Sanitarium "One Square Meal"

[Onestepmore]

Lol SOAB, I think I'd get on well with her. I 'shop the perimeter' in the supermarket. Fresh veges, dairy, meat, bread. I do make my own bread about half the time, at least I know what's in it! I have my own two chooks in a normal suburban front yard (the evil jack russel will eat anything in the backyard) and a big if a hit and miss vege garden. I restrict carbs as otherwise I just gain weight ( unless I'm bushwalking!)
I have actually researched this subject Icefest, and have a brain trained to critically assess in a scientific manner.

[wayno]

this article explains how the western perception of fats got turned on it's head
american crop farmers used their political power and skewed science to boost consumption of their crops at the expense of imported saturated coconut fat and animal fat

http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-f ... of-america

[wayno]

the argument about saturated fats in the diet is interesting when you look at polynesians.... a lot of them still livea traditional life in the islands, men who may still be shirtless in the harsh tropical sun, certainly not bothering to cover up or use sun screen yet the amount of skin cancer in the islands is surprisingly low despite high amounts of exposure to UV rays....
islanders living a traditional life eat a great deal of saturated fat from pig meat and especially coconuts... saturated fat is important for healthy skin.... consuming a lot of processed vegetable fats makes for unhealthy skin prone to skin cancer...

[Son of a Beach]

There's also the 'Seven Countries Study' on which much of our society's ideas of healthy diet are based. Problem was that it was actually a FIFTY countries study and he deliberately omitted the forty three countries for which the results didn't match what he wanted to say. And for this he got his photo on the cover of 'Time' and the cultural dietary following of the entire western world.

Yes, OSM (always reminds me of Open Street Map), I think you and her would have a lot to talk about. Sounds like you've been on similar journeys. Our whole family has been doing it to some degree but I'm not particularly strict about it (but have still seen some benefits). What amazes me most is that without sugar in the system reducing the ability to know when she's had enough, she can now eat a small salad with a little meat for lunch and feel full afterwards. That would have been inconceivable a year ago.

[wayno]

part of the issue with sugar added to food is interesting
jamie oliver demonstrated it in a tv programme... a lot of processed foods have high salt and high sugar content combined
he showed how much was added to tomato sause, if you took out the salt it would by sickly sweet from the taste of the sugar, if ou took out the sugar only it would be too salty to tolerate. but with salt and sugar combined they mask each others extreme taste and they become palatable, and the high salt and sugar content over stimulates the hypothalamus in teh brain which over stimulates the appetite to want to continue eating, theres studies out to show sugar is as addictive as cocaine....

[Onestepmore]

The why is really simple
If you add sugar to food you sell more of it.

Sugar is highly addictive
The majority of the population is sugar addicted
Once you kick the addiction, it's amazing what you can taste, and you only eat what you need. Your appetite control system gets switched on again.

But you have to make a conscious decision. Mostly it's not what to eat, it's what not to eat. ie choose stuff without sugar (not as easy as it sounds unless you make everything from scratch) And the right fats!

[Son of a Beach]

Two personal examples I found myself...

When packing for a bushwalk I wanted to take only half a packet of commercial dried peas so emptied them into a container. Along with the peas, out came about a teaspoon of white crystals. I assumed it was an excessive amount of added salt. I tasted it and found that it was sugar. Normally they would be emptied straight into water so you'd never notice.

More recently and more aware of the issues I was looking at labels on the various brands of crushed garlic. One brand was THIRTY PERCENT sugar! Another brand had nothing but garlic and a bit of vinegar. Well worth paying attention to what's in the packages foods.

My wife found that even many brands of bacon have added sugar.

[wayno]

breakfast cereals. take a look at how much sugar is in them....
muesli bars....
dont assume "health food" is automatically good for you...
read the labels....
remember corn syrup is sugar too, its the sugar thats in a vast amount of processed foods. so is malt.. and fructose....
tomato sauce, is often actually flavoured, coloured apple sauce.....

[wayno]

refined carbs are also a problem, refined grains and root vegetables are turned to sugar in the body quickly,
where you can eat whole grains... watch bread, most brown bread is still full of refined flour with some wholemeal or bran thrown in so they can class it as brown bread...

[McWade]

Where do we drw the line with 'refined'? If I grind some Urid Dhal, does it become 'refined'? I know, I'm stretching the point, but the fact remains. Make your own breads, if you like breads, and you'll know what's in 'em. Mix ups your own 'cereal' (kinda a misuse of the word actually). Or, just make up your own rules based on pseudoscience and what has worked for you in the past - seems to be what most of the 'experts' do....

[wayno]

if you're stripping off the outer layer of the grain with the nutrients then i'd term that as refined, if youre just grinding it up.. i wouldnt term that as refined, im talking about foods such as white flour

[McWade]

I take your point about stripping/skinning the husk of grains being in part the definition of refined. Does that mean that split lentils of any variety are refined, and whole lentils with the husks in tact are not. What if it's a split lentil but not ground? If that same split lentil is ground does it become 'refined'? It's a fine line with all lentils and grains....

When friends ask me about eating 'rrefined' versus non-, I advise them to just eat whole foods. I consider whole foods to be foods that aren't highly refined or mixed with any other. It's a big improvement on the 'supermarket' diet, not matter where you draw the line on 'refined'.

There is NO CLEAR EVIDENCE (show me a paper and I'll show you another) on many of the whole foods we eat, regardless of ones particular preference. There was 'clear evidence' of value in X food 20 years ago that has since been declared untrue, and the opposite of whole food Y. This is almost certainly to be repeated in the next 20 years. Eating a sensible mix of whole foods, and whole foods only, is far and away better than eating a lot of processed 'junk' but that's about as far as anyone should go I think (unless they wanna make money from book sales). Most people can't even manage this, and not for a lack of availability. That's not to mention genetics/genetic adaptations, which is another area of advancement.

If you wanna be fit and maintain good body weight:
Don't buy foods that have an ingredients label. Make up recipes for cooking these combined as you wish. Your body will soon inform of the required proportions and potions. The rest is largely speculative. Okay, maybe not entirely speculative, but if you can't manage that, the rest is of little use so start there. Pretty simple yet almost nobody does it.

[wayno]

lentils arent like grains, lentils have the nutrients spread throughout, with grains most of the vitamins are in the outer layers,
in japan beriberi is becoming more commong because of the diet high in white rice and its now getting combined with a junk food/drink diet instead of veges and good quality meat or fish...

[wayno]

a cup of raw pink lentils has plenty of vitamins in it, you can get most of your daily vitamin b1 daily required intake from it

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/leg ... cts/4405/2

[McWade]

I never said lentils are like grains. My paternal family are from India .-. I eat a LOT of lentils and have since birth. Pink lentils? My point stands - refined is a slippery term. A lot of pseudoscience in this thread which is my main point. Like I said, I advise people to eat whole foods and take it from there; don't buy processed foods at all; 'process' it yourself...
Most people can't manage that (though I do). Don't need to be an 'expert' to advise this and be guaranteed of a good result. If that can be achieved and one still wants to optimise further, choose your cult and go for it. No shortage of food cults (all based on 'science' oddly enough, yet with markedly different conclusions) to choose from.

[wayno]

well i dont have time to write a book on teh subject its hard to explain it all precisely in a short space, you can call whatever you want pseudo science, i practice what i preach and it works, i dont need science to tell me if its going to work or not becaues science itself can get it very wrong.... someone like western price based his facts on what he had seen in the real world...

[LandSailor]

Well looks like Sweden agrees with most of the posters on this thread.

Sweden Becomes First Western Nation to Reject Low-fat Diet Dogma in Favor of Low-carb High-fat Nutrition

[wayno]

most of the dutchies i know aren't overweight... they breed em tall rather than fat there....

[Moondog55]

Amazing, not much to do with the prepacked meal replacement I first posted about.
While i eat as much food as possible that has been minimally processed doing so on long walks becomes difficult as foods that are processed simply have such a long shelf life. White flour Vs wholemeal for instance.
If the rest of the time you are eating a "Healthy diet" then a short time away eating prepacked processed food won't kill you and the long term health detriment should be minimal

[Onestepmore]

Thanks for that link Landsailor

Sorry for the tread hijack, Ted
I do use the One Square Meals as our emergency ration meal. I figure, if you're stuck somewhere, you'll be happy with anything!
Mind you, I only chose it for its awesome name ......

[wayno]

IMO there is a problem when people use weight loss as a gauge of success.
i"m not into a high fat diet, I eat moderate carbs , moderate fat... i get a quarter of my calories from fat.
long term high fat diets can have negative health impacts , communities traditionally eating high fat diets long term dont necessarily live to a ripe old age, fat is acidic, too much acidic food in the diet creates more work for the kidneys and liver and they are more likely to deteriorate with age... high animal fat and animal protein diets make the diet even more acidic...
and there may be a level of eating high cholesterol diets and high animal fat diets that can still encourage clotting of the blood and clogging of teh arteries.

[icefest]

wayno,
Can you explain to me how a fat molecule creates free H+ ions?


EDIT (In lieu of making another post): Thanks for the explanation.

[wayno]

animal and vegetable fat is made up of fatty acids... you digest the fat down to its acidic building blocks, i dont know the details of teh chemistry to tell you how it forms hydrogen ions...
similarly protein is made up of amino acids, you digest the protein down to its amino acid building blocks. animal protein also contains uric acid.

[wayno]

i remember a running mate of mine was right into his nutritional supplemnts, he'd take measured amounts of specific amino acid powders....

from memory I think he was raving on about the amino acid cysteine and how good it was for recovery.. he got me to try some, so i took a small spoonful of the powder and put it on my tong then went to grap a cup of water.... big mistake.
It was so acidic , by the time i took a mouthful of water my tongue was already bleeding... so somehow your digtestion manages to deal with acidic amino acids like that without letting them cause damage to the body

[stry]

Amazing, not much to do with the prepacked meal replacement I first posted about.
While i eat as much food as possible that has been minimally processed doing so on long walks becomes difficult as foods that are processed simply have such a long shelf life. White flour Vs wholemeal for instance.
If the rest of the time you are eating a "Healthy diet" then a short time away eating prepacked processed food won't kill you and the long term health detriment should be minimal

Pretty much my thinking Moondog.If a few days of a given food is going to kill you, you are pretty close to the edge anyway.

I did notice your comments on the OSM sweetness - this seems to be more with the Cranberry flavour than with the Apricot. If you get the apricot, there is much less temptation to indulge the sweet tooth.

On the short shelf life - I always saw this a being something of a plus, as rightly or wrongly I though that the short shelf life probably meant less crap, preservatives and additives.

If you freeze 'em you can ignore the shelf life. At least that's been my practice for many years with no (obvious) ill effects so far.

[Moondog55]

I never tried the Apricot, i may be prepared to try just once more. I prefer my own home made Kram but don't always find the time to make it properly

[wayno]

i eat bumper bars, also made by the people that make one square meal, not sure if you get them in aus.. they are a similar type of muesli bar with the ingredients except they use butter in them,, softer texture than one square meal... 27% sugar. they have canola oil its a lot futrther down the list of ingredients than teh butter which means there is less of it in the bar.

[Onestepmore]

This might be an interesting program.
'Catalyst. Heart of the matter'
Thursday 8 pm on ABC 1

[wayno]

cholesterol is an interesting one
this medical article talks about LDL being the "bad" cholesterol that can clog your arteries.

http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-manage ... l-overview

but my understanding is this, your arteries wno't clog up unless the walls are first damaged and roughened up, usually by damaged or oxidised fat, and vegetable fat is highly likely to be the fat that does that and it can also damage the LDL , LDL cholesterol increasing the likelihood of it sticking to your artery walls, and so LDL gets the bad rap because it is the one that ultimately is seen to clog the arteries....
you've go some vegetable oil at home, if its high in polyunsaturated oil and you've spilt some around the lid or down the side of the container and left it there then it will go hard and or sticky, thats oxidised, thats what it will be like in your arteries, mixing in with saturated fat and cholesterol increasing the chances of it sticking to your arteries,
vegetable fat is more likely to harden your arteries over the years as well , as you age your immune system isnt very good at arresting the damage it can cause....

[stry]

Geez, Wayno !!

Care to offer an upside ?? I was feeling quite good until I digested all that (is the pun as bad as the news in your post?)