starkid wrote:
Mackica wrote:
I was having whole grains,such as quinoa,brown rice,Japonica rice,and lots of various beans.All these requite your body to convert the insulin in carbohydrates,and my body could not keep up with that.I was having ample amounts of vegetables as well.I have never had white grain,white rice products and rarely potatoes.I just saw a nutritionist a few weeks ago and alas there is that huge urban myth about potatoes as well.Potatoes have a huge amount of B vitamins,phytochemicals,they lower your blood pressure,among other healthy functions.
It's not an urban myth that potatoes are simple carbs that can cause a spike in blood sugar, which is why I brought them up. I haven't heard or read anything about them having little or no nutritional value, if that's the urban myth to which you are referring. As for your highs and lows on beans and grains, perhaps you needed to eat less of those and more veggies. I can't say without knowing the amounts and variety of food you ate. I'm quite suspicious of this "not everyone can be a vegan" idea that is floating around. Eskimos who probably evolved to live on nothing or almost nothing but sea creatures? Ok, maybe. Everyone else? Raises some questions. It would be totally maladaptive for humans not to be able to survive or function long-term on a plant-based diet alone. How would our early ancestors, who often could not secure meat, and certainly had little eggs or dairy, have survived during times when the hunt was bad? Did people like you just die, or suffer long-term?
Right, but they had generations to adapt. And you know what happens to the people who don't adapt? They die. So yeah. So pretty much like you said. But, I'm gonna argue the likelihood of them dying from not having tons of meat and eggs or whatever is low.
One thing to keep in mind is, the way we eat meat now is totally absurd. Like how it's processed. Let's take a chicken. Now most people just eat chicken breasts, and no other parts. Occasionally people like wings and thighs. So what happens to the rest of the chicken? Well, it gets turned to "pink slime" sometimes, but usually it's just used for pet food, but many times, it just goes to the landfill. Very wasteful.
Now, the olden days if you got a chicken, you'd get the carcass and make gallons of chicken stock for soup. People would even run perpetual stews, where the fire'd be going all the time, and the stew would have the same broth, and due to the constant boil, it wouldn't get any bacteria. So, let's say you'd have chicken soup everyday. Now you wouldn't get like, a pound of chicken breasts everyday, but you'd still get some meat, and more important imo, than the protein content of meat, is the bones have natural glucosamine, chondroitan, calcium, magnesium, etc. That, and the animal fats and cholesterol is needed for our bodies to make hormones.
The other thing is, besides soups not being a staple in the Western diet (they still are in poor countries/everywhere else) we're just picky as hell. We won't eat organ meats unless they're put in hotdogs, for example. But, in earlier times, liver used to be more expensive than steak, and liver has a ridiculously high nutritional value compared to lots of other meats. But today, liver is like the cheapest cut of meat you can get.
I think the main thing is, we're just picky eaters. If you know what you're doing, and can actually cook and season things correctly (most Americans cannot) I'd say for most families, you could get through the week on like...a chicken or two. But, we never buy whole pieces of meat anymore, we don't know how to process our own meat, hell, we don't know how to cook at all anymore. That, and chickens, pigs, and beef aren't the only sources of meat around. Haven't you noticed all the other edible creatures around you? Most songbirds are edible. Squirrels are edible. Ducks and geese are edible. Deer and moose are obviously edible. Then there's fishing, which we do recreationally and throw fish back even. That'd be looked at as utter insanity in 1800s thinking. A lot of hunting is curtailed artificially, through hunting laws. Most hunting laws actually came about, not because of "normal" hunting, but actually commercial hunting. Like duck hunting, for example, people would use giant cannons called "punt guns" that fired birdshot, and would bait sometimes hundreds of ducks to the corner of a pond, and fire on them. If we hunted normally, ie, not in absurd manners like punt guns and the buffalo hunting of the 1800s America, which we did to try to exterminate the Indians, hunting would be no big deal at all.
31 Aug 2012, 7:36 pm
