/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>6644883

> I think low carb diets put you in a path of eating good for you food that also tastes good

That's where I disagree strongly. Low carb takes you away from many foods universally recognized to be good for you and usually turns to unhealthy foods to get the calories. Having spinach with your dinner is great, unless the dinner is a big steak fried in butter. The low carb message is misguided and is based a lot on the ambiguity of the phrase "carbs." Of course it's bad to drink soda. Of course donuts aren't a health food. That doesn't mean you shouldn't eat things like pinto beans, apples, barley, or sweet potatoes. In fact those are the kinds of foods you're not recommended to eat "in moderation" but as a prominent part of your diet.

If you're a sweet potato "addict," consider yourself lucky, because it's one of the healthiest foods we know of. Okinawa, Japan is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of sweet potato. Highest rate of centinarians in the world, diet made up of 69+% sweet potatoes, and 85% carbohydrate. If being "addicted to carbs" means living a long, healthy life, that sounds like a good deal

>As for the nutritional value of eating fruits... you can get the same nutrients from other sources while avoiding the added sugars.

It's not all about vitamins and minerals though. It's a lot easier to get vitamin C by incorporating more fruits into your diet, but that's not all you're after.

http://www.aicr.org/reduce-your-cancer-risk/diet/elements_phytochemicals.html

Eating a variety of plant foods gives you a wider range of beneficial antioxidants. Since there's never been any recorded negative of fruit consumption, why not enjoy tasty fruit and reap the health benefits?

>>6306293

Alright, so I'm thinking black and white but you've determined that any diet that isn't optimally perfect is "unhealthy."

Well to give me a better understanding of what you consider optimal, what special nutrients are coming from animal sources in this mostly vegetarian diet you've envisioned, and why should they be attained from that specific source, factoring in the full package the nutrients come in (plant foods generally come with extra health-promoting compounds in the form of phytochemicals/antioxidants)

When I think of that kind of diet, I think of the people in Okinawa, Japan, a blue zone known for its centenarians, where their tradition diet was about 3% animal sourced foods, the rest being sweet potatoes, some grains, soy beans, and vegetables. I just don't see what could be so magical about a few grams of meat that would mean the difference between the perfect diet and a terrible diet

>>6213026

>Blue Zones

What was your link to saturated fat here? It says a common theme is a mainly vegetarian diet that incorporates legumes. Pic related, it's what the traditional Okinawa diet looked like, very low in fat

>French Paradox

The French also love smoking and refined carbohydrates (sugar and baguettes). The French Paradox comes from two issues; the fact that the French often misreport their autopsy data and the fact that there's a time lag between their shift towards a fattier diet and the result of higher heart disease mortality rates

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1115846/

But anyway, back to what we're actually talking about. Here's what the National Academies of Science say about saturated fat

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10490&page=422

>Saturated fatty acids are synthesized by the body to provide an adequate level needed for their physiological and structural functions
>A UL is not set for saturated fatty acids because any incremental increase in saturated fatty acid intake increases CHD risk.

So logically it would make sense to attempt to eat less saturated fat. In the context of this thread, that means at least cutting the fat off your steak

>>6155549

Now that's some stretching.

>What he's saying is wouldn't it be nice to eat foods with the nutrients AND calories, not just the nutrients.

Or what I said, "wouldn't it be nice to also be able to get the calories you need to live from foods with similar health promoting qualities." If you take the people of Okinawa for example, famous for their long lifespans, they eat a lot of green and yellow vegetables but they also eat starchy purple sweet potatoes for 69% of their total caloric intake, with most of the rest of their calories coming from grains and beans. All of these foods are well studied and known to promote health. Wouldn't it be sensible to eat them? This post from earlier is still relevant >>6154428

>>5801655

That's debatable. We can consider these things healthy relative to red meat, but in their own right it gets more complicated. The president-elect of the American College of Cardiology, for example, talks in this article about how he had to remove even (lean) fish and chicken from his diet because they're still loaded with cholesterol

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Prevention/46860

When it comes to long-living Japanese, they traditionally didn't eat as much fish as you would expect, and the longest-living people in Japan have been the Okinawans, who eat the least amount of fish (about 3 ounces a week on average) and who mainly center their diet around their famous sweet potatoes.

>>5722389

But the longest-living people in the world eat an 85% carb diet

>>5711017

>So you're basically ingesting high amounts of omega 6 from nuts. Where do you get your Omega 3s from?

The only nut I eat is walnuts, but walnuts and especially flax seeds are some of the biggest sources of omega-3 in the world. I do take a B12 supplement, but then again I did that before I cut out the meat and dairy as well.

From my point of view, I've seen clinical trials where this style of diet has reversed heart disease without even thinking of the omega-3/omega-6 woo that the low carb promoters try to make a mountain out of

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9863851

And epidemiological data like that of Okinawa, where the traditional diet is very low in fat and yet they're the longest-living people on the planet

And then when I try to get into these low carb, eat-lots-of-fat internet gurus, it's just unproven theory after unproven theory that's incompatible with all observable data

>>5677543

>I'm having trouble with you telling someone to stick 80% sugar in their body

Now you're creating a strawman argument.

>80% carbs is seriously way too fucking high. Nobody's doing that if their activity levels are low to non-existent.

I still need you to explain why the percentage of carbohydrate in the diet, independent of caloric intake, should be kept low in sedentary people.

Pic related, the longest living people on the planet, 85% carbohydrate diet.

>>5641739

>either they have magnificent genes for longevity or they're eating the right foods

Or they use their billions of dollars for the best medical care on the planet. If you want to see what more realistically attainable diet and lifestyle trends allow a lifespan of 100+, look towards Okinawa where more people live to be 100 than anywhere else in the world. They live on purple sweet potatoes as the main staple of their diet

>>5614510

Having never seen FoK, I can't speak for it, nor do I know if I would be defending it anyway if I had. I think the take-home message is a "plant-based diet" though, which doesn't necessarily mean strict veganism. The people of Okinawa for example, highest concentration of centinarians in the world, diet is less than 4% animal foods but not strictly vegan, just heavily reliant on plants. In their case, purple sweet potatoes with some grains and lots of vegetables. This is very similar to the highlanders of Papua New Guinea, who traditionally lived on a diet made up of up to 96% various varieties of sweet potatoes. Both cultures are known for their longevity, lack of heart disease, and low rates of most types of cancer. I'm familiar with Esselstyn's work, and the Papua highlanders are one of the cultures he studied to develop his diet that he used to cure heart disease in his patients. Dean Ornish also cured heart disease with a very similar diet. Neal Barnard has had success curing type 2 diabetes with virtually the same diet. It makes more sense to me to take advice from the professionals who are active in the medical community and making waves with proven results and decades of real world experience, rather than book sellers with internet blogs who claim to know the secrets of health that the mainstream medical world is apparently clueless of, who present all of these cherry-picked theories that simply don't hold up to reality.

>>5565350

This is the same sort of argument people make against ALA omega-3, except for vitamin A it's even less practical. The human body absorbs and uses what it requires; obviously people who are also getting retinol through diet are going to absorb and use less beta-carotene because your body isn't going to make more retinol than it needs, which is why it has no toxicity limit in the first place.

>>5565382

>22 grams of fat is what a short woman on an extremely calorie-restricted diet might eat.

It's almost twice as much fat as the daily intake of the traditional Okinawan diet, where more people live to be 100 than anywhere else in the world. Just because it's not the norm in America to eat less than a pound of lard a day doesn't mean it's unhealthy or inadequate.

>>5541209

>Even the most poverty-stricken shitholes only eat about 75% carbs, Japan is closer to 60%

'Fraid not, friend. Asia and Africa are simultaneously known for having the highest carb intake as a percent of calories and for having the thinnest people. You can see Okinawa here, 85% carbohydrate (mostly from sweet potato rather than white rice like the rest of Japan), and famous for having more centenarians than anywhere else in the world. High carbohydrate intake isn't indicative of anything; every nation eats a high-carb diet because that's what humans eat. While there are good and bad sources of carbohydrate, the percentage of calories coming from carb doesn't seem indicative of anything related to obesity.

Okinawa is definitely the province to take diet advice from. Very little meat/dairy, lots of healthy plant foods. Their sweet potato isn't the same as our orange one though. The purple pigment in their sweet potatoes is the same as what you find in blueberries; phytochemicals called anthocyanins that act as powerful antioxidants and also can prevent certain cancers and prevent cognitive decline in old age. Orange sweet potatoes are great too, just not AS good

>>5485609

>You think 45g of proteins and 12g of fat is enough for a person to operate healthily on for an entire day?

It seems to be enough for a person to operate healthily for 100+ years if Okinawa is anything to go by.

I'm not a fruitarian by the way, nor does anyone (fruitarians included) suggest eating only bananas day in and day out, but it shows that it's not "just carbs" you're eating even in the most carb-rich foods, and your ideas of nutrition are off-base and misguided.

>>5469544

Most people who exist on the planet eat meat. Okinawa is known for having the most people live to 100, and while they aren't strictly vegan, you can't tell me 15 grams of meat makes a difference

>>5429089

>Japan

Okinawa specifically is the area known for people living long, healthy lives. Look how "omnivorous" they are

>>5394902

I don't know what you mean by "which is used for people who live above 100 years" but Okinawa, Japan is the place where more people live to be 100 than anywhere else in the world, their diet is essentially vegan aside from about half an ounce of fish a day, and of course on holidays they celebrate with pork. Their staple food for daily eating is the purple sweet potato, high in anthocyanins.

The Mediterranean diet isn't a terrible diet though, but its health benefits don't come from the meat and oil, but of the bountiful vegetables, whole grains, and legumes that it incorporates. Those are three food groups that many studies have shown to be healthy, regardless of the make-up of the rest of your diet, reducing risk of heart disease and cancers. I don't think any traditional diet is necessarily the best for human health though. That's why science exists; so we can isolate variables and find out for sure which foods are good for health and which foods we can do without.

>>5368373

>That said, typical western diet is entirely too much carbs

The western diet has less carbohydrate than the east by far

>every snack and junk food and easy convenience food that young adults that can't into cooking eat is mostly a bunch of carbs

Not true at all, junk food is typically refined carbohydrate sources (which doesn't represent whole plant foods that contain carbohydrate) combined with a lot of fat, but people tend to ignore the fat content for some reason.

>>5355067

Well okay, how about the fact that one of the most effective treatments for the reversal of diabetes is a diet with more than 80% calories coming from carbohydrate

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/29/8/1777.abstract

Diabetes comes from fat in the muscle cells impeding the absorption of glucose, leading to insulin insensitivity. It doesn't come from carbohydrate alone, and it even moreso doesn't come from whole plant food sources of carbohydrate that are rich in fiber (which is also a type of carbohydrate) that slows down the rate of digestion.

Also pic related, the diet of the longest living people in the world. 86% calories coming from carbohydrate. Carbs are what a human being requires for good health, the idea of "too many carbs" is like "breathing too much oxygen"; technically possible, but so unlikely in any normal context that it doesn't even make sense to say

>>5348937

>some of the lowest risk folks are nomadic, almost exclusively carnivorous tribes (Masai).

Where did you hear the Masaii were a healthy group of people?

The healthiest people we know of on the planet are the 7th day adventists in California, who eat no meat, and the centinarians of Okinawa, who have meat as about 1% of their daily calories, and consume no dairy

>>5312629

>If you want to look at health populaces, you should examine diets that exist in a real-world setting.

Okay, let's check out the longest living people in the world, the people of Okinawa, Japan

Not strictly vegans, but a few grams of fish a day, not even half a serving, virtually no meat or dairy, large amounts of plant foods. More people live to be 100 in Okinawa than anywhere else in the world.

>>5273873

>Tell me who you know personally that follows a healthy carb filled diet.

Me, and people I know impersonally are every athlete in the world and every major civilization of humans, including and especially the longest living people on the planet, the Okinawans of Japan, who have an especially high carbohydrate diet

>You're brainwashed by the food pyramid into thinking most of what you should eat is carbs.

No, I'm educated to know that whole grains, legumes, and fruits are some of the most consistently beneficial foods in existence whenever studied, and that meat, eggs, and dairy are the opposite. Why you think we evolved from lions instead of fruit-eating apes, I have no idea, but carbohydrate are what we're designed for.

>>5256961

The most long-lived people on the planet eat a high carb, low fat, low protein diet. The only diet proven to reverse both heart disease (Caldwell Esselstyn) and diabetes (Neal Barnard) is a high carb, low fat, low protein diet. Low-carb is a fad started by fat, unhealthy people like Robert Atkins and Loren Cordain who have no true science to back up their claims. Atkins didn't even understand his own diet, he got his ass handed to him on a radio talk show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBi2VABLNb0

>>5238835

That would be a valid point if it was substantiated by something scientific, but it's not. Here's the diet of the most consistently long-living population of people on the planet

39 grams of protein a day. You don't need 100+ grams of protein a day, and when I say "don't need" I don't mean it would be beneficial but not required, I mean it offers no benefit at all, and some sources would say it even harms you, especially animal protein if you subscribe to the idea of methionine restriction as a life extension strategy, or the role of animal protein in osteoperosis. "It's healthy because protein" is not a reasonable stance to take considering how relatively easy protein is to get and how little you require of it