From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 00:46:39 MDT
On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 08:34:22PM -0400, gts wrote:
> > Looking at nutritional labels there's a fair bit of protein,
> > fiber, and iron there as well, especially for whole wheat
> > flour. One test I do is to ask "what would I be getting if I
> > got all 2000 of my calories from this food?" and good breads
> > and pasta hold up decently.
>
> I don't understand how you can say that breads and pasta hold up decently!
Because I look at the labels and do the math and get decent numbers. Some
multi-grain bread here would give 80g of protein and 160% of fiber, plus 100%
of iron and lots of various B-vitamins. Some conventional pasta would give
70g of protein and 90% of fiber. Like I said, they're not complete foods, but
they're not horrible. Eat a bit less, eat an orange and a carrot, or some
broccoli, and you're doing pretty well, or better than lots of sugar-fed
Americans. Calcium shortage, though.
> Practically any vegetable is more nutrient-dense than any agricultural
> product.
Oh, definitely. But you have to get calories too. And the link between
saturated fat and heart disease seems pretty strong, so I'd be careful with
the meat and fowl.
And I'm on a budget. Grains and beans are cheap. (I miss Trader Joe's and
whole wheat pasta which wasn't a price ripoff.)
Look, my main objection is people acting as if grains are empty calories.
They're not. Maybe Wonderbread is close to it, but there's more to the world
of grains than that. Bleached and refined flour is not all there is.
> The aborigines you mentioned have learned to grind seeds to make flour,
Not flour, breaking up seed cases.
> which puts them on the cusp of Neolithic. Before long they will learn to
> plant those seeds to provide food for the next season, if they haven't
> already learned to do so, and this will put them squarely into the
They might have been using those stones since before the Neolithic happened
elsewhere. And this is Australia; the next season is pretty unreliable and
the aborigines did fine without planting and anyway the European invasion
pretty much disrupted everything.
On the flip side those are unselected grass seeds -- which are, after all,
simply seeds. If you want to say large and starch-boosted agricultural
products are unhealthy I don't think the Australians contradict you.
The other way of looking at all this is that while it's hard to know exactly
what the Palaeolithics were eating -- plants don't preserve well, and studies
can be biased by the hunter or gatherer biases of the researchers -- there's a
population in the world today which lives longer than everyone, which unlike
alleged yogurt-eating Caucasus folk is documented thanks to a modern
bureaucracy. I speak of the Okinawans, who have more (and more active)
nonagenarians than anyone, and who eat a lot of rice. White rice, even. But
they also eat lots of fish and vegetables and drink lots of green tea and
don't eat much land meat or dairy and also seem to avoid stress. And their
children go off and live like Westerners and die early, so genetics don't seem
a likely culprit here. Or at least so says _The Okinawa Program_, from which
I conclude having some grains in your diet is not going to kill you.
I do have to amend the "lots of"s above; apparently another cultural feature
of old Okinawans was "eating until 80% full", so there may be a mild
calorie-restriction component going on here too...
-xx- Damien X-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Apr 13 2003 - 00:54:57 MDT