"Super" foods

[BrilloPad]

Turkey is a good one. So is avocado.

[OwlHoot]

That's fattist.

But also very true - it is always the porkers you see with their trollies full of pre packed convenience food which is easy to ding in a microwave.

Maybe if they stood up for 20 minutes and actually cooked some stuff healthy stuff they would get a 2 fold benefit - 1 for not sitting on their lardy asses watching tulip on the tulipbox without moving for hours on end and 2 they may actually get some decent food.

Absolutely. I once worked with a contractor with skin more cratered and pox marked than the far side of the Moon, and it was no surprise that this idiot was addicted to Coca Cola and would neck back tin after tin, probably at least four or five each day, but never seemed to make the connection.

[SueEllen]

Not convinced about that. The humble spud and bread has always been the staple diet in this country, with meat and veg added when the money/weather dictated it. Then as we got to the 70's and started embracing other cultures, we discovered rice from the Chinese and Pasta off the Italians.

I'd agree 100% sugar is a lot more prevalent these days though in food and drink, I always laugh when I see fatties in supermarkets getting 4x2L bottles of coke/fizzy drinks. They honestly must think "I'm thirsty, I need a fizzy sugary drink.."

So the British never ate rice pudding before the Chinese appeared?

Oh and they were in the country before the 1970s though whether your diet was influenced by other cultures e.g. Italian, Chinese, Indian depended on where you lived.

[scooterscot]

You are aware that veggies and fruit contain carbs right?

So saying no carbs when you eat them is nonsense. What you actually mean is follow a low carb diet which means you don't get sugar spikes.

no high carb foods after 6pm... sleeping on carbs is pointless.

[SueEllen]

"Respectable" because it fits your warped world view?

Low carb diet's success comes in part due to the biology of digesting said carbs; especially simple carbs which have horrible effects on the endocrine system. Calorie equivalency is a myth; 4K calories from meat + veg is far less likely to induce the onset of type 2 diabetes (the disease of the fat and lazy) when compared to typical modern "diets" that include copious amounts of simple sugars.

It isn't a warped view.

Working class people in this country staple foods for years was potatoes and then bread. The reason they weren't obese is because food was more expensive, they didn't snack and they moved more.

Also if you replace 4 slices of bread with chicken with a large portion cauliflower and broccoli with the chicken you will consume less calories. The fibre in the cauliflower and broccoli should help fill you up.

[scooterscot]

One month of no carbs after 6pm

[FrontEnder]

One month of no carbs after 6pm

That's your evidence? You can't be serious.

[TheGreenBastard]

It isn't a warped view.

Working class people in this country staple foods for years was potatoes and then bread. The reason they weren't obese is because food was more expensive, they didn't snack and they moved more.

Also if you replace 4 slices of bread with chicken with a large portion cauliflower and broccoli with the chicken you will consume less calories. The fibre in the cauliflower and broccoli should help fill you up.

False equivalency; indeed there wasn't a epidemic of obese - however potatoes (16th century) and bread with simple sugars are relatively new. You don't get obese on a diet that's in calorie restriction - that's the laws of physics - but that wasn't my argument.

[PurpleGorilla]

"Super" foods

All the respectable research I've seen suggests that weight loss in a low carb diet comes from a reduction in calories. Am I missing something?

Carbs turn to glucose - which raises insulin levels.

Insulin converts glucose to body fat.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news...s-take-glucose

Reducing carbs to keto levels means your body starts to burn more body fat when you are in a calorie deficit.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945587/

[Cirrus]

Carbs, particularly from tubers, have been the engine of human development.

Especially when humans got on top of cooking. Cooking root vegetables releases more nutrients. Our teeth got smaller and our alimentary canals shorter. Chimps spend about five hours a day eating whereas humans could get sorted in one hour. These developments paved the way for bigger brains.

Early stone tools were for breaking into bone marrow. For a long time we could only scavenge off the remains of all the other predators and scavengers ie bones. Meat was added to the diet but probably only accounted for 20% of calories typically.

Having said that, humans have thrived on a myriad different diets. We have evolved to eat all sorts of things in all sorts of combinations. To start pontificating about what is a 'good' diet and what is a 'junk' diet is pure myth, like religion.

The idea that 'fresh' or 'local' food is more nutritious is also bunkum. Some components decay with time, and cooking. Vitamin C degrades but you don't need much of it anyway. Anything above about 50 mg is just excreted. Cooking and storage may reduce nutrient value but who cares - we don't have a problem of having too little of anything. The more it degrades the better in the modern world of excessive intake. You may possibly prefer the taste of fresh food but it doesn't make it significantly better for you. Compared to the millions of years of our evolution our food is super, super fresh anyway.

Also often stuff from across the other side of the world consumes less CO2 to reach your table, than things grown more locally (due to the efficiencies of the supply chains)

For the last 5-10000 years your genes have been running on processed carbs (rice, wheat, maize etc). You could go back to hunter-gatherer diet with more berries, nuts, honey etc if you wanted. But at the end of the day we are tuned for a mixed fruit/vegetable/tuber/meat diet so if you aim for that (varied, balanced) you shouldn't need to go for extremist interpretations like vegan or high-fruit, although it probably won't do you any harm.

We have evolved to deal with things like sugar and alcohol but not the levels we can create today so such excesses can be viewed as dangerous (as with certain vitamins and psychoactive substances).

Also burning food (frying, grilling, roasting etc) exposes you to substances like nitrosamines which we've only come into contact with over the last 200,000 years or so, and as a result have not evolved enough to be fully protected against cancer.

Otherwise it's not what you eat but how much of it.