About to embark on a 30-day trial of meat and water

[steve_bank]

Thee is a strong correlation between colon cancer and meat.

Did you have any constipation problems?

 

[PyramidHead]

Thee is a strong correlation between colon cancer and meat.

Did you have any constipation problems?

No, there isn't, and no, I don't.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Day 477.

This diet has become my new normal. All of the unevenness has worked itself out energy-wise, my digestion has fully adapted, and I'm continually finding new ways to prepare delicious meals for myself. My weight has stabilized and is at a healthy BMI for the first time in decades (I lost 45 pounds overall). My sleep has improved. My anxiety and depression are gone. My heartburn, gone. IBS and related issues, gone.

I just wanted to note that the losing 45 pounds is likely a big factor in the improvement of your health. That your body has adapted to not deal well with digesting sweet foods (sugars) is not necessarily a good thing.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm curious about your blood results. If you don't mind my asking, what is your current BMI?

 

[PyramidHead]

I'm curious about your blood results. If you don't mind my asking, what is your current BMI?

I haven't checked it in a little while, but it was hovering at about 21 most of the time after I stopped dropping weight.

I just wanted to note that the losing 45 pounds is likely a big factor in the improvement of your health. That your body has adapted to not deal well with digesting sweet foods (sugars) is not necessarily a good thing.

Maybe not "necessarily", but in my case it has been a good thing because it discourages me from eating sweet foods. I'm not sure if I should even count that as an anomaly, maybe this is just how most human bodies would have reacted to concentrated doses of processed carbs had they been available throughout our history. Maybe being able to tolerate high amounts of sugar is a sign of a problem.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain

...the take-home message for consumers is, "We should try to eat as much real food as we can. That can be plant food. It can be animal food. It can be [unprocessed] beef, pork, chicken, fish or vegetables and fruits. And one has to be very careful once one begins to go into other kinds of food."

It's just common sense that edibles with a hundred different ingredients, many manufactured in labs, cannot be as nutritious as real whole food.

 

[bilby]

Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain

...the take-home message for consumers is, "We should try to eat as much real food as we can. That can be plant food. It can be animal food. It can be [unprocessed] beef, pork, chicken, fish or vegetables and fruits. And one has to be very careful once one begins to go into other kinds of food."

It's just common sense that edibles with a hundred different ingredients, many manufactured in labs, cannot be as nutritious as real whole food.

Yeah, most common sense is nonsense.

Natural - Artificial is completely orthogonal to (and therefore unrelated to), Beneficial - Harmful.

That most people refuse to believe that is sad, but as unsurprising as that most people refuse to believe that the universe isn't run by a big boss for their personal benefit.

Whole Food, Natural, Non-GMO, and Organic are all marketing schemes, many of which overlap with each other. Their only benefit to anyone is that they allow food sellers to charge more money for lower quality. If you are not selling food, these labels are a sure indicator that you are about to be scammed.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain

...the take-home message for consumers is, "We should try to eat as much real food as we can. That can be plant food. It can be animal food. It can be [unprocessed] beef, pork, chicken, fish or vegetables and fruits. And one has to be very careful once one begins to go into other kinds of food."

It's just common sense that edibles with a hundred different ingredients, many manufactured in labs, cannot be as nutritious as real whole food.

Yeah, most common sense is nonsense.

Natural - Artificial is completely orthogonal to (and therefore unrelated to), Beneficial - Harmful.

That most people refuse to believe that is sad, but as unsurprising as that most people refuse to believe that the universe isn't run by a big boss for their personal benefit.

Whole Food, Natural, Non-GMO, and Organic are all marketing schemes, many of which overlap with each other. Their only benefit to anyone is that they allow food sellers to charge more money for lower quality. If you are not selling food, these labels are a sure indicator that you are about to be scammed.

Not sure your point. There's a very real health advantage to not eating twinkies vs eating asparagus. But you are probably correct that that is not widely known and appreciated, as I wrongly implied that it is.

 

[rousseau]

Yeah, most common sense is nonsense.

Natural - Artificial is completely orthogonal to (and therefore unrelated to), Beneficial - Harmful.

That most people refuse to believe that is sad, but as unsurprising as that most people refuse to believe that the universe isn't run by a big boss for their personal benefit.

Whole Food, Natural, Non-GMO, and Organic are all marketing schemes, many of which overlap with each other. Their only benefit to anyone is that they allow food sellers to charge more money for lower quality. If you are not selling food, these labels are a sure indicator that you are about to be scammed.

Not sure your point. There's a very real health advantage to not eating twinkies vs eating asparagus. But you are probably correct that that is not widely known and appreciated, as I wrongly implied that it is.

I agree. I don't think Bilby interpreted your post how you intended it.

GMO, Organic etc is an entirely different thing from being unprocessed. I don't bother with all the fad, diet crap like that, but I do try to minimize how processed my food is. And that's for a few reasons:

- the less a food is processed, the more nutritional content you tend derive from it
- and the cheaper it is

When we go grocery shopping a huge proportion of what we carry out of the store is fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. We'll by a small amount of processed foods, like chicken fingers, but that's only for convenience to give us something to eat when we're feeling lazy, so we don't have to spend even more money on fast food.

 

[PyramidHead]

"Processed" is vague enough that it can mean anything from just ground up into smaller bits to milled into a powder that changes its entire nutrient profile. It's a correlation, sure, but the thing that's bad about a lot of processed foods isn't necessarily just that they are processed. Some of them would be bad for you even in their "whole" form (like grain for example).

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

GMO, Organic etc is an entirely different thing from being unprocessed. I don't bother with all the fad, diet crap like that, but I do try to minimize how processed my food is. And that's for a few reasons:

- the less a food is processed, the more nutritional content you tend derive from it
- and the cheaper it is

When we go grocery shopping a huge proportion of what we carry out of the store is fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. We'll by a small amount of processed foods, like chicken fingers, but that's only for convenience to give us something to eat when we're feeling lazy, so we don't have to spend even more money on fast food.

I suppose that if I pick an apple, wash it, and cut it with a knife that counts as processing as compared to walking up to the tree like a deer and taking a bite. We're into the realm of
reductio ad absurdum here when someone defends buying hot-pockets or something similar. It's a matter of degree for various reasons obviously.

Cost is always important and those $1.99 boxed dinners on sale that promise convenience, "natural" and nutritious are popular if you don't know any better.

 

[rousseau]

GMO, Organic etc is an entirely different thing from being unprocessed. I don't bother with all the fad, diet crap like that, but I do try to minimize how processed my food is. And that's for a few reasons:

- the less a food is processed, the more nutritional content you tend derive from it
- and the cheaper it is

When we go grocery shopping a huge proportion of what we carry out of the store is fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. We'll by a small amount of processed foods, like chicken fingers, but that's only for convenience to give us something to eat when we're feeling lazy, so we don't have to spend even more money on fast food.

I suppose that if I pick an apple, wash it, and cut it with a knife that counts as processing as compared to walking up to the tree like a deer and taking a bite. We're into the realm of
reductio ad absurdum here when someone defends buying hot-pockets or something similar. It's a matter of degree for various reasons obviously.

Cost is always important and those $1.99 boxed dinners on sale that promise convenience, "natural" and nutritious are popular if you don't know any better.

Well I guess we wouldn't have anything to argue about if people carefully read posts and then said 'yea, you have a point'.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, most common sense is nonsense.

Natural - Artificial is completely orthogonal to (and therefore unrelated to), Beneficial - Harmful.

That most people refuse to believe that is sad, but as unsurprising as that most people refuse to believe that the universe isn't run by a big boss for their personal benefit.

Whole Food, Natural, Non-GMO, and Organic are all marketing schemes, many of which overlap with each other. Their only benefit to anyone is that they allow food sellers to charge more money for lower quality. If you are not selling food, these labels are a sure indicator that you are about to be scammed.

Not sure your point. There's a very real health advantage to not eating twinkies vs eating asparagus.

There is. But your claim was FAR broader than this new, far more reasonable claim.

Twinkies are not bad for you because they are 'processed'; They are bad for you because they are mostly sugar.

But you are probably correct that that is not widely known and appreciated, as I wrongly implied that it is.

Your original claim isn't 'known' at all - it's simply false.

Despite being widely believed.

 

[bilby]

"Processed" is vague enough that it can mean anything from just ground up into smaller bits to milled into a powder that changes its entire nutrient profile. It's a correlation, sure, but the thing that's bad about a lot of processed foods isn't necessarily just that they are processed. Some of them would be bad for you even in their "whole" form (like grain for example).

Exactly.

'Processed' is an antonym for the contentless marketing phrases like 'whole food' I am railing against. It means whatever the huckster wants it to mean. It means 'don't buy that cheap stuff, buy my expensive stuff instead'.

There are foods that are not good for your health, but words like 'processed' or 'organic' do absolutely nothing to help to identify them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"Processed" is vague enough that it can mean anything from just ground up into smaller bits to milled into a powder that changes its entire nutrient profile. It's a correlation, sure, but the thing that's bad about a lot of processed foods isn't necessarily just that they are processed. Some of them would be bad for you even in their "whole" form (like grain for example).

There's another factor here--it seems to me there's a fundamental flaw in the study. The problem is we don't actually measure calories correctly. The normal measuring tool is known as a bomb calorimeter. Burn up the food, see how many calories it releases. (Why the "bomb" part I do not know.) The problem is that not everything can be digested and not everything is equally easy to digest. If you were to eat the "same" number of calories of hard-to-digest food your body would get less net energy from it, and your body actually loses a bit of energy from things that can't be digested.

Thus, if the processing of the food makes it more available to the body you would see the weight gain they are reporting but it would really be a measuring problem.

 

[steve_bank]

Processed meats means bologna, hot dogs, water and chemical saturated ham and turkey, sausage, peperoni, salami. Sugars, bad fats, calories, and little nutritional value.

Whole beef has a high nutrient density. You only need a few supplemental foods to stay healthy. Some corn, potatoes, beans, and rice. You need fiber.

When I stared weight lifting I looked at the energy equivalent of fat. From what I could see it is not clear cut. First off it is much easier to work in joules instead of nutritional calories.

The heat equivalent energy of food is easy, calorimitry. The work equivalent in terms of how many calories of food it takes to lift a weight is complicated chemistry. I do not know it off the top of my head.

Food goes to glucose which goes through another transformation to power muscles. It would probably be easier to frame it in joules/liter and watts.

I have gotten into a little and talked to doctors. The notional calorie content on labels does not mean the same amount of glucose or energy transfer to the blood. Eating 100 calories of potatoes or meat or table sugar does not mean the same amount of chemical energy created in the blood.

Measuring body rest energy usage is simple. Have somebody sit in a tank of water and measure temperature rise.

 

[bilby]

"Processed" is vague enough that it can mean anything from just ground up into smaller bits to milled into a powder that changes its entire nutrient profile. It's a correlation, sure, but the thing that's bad about a lot of processed foods isn't necessarily just that they are processed. Some of them would be bad for you even in their "whole" form (like grain for example).

There's another factor here--it seems to me there's a fundamental flaw in the study. The problem is we don't actually measure calories correctly. The normal measuring tool is known as a bomb calorimeter. Burn up the food, see how many calories it releases. (Why the "bomb" part I do not know.) The problem is that not everything can be digested and not everything is equally easy to digest. If you were to eat the "same" number of calories of hard-to-digest food your body would get less net energy from it, and your body actually loses a bit of energy from things that can't be digested.

Thus, if the processing of the food makes it more available to the body you would see the weight gain they are reporting but it would really be a measuring problem.

A bomb calorimeter burns a sample without allowing any hot combustion gasses to escape (as these would carry away heat and result in a spuriously low result).

To achieve this, the combustion chamber must be able to withstand considerable pressure - so it is typically a thick-walled steel cylinder with rounded ends - it is made almost exactly like a high-explosive bomb or artillery shell.

The heat capacity of the 'bomb' can be measured to a high degree of accuracy, so as long as nothing is allowed to escape the chamber during combustion, it's fairly simple to calculate the heat generated by combustion of the sample, by measuring the change in temperature of a water bath in which it is immersed.

Typically the sample is placed in the bomb, which is then pressurised with pure oxygen to about 30 Bar, and then ignited electrically while immersed in a water bath. The oxygen is ideally saturated with water, so that any water generated by the combustion process immediately condenses, so that latent heat needn't be considered in the final calculations (in practice, adding water to the sample before pressurising with O₂ is usually sufficient to achieve this).

Early models did have a 'slow release' system that vented combustion gases via a copper heat exchange coil also immersed in the water bath, to capture that heat. But modern steel allows the construction of totally sealed bombs, able to withstand the full pressure of these combustion products.

 

[PyramidHead]

Processed meats means bologna, hot dogs, water and chemical saturated ham and turkey, sausage, peperoni, salami. Sugars, bad fats, calories, and little nutritional value.

Whole beef has a high nutrient density. You only need a few supplemental foods to stay healthy. Some corn, potatoes, beans, and rice. You need fiber.

I need fiber? Why am I healthy and regular without eating any fiber for a year and a half? And not eating any of those "supplemental foods" either?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Processed meats means bologna, hot dogs, water and chemical saturated ham and turkey, sausage, peperoni, salami. Sugars, bad fats, calories, and little nutritional value.

Whole beef has a high nutrient density. You only need a few supplemental foods to stay healthy. Some corn, potatoes, beans, and rice. You need fiber.

I need fiber? Why am I healthy and regular without eating any fiber for a year and a half? And not eating any of those "supplemental foods" either?

Added fiber works for some people. If a person needs fiber it seems better to eat the foods that have fiber, and not use fiber supplements. But that's just me.

 

[PyramidHead]

Processed meats means bologna, hot dogs, water and chemical saturated ham and turkey, sausage, peperoni, salami. Sugars, bad fats, calories, and little nutritional value.

Whole beef has a high nutrient density. You only need a few supplemental foods to stay healthy. Some corn, potatoes, beans, and rice. You need fiber.

I need fiber? Why am I healthy and regular without eating any fiber for a year and a half? And not eating any of those "supplemental foods" either?

Added fiber works for some people. If a person needs fiber it seems better to eat the foods that have fiber, and not use fiber supplements. But that's just me.

I guess, but my point is that needing fiber is tied to eating foods that spike blood sugar. There isn't a natural human requirement for fiber anymore than there is one for insulin injections, which some people also need because of their diet and genetic factors.