Dude! Chill! Here, munch on this tasty carrot… I wrapped some bacon around it. 
Not to mention, meat.
Here’s the classic paper on the subject.
It’s received plenty of criticism in the decades since, but the broad point still stands: young children will voluntarily eat a variety of healthy foods, including vegetables, if they are regularly offered.
Is it really you? I’ve sent that to half a dozen people to convey my views on vegetables. (“He’s as nutty as you,” said my mother.) I laugh every time I drag it out again. Brilliant.
That’s exactly what Homeopathy proponents claim about homeopathy: “There may be certain structures present in succussed remedies that we haven’t discovered yet.” Their claim is, quite frankly, specious – like claiming that invisible unicorns might exist.
And, frankly, if there ARE micronutrients in fruits & vegetables that we haven’t already discovered – well, we’ve been studying them scientifically for over a century now. If any nutrients exist that have evaded detection for THIS LONG, their effect must, almost by definition, be extremely subtle, to the point of hardly mattering.
Why would you do such a horrible thing to a perfectly innocent piece of bacon?!?! :eek:
OK, you can get fiber from supplements- and you need a lot more than you are getting. I suggest both the “orange powder” form and some sort of fiber complex pill, one that has several kinds of fiber. Honestly- you are not getting enough fiber (few Americans are)
Now sure, there are micronutrients, some have been IDed and some have not been found to be NEEDED for human health. Of course, they still could help in the long run, like resveratrol or bioflavinoids.
The good news is that you can get those in pill form also. You can even get concentrated veggies in pill form. By buying them, you are likely wasting some money, of course. OTOH, in the long run it could be a great investment.
Swanson has a very complete catalog and reasonable prices.
tracer Do you also hate potatoes and corn? Like mashed taters, french fries, corn on the cob, etc? Note by eating e.g. Yukon Gold Potatoes (which are very tasty) you can get many of the benefits of eating “veggies” while still eating mashed taters. How about beans, like chili or baked?
Methinks that overstates matters by a notch.
Overcooked vegetables, properly cooked vegetables, undercooked vegetables and raw vegetables taste rather different. Personally I dislike numbers 1 and 2 and believed that my aversion to vegetables was general for a while. But I later learned that I liked 3 and 4. YMMV of course, but it seems reasonable to me to question whether somebody dislikes all vegetables cooked in all manner of recipe pending greater substantiation of that claim.
Lazybratsche presented a very nice explanation about why this claim is more credible for vegetables than for homeopathy: we know there is a strong correlation between a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and good health. We have several theories about why–vitamins, less eating unhealthy stuff, fiber–but it’s hard to proved exactly what does what.
If someone showed in many, many studies that there was a strong correlation between homeopathic remedies and lifelong health, it would be a much stronger argument for “something is going on here”.
You might note that chapter 3 of tracer’s polemic outlines what he considers a “vegetable”. Corn is considered as a special case, potatoes are not. I suspect that he might consider potatoes as something which can undergo a transformation to become “not a vegetable”, like corn and tomatoes. Kids sometimes don’t realize that french fries ARE potatoes. And I’ll disagree with him about mushrooms.
Oh, and what do you think of olives?
I will volunteer for the group that eats veggies …
meh now if it was asparagus or water chestnut with bacon, that is different =)
I like my carrots plain and raw, to be honest. Maybe with a bit of hummus to dip in.
Olives are fruit. It’s obvious: look at them growing on a tree as drupes, just like cherries and plums.
Historically, though, going back to the Bronze Age, the main importance of olives in their native habitat, the Mediterranean, is the production of oil. To provide the essential fat that is otherwise hard to derive from plant food. To serve pickled or cured olive fruits as a snack food is just a sideline to the oil, the real reason for growing olive trees.
Potatoes aren’t a special case because they appear in one, and only one, Food Group. Corn appears as “corn” in one food group and “popcorn” in another.
Technically, the fact that I eat mashed potatoes and (occasionally) French fries means that I’m eating “vegetables,” since potatoes are classified in the USDA’s vegetable food group (under the “starchy vegetables” subcategory). But no vegephile would claim I was “getting enough veggies” by eating mashed potatoes.
Perhaps the sharp distinction between “vegetables” and “grains” – created by the USDA’s insistence on categorizing a food item in one and only one food group – should actually have some gradations in between.
Ew.
Yes, yes – and, taxonomically, tomatoes are fruits too.
But tomatoes appear in the USDA’s Vegetable Food Group.
And olives, it seems, appear in the USDA’s Oils Food Group.
This would mean that, as far as the USDA is concerned, olives are more closely related to sperm whales than to oranges.
In addition to the possibility of unknown micronutrients in veggies, one must consider a synergistic effect of all the nutrients in a veggie, fruit, etc., as opposed to taking them singly in pills. Many studies on just taking a vitamin pill, vitamin E particularly, have been disappointing, but those taking food with vitamin E (and other nutrients) have been encouraging.
You sure those studies aren’t comparing the difference between the dl-alpha tocopherol and the d-alpha tocopherol forms of Vitamin E?
Traditionally, most vitamin E supplement pills have contained one form, while most vegetable sources of vitamin E contain the other. (Although both forms are starting to become available in pill form now.)
I don’t think that they were comparing different forms of the same vitamin. In addition, studies on beta-carotene were disappointing when taken in supplement form. Now Foods Natural Beta Carotene 25000 IU Softgels
Because I like it that way!
In addition, I just received an email from Dr. Mirkin, who says:
That’s not quite what that article says. It only mentions “the inconsistent results from research studies aimed at evaluating the health benefits of beta-carotene supplements.” The real disappointment here is that we can’t conclude anything one way or the other.
Unfortunately, the study mentioned in that article only discovered that beta carotene and vitamin A supplements appear to put people at high risk of lung cancer (smokers and asbestos workers) at even greater risk. And we don’t know how strong the correlation is, because the study was halted early.