On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 3:39 AM, Chantelle <chantelles@cox.net> wrote:
so as long as you eat your meat raw......maybe you are fine?i think getting outdoors and getting adequate physical activity seems to do a lot to ward off cancer. some people still get it though that do these things......i have always loved the taste of all veggies but don't find them "necessary"........so I'm struggling with your post and trying to fit it into what I now believe about optimum nutrition.....chantelle
People argue a lot about theories on nutrition, but my own approach is:
1. Experiment. How does it work for me? Fast-5, for example, works. It's worked for people who eat a wide variety of foods.
2. Look at *cuisines* rather than ingredients. There really isn't a population on Earth, except modern Americans, that wakes up and says "I'm going to get 80% fat today!". Rather, they cook and eat according to a cuisine handed down over generations, that has worked for them. I think this is REALLY important, because the foods interact with each other in non-intuitive ways.
3. Look at the health of the populations eating those cuisines. Not all cuisines are created equal. Some of them have resulted in sickly, fat people. Others have resulted in lean, long-lived, healthy people.
4. Learn to trust your appestat. Your needs for foods change over time, level of activity, mineral needs, etc.
My feelings about vegies stem largely from #3. Certain polysaccarides are associated with gut health, probably because they feed bacteria in the lower gut which produce butyrate. There is no other known way to feed those bacteria ... most foods are absorbed in the upper gut, so there is no food left over for the lower gut. Butyrate feeds the gut cells and keeps them healthy, and also, it kills cancer cells. Populations that eat those polysaccharides tend to have very low rates of gut cancer. Having watched two people close to me get gut cancer, and having had major gut disease most of my life ... I think about that!
There are also vitamins in vegies that simply are not found in meat.
And from #2: There is no population that I know of that does NOT eat vegies (except some modern Americans, and some nomadic herders that live mainly off milk). The Inuit had "summer camps" where they got berries and plants, and the Plains Indians ate a wide variety of plants. One Aborigine, talking about "food habits" he had learned from his mother, said he was told to eat a little bit out of each of the food types (one of the food types being plant material).
And from #4: Since I came up with a cuisine that works for me, meals just don't feel right unless there are some greens. I'm pretty picky about the greens, and these days I'm growing more and more of them myself. But my body craves green stuff!
My other issue with meat has to do with traditional cuisines also. When people talk about an "all meat" diet today, they usually mean beef, lamb, pork. My issue with that is that again, I can't find an example of a cuisine were those are the main protein sources. Nomadic cultures don't usually eat the animals ... they drink the milk, sometimes the blood, and sometimes eat older animals for feast days or when they are starving. But if you look at old cookbooks, dairy and eggs (inland), or seafood and eggs (shoreline) are the staple proteins. After people got into living in cities, you could buy a roast and have it for Sunday dinner. And people got into raising chickens JUST for eating.
The only peoples I can find that ate mainly beef and pork were sailors, who ate salt beef and salt pork and hardtack, and they weren't very healthy at all. Might be because it was salted, or all the rum they drank. Steffanson did one experiment in the hospital, but it wasn't clear to me exactly what constituted "meat" on that menu either (it did appear to include fish), and it wasn't run long enough to really tell long-term effects, and it wasn't run on pregnant women or children to see what the multi-generational effects would be, and it wasn't run on a lot of people. The Inuit, whose diet he was replicating, didn't have cows or pigs ... they were eating sea mammals and fish, which are quite different.
Anyway, this group is mainly about Fast-5, not the foods that constitute "the ideal diet". I speak up now and then because some people advocate this or that diet as an adjunct to Fast-5, which is ok as an adjunct, but it should be understood that these are just dietary opinions and don't have much to do with Fast-5.
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