Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Re: [fast5] ancient diets and hunting Re: Dealing with Hunger??

 


On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 1:49 PM, barnabywalker <barnabywalker@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that rice added to a meal makes it very inexpensive. You have been pushing rice a lot more than many of us following a low carb/high fat diet. My concern is with all the carbohydrates in rice, I would gain fat when I included it with an inexpensive meal with fish.

Do you have to limit your portions of rice CARBS to a certain portion size, instead of a very filling portion that I had been eating with salmon? How many carbs do you eat? After all, one cup of cooked rice is 44 carbs and a half cup wouldn't be filling.

Barnaby

I wouldn't limit *any* macronutrient, is what I'm saying. I basically believe the brain knows what your body needs, and what your body needs changes according to your age, activities, and phase of the moon for all I know. Even "milk" changes according to the age of the baby animal, and each human baby drinks a different amount of milk from other baby humans. How can anyone know what another human being needs to eat?

Looking at the health of Asians, they typically do quite well on a very high carb diet, even though rice is about the emptiest carb around. This does not jibe with the current thinking on carbs. 

But one of the points of Fast-5 is that it helps the "appestat" ... that conglomeration of hormones and gut brain and who knows what else ... and THEN you'll eat what you need. So my experiment is: I cook food. My family (and I) take the proportions of meat, vegies, and carb that seem right and yummy. My family has basically glommed on to rice big time, and not only "rice" ... it has to be a certain kind of rice, and cooked fresh each meal. Which is pretty much the routine my Asian friends have ("If there is no rice, it's not a meal!"). 

I didn't start out pushing rice. Basically our only deal was "anything but wheat" at the beginning, and I was making a lot of non-wheat pizza, tacos, spaghetti, steak & potatoes, chili and cornbread, salads. Then I got into rice, and cooked it for ME ... but the rest of the family decided they liked what I was making better. So now every meal must have rice, "or it's not a meal". 

I have zero idea why this works. But ... good white rice sets differently and does different things in my stomach, than rice-based noodles do. Brown rice doesn't work at all.  Yet if you believe in the concept that our brains at some level know what is good for us, then you have to ask yourself: WHY did several billion people all decide to make white rice the basis of their diet? Pretty much all the grains grow ok somewhere in Asia, and they have in fact had wheat and buckwheat, barley, rye, and millet for a long time, but still: rice is the staple.

Another interesting thing is that red pepper was an American staple that did not come to Asia until 1700 or so. Yet they adopted it almost instantaneously. They didn't adopt a whole lot of OTHER American staples (like white potatoes or tomatoes or corn). But peppers became the central item in kimchi shortly after they got introduced. So what is it about red pepper?

Eating one meal a day ... it's pretty easy to see the effects of that meal. Either it is satisfying, or it is not. Either it makes you feel queasy, or it does not. My goal is a meal that makes me sit back and think : "Ummm. Now THAT was a meal!". Lately I mostly succeed in that. But the things that work for me might not work for you!

  
--
Heather Twist
http://eatingoffthefoodgrid.blogspot.com/
 
 

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