No. What makes them “evil” is that they are taking foods we have evolved to digest a certain way and unbalancing them in a way our bodies have not evolved to metabolize healthfully, which leads to Type II diabetes and all kinds of other problems. It’s the same problem with juice. If you eat a whole apple, that’s great. You get the sugar, along with everything else in the fruit, and it all metabolizes slowly. When you squeeze out just the juice, you get something that spikes insulin levels and chips away at your cells’ ability to use insulin properly.
With flour, it’s the same problem plus the discarding of the fiber and protein, which also is terrible for your gut flora and your intestines.
I’ve always preferred whole milk because I prefer the taste. However, I was under the impression that most of the milk you see in grocery stores are all processed. My recollection is that because the fat content varies depending on the breed of cow and the time of the year, the milk is mixed together in big vats, with the fats first removed, then a precise amount added back in to reach whatever % milk fat desired so that it’s consistent. So whole milk is any less processed than skim. I don’t think the benefits are because of any differences in processing, unless you can get milk fresh from the source.
Edit: Oops I see this is already mentioned above. So I’ll add a cite.
Sure, it would probably be ideal to drink fresh farm milk from one cow. But I think in terms of ratios of fats, proteins, hormones, and so on, whole milk is going to be a lot closer to what Northern Europeans have accustomed themselves to drinking for thousands of years than lowfat milk is.
I’d have said this idea was crazy six months ago, and yet here I am… I too hated skim milk yoghurt, so I’ve been making my own. The process is so easy, I make a gallon at a time in the crock pot overnight, then strain it through a big coffee filter to get the thickness and creaminess. I make some into tzatziki with dill and mint and garlic and cucumber, and eat some sweet with jam or jelly, nuts, granola, etc.
If I strain it a LOT it turns into labne, which is amazingly delicious yoghurt cheese.
Check out grocery stores serving ethnic groups that eat a lot of yogurt (Indian, Middle Eastern). Around here even Costco carries 2 qt. plain yogurt containers (lowfat, though, not full-fat) for $4, which is probably cheaper than it would be for me to make it myself. The two of us go through about 3 qts. of yogurt a week. The nice thing about plain yogurt is that we can use it in cooking, etc. or sweeten to taste. I bought some flavored vanilla yogurt while staying in a hotel this past weekend, and it made me remember just how much sugar is normally in flavored yogurt.
I agree that there is way too much sugar in most commercial yogurt. However, it is the protein that helps make one container of yogurt a snack that will keep you from feeling hungry for a couple of hours. The fat also helps, but nonfat does work reasonably well in that way.
I remembered the guy’s name: Weston Price. His dietary principles are, as I say, looking better all the time, even if not perfect in every detail. Pretty impressive IMO for someone whose principal book on nutrition was published in the 1930s.
Not quite. The problem is not refined sugar or flour specifically. It’s that we have it in so much abundance. When refining sugar or flour were first discovered, they improved health outcomes, as it got us more of the nutrition we needed.
We only relatively recently (on evolutionary scales) evolved the ability to digest plant matter, to get a lot of nutrition out of it. We were primarily carnivores prior to the agricultural revolution. We evolved to crave carbs because it took a lot more carbs to make up for our lack of meat.
With food in abundance, though, that craving is counterproductive. We eat more calories than we need. Food manufacturers inherently took advantage of our cravings for carbs and threw more in. Not even with nefarious intent–it’s just naturally what happens in a free market system.
My point is that it’s not the refining process per se that creates this lack of balance. It may seem a nitpick, but I don’t think it is. Because the implication of what you say would be that all we’d have to do is stop the refinement and we’d be fine. But if they put it in the same quantities we have now, I believe it would still be just as problematic.
Kids in school always shook their milk up. I never did know why, so I asked my mom. She explained how milk was delivered back when she was a girl in the early 40s.
My grandfather died before I was born (due to a congenital heart valve problem). Stories are my mom’s.
Cream would rise to the top, but remember, it wouldn’t be *all *the cream. I imagine that a good amount would be left in the milk.
You could use the leftover (essentially lower-fat) milk to make creamed veggies or in baking or on cereal.
There is some fascinating stuff about the making of butter and use of left-over milk if you google “second skimmings milk”. I’ve now been distracted by a google document from 1909.
This notion that it is all about calories reigned supreme among nutritionists for many years, but has taken a beating of late. You won’t find many experts that will agree with your thesis that ending the production of refined flour and sugar would have no impact on public health, or that overeating oats or beans is the same as overeating donuts or white bread.
Yeah, I think you need a better breakfast. For example, you can buy pre-made protein shakes (the brand I buy is Premier Protein) at Costco for about $1.40 each in boxes of 18, 160 calories for 30 grams of protein. I have one every morning (with my low-sodium V8 and apple) and I am usually good until lunchtime.
Oh, I could easily eat more – a scrambled egg takes no time. But honestly, I hate food when I first wake up and only eat the toast because I take medication (including NSAIDs, which are hard on an empty stomach). The toast, followed by Fage and fruit, is fine.
I’ve been not eating breakfast for 30+ years and my blood labs and such are all dead normal, so it seems to be fine for me. I eat a good-sized lunch (yesterday I had tagine chicken stew), so things even out.
Even at that, it’s not WHAT you eat nearly as much as how much of it you eat. The current obesity explosion isn’t due to people eating juice, sugar and white bread- that stuff’s been around for CENTURIES. Rather, it’s the quantities in which it’s eaten, and the fact that for a lot of people, it’s a predominant part of their diets. (again, the quantity, not the quality). None of that stuff is a problem in a balanced diet- but most people don’t eat anything close to a balanced diet. You wouldn’t see any real difference between someone getting the majority of their calories from white rice, peeled, boiled potatoes or white bread. They’re all overwhemingly just carbohydrates without much else- if anything, the bread might be the most nutritious thing, being more calorically dense, and having a lot of protein and more fiber per 100 grams than the other two. The potato has some vitamin C, and the rice is higher protein than the potato, but all 3 foods are predominantly carbohydrates without much fiber.
Nobody’s arguing that these foods are particularly nutritious. But blaming foods that have been commonly eaten for hundreds of years for a phenomenon that’s less than 70 years old is absurd.
