From: Gary Miller (garymiller@starband.net)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 20:44:55 MDT
> The less efficient foods one consumes the fewer people the
> planet can support.
Does anyone know of a food list or cookbook that could be used a
decision support tool when buying/consuming foods. I have seen books
listing calories and even rating fast foods in terms of how bad they are
but nothing rating foods in terms of the best nutritionally.
For instance if a great many of the foods that people consumed were
rated 1 to 10 in terms of desirability from a nutritional standpoint, it
could be used when shopping or ordering from a menu to determine which
dishes would be healthiest. It's not always easy to tell due to added
salt, butter, sauces etc...
For instance most people would say spinach would rate high, but as I
learned on this list there are many other greens that have higher iron
content than spinach. But iron is just a single mineral. Which
vegetables provide the maximal nutritional benefit?
Even if I did not buy all the highest rated foods when I shopped due to
price or personal tastes I would still probably bring home a much
healthier selection based on the knowledge than I do now.
I like the idea of an Extropian diet. We could take the highest
nutritionally rated foods and find recipes that maximized the use of
them. Recipes could be designed to be prepared in ways that did the
least nutritional damage to the ingredients in the preparation process.
Each recipe could have suggested side dishes that would complete
proteins, add missing nutrients that the main dish did not provide
etc... If sweeteners are required the recipes could list a
nutritionally preferred low-cal sweetener quantity instead of sugar.
It would be a great thing to add to our Wiki when we get it. (Hint hint)
Then Extropian could take a crack at contributing their own recipes and
others could rate them or make suggestions for improvement.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]
On Behalf Of gts
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 12:32 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: RE: Experiences with Atkins diet
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> No, I mean "optimal" in terms of making the optimal use of
> the available energy in terms of Watts of sunlight ->
> calories of well-balanced nutrients.
>
> The less efficient foods one consumes the fewer people the
> planet can support.
That is exactly what I mean by "expensive." Animal foods are less
economical sources of calories than many other foods. This is true for
individuals, for societies and for humanity in general. This argument
however does not speak to the question of optimal diet.
> At the genetic level there is no "proper diet". There are
> millions of polymorphisms in the genome and what is right for
> one person will not be right for another.
Obviously so, but we can nevertheless speak statistically about the
human genome and the diet to which it is best adapted. Individual
deviations from the standard paleodiet would then be prescribed after
genetic analysis indicated that such deviations would be beneficial.
-gts
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