cheap substitutes were introduced and the margarine marketing ended up being embedded in our culture. There are many brands of similar branded fats today, operating on insane margin and promising to do marvelous things for your health.
We should treat food with moderation as you mention and that involves eating some meat. Looking at tradition we can tell that it's an ancient habit. Looking at our body it is easy to tell that the design of our digestive system permits it and probably demands it by its organisation, its size and its chemistry. There is no relation to the digestive system of a plant eating animal and that's easy to tell by the problems a human gets when he starts eating like one.
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
Search on this:
A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009
EDIT: http://www.dcscience.net/mente-aim-2009.pdf
146 studies and 43 trials. No proven relation of saturated fat and meat consumption to heart problems. The only studies that reached that conclusion also changed other major contributing factors when reducing the consumption so their cause/effect relation was flawed.
http://www.drbriffa.com/blog/2009/0...urated-fat-causes-heart-disease-its-official/
etc etc
EDIT: THis must be the largest systematic I have ever seen. Results from decades of studies and trials. Considering the years and years of recommendations that did not have any hard scientific facts behind them where does that leave us? They changed the entire food industry and the way we eat within only 50 years, they eliminated the profitability in some food sectors, and made some new products insanely proftable. Even if we assume that it was not an organised marketing effort (there is evidence for that), it certainly cost lives.
The choresterol reducing margarines (unsaturated fats) are known to be damaging by many studies and they are marketed for the health effect they have.
People still blame the meat in the burger and not the tons of sugar that come with its additives, the high glycaemic index french fries, the fats used for cooking them, the colas and the low quality bread that surrounds the burger. Even thought many studies have proven the opposite.
A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009
EDIT: http://www.dcscience.net/mente-aim-2009.pdf
146 studies and 43 trials. No proven relation of saturated fat and meat consumption to heart problems. The only studies that reached that conclusion also changed other major contributing factors when reducing the consumption so their cause/effect relation was flawed.
http://www.drbriffa.com/blog/2009/0...urated-fat-causes-heart-disease-its-official/
etc etc
EDIT: THis must be the largest systematic I have ever seen. Results from decades of studies and trials. Considering the years and years of recommendations that did not have any hard scientific facts behind them where does that leave us? They changed the entire food industry and the way we eat within only 50 years, they eliminated the profitability in some food sectors, and made some new products insanely proftable. Even if we assume that it was not an organised marketing effort (there is evidence for that), it certainly cost lives.
The choresterol reducing margarines (unsaturated fats) are known to be damaging by many studies and they are marketed for the health effect they have.
People still blame the meat in the burger and not the tons of sugar that come with its additives, the high glycaemic index french fries, the fats used for cooking them, the colas and the low quality bread that surrounds the burger. Even thought many studies have proven the opposite.
Last edited:
VGurcu
Well-known member
I have to say that the study is impressive in its scope and coverage. To be honest I usually take the medicinal 'epidemiological' & 'Randomized controlled trials' with a grain of salt. I became aware of the flaws in the 'Seven Countries study' while reading about cholesterol. I wish there were similar systematic evaluation of other medicinal studies, especially on vaccines.
Anyway lets leave all the theory aside and look at the mechanics of the meat digestion to be able to explain the benefits of a diet that is based on more vegetables (not that I know much):
Basically digestion of meat has a heavier taxation on the entire digestive system:
-Amount of stomach acid needed doesn't go well with the alkaline-based digestive system of humans.
-It stays longer in the intestines.
-A byproduct of excess protein digestion is uric acid, which may have negative effect on the kidneys already overloaded with filtering ton of chemicals, additives etc.
-I am not even going into antibiotics & growth hormones in the meat, its effect on the body etc...
So try to eat healthy meat, I suggest eating fish(not farmed) twice a week. We are pretty much on the same page; it is all about balance & moderation.
Jason Ramsey
Admin
Haven't read that link yet so i won't comment on it, but it did spark a little thought. I would suggest that in general "vegans" are more health conscious demographic of people than non-vegans are going to be as an entire demographic. Being a vegan is generally a conscious choice people make and they are focused on trying to eat and behave in a way that would promote a healthy lifestyle (use the word in general b/c I recognize that for some people it's not a health decision at all, but a moral one). Non-vegans can include a very wide range of people from not health-conscious at all, to very health conscious and everywhere in between. I don't really know any vegans who don't pay attention to what they eat, don't exercise, etc, etc... So, I think there might be a bit of built-in "bias", if you will, when it comes to comparing vegans to non-vegans in that vegans are generally going to be a health conscious group of people who take steps to try to ensure a healthy lifestyle. "Non-Vegans" could cover a very wide range of people. I'd be more interested in seeing a small group of people take otherwise identical lifestyle choices in terms of "healthy" eating, exercise regimen, etc, etc... The only difference being one incorporates meat into their diet, and the other does not, and then see some long and short term results. Personally, (and, I'm in no way qualified in such things) I think the potential health issues that come up about eating meat have more to do with the fact that the meat (and much of what we eat these days) is very "unnatural".... In other words, it may not be the meat so much as it is unknown side-effects of genetically "enhanced" animals and so on.
Slightly off-topic... saw an interesting story a while back where a school stopped serving all that bulk, processed crap to the students and started making their lunches in-house and they found that the performance and behavior of students in that school increased. Not only that, but the overall cost of doing so was pretty negligible in the long-run.
Later,
Jason
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
The chemistry of a human is way to complex for us to attempt to explain or even regulate. I'm not a doctor. But I do know that certain nutricients cannot be extracted and used well when they come from a plant source. Iron is one of these.
I also suspect that meat has to be far easier to digest compared to plant sources because all carnivorous animals have way shorter and simpler digestive systems compared to plant eating mammals. Some of these animals have remarkable digestive systems, they can even digest fiber which we cannot. Isolated communities that depend on animal protein (eskimoes) have shorter digestive systems. The cellolose in plant sources cannot possibly help digestion and our system is certainly not designed for it.
Sugars are ultra fast in digestion but we know now that it's not a good thing and the system takes some serious chemical abuse when we eat simple carbohydrates. The explanation is simple, our ancestors rarely got the delights we had today so the entire process is unnatural. Remember that they rarely found honey if ever, and the fruits they ate were not very sweet and had higher fiber content. Most of the fruits we have today are generally the results of eons of optimising the sweetness and production yeild, without much regard on how appropriate the new fruit was for a human. And table sugar, cakes and sweets took this even further. A human that is used to eat 2 fast food meals per day would have serious trouble digesting lentiles, any type of beans, most seeds and meat. The digestive system would be inadequate and disoriented.
There are quite a few books on the subject of carnivorous vs herbivorous, written by everything from biologists and doctors to anthropologists. The verdict is clear, we are way more carnivorous by design/evolution but we absolutely depend on fruit and can get nutrients from most vegatables and seeds. This is logical if you take into account how our food options evolved. Hunting for meat came last, it took some serious mental and physical skill and intruments probably but it provided a rich source of food which allowed as to eat less and get more energy so it had a huge impact. Many scientists believe this led to very fast development of our brain since less energy and time was used for eating and digestion due to the low volume. A human uses a large part of its total energy for the brain while a plant eating animal consums most of its resources on eating and digestion. Try getting 2000 calories from green vegetable without having access/technology to olive oil or other fats.
The diet most people have is way too distorted by sugar content, and many of us have bad habits, so digestive problems are very common. I wouldn't expect our digestion to operate as well as that of a community in the medditteranean 5,000 years ago. It could indeed have problems with our natural food, even meat and fruit. Even if we adapted a perfect diet for our species, it would probably take months until we adapt to the "new" diet.
I wish lack of moderation was the only problem in modern diet. The most important problem is that diet is so personal and it affects our chemistry so much that it affects our psychology and we sometimes get defensive about it. Those recovering from an eating disorder get used to the unnatural but effective diets that were used to save their lives and end up in the opposite end of the spectrum. Those who develop a health problem take extreme measures by completely avoiding a type of food. Some vegetarians are so fixed on their diets that refuse to provide a natural healthy diet to their children and those who do ketogenic diets have their problems also. Millions of young people are performing experiments with their diet and misinformation is everywhere, completely uncontrolled now that we have the internet. Then we have weight loss schemes, anti-cancer diet cults etc.
I remember my school books that contained the Pyramid of Food. It was an old type that had parallel segmentation. Carbohydrates were half of it and meat was up there with sweets in tiny triangles. I was 7yo but I though that it can't possibly be right. Later I found out that the Pyramid was not introduced by a health organisation but by the USA department of agriculture. I believe production had gone up with the technological development and consumption had to go up. It was certainly good promotion, it reached as far as Greece, decades later and many greeks eat cereal for breakfast today, something that was not a custom on the meditteranean. It also made sense economically. Cereal production does not require a large investment and I can't imagine a better industry than an industry that starts with first material that is only a few cents per kilo and ends up in a retail price of 8 euro/kilo.
I also suspect that meat has to be far easier to digest compared to plant sources because all carnivorous animals have way shorter and simpler digestive systems compared to plant eating mammals. Some of these animals have remarkable digestive systems, they can even digest fiber which we cannot. Isolated communities that depend on animal protein (eskimoes) have shorter digestive systems. The cellolose in plant sources cannot possibly help digestion and our system is certainly not designed for it.
Sugars are ultra fast in digestion but we know now that it's not a good thing and the system takes some serious chemical abuse when we eat simple carbohydrates. The explanation is simple, our ancestors rarely got the delights we had today so the entire process is unnatural. Remember that they rarely found honey if ever, and the fruits they ate were not very sweet and had higher fiber content. Most of the fruits we have today are generally the results of eons of optimising the sweetness and production yeild, without much regard on how appropriate the new fruit was for a human. And table sugar, cakes and sweets took this even further. A human that is used to eat 2 fast food meals per day would have serious trouble digesting lentiles, any type of beans, most seeds and meat. The digestive system would be inadequate and disoriented.
There are quite a few books on the subject of carnivorous vs herbivorous, written by everything from biologists and doctors to anthropologists. The verdict is clear, we are way more carnivorous by design/evolution but we absolutely depend on fruit and can get nutrients from most vegatables and seeds. This is logical if you take into account how our food options evolved. Hunting for meat came last, it took some serious mental and physical skill and intruments probably but it provided a rich source of food which allowed as to eat less and get more energy so it had a huge impact. Many scientists believe this led to very fast development of our brain since less energy and time was used for eating and digestion due to the low volume. A human uses a large part of its total energy for the brain while a plant eating animal consums most of its resources on eating and digestion. Try getting 2000 calories from green vegetable without having access/technology to olive oil or other fats.
The diet most people have is way too distorted by sugar content, and many of us have bad habits, so digestive problems are very common. I wouldn't expect our digestion to operate as well as that of a community in the medditteranean 5,000 years ago. It could indeed have problems with our natural food, even meat and fruit. Even if we adapted a perfect diet for our species, it would probably take months until we adapt to the "new" diet.
I wish lack of moderation was the only problem in modern diet. The most important problem is that diet is so personal and it affects our chemistry so much that it affects our psychology and we sometimes get defensive about it. Those recovering from an eating disorder get used to the unnatural but effective diets that were used to save their lives and end up in the opposite end of the spectrum. Those who develop a health problem take extreme measures by completely avoiding a type of food. Some vegetarians are so fixed on their diets that refuse to provide a natural healthy diet to their children and those who do ketogenic diets have their problems also. Millions of young people are performing experiments with their diet and misinformation is everywhere, completely uncontrolled now that we have the internet. Then we have weight loss schemes, anti-cancer diet cults etc.
I remember my school books that contained the Pyramid of Food. It was an old type that had parallel segmentation. Carbohydrates were half of it and meat was up there with sweets in tiny triangles. I was 7yo but I though that it can't possibly be right. Later I found out that the Pyramid was not introduced by a health organisation but by the USA department of agriculture. I believe production had gone up with the technological development and consumption had to go up. It was certainly good promotion, it reached as far as Greece, decades later and many greeks eat cereal for breakfast today, something that was not a custom on the meditteranean. It also made sense economically. Cereal production does not require a large investment and I can't imagine a better industry than an industry that starts with first material that is only a few cents per kilo and ends up in a retail price of 8 euro/kilo.
As a former inner city school teacher, I can tell you that this is not surprising whatsoever. My students were given the choice (by the school) between cereal, fruit, and donuts for breakfast every morning. Guess what they always chose. Ten minutes of hyperactivity followed by heads on desks.
They used to arrive at school clutching bags containing corner store-bought junk because their parent would throw them a dollar in the morning for lunch. Of course, these kids were never dressed properly for the weather and, more often than not, lived in a single-parent household. There were a number of fathers in jail as well. However, I still believe that given a better diet, children can learn substantially better even if other negative factors remain.
Like an animal... or an herbivore?
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
I meant like a herbivore But it works both ways doesn't it? Vegetable is 50 to 300 Kcal per Kgr due to its water content. Imagine if there was lack of seeds/fruit in the environment. We are talking 7 to 40kg of food per day. Apllied to school meals, imagine the time lost in dealing with food, and the constant chewing/digestion/whatnot during the classes
EDIT: Scratch fruit. Common fruit like oranges, strawberries, melons, pears are only a low 200 to 400 Kcal/kg. 5 to 10kg a day. Seeds at 5000 to 7000 Kcal/Kg would do the trick.
But it works both ways doesn't it? Vegetable is 50 to 300 Kcal per Kgr due to its water content. Imagine if there was lack of seeds/fruit in the environment. We are talking 7 to 40kg of food per day. Apllied to school meals, imagine the time lost in dealing with food, and the constant chewing/digestion/whatnot during the classesEDIT: Scratch fruit. Common fruit like oranges, strawberries, melons, pears are only a low 200 to 400 Kcal/kg. 5 to 10kg a day. Seeds at 5000 to 7000 Kcal/Kg would do the trick.
Last edited:
VGurcu
Well-known member
Wrong, wrong. We are talking about us (humans) and humans are not carnivorous animals. You are referring to shorter intestine in carnivorous animals, but neglecting the fact that their stomach acidity levels are 20 times more comparing to humans or plant eating mammals.
There is no suspicion here; biologists, doctors, nutritionist will all agree on the comparative difficulty of meat digestion in humans.
That is baloney. Intestinal track length, stomach acidity, jaws, teeth structure, anatomically we are almost identical to herbivores. Check it out(roll down to the summary at the end, table comparison)
http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-anatomy-of-eating.html
So yes, we are designed to eat meat as well, but we are not more carnivorous by design, to eat meat there is no need for such justification. For vegetarians getting right amount of calories is not difficult either as their diet includes more than just vegetables (grains for example; rice, wheat, barley, oat, rye AND BEANS & LEGUMES...)
Other than that, you are right about food pyramid, manipulation in the food industry, ignorance etc. Also, agriculture is in trouble as much as meat industry when it comes to contaminations, pesticides, carcinogens etc. That is why I constantly remind to eat quality food (organic) and nutritionally well balanced.
We all agree on that. Bad foods, a medical society treating human beings like car mechanics, ignorance, decaying intelligence all parts of the problem.
Last edited:
Jason Ramsey
Admin
Not to dispute it or even get involved in that debate really (it's a never ending one on this site for some reason)... but, I do think it's worth pointing out that your link comes from a site dedicated to vegetarianism. Not saying it makes it false by any means, though it is worth pointing out particularly in an age of studies and research that is quite often put in motion for less than un-biased, honorable intentions. Take the FDA for example.. funded by the very people whose drugs they approve, with example after example of a pattern of behavior that looks after their funders first, and everyone else perhaps 2nd... that's off-topic and borderline breaking our rules though
My feeling is that (at the very least) we are certainly not primarily carnivorous creatures, and the bulk of our diet should be made up of things other than meat products... fruits, veggies, etc... and (if you eat meat) some meat products, or a suitable alternative.
Anyways... RAkesh...I'm happy to hear that you are becoming more health conscious and I wish you the best of luck. I'm in the same boat, but kinda coming from a different angle, in that I need to gain about 20 lbs. I've been pretty malnourished and very "un-active" in my lifestyle for years. Initially out of being poor, and then after... well, a combination of things... But, let's just say old habits die hard... Except for staying healthy for some reason I am but a shadow of my former self 10-12 years ago, and it seems little more than someone elses memory, rather than my past at times. Anyways... good luck to you. Keep it up. Proud of ya'
My feeling is that (at the very least) we are certainly not primarily carnivorous creatures, and the bulk of our diet should be made up of things other than meat products... fruits, veggies, etc... and (if you eat meat) some meat products, or a suitable alternative.
Anyways... RAkesh...I'm happy to hear that you are becoming more health conscious and I wish you the best of luck. I'm in the same boat, but kinda coming from a different angle, in that I need to gain about 20 lbs. I've been pretty malnourished and very "un-active" in my lifestyle for years. Initially out of being poor, and then after... well, a combination of things... But, let's just say old habits die hard... Except for staying healthy for some reason
I am but a shadow of my former self 10-12 years ago, and it seems little more than someone elses memory, rather than my past at times. Anyways... good luck to you. Keep it up. Proud of ya'
VGurcu
Well-known member
Jason, I hear your concern. Here is the same information also available from wiki-answers:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_humans_omnivores_or_herbivores
Trust me I am doing my best to not get involved in naming names(FDA etc)
Who said something like that: Give me a child at age 7 and I'll give you the man at age 70.
Otis Grapsas
Carbonite Member
That page is off in many things. I wouldn't call it an article because there are no references. As an example this is the first time I see a stomach acidity rated with food in stomach. What is that supposed to mean anyway? The acids in a human stomach are down to 0.8 and typically 1 to 2.5 dilluted (various sources). This guy mentions 4 to 5 which looks like a seriously disturbed stomach which barely functions. This is not the first time I see this acidity nonsense. Some veg sites even mention 20 or 30 times higher acidity in carnivores vs a human which is chemically impossible. This site exagerates by a factor of 2x at least in order to identify us with herbivores. On top of that, it mentions the same acidity level in carnivores and omnivores and generally matches the two in everything, because it does not want humans to look omnivores either. And the acidity (with the same "food in stomach") is one for carnivores? Even if I accept a crazy measurement condition that gets 4 to 5 in humans (by dillusion or on entry of food?), the same condition cannot possibly get 1 in carnivores. That would mean all food would be purely acidic at a Ph of slightly over 1, so acidic it would not be eatable.
EDIT: Reading a little more on the subject, I found that this guy confused the gastric acidity with the small intestine acidity (on/after the duodenum) which is indeed 4-5 and 6.5 according to some references. But that's not in the stomach so he is comparing apples to eaten oranges. The related figure on a cow is 3 after its multiple stomachs and on the small intestine. The figure for dogs is 4 to 7. In any case, it's a very small detail in a very complex system, I don't think it can prove anything.
EDIT2: A comparison that could make sense is body weight of animal vs volume and surface of each part of the digestive system. The large intestine of a cow must be rather small for the body weight and volume of food compared to a human or a pig.
Humans have been on omnivore diet for ages, why do they even bother? Some vegs are so consumed in this acidity hypothesis and produce so many web hits that it's almost impossible to find scientific data on the subject.
Here is a vegetarian that accepts we are omnivores:
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm
How about a carnivore theory and ketogenic diet advocate to go to the other extreme?
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/carn_herb_comparison.html
And how about this educated fellow?
"When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores." William C. Roberts, M.D., editor, American Journal of Cardiology
We do know some of these things a little far fetched, but opinions like that will always be around.
The external anatomical differences are IMHO easy to explain. We stopped needing those because we were pretty clever and could hunt with tools and strategy far better than that of any other carnivore. We don't need claws and we don't need to bite the animal in the neck in order to capture it. It was no longer important for survival because no human died because his teeth were not long and sharp enough. Our teeth and jaws got smaller and shorter since we started processing food mechanically and eventually thermally and this also changed our digestive system. This probably explains any differences in that department.
I don't believe an advanced carnivore would have the teeth of a T-Rex. Our canines are unused (no pan to vampires) but they still exist and we do not have the gaps a herbivorous animal has (cows etc). We do have 12 teeth that were not made for infinite chewing of herbs.
You will also find that humans have nearly no protection from their environment with only a little hair left. It's only because humans had a mind that could make up for this and they didn't need it anymore, it didn't affect their survival much. Would someone think that this planet is alien to us because we don't fit the climate? Hunting and eating meat is not alien to us also, despite our modern appearance.
( Insert the first minutes of Space Odyssey 2001 here )
We do have pretty good evidence that we can tolerate meat and many communities are on diets full of meat/fish for decades, while meat is not safe for herbivores. Why worry about the resulting chemistry and the mechanism and prove the obvious? It does the job. It is also clear that we need the high energy food sources (meat and seeds) because we cannot process enough green vegetable in order to survive.
This was interesting:
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/pdfs/meateating.pdf
Herbivorous cow vs omnivorous pig on page 2, notice and read about the cow specifics (stomach equivalent):
http://animalscience.tamu.edu/images/pdf/nutrition/nutrition-cows-digestive-system.pdf
Human digestive system (even ignoring the cow specifics, how does it compare to the pig?):
http://www.vitallywell.net/images/digestive-system-diagram.jpg
Pure carnivorous:
http://www.kingdomofpets.com/dog_health/images/dog-digestive-system.jpg
EDIT: Reading a little more on the subject, I found that this guy confused the gastric acidity with the small intestine acidity (on/after the duodenum) which is indeed 4-5 and 6.5 according to some references. But that's not in the stomach so he is comparing apples to eaten oranges. The related figure on a cow is 3 after its multiple stomachs and on the small intestine. The figure for dogs is 4 to 7. In any case, it's a very small detail in a very complex system, I don't think it can prove anything.
EDIT2: A comparison that could make sense is body weight of animal vs volume and surface of each part of the digestive system. The large intestine of a cow must be rather small for the body weight and volume of food compared to a human or a pig.
Humans have been on omnivore diet for ages, why do they even bother? Some vegs are so consumed in this acidity hypothesis and produce so many web hits that it's almost impossible to find scientific data on the subject.
Here is a vegetarian that accepts we are omnivores:
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm
How about a carnivore theory and ketogenic diet advocate to go to the other extreme?
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/carn_herb_comparison.html
And how about this educated fellow?
"When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores." William C. Roberts, M.D., editor, American Journal of Cardiology
We do know some of these things a little far fetched, but opinions like that will always be around.
The external anatomical differences are IMHO easy to explain. We stopped needing those because we were pretty clever and could hunt with tools and strategy far better than that of any other carnivore. We don't need claws and we don't need to bite the animal in the neck in order to capture it. It was no longer important for survival because no human died because his teeth were not long and sharp enough. Our teeth and jaws got smaller and shorter since we started processing food mechanically and eventually thermally and this also changed our digestive system. This probably explains any differences in that department.
I don't believe an advanced carnivore would have the teeth of a T-Rex. Our canines are unused (no pan to vampires) but they still exist and we do not have the gaps a herbivorous animal has (cows etc). We do have 12 teeth that were not made for infinite chewing of herbs.
You will also find that humans have nearly no protection from their environment with only a little hair left. It's only because humans had a mind that could make up for this and they didn't need it anymore, it didn't affect their survival much. Would someone think that this planet is alien to us because we don't fit the climate? Hunting and eating meat is not alien to us also, despite our modern appearance.
( Insert the first minutes of Space Odyssey 2001 here
)We do have pretty good evidence that we can tolerate meat and many communities are on diets full of meat/fish for decades, while meat is not safe for herbivores. Why worry about the resulting chemistry and the mechanism and prove the obvious? It does the job. It is also clear that we need the high energy food sources (meat and seeds) because we cannot process enough green vegetable in order to survive.
This was interesting:
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/pdfs/meateating.pdf
Herbivorous cow vs omnivorous pig on page 2, notice and read about the cow specifics (stomach equivalent):
http://animalscience.tamu.edu/images/pdf/nutrition/nutrition-cows-digestive-system.pdf
Human digestive system (even ignoring the cow specifics, how does it compare to the pig?):
http://www.vitallywell.net/images/digestive-system-diagram.jpg
Pure carnivorous:
http://www.kingdomofpets.com/dog_health/images/dog-digestive-system.jpg
Last edited: