response 50 of 82:

Jun 25 09:23 UTC 2002

I agree that carbonated drinks, including soda pop, are a real bane to 
a good diet.  Most people don't understand that carbonation *alone* is 
a real problem.  A friend of mine did research on a project that showed 
even diet pop is a problem: because your body must process carbonation 
first, as it is CO2 and would interfere with reoxygenation.  Your 
metabolism slows down as your body processes the carbon dioxide.  So.. 
diet pop can still make you fat.

Daniel is right.  It is hard to make meat moist and tender if there 
isn't much marbling.  Thus consumers demand it.  Much of 
food "processing" also has to do with palatibility, too.

I think you both breezed RIGHT past my point.  If you're working hard 
to grow your own food, cook it and prepare it yourself, chances are, 
yes, you'll probably be eating healthier and probably won't be as fat.  
Restaurants and *convenience* foods cater to those who are concerned 
with time or don't want to do the work themselves.  Capiche?  Oh, by 
the way, by restaurants, that would imply much more so for "fast food."

Hey, do we have a gardening conference?

response 52 of 82:

Jun 25 15:51 UTC 2002

If you want meat to be moist, you can boil it. The fatty cuts are designed
for roasting or broiling and I doubt it is actually moisture in them but
melted fat, unless all that fat keeps the water from getting out as fast when
cooked.  

From a nutrition book:  3 oz lean meat has as little as 9 g fat, 3 oz lean
hamburg 16 g fat, regular hamburg 17.8 g fat, roast beef up to 26 g fat.
One cup cooked (8 oz raw?) brown rice 1.2 g fat, one cup white rice .2 g fat.


Carbohydrate and protein are 4 calories per gram, fat is 9 cal/g.

One 3 oz serving of lean hamburger is 230 calories of which 9x16 = 144 cal
are fat, or more than half fat.  Lowfat cottage cheese is 2.3 g fat (22 cal
fat) and total calories 164, or about 15% calories from fat. Brown rice is
232 calories per cooked cup of which 1.2x9 = 11 cal is fat, or about 5% of
calories from fat.  White rice even less.  Lentils are about 5% of calories
from fat.  Fruits and vegetables 5% or less.  Granola is 35% fat because of
all the added oil.  Peanuts 78% so we add nuts to our stir fries.  Coconut
milk - do you mean the sweet watery liquid in the coconut, which I suspect
is mostly water, or the opaque white stuff which is squeezed out and is
probably mostly oil?  

response 54 of 82:

Jun 26 00:55 UTC 2002

What you are feeling is the melted fat.  Dry bread does not have fat smeared
on it, but the water content is no different from buttered bread.

response 56 of 82:

Jun 26 14:27 UTC 2002

Sweet foods are good for you if you are short on calories, same for salt if
you need that, it is just that Americans have too much food available of the
type that would be good for them if they were starving but is not if they are
already eating plenty.  Bitter foods are not good for anyone unless they are
eating them as medicines.

response 58 of 82:

Jun 27 06:06 UTC 2002

I suppose you could view bitter herbs as medicine, perhaps, but I 
think "digestive aid" is better, and you can eat them as *food*, not 
like many other substances medicines are derived from (willowbark, for 
example, for aspirin).

response 60 of 82:

Jun 27 16:45 UTC 2002

I cited Jim.   People and other animals have evolved to be able to taste
things that are bitter and therefore poisonous.  Your liver can detoxify
certain amounts of bitter substances so that you can eat foods containing
them, which does not mean that the bitter substances in them are nutritious.
The poisons can be useful under certain circumstances, such as things with
tannin in them killing intestinal parasites.  Sick animals seek out certain
plants and eat them as cures.  

Rats fed foods high in fat and sugar eat more of them than they need to
maintain their weight so they get fat.  Rats fed a normal rat diet, also
allowed to eat as much as they want, do not get fat.  If people are around
long enough to adapt to the current American diet, presumably those with a
tendency to overeat will leave fewer descendants (due to dying of circulatory
problems and cancer) and people will eventually not overeat when presented
with the typical American diet.  Which may make problems in times of famine.

response 62 of 82:

Jun 28 02:00 UTC 2002

We have two friends aged about 50 who just had bypass surgery, both men.  One
of them plans to get married this year and have kids (not grandkids, yet).
He eats in fast food places most of the time.  Women who have kids up to age
45 are not going to do a good job raising them if they die of a heart attack
at age 50.  Kids don't raise themselves after you breed them, or at least they
are less likely to survive if they do, even in a welfare society like ours.
Through most of history kids without parents tended to either get sent to live
with relatives, some of whom did not care, or to orphanages where many died.

response 64 of 82:

Jun 28 13:57 UTC 2002

Evolutionarily speaking, you're a success if you breed and most of your 
kids don't die.  Most kids born in America these days don't die, 
regardless of their other circumstances.  That's assuming they don't 
have a fatal genetic defect, of course.

Even if your mother dies in childbirth and your dad chokes on a french 
fry at McDonald's later the same day, you'll most likely survive to 
adulthood.

Fast food isn't improving the breed evolutionarily, any more than it's 
doing so nutritionally.

response 66 of 82:

Jun 29 15:37 UTC 2002

Kids born in poverty have a higher chance of dying in America, due to violence
if not disease.  So your point is that in affluent societies where kids are
raised whether or not they have parents, there is no genetic disadvantage,
as regards passing along your genes, if you are the sort that eats yourself
to death by age 50?  

response 68 of 82:

Jun 30 01:58 UTC 2002

I'm causing drift in this item.  I apologize.

response 70 of 82:

Jul 1 13:59 UTC 2002

I did a quick search.  Lots of stuff on orphan drugs, and an article on
hummingbirds, and adoption of foreign 'orphans' (defined as anyone whose
parents have agreed to let them be adopted), and one badly written and badly
spelled article urging that all parents get married because otherwise they
are 20 times as likely to abuse their children because they are not committed
parents.  One of the points in this article is that boyfriends are likely to
abuse the kids of woman they are living with, which might lead one to conclude
that fathers should not eat themselves to death by age 50 if they don't want
their kids to be beaten up and burned with cigarettes.  Poorer families (read
single-parent) are also more likely to neglect their kids.  

I suspect that the actual percentage of boyfriends or stepfathers who abuse
their stepkids is rather low to start with (20 times a small fraction is still
a small fraction) but having two biological parents probably does increase
a child's chances of surviving to have children even in the US.

My father lost his father at age 12 but his three older siblings got jobs.
They did not manage to go to college;  he did.

response 72 of 82:

Jul 1 15:34 UTC 2002

(An extended discussion of genetic effects in an item in the cooking 
conference on healthy food seems a bit of an excessive drift.)

response 74 of 82:

Jul 1 22:30 UTC 2002

If no one objects, I'll withdraw my apology, then.  (-: