Is this really that big of a surprise at this point? I thought the evidence had been mounting for a while.
I really never thought that after 50 years of relentlessly useless bestselling books of diet advice, we would discover a single diet that actually works. But here we are!
I generally like this sort of thing, but when I try to implement it, I get stuck on cost and logistics of meal-planning.
re: 4
Ditto. When I've done a very low carb diet in the past I found it prohibitively expensive. I expect I could find a slightly better balance that was lower carb without killing me cost-wise, but it's not easy.
South Beach/Atkins wins! Yaaay.
Or really, what 1 said.
Its too bad, really. I love carbs.
Steak is very good on occasion, but I could eat pancakes and maple syrup every day of the week.
Meat and veggies ftw. I didn't realize that was a key component of Halfordismo.
6: I think that there's a big difference between South Beach and Atkins. South Beach is kind of obsessive. You can't eat watermelon in the beginning, because it's too high on the glycemic index, but it is full of water and low in calories and alleged to have fat fighting compounds.
Its too bad, really. I love carbs.
Steak is very good on occasion, but I could eat pancakes and maple syrup every day of the week.
I'm kind of the other way, with one big exception. I could quite happily subsist on a protein and fat diet, but I can't not eat rice.
10: Atkins is actually much more obsessive. In the first phase you're actually trying to initiate a starvation response.
I'm a little bit confused about the part of the article about LDL. It says that denser, as opposed to light and fluffy, low-density lipids are *worse* to have, but I thought that what was good for your heart was having lots of HDL.
So, is this saying that you want your bad low-density lipids to be even lower density? How does that compute?
12: The phases of Atkins are obsessive.
I just meant that they were quite different, especially since South Beach distinguishes between types of fats more than Atkins does.
15. Asking the important questions: are there carbs in bourbon?
There's carbs in vodka, but not in brown liquors or beer.
Low carb diets are expensive. I spend a lot of money on food and I could spend more.
I am hesitant to put my kids on a low carb diet because the the conventional high carb diet probably increases your height about 2 inches over low carb.
I have been doing intermittent 24 hour fasts starting after lunch on Friday. They are doable. I don't feel super hungry; mainly just light headed. I don't really think straight. And, I often wake up in the middle of the night or super early. I am not sure whether I should just stop doing it.
14.2: well, sure. And it is probably the case that both the starvation phase of Atkins and the emphasis on reducing saturated fats in South Beach are sort of unjustifiable and silly. But they fall under the umbrella of "low carb", and the emphasis on figuring out what people ate at some arbitrary point in history is also silly, so I just lump all three diets together as having gotten one important thing right for silly reasons.
19.2: In my experience, kids won't eat low carb diets anyway. Or at least, the carbs are the first thing my son eats. He'll eat pancakes and leave bacon. Finish the rice and leave his steak to me. That kind of thing.
19.3: That sounds like a bad idea. The fasting, not the stopping.
21.1: Drinks the vodka, leaves the Scotch?
We have rules about what need to be finished before you can leave the table.
17 is the best possible alternative world.
23: Say that in a Strother Martin accent and add ", boy" at the end.
21.1: The boyfriend's father insisted that the children eat the most expensive part of a meal first and was irritated if they went for potato before fish.
Figuring out who that was led me to the knowledge there was an Oscar winner in the cast of The Naked Gun.
27 to 25.
26: I just eat the expensive parts left behind.
Yeah it's weird how proportional the cost of food is to its protein content. All the best stuff - nuts, avocados, fish - is so much more expensive per calorie then something like bread. Eggs are the blessed exception to this rule.
And bread costs more than rice or corn, which I think are much lower in protein.
Google seems to think corn has 9g protein per 100g, which is a hell of a lot more than avocados.
especially since South Beach distinguishes between types of fats more than Atkins does
South Beach is my diet of preference when I need to reset. I just ignore the stuff about the fats. Also the stuff about no yogurt: I'm pretty sure they're talking to Generic American who assumes that yogurt only comes with a sweetened fruit mixture.
31: I guess it's poor quality protein or something. Avacados are all about the fat, not protein.
26
We had that rule if we were eating out. If we couldn't finish it all, we had to eat the expensive food first. At home, the meat we didn't eat got saved and eaten later. My one grandmother used to say, "If you don't eat everything today, then we'll have something to eat for tomorrow."
You can pry carbs from my cold, dead, hands. Last time I had blood work done (about a year and a half ago), my triglycerides were well below normal despite the fact I don't exercise and eat lots of carbs, so I'm going to pretend I'm one of those unique people designed to live off of refined carbohydrates until hubris catches up with me in a few years in some particularly humiliating fashion. Interestingly, when I stick to a traditional Chinese diet--high in meat/protein, fat, white rice, veggies, moderate fruit, and few sweets, I tend to lose weight and feel hungry about 2 hours after a meal even though I eat until the point of nausea during the meal.
That was the old joke about Chinese food.
In Minecraft, I've put Steve on a diet of all chicken because I need the feathers anyway.
I know essentially zero about nutrition ("low quality protein"? is butter a carb?) but I thought corn and beans was famously a vegetarian source of complete protein, whatever that means.
32: I don't make fun of the being careful about what fats you eat stuff. This is probably woo of me, but while I'm perfectly happy to have some good butter, I do generally try to avoid soybean/ vegetable oil and corn oil. I use canola if I want something with no flavor, but mostly I just use olive oil. (Unless I want a taste like walnut or sesame). I have probably been brainwashed by the Mediterranean diet people.
is butter a carb?
Butter is what makes carbs taste good.
Oh yeah, olive oil is another blessed exception. Olive oil is where it's at.
I live in a Canola oil producing region and I've discovered that the local canola oil all has a strong flavor and I don't like it. I don't remember American canola oil having a flavor, so is that really just kind of fake? Are there different varieties of canola? I've seen every step of the oil making process here, so I know the stuff I'm using is legit canola oil, and not, say, adulterated motor oil.
Coincidentally, the wife and I started Atkins yesterday. I've done it maybe 8 of the last 10 years, but go off in the summer to eat fruit (and then donuts.) It's her first time, so everything is more formal this year.
Everyone knows that vodka doesn't have carbs, right?
"This is probably woo of me"
That certain proportions of different types of fats are much better for you than others are surely as well established as anything in nutrition.
I thought corn and beans was famously a vegetarian source of complete protein, whatever that means.
The "Complete protein" thing is a myth that was popularized by Diet for a Small Planet. The idea was that plant proteins lack some of the essential amino acids, so you always need to combine your plants in a way to get all nine of them in one meal. This was then linked to some vague ideas about the traditional diets of native peoples, and how they intuitively knew these things because they were in touch with the Earth or something.
In fact, you don't need to get all the amino acids in the same meal, and anyone with a reasonable diet will manage to get all of them without really trying. So the whole thing should really just be forgotten.
The myth persists, however, sometimes as a fake problem for going vegetarian ("But how will you get a complete protein!?") or as a fake solution to the fake problem ("I will eat foods in traditional combinations, as my wise elders did!")
It isn't a protein deficiency, but pellagra is a real thing that happens to people in reasonably large numbers.
I have been doing intermittent 24 hour fasts starting after lunch on Friday.
I've been doing no-food-for-20-to-28-hours pretty regularly this summer, not really because I meant to, just don't get around to eating more than once a day usually. I've lost 10 lbs at some point in the past few months.
I'm going to pretend I'm one of those unique people designed to live off of refined carbohydrates
AIMHB, my biggest weight loss ever was eating a diet of pancakes, spaghetti, apples, ginger ale, Kool Aid and onion rings for a few months. Kinda surprising I made it through that alive.
But don't deficiency diseases happen pretty much exclusively to people with very very restricted diets -- the sort of thing you'd be unlikely to eat voluntarily? If the overwhelming majority of your calories come from some one particular type of grain, you've got a problem, but short of that, probably not.
48: Right. It's a problem that's unlikely to occur outside of extreme poverty. But it's a huge issue for many part of the world.
44: Right, but preferring real butter (ideally from grass-fed cattle) to unsaturated vegetable oil is a little contrarian.
Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelette, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee. And hold the chicken.
It's such bullshit that vegetarian substitute stuff like meatless meatballs, veggie burgers, etc. is way more expensive than the real thing (ground beef, chicken). I'm guessing that's due to farm subsidies, since yield/acre has to be way cheaper for whatever is going into the substitutes, even accounting for the processing? Straight tofu is still cheaper at ~$2/lb.
I don't think we could do a low-carb diet as vegetarians, although at least we eat dairy. Not that I'm a vegetarian but the wife and kids are, and we have a policy of everyone eats the same meal, no making other food if you don't like the meal. Exception is they can have fruits or vegetables of their choice to supplement.
I want you to hold the protein between your legs.
I always kind of suspect that low carb diets work for weight loss purely on calorie restriction, and wouldn't work for someone who enjoyed it. I have not tested this, though, through not having the attention span necessary to diet in any sort of organized way ever.
My interest in low carb diets is due to the fact that they seem to control my appetite quite well. I just don't get hungry as much if my last meal was low carb. I can tell if I've just had a high carb meal due to the hunger that follows a few hours later.
Yeah, if there's only, what, 3 or 4 brands* of plant-based sausages, the market's not going to get rationalized too quickly.
*None of them generic.
I heard that if you eat tofu, your balls shrink or something.
knecht -- I sent you an e-mail.
I'm no conventional agribusiness expert, but isn't it generally the case that any usable nutrients that can be separated out are going to be et by something, at some point? Cf. Ben & Jerry's waste milk going to feed pigs, mash from whiskey the same, and I'm sure that kind of stuff makes its way into cattle and chicken feed. So it's difficult to break things down into just "feeds animals" or "feeds people".
To a first approximation, soybeans are used to feed animals. And corn is animal feed/biofuel.
I don't know what "to a first approximation" means. But Spock used it.
Anyway, in the U.S. there is probably more ground in corn fields used for growing pot than there is for growing corn for direct human consumption.
58: they work like the dickens for me and I enjoy them perfectly well (except for missing beer).
I don't even understand how it's possibly to enjoy something perfectly well and miss beer.
Is "ale" not counting as "beer" or something?
58 -- In my case, if it's a calorie restriction, that's just coincidental. I do like to eat low carb -- bacon cheeseburger, hold the bun; prosciutto roll-ups with mozzarella if I want a snack -- and it works pretty well.
The link in 42 misses the significance of the article. It's not that a low carb diet is better than a bullshit* low fat diet -- although that's the headline -- it's that all the people going around saying that a low carb diet is going to kill you (any minute now!) are wrong. Unfamiliarity with the ubiquity of this warning -- I'm going to use a banned analogy here, so stop now if this is going to trigger something -- is like unfamiliarity with the ubiquity of the petty harassment women face from strangers who feel entitled to comment on appearance, bearing, etc.
* I don't disagree with the author's characterization of the low fat diet in the study. The problem with these things is finding a low fat diet that fat people are actually going to eat. I'm sure putting them on clippings and mulch would have led to better numbers: hooray for the people who like clippings and mulch.
It would be interesting to see, in a situation where cannabis was fully legalized, how the economics of the agricultural side would shake out. For instance, if you were growing 1,000 acres of well-bread cannabis sativa (non-sinsemilla) for, say, hashish making purposes, what would happen to the seeds? Per all the libertarian head fantasies, would things get worked out so much that you could grow a varietal that would produce lots of fiber, lots of seeds AND lots of THC/CBD/etc? Or would it be more economical just to concentrate on one usage per variety, and do whatever with the unused parts?
Small birds certainly do love pot seed. I have no idea if it would be economical to collect them for sale.
69 -- Becks Light is pretty low in carbs. Whether you consider that beer is another question.
I think if cannibis were fully legalized, our obesity problems would increase.
I've also done a diet that was, essentially, "no beer" (actually "no beer or fries") and it didn't work nearly as well as "low carb" generally, so it can't be that it's just reduced calories from beer.
But what about in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey gets high and does all that weight-lifting?
72: Eh, I'm probably wrong then.
73: Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you can do with various parts of the plant, but to the best of my knowledge, the varietals extant tend to privilege either fiber amounts (like, 15-foot high plants), or psychoactive chemical levels. I suppose there must be some that produce lots and lots of seeds, but there's little market for that now outside of birdseed.
Lots of weightlifters smoke weed. Lots of athletes in general. Note the overall lack of fat pro snowboarders.
Lots of non-athletes smoke weed, too.
Meth addicts seem really fit, if we're going by lack of fat.
Some of the discussion I've seen of this focuses on whether it's eliminating carbs per se that helps, or eliminating refined carbs. I agree that it's probably easier for a lot of people to cut out all carbs (or bread/pasta) than to try to figure out exactly how much they can tolerate.
I don't usually bother tracking my diet, but I usually end up with a 40%ish fat, 30-40%ish carb, 20%ish protein split, with some variation. My general rule of thumb is that as long as I'm not eating a lot of processed stuff, and I'm training for a half marathon, it doesn't really matter too much what I eat, as long as I don't refuel after long runs with ice cream, which sounds awesome right about now.
My friends have all gone paleo, so I'm learning to make paleo treats for potlucks. Vegan treats are easier than paleo.
73: I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that told me that legalized pot would be a third big crop in CA, on the order of vines or almonds, but not so overwhelmingly disproportionate that it really changed ag.
The front-of-the-envelope calculation would be the same if you were careful not to add the zip code in.
Couldn't afford rolling papers, eh?
It seems like if it were completely legalized, so many people would grow at home that there wouldn't be such a big market for smoking-weed on the agribusiness side of things. But, of course there are a lot of lazy people in California too.
But of course, no one is eliminating carbs. From the 42 link:
Everything from lentils to lollipops is carbohydrate; why on earth would anyone want to treat such a vast expanse of the food supply as if it were just one thing? Sillier still, all plant food is a carbohydrate source. A truly "low carb" diet is, of necessity, low in all plant foods- including vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, and lentils along with whole grains.
Reducing heavily refined carbs and sugars, sure. But no one is actually carb-free.
But, of course there are a lot of lazy people in California too.
MM-HMM.
Okay, now I've had time to look it up (source: LiveStrong.org -- if you can't trust Lance Armstrong who can you trust?).
beer: up to 13g carbs
lite beer: up to 4-5g carbs
wine: 0.8-5g carbs ("depending on color"?)
champagne: 2.5-4.5g carbs
spirits: 0 carbs (vodka, gin, whiskey, rum, etc.)
cocktails: zillions
mixers: zillions (they recommend diet tonic water -- ick)
I thought the actual alcohol was itself a carb. Guess not.
I thought that too. It's basically a refined sugar with wonderful benefits to mental processes.
But no one is actually carb-free.
I AM
So if I eat apexes, I don't get any carbs?
96: Lies! You eat the leaf-and-berry filled tummies of your poor widdle prey, you monster!
Just skimming the thread, but it sounds like my vodka and pot seed diet is a go.
96, 98: not only that, but, as you know, muscle tissue and (especially) liver is loaded with glycogen, which is of course a carbohydrate - it's the animal equivalent of starch, and pretty much chemically identical to it as they're both polysaccharides made from joining glucose units together.
You shouldn't eat apex predators (see my earlier remarks in this forum on the Renfield Diet) because they bioconcentrate stuff like, eg, retinol and mercury, and you will get the Twitching Madness and/or your skin will fall off.
I always kind of suspect that low carb diets work for weight loss purely on calorie alcohol restriction
This is certainly a lot of how it works for me.
I meant to link the NYT article last week about how too little salt was as bad as too much salt, and how most Americans are on the low end of the healthy range.
I've been doing the Tim Ferris "Slow Carb" diet, which basically Atkins + beans + a cheat day. Down 16 pounds in 8 weeks. And that's not accounting for any reorganization of the fat to lean muscle ratio from the accompanying weight lifting.
72.2 or breastfeeding decisions
Alcohol has calories but not carbs, apparently.
Isn't the liver basically a toxins filter? So in effect it's a apex predator you shouldn't eat. Even if not true I intend to abide by that rule, as I hate liver.
||
NMM to influential Hong Kong movie director Patrick Lung Kong. He gave a new life to Cantonese cinema. He was given a lifetime achievement award at MOMI a couple of weeks ago with Tsui Hark presenting and I was lucky to have met him and spoken with him a bit after the screening of Hiroshima 28. From the audience after showing Teddy Girls I asked him a question about the use of humor in his films that made him cry. A charming and deeply humane man whose films deserve a much wider audience (Story of a Discharged Prisoner and Teddy Girls especially IMHO). RIP.
http://artforum.com/film/id=47802
http://www.movingimage.us/films/2014/08/15/detail/yesterday-today-tomorrow-the-cinema-of-patrick-lung-kong/
Per all the libertarian head fantasies, would things get worked out so much that you could grow a varietal that would produce lots of fiber, lots of seeds AND lots of THC/CBD/etc? Or would it be more economical just to concentrate on one usage per variety, and do whatever with the unused parts?
Isn't THC content inversely proportional to seed production?
(I forgot to hit pause so on 106 so...)
His Hiroshima 28 was very controversial as it portrayed the 1st and 2nd generation Japanese survivors of the atomic bombing in a very sympathetic light, he suffered death threats and there were bomb threats and actual bombings IIRC correctly at some of the theaters in HK which screened the film. Likewise his Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, a retelling of Camus' The Plague was heavily censored and occasioned threats. A very socially conscious filmmaker who never repeated himself. I feel lucky and blessed to have encountered him.
|>
Isn't the liver basically a toxins filter? So in effect it's a apex predator you shouldn't eat. Even if not true I intend to abide by that rule, as I hate liver.
It's a toxin filter among many other things (like being a carb store, as I said). You'd probably be OK eating calf liver etc because they won't bioconcentrate much from grass. But predator liver is bad. Especially polar predators. Always turn down the little vol-au-vents filled with polar bear liver pate at the Explorers' Club soirees.
Honestly, at this point, what even is there to say? I'd just embed some victory .gifs but apparently that's technologically not possible here. It's just sad that so many people had to waste so much time and energy pointlessly weighing cups of pasta salad and blowing their money on "low fat" nonsense while getting obese.
The "oh but everything has carbs even Kale ha ha!" argument is just so fucking stupid. No shit, moron. Every single proponent of a "low carb" diet knows this. "Carbs" is a shorthand for eliminating grains, starches, and other high-glycemic sources of carbs.
Also yes, agree with Carp that the real information here isn't that low carb diets work for weight loss (at this point, who doesn't know this, except possibly "nutritional experts" at Harvard or Yale) but another building block in the argument against "OMG heart attack" nonsense that was propagated for years, and is common even among doctors. Like even my GP, who is very good, was shocked at my super good indicators for heart attack "despite" (in reality, "because") of my diet (today's breakfast: two sausages, leftover zucchini, hardboiled egg, and salmon).
Halford has clearly succumbed to the Twitching Madness.
Barry, how does Story of a Discharged Prisoner stack up to A Better Tomorrow?
110: If the link in 42 is right, that completely refutes the paper -- he says the way the experiment was set up, the low-carb diet was lower in calories than the low-fat diet.
91 -- In Atkins, the relevant measure is net carbs -- you get to subtract the carbs that the body doesn't metabolize (e.g., dietary fiber). I probably had 15g or so all day yesterday -- I don't care about the exact number, just staying under 20 -- which is less than a slice of bread.
We should just commission a tapestry of Khal Halford eating a raw wolf liver while triumphantly astride a bison yelling "Count this motherfuckers!" at the head of a massive herd assembled from across the Buffalo Commons forcing its way into Yellowstone and driving abject park rangers before it.
115 -- thank God you suggested it, I've been wanting that for years but it's little too gauche and embarrassing, even for me, to commission such a tapestry for oneself.
There is a blog by an psychiatrist who professes an interest in "evolutionary psychiatry," i.e. eating certain foods to promote positive mental health.
She had a post where she argued that organ meats are good for you and prevent fatty liver.
The "oh but everything has carbs even Kale ha ha!" argument is just so fucking stupid. No shit, moron. Every single proponent of a "low carb" diet knows this. "Carbs" is a shorthand for eliminating grains, starches, and other high-glycemic sources of carbs.
I assume this is to me, in 91. I was just responding to this, from earlier:
Some of the discussion I've seen of this focuses on whether it's eliminating carbs per se that helps, or eliminating refined carbs.
Anyway, I also don't really know how to square 42 and the reduced calorie thing. I mean, I don't believe that healthy fats are bad, especially if you're exercising, and I don't think all carbs are identical, etc. But it also doesn't look like this study demonstrated much.
117.1 -- Unless "positive mental health" means "swearing at people on the Internet," I'm pretty sure that 117.1 doesn't work, though it's nice to be thinner.
If people not trying to control calories ate fewer calories when eating a low carb diet, and that's why they lost weight, it's important and interesting in itself that they spontaneously ate fewer calories, isn't it?
118 -- no, it was to the doctor linked in 42. As I say, the main (new) information in the study was another link in the chain of refuting the supposedly negative health effects of a low carb diet. Everyone already knows that low carb, non-calorie restrictive diets work for weight loss, and better for almost everyone than almost all (as practiced) low fat, high carb diets. It's plausible that some (or much) of this effect comes from a psycho-physiological mechanism allowing you to consume less calories, but from the dieter's perspective, who gives a shit? One diet lets you eat as much as you want, the other doesn't.
118: I should have said "reduce" rather than eliminate. E.g., is it that eating no more than Xg of carbs per day is good for you, or that when you tell someone "don't eat more than X g of carbs per day", they cut out bread and pasta and cookies, and with it a lot of empty calories?
120: I think that's really interesting, for what it's worth, because I think it's much easier to stick with a way of eating if one doesn't have to think about it much.
As a point of idle curiosity, once you've lost all the weight you want to lose, do you have to eat a lot of calories on a low-carb diet in order to stay healthy/maintain a normal weight? Significantly more than would be needed on the standard "balanced" diet with whole grains and fruit and so forth?
123 -- no. The point (or, a point) of a low carb diet isn't to eat more calories, it's to not have to worry about the quantity of what you're eating.
In defense of Katz, he's responding to a bunch of headlines that say, without qualification: low-carb beats low fat for heart health, which the study really doesn't demonstrate.
Are there any data on low-fat, high protein diets?
112 Definitely worth seeing, it's one of his best films and widely regarded as a masterpiece of Hong Kong filmmaking (and who am I to argue?) But a lot less guns (as Lung Kong noted to laughter in the discussion before the screening). And Shih Kien really hams it up, PLK said he had a hard time reining him in. Lung Kong was noted for shooting on location so you can see a lot of really great 1960s Hong Kong that you wouldn't usually see in other films of the period. I thought it was great.
They screened A Better Tomorrowthe following night also with Tsui Hark and Lung Kong in attendance. While Patrick Tse, star of Story of a Discharged Prisonerhas a powerful screen presence but seeing A Better Tomorrow you can really see what made Chow Yun-fat such a star - it's like seeing James Dean or early Marlon Brando for the first time.
Incidentally, if you like John Woo, he also took the criminal/blind girl pairing of Lung Kong's The Window for his The Killer. Patrick Tse and Josephine Siao have some really great chemistry there.
Along with Story of a Discharged PrisonerI think I was most impressed with Teddy Girls (and with Josephine Siao and Nancy Sit, what's not to like?)
"As a point of idle curiosity, once you've lost all the weight you want to lose, do you have to eat a lot of calories on a low-carb diet in order to stay healthy/maintain a normal weight? Significantly more than would be needed on the standard "balanced" diet with whole grains and fruit and so forth?"
Once you hit your target weight you can ramp up the carbs a bit. I added fruit. There is a decent amount of leeway. Probably best to avoid sugar, grains, potatoes. You want to avoid blowing off the diet totally.
Shorter answer to 112: Very favorably indeed. See it if you can.
126: I think the deal is that you can't practically get most of your calories from protein -- any realistic diet, well more than half the calories are some combination of fat and carbs. So a low fat, high protein diet can also be conceptualized as a high carb, high protein diet.
109. Yes! Polar bear liver tends to be super-high in vitamin A, to the point of human toxicity. I remember that from an old life-among-the-Eskimos movie (or book, perhaps).
You might be okay with a vol au vent, though.
Unrelatedly, I recently got put on some mega iron-and-B-complex prescription for anemia, and wow do I feel better already. Or maybe relatedly. All summer long I've just been napping constantly. Maybe it's just placebo, but I feel somewhere closer to normal.
I am reading the "anatomy of violence" book. He believes that fish consumption or omega 3 supplementation is an important way to reduce violent and aggressive behavior.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Anatomy-Violence-Biological-Roots/dp/0307378845
Omega-3s are known as anti-lead.
I tried erasing my pencil marks with fish oil and it really didn't help.
He also thinks the twinkie defense sort of makes sense.
137: Because that's graphite.
126
One issue with the paleo diet as a theory is that it was a lot harder to get fats on the savanna than it is at the supermarket. Bone marrow and organ meats were highly valued.
140: They ate Neanderthals, thus explaining the disappearance of Neanderthals. Occam's Razor cuts through the confusion yet again!
139: Really greasy graphite, now.
Great big gobs of really greasy graphite guts?
And now you're immensely well-lubricated.
146 makes no sense, but it includes "butt" so I posted it.
Damn straight. Let's go do some crimes.
Next week's headline: Texas Legislature Abolishes University Sabbaticals After Recreational Abortion Scandal.
22:
If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Drink the vodka, leave the Scotch:
I do not like thee, Dr. God
I feel like I've got a whole lot of sunk costs with this pregnancy. Plus I'm hoping to get a baby out of it. So the cost-benefit analysis of the abortion isn't at all clear cut, from an Econ 101 pov. Plus, 30 weeks, Texas, etc: you really must go first.
127 - It's not the sum of his work at all but I encountered Tsui through his wuxia movies, so it's weird seeing him discussed in this context. (Although not any weirder than Ann Hui being one of the fill-in directors on The Swordsman, a fact I just discovered. What??)
Okay, fuck low carb: I will just eat with an abusive fork.
It's plausible that some (or much) of this effect comes from a psycho-physiological mechanism allowing you to consume less calories, but from the dieter's perspective, who gives a shit? One diet lets you eat as much as you want, the other doesn't.
Except that the low carb people started out eating 200 calories per day less, and by the end were eating 100 calories per day less. Because they weren't, actually, eating as much as they wanted at the start, so they backslid.
Everyone already knows that low carb, non-calorie restrictive diets work for weight loss
Again, that wasn't even demonstrated by this study, since the low carb people did, in fact, restrict their caloric intake.
LB maybe gets it right in 120 (although "spontaneous" doesn't enter into it - "OMG I can't face another fucking piece of bacon" isn't spontaneous), but another way to phrase it is, "Diets such as paleo, that are so unpleasant that people go hungry rather than consume as many calories as they did formerly, lead to weight loss."
Again, the people in the study did not stick with the reduced caloric intake, so don't try to come back with "people on low carb diets don't want those extra calories!", because that was not, in fact, the revealed preference. Needless to say, some people will find a paleo diet more congenial, which is fascinating anecdata that I can't wait to see in 6 different comments.
This is kind of weird and affecting. Looking around twitter at some of the reactions to Lung Kong's passing from the NY film tweeps I came across a series of tweets from someone who mentions that question I asked him that caused him to cry and his own reaction.
https://twitter.com/planetchocko/status/506871339970752514
just thinking about Lung Kong's Q/A after the screening of TEDDY GIRL @ MOMI. There was 1 question from the audience that brought him 2tears
which subsequently had me drop a tear or two. The question was about the comedic bits in the film amongst the seriousness of HK social probs
Lung Kong offset the seriousness of family, social, & economic issues in HK in Teddy Girl w a light sprinkle of laughs or else he would cry.
watching Teddy Girl which was filmed in the 1960s in HK,instantly brought back the struggles of my family trying 2survive in HK @ that time
struggles of leaving the mainland 2escape from the Japanese 2inheriting other issues in HK until my fam found themselves in Chinatown,NYC!
Thanks to Lung Kong for his humble & gracious pit bull fight to restore Cantonese films & Canto pride!!
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I don't have a twitter account myself or I'd probably reply. Maybe it's finally time to make one.
BTW, I do think it's weird that low fat diets have persisted as long as they have, since it's now 23 or 24 years since there was a major, news making study released showing that low fat diets don't make you any healthier*. Butter's been on the comeback trail for over a decade, and people have been trying to bring back lard for over 5 years as well (they haven't succeeded because commercial lard in the US is pretty gross, and not very healthy as these things go), but somehow the message has never quite sunk in. I haven't the least fear of dietary fat, but I loves me some grains.
*I recall this vividly, as the day after the report came out, I worked a temp job at Nabisco assembling some sort of low fat snack for taste testing purposes - I kept waiting for someone to tell us not to bother. There's also a Letterman Top Ten list on the subject - Top Ten Things (Other Than Cutting Out Fats) That Will Extend Your Life by Six Months [#6, Don't give the finger to John Gotti's limo]
I think healthy fats are pretty mainstream at this point - "mayonnaise, made with olive oil!!", etc.
(I am eating cheesecake while I type the comment.) Halford, if you never let you child taste ice cream or eat birthday cake, you're a monster. Let's get that out in the open.
She can eat ice cream and birthday cake now, but has to stop when she turns 12.
Butter is making a comeback because margarine has an unequivocally unhealthy byproduct in it.
has to stop when she turns 12
Can't let her get fat just as she's blossoming into a young woman.
Butter is making a comeback
My god, the butter we go through. We are bringing butter back. We are some kind of butyraceous Justin Timberlakes. (The first person to call me butyracist gets a sock in the eye.)
Butyraceous? Most butter molecules have more than four carbon atoms. And it would really smell bad if it did.
because margarine has an unequivocally unhealthy byproduct in it.
It does?
After reading all day about how I should be eating nothing but beef and nuts and eggs, I went forward with my planned meal of pasta with some veggies. The kids each had seconds, at least. At LEAST there was some cream and cheese in the pasta.
My novel diet idea is that you should treat carbs and fats like kosher people treat dairy and meat. So you can have as much carbs as you want at a meal as long as you have no fat with it, then as much fat you want at another meal as long as there are no carbs. That means certain foods like ice cream or fries are trayf.
171- If you google a food product you get the nutrition information label for the average serving of that food.
159. "OMG I can't face another fucking piece of bacon"
Clearly posted from an alternate universe.
Hydrogenated fats are apparently the devil. Mostly tho margarine is objectionable because it tastes awful.
I find the lack of detail re types of carbs in coverage of these studies maddening, as it seems bizarre to not differentiate between whole grains/legumes and high fructose corn syrup/white bread. Why don't they just cut to the chase and endorse MY preferred diet of fruit and veggies in riotous profusion, plenty of nuts, oils and dairy, legumes daily, meat a few times a week in a moderate amount? Sheesh.
174: Are you really telling me in a coy way to google margarine and discover something? That it's basically devoid of anything except calories?
I like country crock because I make approximately two hundred butter and honey sandwiches each week, and it spreads super easy. That's what I care about.
Trans fats. But it looks like country crock is safe. Stick margarine is the devil.
Do we really need any more trans-phobia in this country? Be the change.
Except I can never eat that stuff because the nickname of a guy at my camp was country cock.
166:also, margarine tastes like nothing and adds nothing.
We eat cultured unsalted butter, because we aren't savages.
This may constitute SF's chief climatological advantage: we keep butter in a cupboard at room temp, so it's perfect temperature for spreading but never sweats or melts. Note this still doesn't make up for dreary days of endless fog, cutting Pacific winds and near total dearth of warm nights.
My kid circa appx age 6 told a friend who served him buttered bread made with butter from refrigerator (hence, slab o butter on bread) that she made particularly delicious buttered bread. Maybe just serve your kids chilled slabs o butter spread with honey? Do the have chilly hands?
These are supposed to work well. Keep butter at RT upside down in a cup of water.
Under a pretty broad range of temperature a butter keeper will keep butter fresh and spreadable for ages.
185 to 184, I've seen them all over Europe but here people are surprised by them.
Although I'm wondering why that product description twice notes that handwashing is recommended. Does it keep your butter so tasty that you'll have an irresistible urge to scoop it out and eat it off your fingers?
187: I expect they mean that the blue lines would come off in the dishwasher.
184: Those work very poorly for jelly.
Soft butter on the counter is essential to life.
I use one of those butter crocks, and it's mostly great. Less great bits are when the butter detaches from the upper part and falls into the water (colder weather, mostly), and when I have no reason to use butter for too long and it develops a blue-cheese flavor.
I generally avoid pasta, bread and rice, but I'm happy as a clam to eat the most refined carbohydrate of all: sugar. You will never get my chocolate and ice cream.
This seems to work okay, since the squares of dark chocolate I eat are pretty small. But I could eat a lot of ice cream.
I'm supposed to just go around my whole life NOT eating slices of my dad's delicious whole wheat great with president unsealed butter on it and an embarrassing amount of apricot preserves on there, like to where I have to shield my bread from people so they won't see the inch-thick layer of jam on there? NOT eating chocolate-dipped macaroons? or salted caramel ice cream? or roasted sweet potatoes, even? that's just dumb. I could see eating bacon all the time to lose weight for a little while, but I would go back to a big bowl of purple dragonfruit, or yogurt and new zealand rata honey.
Tell us more about the salted caramel ice cream, please.
Columbus's own Jeni's claims to have made the first salted caramel ice cream.
Salted caramel ice cream is everywhere today. If you make ice cream in America, you're making a variation. But our version--Salty Caramel--the signature flavor that Jeni has been making since 1996, is the original salted caramel ice cream, the flavor that put us on the map.
Margarine, like tinned food, invented by those great culinary debasers, the French.
Dragon fruit is the cocktease of fruits. It looks really awesome, like something Yoshi would eat, and then it ends up tasting like a garish pear.
Dragonfruit ice cream/gelato is pretty good.
Also totally do not understand how to fuel teen era growth with a decent amount of physical activity without carbohydrates? Plus why deny oneself the pleasure of buttering bread obscenely thickly, ladling cured cream onto bowls of fruit and making pain perdu with brioche and creme all for someone who is built like a 6 foot tall filet bean? A very strong, wiry filet bean.
I have never heard of a butter and honey sandwich.
193 is preaching the gospel, as far as I'm concerned. I love my home-baked bread, and it's even better with lashings of sugar-laden jam.
201. Butter and honey sandwiches are fine things. You should also try buttermilk biscuits with butter and honey; they are even finer.
Oh, I do the biscuit and honey thing. One of the finest things in the world, indeed. I just can't quite imagine it as a sandwich. Or with margarine instead of butter.
Setting semolina bread to rise now. Will probably have it with butter hot out of the oven, olive oil when cool, jam on toast later.
173: A pair of twin MDs tried (IIRC) a low-fat and a low-simple-carb diet, and I forget which had which effects, but one of them said that the really snacky morish foods were all fatty carbs and either diet ruled them out.