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#1
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Protein requirements; excellent article
Wildbilly wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote: Wildbilly wrote: We would probably eat less meat, if we had to kill our own. Societies that hunt for their meat tend to eat a higher percentage of their calories from meat than a lot of modern cultures. With the existance of "modern" ideas (under 5K years old ;^) like vegitarian eating the trend is the opposite of your suggestion. You didn't read the article by Jared Diamond, did you? Standard issue rule for any on-line activity - Don't follow any URL you didn't ask for unless there is enough quoted from it to know following it will be safe from malware and through the reading effort. When posting any URL never expect anyone to follow it without posting enough exerp from it to justify folks follow the link. In a world of spyware and computer viruses that's how it works. you did not post any justification at all for following the link and you posted the link more than once making it even more problematic. So - Is that the Diamond of "Fit for Life"? He has his good points and bad points. I think he's intolerant of milk proteins given his vociferous objection to all dairy. If I were intolerant of milk proteins I might be a low fatter with an attitude against dairy. Instead I'm wheat intolerant and an inconsistant low carber with an attitude against viewing grass seeds as a necessary staple. Hunter-gatherers were healthier than we are, Yet more reason to doubt any claim that eating grain is beneficial - Societies that start eating grain as a staple see a large decrease in health levels. The reasons for grain are economic not medical. |
#2
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Protein requirements; excellent article
In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote: Wildbilly wrote: Doug Freyburger wrote: Wildbilly wrote: We would probably eat less meat, if we had to kill our own. Societies that hunt for their meat tend to eat a higher percentage of their calories from meat than a lot of modern cultures. With the existance of "modern" ideas (under 5K years old ;^) like vegitarian eating the trend is the opposite of your suggestion. You didn't read the article by Jared Diamond, did you? Standard issue rule for any on-line activity - Don't follow any URL you didn't ask for unless there is enough quoted from it to know following it will be safe from malware and through the reading effort. Whatever. This is a PDF from my own computer. When posting any URL never expect anyone to follow it without posting enough exerp from it to justify folks follow the link. In a world of spyware and computer viruses that's how it works. you did not post any justification at all for following the link and you posted the link more than once making it even more problematic. So - Is that the Diamond of "Fit for Life"? Nooo, this is the Diamond of "Guns, Germs, and Steel". http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Ste...393038912/ref= sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258784083&sr=1-1 He has his good points and bad points. I think he's intolerant of milk proteins given his vociferous objection to all dairy. If I were intolerant of milk proteins I might be a low fatter with an attitude against dairy. Instead I'm wheat intolerant and an inconsistant low carber with an attitude against viewing grass seeds as a necessary staple. Hunter-gatherers were healthier than we are, Yet more reason to doubt any claim that eating grain is beneficial - Societies that start eating grain as a staple see a large decrease in health levels. The reasons for grain are economic not medical. "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" by Jared Diamond, Prof. UCLA School of Medicine Discover-May 1987, pp. 64-66 To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism,that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape? For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture? The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of socalled primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and ninety-three grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modem huntergatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps. How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in .part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples. In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts founds well preserved' mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites. Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases. One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. " I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity." says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor, with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate." There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities. Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice? Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts-- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies, for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease. Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New guinea farming communities today, I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 11 O-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples. As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modem hunter-gathers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While postagricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Inuit and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by extended nursing and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years. As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer didn't want. At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us? -------- I'm talking about refined carbohydrates (white flour, white rice, and sugar). What are you talking about? -- Wildbilly http://english.aljazeera.net/news/mi...826384398.html http://countercurrents.org/roberts020709.htm |
#3
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Protein requirements; excellent article
Wildbilly wrote:
I'm talking about refined carbohydrates (white flour, white rice, and sugar). What are you talking about? White rice is a few thousand years old. White flour is a result of industrial milling invented under 300 years ago. Large amounts of refined sugar have been available for under 500 years and has exploded in the last century. The article you quoted was about the 10,000 year old transition to agriculture and how that led to poor health. Thus the article is about the ill effects of eating whole grain. Looks to me like what I'm talking about is what the article states - Refined carbs are only the most recent and most extreme feature but the long term trend of ill health caused by whole grain is illustrated in the article. Interesting point - Agriculture has been pushing human evolution for millenia. That's a short time on evolutionary time scales but the pressure has been immense. Check the selective breeding implications in the number of people who have died from the evolutionary pressures of an agriculture based culture. While humanity evolved during the stone ages less than the 5 million years it takes to evolve an ideal diet, the evolutionary pressure has been extreme since then. The arguments for adopting a paleolithic diet aren't as strong as some would like. But ten millenia is an evolutionarily short time span any ways. The arguments for a grain based diet are weaker still except for economic reasons. |
#4
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Protein requirements; excellent article
In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote: Wildbilly wrote: I'm talking about refined carbohydrates (white flour, white rice, and sugar). What are you talking about? White rice is a few thousand years old. White flour is a result of industrial milling invented under 300 years ago. Large amounts of refined sugar have been available for under 500 years and has exploded in the last century. The article you quoted was about the 10,000 year old transition to agriculture and how that led to poor health. Thus the article is about the ill effects of eating whole grain. Looks to me like what I'm talking about is what the article states - Refined carbs are only the most recent and most extreme feature but the long term trend of ill health caused by whole grain is illustrated in the article. Interesting point - Agriculture has been pushing human evolution for millenia. That's a short time on evolutionary time scales but the pressure has been immense. Check the selective breeding implications in the number of people who have died from the evolutionary pressures of an agriculture based culture. While humanity evolved during the stone ages less than the 5 million years it takes to evolve an ideal diet, the evolutionary pressure has been extreme since then. The arguments for adopting a paleolithic diet aren't as strong as some would like. But ten millenia is an evolutionarily short time span any ways. The arguments for a grain based diet are weaker still except for economic reasons. OK, so you finally read the Jerod Diamond article. Try reading the article again. The problem, IIRC, was the lack of variety in the crops (nutrition) in the farmers diets, occupying the same area over a period of time, population density, which in turn gave rise to communicable diseases (There are reasons why we refer to bird flu and swine flu.), and the rise of government with its' establishment of the hierarchy of social classes (the hunters and gatherers being egalitarian). IIRC, in the early 20's a study was done on cadavers of people who died from accidents, that came to a N.Y. morgue. Most of them showed signs of arteriosclerosis, but that isn't what they died from. I'll look up the citation over the Thanksgiving break. Sugar cane workers consume the most sugar of any demographic, and show little sign of CVD, but they work like burros. My points were that the elite of Egypt were the most likely to have a sweet diet, and as the article stated, there is no way to know if they died because of heart disease. Gotta go get some sleep now, but I'll be back. -- "When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -Archbishop Helder Camara http://tinyurl.com/o63ruj http://countercurrents.org/roberts020709.htm |
#5
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Protein requirements; excellent article
Susan wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote: The article you quoted was about the 10,000 year old transition to agriculture and how that led to poor health. Thus the article is about the ill effects of eating whole grain. You realize that once a grain is milled into flour or cereal, it ceases to be a whole grain? I don't realize that because it was not true until recent centuries. For millenia grain was tossed into the air to rid it of the husk and what remained was fertile particles that have bran, endosperm and germ. That is to say whole grain. These whole grain particles were stone ground by hand then allowed to rise and baked into bread within two days. Then for centuries the whole grains were ground using water powered stone mills rather than hand ground. Hand ground or water power ground the result was still whole grain flour not refined flour so it did not cease to be whole grain. The problem with this fresh ground whole grain flour is retaining the germ means the flour spoils in a few days so milling needs to be local. A couple of centuries ago a different kind of milling process was invented. This modern refining method separates the bran (which was mostly fed to pigs until the oat bran crazy a few years ago), the endosperm (which becomes the refined white flour that is so problematic) and the germ (which is available dried in may stores). The ground endosperm starch is lower in nutrients but it also lasts *much* longer. Refined grain is now milled in very large mills and shipped long distances. Before the refining process was invented the whole grin flour would spoil in a few days. The ill health effects resulted when argiculture was invented millenia before refined milling was invented. The ill effects accelerated greatly when the refined milling process was invented. Looks to me like what I'm talking about is what the article states - Refined carbs are only the most recent and most extreme feature but the long term trend of ill health caused by whole grain is illustrated in the article. This is why scientific historians refer to the "diseases of civilization" diabetes and CVD. Grains developed civilization, but at a cost to health. The article points out why agriculture eventually dominated the globe replacing hunter-gatherer societies almost completely. In spite of the ill health effects and the hard labor involved, argiculture allows more people to live. With large enough populations quantity *does* beat quality. Even with the lower mean and medians of agricultural societies compared to hunter-gather societies the variance and total populations ensure that there are more high production people in an agricultural society than in a hunter gatherer society. And so no hunter-gather society has ever developed metal smelting and thus no hunter-gatherer society has ever moved towards industrialization. It's true that it was done on the backs of millenia of heavy labor misery, but civilization has advanced to the point where many can now eat better than people do in hunter-gather societies. Over time the percentage of the total world population in poverty shrinks. The dream that the total number will shrink becomes realistic as the percentage continues to decline. The dream that few will be poor remains a dream but the direction is clear. The question becomes whether human society can pull that off. Build hot houses and grow veggies. Plant trees to maintain forests. |
#6
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Protein requirements; excellent article
Doug Freyburger wrote:
Susan wrote: Doug Freyburger wrote: The article you quoted was about the 10,000 year old transition to agriculture and how that led to poor health. Thus the article is about the ill effects of eating whole grain. You realize that once a grain is milled into flour or cereal, it ceases to be a whole grain? I don't realize that because it was not true until recent centuries. For millenia grain was tossed into the air to rid it of the husk and what remained was fertile particles that have bran, endosperm and germ. That is to say whole grain. These whole grain particles were stone ground by hand then allowed to rise and baked into bread within two days. Then for centuries the whole grains were ground using water powered stone mills rather than hand ground. Hand ground or water power ground the result was still whole grain flour not refined flour so it did not cease to be whole grain. The problem with this fresh ground whole grain flour is retaining the germ means the flour spoils in a few days so milling needs to be local. Once it's ground, no matter what's included or the method, it's flour, or cereal, but not whole grain, which is a kernel type thing. Susan |
#7
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Protein requirements; excellent article
In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote: I don't realize that because it was not true until recent centuries. For millenia grain was tossed into the air to rid it of the husk and what remained was fertile particles that have bran, endosperm and germ. That is to say whole grain. These whole grain particles were stone ground by hand then allowed to rise and baked into bread within two days. Then for centuries the whole grains were ground using water powered stone mills rather than hand ground. Hand ground or water power ground the result was still whole grain flour not refined flour so it did not cease to be whole grain. The problem with this fresh ground whole grain flour is retaining the germ means the flour spoils in a few days so milling needs to be local. A couple of centuries ago a different kind of milling process was invented. This modern refining method separates the bran (which was mostly fed to pigs until the oat bran crazy a few years ago), the endosperm (which becomes the refined white flour that is so problematic) and the germ (which is available dried in may stores). The ground endosperm starch is lower in nutrients but it also lasts *much* longer. Refined grain is now milled in very large mills and shipped long distances. Before the refining process was invented the whole grin flour would spoil in a few days. The ill health effects resulted when argiculture was invented millenia before refined milling was invented. The ill effects accelerated greatly when the refined milling process was invented. And when you grind even the best whole grain into flour, you raise the glycemic index. IF you must eat wheat eat it as a cereal. -- A computer without Microsoft is like a chocolate cake without mustard. |
#8
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Protein requirements; excellent article
In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote: It's true that it was done on the backs of millenia of heavy labor misery, but civilization has advanced to the point where many can now eat better than people do in hunter-gather societies. Can but for the most part do not. :[ I was talking with a friend the other day about organic grass finished beef and he asked, "Isn't it expensive?" Actually, the cost is in the range for cheese or virgin organic coconut oil. -- A computer without Microsoft is like a chocolate cake without mustard. |
#9
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Protein requirements; excellent article
Walter Bushell wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote: It's true that it was done on the backs of millenia of heavy labor misery, but civilization has advanced to the point where many can now eat better than people do in hunter-gather societies. Year by year the percentage of humanity so deep in poverty they are exposed to regular starvation drops. Year by year the total human population increases fast enough that the total number of people at or near starvation increases. As the percentage drops there's a point where even with the total population increasing the number starving drops. I am hopeful that will happen in the next decade during the regular economic up cycle that happens every decade. If not this one then the next one. It's not an end to world hunger but it is a step along the path to it. Can but for the most part do not. :[ Agreed and I'll reenforce it by adding a different sad face. :^( Even among the cultures rich enough that almost none starve folks have no idea what to eat. This is as puzzling to me as folks who can't glance at food and estimate what ingredients it was made from. I was talking with a friend the other day about organic grass finished beef and he asked, "Isn't it expensive?" How much extra are folks willing to pay for organic? For me it's some extra but not a lot. Maybe 10-15% more. Actually, the cost is in the range for cheese or virgin organic coconut oil. Regular coconut oil at Super Walmart is a couple of dollars. Fancy extra virgin organic coconut oil at the fancy grocery is well over ten dollars for the same amount. When used as a cooking oil I can't tell the two apart. Am I missing something by buying the cheaper type that appears to be targetted to the Hispanic market? |
#10
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Protein requirements; excellent article
In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote: Susan wrote: Doug Freyburger wrote: The article you quoted was about the 10,000 year old transition to agriculture and how that led to poor health. Thus the article is about the ill effects of eating whole grain. You realize that once a grain is milled into flour or cereal, it ceases to be a whole grain? I don't realize that because it was not true until recent centuries. For millenia grain was tossed into the air to rid it of the husk and what remained was fertile particles that have bran, endosperm and germ. That is to say whole grain. These whole grain particles were stone ground by hand then allowed to rise and baked into bread within two days. Then for centuries the whole grains were ground using water powered stone mills rather than hand ground. Hand ground or water power ground the result was still whole grain flour not refined flour so it did not cease to be whole grain. The problem with this fresh ground whole grain flour is retaining the germ means the flour spoils in a few days so milling needs to be local. A couple of centuries ago a different kind of milling process was invented. This modern refining method separates the bran (which was mostly fed to pigs until the oat bran crazy a few years ago), the endosperm (which becomes the refined white flour that is so problematic) and the germ (which is available dried in may stores). The ground endosperm starch is lower in nutrients but it also lasts *much* longer. Refined grain is now milled in very large mills and shipped long distances. Before the refining process was invented the whole grin flour would spoil in a few days. Shelf Life of whole wheat flour: 6 months to one year in the freezer if stored in tightly sealed plastic containers or if tightly wrapped. It will keep for only a few months if stored in a cabinet. http://www.recipetips.com/kitchen-ti...rage-guide.asp The ill health effects resulted when argiculture was invented millenia before refined milling was invented. The ill effects accelerated greatly when the refined milling process was invented. Looks to me like what I'm talking about is what the article states - Refined carbs are only the most recent and most extreme feature but the long term trend of ill health caused by whole grain is illustrated in the article. This is why scientific historians refer to the "diseases of civilization" diabetes and CVD. Grains developed civilization, but at a cost to health. The article points out why agriculture eventually dominated the globe replacing hunter-gatherer societies almost completely. In spite of the ill health effects and the hard labor involved, argiculture allows more people to live. With large enough populations quantity *does* beat quality. Even with the lower mean and medians of agricultural societies compared to hunter-gather societies the variance and total populations ensure that there are more high production people in an agricultural society than in a hunter gatherer society. And so no hunter-gather society has ever developed metal smelting and thus no hunter-gatherer society has ever moved towards industrialization. It's true that it was done on the backs of millenia of heavy labor misery, but civilization has advanced to the point where many can now eat better than people do in hunter-gather societies. Over time the percentage of the total world population in poverty shrinks. The dream that the total number will shrink becomes realistic as the percentage continues to decline. The dream that few will be poor remains a dream but the direction is clear. The question becomes whether human society can pull that off. Build hot houses and grow veggies. Plant trees to maintain forests. First, poverty. Most of the people who have escaped extreme poverty remain very poor by the standards of middle-income economies. The median poverty line for developing countries in 2005 was $2.00 a day. The poverty rate for all developing countries measured at this line fell from nearly 70 percent in 1981 to 47 percent in 2005, but the number of people living on less than $2.00 a day has remained nearly constant at 2.5 billion. The largest decrease, both in number and proportion, occurred in East Asia and Pacific, led by China. Elsewhere, the number of people living on less than $2.00 a day increased, and the number of people living between $1.25 and $2.00 a day nearly doubled, to 1.18 billion. Most countries these days are oligarchies, the government are just charades and facades, be it Red China or the USA. "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth." -Lucy Parsons Part of their wealth is stock in Lockheed-Martin, Boeing Co., Raytheon Corp., and other manufactures of American weapon systems that consume one half of the world's military budget. Stay tuned. There should be a war coming to a continent near you soon. (Venezuela would be my guess :O( Meanwhile, back on the nutrition front, one of the interesting things about white flour is that it attracts fewer insects and rats than whole grain flour. (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Tauber p.96) Secondly, "Anything that raises blood sugar - in particular, the consumption of refined and easily digestible carbohydrates - will increase the generation of oxidants and free radicals; it will increase the rate of oxidative stress and glycation,and the formation and accumulation of advanced glycation end products. his means thatanything that raises blood sugar, by the logic of the carbohydrate hypothesis, will lead to more atherosclerosis and heart disease, more vascular disorders, and a pace of accelerated degeneration, even in those of us who never become diabetic." (Ibid, p.194) I agree with you about the consumption of fruit and vegetables, but these are usually low in calories. The evils (lack of nourishment) of the consumption of grains can be somewhat mitigated by eating whole grains and whole grain flours, but (and this was a surprise to me) their glycemic indexes are very similar. As a result, basing the diets on grain (carbs), is akin to slow poisoning. Basing the diets on meat requires more farmland (and I hopefully a major change in the model of production). It is estimated that cropland will need to be increased by the size of Brazil, if we are to feed the 3 billion people who will be joining us by 2050. We got ourselves a conundrum here. Anybody for mandatory birth control? -- "When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -Archbishop Helder Camara http://tinyurl.com/o63ruj http://countercurrents.org/roberts020709.htm |
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