Nutrition

[mig]

All right experts. Everyone talks about conditioning, exercises, weight lifting and then a few words about nutrition. Considering that I have lost weight and just found that triglycerides are my worst enemies, meaning any refined sugar, I am looking forf a way to build muscle and have a proper nutrition both for healthy purposes and conditioning. Read a little bit about Gracie's nutrition but wanted to explore what had others experienced in this forum in gaining weight, keeping yourself in shape and great conditioning as you grow older and also for those over 50. Any insights and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

[taai gihk yahn]

All right experts. Everyone talks about conditioning, exercises, weight lifting and then a few words about nutrition. Considering that I have lost weight and just found that triglycerides are my worst enemies, meaning any refined sugar, I am looking forf a way to build muscle and have a proper nutrition both for healthy purposes and conditioning. Read a little bit about Gracie's nutrition but wanted to explore what had others experienced in this forum in gaining weight, keeping yourself in shape and great conditioning as you grow older and also for those over 50. Any insights and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

http://bodyforlife.com/

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

the info on these two sites will keep you busy for a looong time; somewhat different approaches, but both valid, IMPO

[wenshu]

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
We in the Primal community talk a lot about the modern medical situation – the growing prevalence of lifestyle disease

The most overlooked modern lifestyle disease of affluence: fad dieting. I wonder if this guy offers statin dosage consultations as part of his sales pitch?

No matter how much pseudo scientific language someone uses it does not change the fact that this entire ridiculous "paleo" fad is predicated solely on the ridiculous assertion that human evolution came to a grinding halt ten thousand years ago.

Eat less processed foods, mostly plants and lean meats. Stay away from high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils. You don't need a Nytimes Sunday Styles trend piece to inform some asinine, preening lifestyle choice.




edit:
Upon further review, he is not that bad. I just have a knee jerk reaction to the whole "premodern humans ate wooley mammoth testicles three times a day so it must be good for you" crowd. . .

[viper]

I am actually doing sport nutrition as part of my sports degree. A cheap way is to use calorie king data base and keep a food diary and analyze it.

[monkey mind]

Eat less processed foods, mostly plants and lean meats. Stay away from high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils. You don't need a Nytimes Sunday Styles trend piece to inform some asinine, preening lifestyle choice.


Michael Pollan, writing in the NY Times a few years ago, gave pretty similar advice. It's his concise statement that I find the best general nutrition advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

[JamesC]

The most overlooked modern lifestyle disease of affluence: fad dieting. I wonder if this guy offers statin dosage consultations as part of his sales pitch?

No matter how much pseudo scientific language someone uses it does not change the fact that this entire ridiculous "paleo" fad is predicated solely on the ridiculous assertion that human evolution came to a grinding halt ten thousand years ago.

Eat less processed foods, mostly plants and lean meats. Stay away from high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils. You don't need a Nytimes Sunday Styles trend piece to inform some asinine, preening lifestyle choice.



edit:
Upon further review, he is not that bad. I just have a knee jerk reaction to the whole "premodern humans ate wooley mammoth testicles three times a day so it must be good for you" crowd. . .

Paleo isn't THAT bad. And, to be fair, "processed" food hasn't been around all that long. Have we had enough time to evolve for processed foods since the agricultural revolution? I honestly don't know, so if you could enlighten me that would be great.

The highlighted section pretty much describes the paleo diet as I know it. It's really common sense as far as nutrition goes and I always just used the term "Paleo" to describe this type of eating. Is there more to the paleo diet than i'm aware of?

[wenshu]

Michael Pollan, writing in the NY Times a few years ago, gave pretty similar advice. It's his concise statement that I find the best general nutrition advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html

Half plagiarization, half paraphrase on my part. If I remember correctly he talks about shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store. As James points out it really is just common sense.


Paleo isn't THAT bad. And, to be fair, "processed" food hasn't been around all that long. Have we had enough time to evolve for processed foods since the agricultural revolution? I honestly don't know, so if you could enlighten me that would be great.

The highlighted section pretty much describes the paleo diet as I know it. It's really common sense as far as nutrition goes and I always just used the term "Paleo" to describe this type of eating. Is there more to the paleo diet than i'm aware of?

I wasn't talking about processed food consumption vis a vis evolution, I was referring to the argument against eating anything produced by means of agriculture. For instance the gene that allows adults humans to digest dairy products. Research it a little more; some fanatical proponents say **** like premodern humans did not eat vegetables therefore your primary caloric intake should be from fatty red meat. Not only is this ridiculous and dangerous from a nutritional stand point but evidence has been found of premodern consumption of cooked plant material. It's just bad pseudo science dressed up as a superfluous marketing ploy. The reason people see such quick results from it is primarily because of the inherent caloric restriction which is necessary lest XFit becomes XFat.

Marketing it as "Paleo" is just desperate fumbling at more of the same; impotent beta male hard gainers trying to convince themselves that they are tough and elite, just like in kung fu!

[JamesC]

Got it. Thanks Wenshu.

Fanatics ruin everything. Thanks alot Bin Laden.

[wenshu]

This guy is a good read.

http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/

Some choice cuts:


Review of Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/09/catching-fire.html
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bgKuRPVyL._SL110_.jpg

Wrangham's hypothesis competes with the Man-The-Hunter hypothesis which maintains that humans evolved big brains and small guts by route of increased meat-eating. However, Wrangham points out that the hunting hypothesis can't account for some of the facts. Increased meat-eating might explain the transition from Australopithecines to ****habilis (habilines), but not the transition from the habilines to **** erectus:

"Meat-eating accounts smoothly for the first transition, jump-starting evolution toward humans by shifting chimpanzeelike australopithecines into knife-wielding, bigger-brained habilines, while still leaving them with apelike bodies capable of collecting and digesting [raw] vegetable foods as efficiently as did australopithecines. But if meat eating explains the origin of the habilines, it leaves the second transition unexplained, from habilines to **** erectus. Did habilines and **** erectus obtain their meat in such different ways that they evolved different kinds of anatomy? Some people think the habilines might have been primarily scavengers while **** erectus were more proficient hunters. The idea is plausible, though archaeological data do not directly test it. But it does not solve a key problem concerning the anatomy of **** erectus, which had small jaws and small teeth that were poorly adapted for eating the tough raw meat of game animals. These weaker mouths cannot be explained by Home erectus's becoming better at hunting. Something else must have been going on."

Increased meat eating can't explain whey we have such small mouths and jaws.

"Given that the mouth is the entry to the gut, humans have an astonishingly tiny opening for such a large species....To find a primate with as relatively small an aperture as that of humans, you have to go to a diminutive species, such as a squirrel monkey weighing less than 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds). In addition to having a small gape, our mouths have a relatively small volume––about the same size as chimpanzee mouths, even though we weigh some 50 percent more than they do. Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal, or big-brained ape. They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape."

Compare the jaws of any raw food eating animal to human jaws. The largely vegetarian chimp has a gape much larger than that of a human:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G6P9iD1oTH0/Tl_cBVXIseI/AAAAAAAAAos/mYuyKAoI0ZA/s320/Chimp+Yawn.jpg
Source: Junglewalk

The carnivorous cat has a gape nearly half the size of its head, and the jaws are very powerful for cutting through raw meat.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jHFJ93xG_CI/Tl_b_TnNpbI/AAAAAAAAAoo/jSPFbK7Ut_c/s1600/Cat+Yawn.jpg
You can see some other big yawns here. Compare to the modern human gape:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HUKn83M3U9k/Tl_ijB106RI/AAAAAAAAAo4/Ish2VgYWUlY/s1600/why_do_people_yawn.jpg

Source: Flikr
Humans have a small mouth for such a large head. The larger gape of other species is not for taking in large bites, it is necessary for leverage to crush tough, chewy raw foods.

By the way, although Wrangham does not mention it, the shrinkage and reorganization of the mouth laid the foundation for speech. Thus, we may owe our linguistic abilities to the mastery of fire and cooking. I seem to recall reading that another anthropologist had proposed this hypothesis more than 20 years ago, but I no longer have the book that had the reference.

If evolution from **** habilis to **** erectus had been driven by increased consumption of raw meat, with technology and cooking as an afterthought, we would expect to have seen it maintain the large powerful ape mouth and jaws, retained the large, sturdy teeth, and increased the shearing action for adaptation to meat eating. Instead, from the habilines to the erectines the mouth and teeth shrank.


More on Vegan Raw Food Diets


http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/02/raw-truth-about-raw-vegan-diets-primal.html
Hedren et al performed an experiment designed “to develop an in vitro digestion method to assess the impact of heat treatment, particle size and presence of oil on the accessibility (available for absorption) of alpha- and beta-carotene in carrots.” Their methods:

“Raw and cooked carrots were either ****genized or cut into pieces similar to chewed items in size. The carrot samples, with or without added cooking oil, were exposed to an in vitro digestion procedure. Adding a pepsin-HCl solution at pH 2.0 simulated the gastric phase. In the subsequent intestinal phase, pH was adjusted to 7.5 and a pancreatin-bile extract mixture was added. Carotenoids released from the carrot matrix during the digestion were extracted and quantified on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).”

Their results:

“Three percent of the total beta-carotene content was released from raw carrots in pieces. When ****genized (pulped) 21% was released. Cooking the pulp increased the accessibility to 27%. Addition of cooking oil to the cooked pulp further increased the released amount to 39%.”
Look, although they treated the finely chopped (chewed-simulation) carrots with an HCl solution at pH 2.0, only 3 percent of ß-carotene was released. Don't you think this tells us something? For example, maybe our gut isn't equipped to adequately digest raw plants as they occur in nature?

The human gut can’t extract high amounts of anything from raw carrots or similar vegetables for one simple principal reason: our bodies do not produce the enzyme cellulase required to digest and break down the plant cells that contain all the nutrients supplied by fibrous plants.

Almost all of the valuable nutrients in plants occur inside the cells of the plants. These cells have walls composed of cellulose. Lacking any enzyme to break down this cell wall, humans must use other means to open the cells to extract the nutrients. Outside modern industrialized nations, most people apply heat to the food, which causes the juice in the cells to expand and this causes the cells to explode open, making their contents more available for absorption.

Thus, carrots cooked to a soft texture deliver 9 times as much ß-carotene as chewed raw carrots. This experiment explains why raw foodists love and need their blenders and juicers. Let’s say some raw food person eschews machinery. Here’s the data:

One hundred grams of raw carrot contains 16, 706 potential IU of potential vitamin A activity in the form of carotenes.
A human requires about 1000 mcg daily of retinol equivalent (RE) activity from food.
If only chewing the carrots, a human will extract about 3% of the carotenes, or 501 IU.
10 IU of ß-carotene from plant foods provides one RE.

From this we can conclude that 100 g of raw carrot provides only 50 RE. Since a human requires about 1000 RE daily, he would have to eat 20 x 100 g, or 2 kg/4.4 pounds of carrots daily to even have a chance of meeting his vitamin A needs.

Since the typical person eats only 3-5 pounds of food daily, he would have to eat nothing but carrots. Two kilos of carrots supplies only 820 calories, assuming that we can extract 100% of available calories from raw plants, or only about 24 calories if we extract calories from chewed carrots at the same 3% rate that we extract ß-carotene (the safer assumption, since all the sugars in carrots are also locked up in the indigestible cells).

So this guy better be up for spending a lot more time eating to meet his 2500 calorie daily requirement. How about at least 6 kilos of carrots daily, and possibly 200 kilos daily, to meet your energy requirements?

So the raw fooders fall back on their blenders, which will increase the nutrient delivery by about 7 times. Now you only need a mere 600 g/1.3 lbs. of carrots to get enough ß-carotene to have a chance at adequate vitamin A production. The caloric delivery soars to 84 calories per kilo. Now we’re making some progress.

Perhaps you can begin to see why some people rave about weight loss achieved when they gorge on raw foods. The caloric delivery can be so low, you may as well be fasting.

[wenshu]

He was a long time advocate and practitioner of high fat, high protein, low carb "paleo" nutrition and has found serious flaws in it. After writing a post saying "Farewell to Paleo" the backlash within the "paleosphere" lead to a follow up.

http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/08/follow-up-on-farewell-to-paleo-and.html

It seems paleo has for many people become synonomous with meat-based, high-fat nutrition, and so many 'paleo' and 'primal' people are also endorsing and including processed meats (bacon, sausages, etc.) or dairy products (cream, butter, etc.), that it has become little more than a kind of rehashed Atkins.

I regret having contributed to that.

It is to that 'paleo' that I said good bye.

After looking at research ignored by advocates of meat-based and high-fat nutrition, thinking things through, and experimenting a bit, I now have a different understanding of paleo diet. I leave the details for the follow-up on the Ancestral Health Symposium.

For now, in case you didn't notice, people in the media have already pegged 'paleo' as rehashed Atkins in the 'caveman diet' guise. If anything will destroy paleo, it is this.

Now, I have also noticed that people in the paleosphere have taken to accusing me of confirmation bias. I find that very rich indeed.

Confirmation bias means only seeing evidence that supports your beliefs, and not seeing evidence that contradicts your beliefs.

In the paleo- and low-carbo- spheres, confirmation bias looks like this:

Only focusing attention on or considering as important those physiological features that make humans different from other primates, and ignoring the many nutrition-related physiological features that humans share with other primates.

Only seeing/accepting evidence that meat-eating has benefits, while ignoring, refusing to accept, or denying good evidence that meat-eating can in some quantities and contexts be harmful.

Only seeing/accepting evidence that saturated fats are neutral or beneficial, refusing to accept good evidence that excess dietary SFs have harmful effects in certain quantities and contexts.

Only seeing/accepting evidence that unsaturated fats are harmful, while ignoring contrary evidence.

Only seeing/accepting evidence for the positive effects of cholesterol, while ignoring a mountain of contrary evidence showing adverse effects of excess dietary and serum cholesterol.

Only seeeing/accepting evidence that grains and legumes are harmful, refusing to acknowledge evidence that they can be neutral or beneficial.

Only seeing/accepting evidence that 'vegetables are useless or unnecessary,' while refusing to acknowledge evidence that they have benefits.

Only seeing/accepting evidence of potential harm from eating nuts (e.g. so-called antinutrients), while ignoring or belittling evidence that they provide benefits.
And so on.

I was caught up in that confirmation bias for quite a while.

But as I have increasingly broken away from it, and written blogs discussing evidence contradictory to the popular 'paleodiet' and high-fat/low-carb perspectives, I get attacked for confirmation bias?

It reminds me of the old adage: When you point a finger at someone else, you have several pointing back at yourself.

As I said in the 'Farewell to Paleo' post, I said farewell after tolerating cognitive dissonance for too many years.

I forgot to write that I came to meat-based 'paleo' diet after ~14 years eating a primarily vegetarian, grain-based, macrobiotic diet. That diet, combined with herbal medicine, had provided me with many health benefits, not the least of which being control of my constitutional tendency to respiratory allergies and inflammatory skin conditions (diagnosed as eczema and psoriasis, labels I don't necessarily accept).

As a graduate of the American Academy of Nutrition, and after 14 years as a vegetarian, I could martial plenty of evidence for a vegetarian, low-fat diet. When I encountered the evidence for meat-based 'paleo' I of course found it was totally contrary to my expectations, but after serious consideration it appeared strong enough to me that I could no longer ignore it, so I switched from macrobiotic to meat-based, intellectually convinced that the change might improve my health even further than I had gotten with macrobiotics.

I'm not one to try things lightly then dismiss them. If I think 'paleo' should work, and I find glitches, I will go back to re-evaluate the basics. If I still think the basic plan is correct, I will try some adjustment within the framework, like decreasing protein and increasing fat, or some other. I might be stubborn, but I don't give up on what I think is correct until I seem to have exhausted all possible variations, OR I notice that I am ignoring evidence that the basic plan has some important flaw.

When I see evidence contrary to my expectations repeatedly coming to my attention, I can't keep ignoring it, or explaining it away, to satisfy my preconceptions.

In my life, not only me, but people I love were putting into practice the ideas that increasing intake of meat and saturated fat will improve health, and they were suffering: Gaining body fat, rising blood lipids, congestion, malaise, low energy, etc.

Meanwhile, I could no longer ignore or consider invalid all of the literally thousands of epidemiological, clinical, and animal studies linking modern degenerative diseases to excessive intake of meat and fats, including saturated fats, in modern nations.

Nor could I continue to ignore or belittle all of the hundreds of well-designed studies showing positive health effects of increasing the plant: animal ratio or particular plant components of modern diets.

And that's why I finally said farewell to meat-based, high-fat 'paleo.' I just couldn't keep ignoring evidence hitting me in the face, contradicting my belief that a diet providing a high proportion of energy from meat and fat promotes health.

I could no longer accept a flat earth, when the evidence for a sphere hit me in the face.

Which led me to realize, that if the paleo principle is correct, there must be some evidence for strong human adaptation to plant-based diets that the meat-based paleo crowd has either overlooked or ignored.

[wenshu]

http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/search/label/Chinese%20medicine



Warning: This series of blogs presents an alternative Chinese-scientific perspective on the development of disease. I won't and can't provide 'research' to back everything largely because modern scientists have not shown much interest in understanding the directly observable marks of deteriorating health, due to their entrancement by laboratory tests which may distract them from direct observation of the people they attempt to help.

In the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (Huang Di Nei Jing), Qi Bo, the emperor’s personal physician, says (paraphrased):

“Those who wait to treat disease until it has already arisen are like those who wait until they are thirsty to dig a well, or wait until they are in battle to forge weapons. Are not these actions too late?”

Due to this preventive perspective, for several thousand years of development Chinese physicians focused on identifying early signs of imbalance so that they could take actions to avert health disasters by adjusting their own, and their patient’s diets and lifestyles. Perhaps as a consequence, famous traditional Chinese physicians had extraordinary healthy lifespans for their times. For example:

Dr. Sun Su Mao (Ssu-Mo) (581-682) – lived 101 years, an impressive feat for the 6th century. He once said “Anyone over 40 years old should try to avoid laxatives, which will weaken his body, and begin to take tonics. Anyone over 50 years old should take tonics all year round; such are the secrets of nourishing life to enjoy longevity.”

Dr. Meng Shen (621-713) – lived 92 years. He once said “A person who really knows how to nourish the body should always keep good foods and herbs handy.”

Dr. Luo Ming Shan (1869-1982) lived 113 years.

In Chinese Foods for Longevity, Henry Lu points out that according to Outstanding Chinese Physicians in the Past and their Medical Theories published by Peking College of Chinese Medicine in 1964, the 37 most outstanding Chinese physicians between 581 CE and 1964 CE had an average lifespan of 80.56 years.

Many of these guys lived well before the 18th century, yet, on average they lived 10 years longer than the average modern citizen of modern industrialized nations.

Over the millennia of its development, due to their considering dietetics one of the essential branches of medicine, Chinese physicians realized that many supposedly ‘minor’ symptoms arise from dietary imbalances, and that if left unchecked the process producing these 'minor' symptoms would eventually produce a major disease. Gradually this came to formulation as an understanding of how the bodymind (Chinese medicine considers mind and body as one unit) progresses from minor to major diseases based on an imbalance between dietary intake and elimination or expenditure.

The Chinese perspective rests on the realization that to maintain homeodynamics (health) the bodymind must have just the right amount of nutrition, neither too much nor too little. Like Plato, ancient Chinese physicians noticed a clear division of disease incidence between wealthy aristocrats and ordinary peasants.

So long as they had adequate quantity and variety of simple plant foods and a little animal products, the peasants remained lean, healthy and fit and had long lives. If they suffered food shortages, often due to excessive taxation (taxes were paid in bushels of grain) by overlords, they developed deficiency diseases marked by infectious disease susceptibility, weakness, wasting, mental and physical listlessness, and pallor.

In contrast, among wealthy and overfed overlords who used some of the grains procured by taxation to produce grain-fed animal products for their own feasting, physicians saw diseases of excess marked by abnormal accumulations: obesity, diabetes mellitus (identified by Chinese physicians by 700 AD, 900 years before Europeans), tumors, restlessness, tension, and sluggishness.




On the medical side, by treating both the wealthy and the poor, Chinese physicians developed a clear understanding of how disease develops.

On the one hand, deficiency of intake relative to requirements (elimination and expenditure) will create deficiency diseases, and on the other hand, excessive intake relative to requirements will create diseases of excess, accumulation, congestion, blockage, and stagnation. Chinese philosopher-physicians saw this process occurred whether talking about diet (excess or deficiency of food) or other matters (excess or deficiency of clothing, shelter, possessions, etc.).

To the Chinese, health, whether personal, mental, social, or political, could arise only through achieving the Golden Mean, a concept held in common with Aristotle.




Oriental medical theory maintains that in most cases these late stages of psychophysical degeneration are preceded by a long gradual process of apparently minor alterations in health that herald the oncoming or eventual disaster and offered opportunities for self-correction. Chinese physicians taught their patients to stay aware of this process and to self-correct using food therapy.<1>

However, one must understand that these food therapy methods work well only in the context of the basic healthy diet developed and integrated into Asian cuisine: starch-based, low in fat and animal products, rich in colorful vegetables. You can't overturn the ill effects of a very imbalanced diet by adding a few servings of a medicinal food.

Basically, if you understand how disease progresses from minor to major, you can interrupt the process before it becomes so deeply rooted that you will have trouble correcting it with natural approaches. Updated application of this perspective using traditional Chinese medical theories (yin-yang, Eight Principles, and Five Transformations) can easily incorporate and make sense of otherwise inexplicable medical findings, such as why many people with skin disorders have a history of respiratory allergies or asthma as well.

In outline form, the progression looks like this:

1. Health: Balanced intake and normal discharge
2. Abnormal discharge and general fatigue
3. Impairment of blood circulation and aches and pains
4. Impaired blood quality with chronic discharge
5. Accumulation of excess material in circulation
6. Storage of excess material in various compartments
7. Nervous disorders
8. Diseases of mind and spirit, summed as self-delusion

1. Healthy condition: Balanced Intake and Discharge
We take in nutrients from foods and beverages as well as influences from climate (hot, cold, damp, dry) and social environment (emotions, sounds, colors, etc.). All of these inputs have some effect on our physiology. To maintain health we have to retain what we need and discharge any excess.

We all transform or discharge inputs through respiration, perspiration, urination, defecation, and physical and metal activities. Women have additional avenues of discharge through menstruation, parturition, and lactation.



Every physical or mental activity we express reflects the quality of what we have ingested.

What comes out reflects what went in.



Chinese physicians did not recognize a dichotomy of body and mind, nor did traditional Western physicians or culture. Chinese physicians watched the development of internal organ disorders and saw mental and emotional effects of those disorders, and also the reverse, that sudden emotions resulted in altered operations of internal organs. They correlated fear with the kidneys, anger with the liver, joy with the heart, rumination with the digestive system, and grief with the lungs, by noticing how emotions affected or were affected by the organs.

So for example, in fear people may lose control of urination, in anger they may get indigestion marked by reflux, bloating and pain, rumination can destroy the appetite, overjoy (excitement) can affect heart rate and strength, and grief affects respiration (sobbing).

In English, we still have words reflecting this ancient understanding. For example, an disrespectful person "has the gall," referring originally to an imbalance of the gall bladder, a depressed person has 'melancholy,' an imbalance of the bile (chol-), and an aggressive or angry person is 'bilious' or 'choleric,' again, an imbalance of the bile, or liver/gallbladder system [1]. And how about being "****ed off" and "so scared I **** my pants"? Chinese medicine has a way of physiologically understanding the actual experiences that gave rise to these locutions as well.

I know, where are the 'studies' to support this? I don't know of any, yet. Chinese physicians discovered that eating animal liver would treat night blindness hundreds of years before laboratory science discovered retinol (vitamin A) and showed that night blindness results from retinol deficiency. If they had waited for double-blind, placebo-controlled studies and modern biochemistry to confirm that eating animal liver treats night blindness, thousands of people would have gone blind from deficiency over the years.

Modern laboratory and clinical science creating 'top-down' knowledge only studies a quite small part of reality and moves very slowly compared to empirical discovery growing from 'bottom-up.'


The statements in bold mark up align with a certain viewpoint that qi is not a thing but a process. Or more precisely a metaphor used to describe a group of processes; a system of biophysical classification.

[IronFist]

ifl

message too short

[Lee Chiang Po]

It is true that man was a hunter/gatherer up until about 10,000 years ago. He ate lots of different stuff, but the things he could not eat were things that today require high technology to make. There were no canned foods, no preserved foods, and most foods were in small portions and grains and vegetables were not likely to be found on a regular basis in quantity where you could regularly eat it. Most gathered foods were seasonal at best. Eggs were a spring time things. Of most any kind. Nuts were keepable for a while, and yet still seasonal. You can find things like wild native pecans, persimmons, berries, and some green leafy vegetable matter, and you could get fish most all times and meats now and then. Small animals like squirrels, rats, rabbits, things like that probably made up most proteins, and larger animals on occasion. This is a diet that carried human kind for literally millions of years, until man decided to stay put and start raising his food.
When we take an animal as a pet we tend to learn what it eats and try to provide that natural diet to him. If we deviate from that it can die on us. People are animals, and they do not do well on un-natural diets either.
Triglycerides come strictly from carbohydrates. Fat in other words. It is the fat that stores on the body. It also causes you to become diabetic, 1and 2, and it also raises the cholesterol level, and that is what clogs the heart arteries. Fats do not metabolize into fat. It is completely broken down by your liver bile. So eating low fat meats is a complete waste of your time. Lots of fats from vegetable matter, such as cooking oils, contribute some proteins, which will go into rebuilding your joints and such, which then can cause an auto immune system attack, like arthritis. By far the greatest danger to us is processed sugars. In 1900 type 2 diabetes was unheard of, eventually it became known. It was called Adult Onset diabetes. Today children under 10 years old are coming down with this affliction. It is because in 1900 hardly anyone regularly used processed sugars, but today it will range in the literal hundreds of pounds per person.
In the late 60's Gerber baby foods removed millions of bottles of baby foods from the American market because it was determined that it caused serious brain damage in mice. It also had a serious effect on human babies. Sugar. However, they just shipped the crap over to Spain and Italy. I guess their kids are immune or didn't count as human. Either way, the stuff has America obese and young people are having heart and stroke problems at very early ages now.
We will always have those that disagree with that, but go to any grocery store and pick a fat shopper and a skinny shopper, follow them about and watch what they put into their basket. It will tell you a great deal more than just reading about it.