My son kept leaning on me to eat catsup flavoured potato chips. They are BEYOND disgusting!:eek:
Domestic animals destined for slaughter are fed grain for more than a few reasons. One of the biggest is that because grain can be stored and retains its nutrients for a long time (unlike, say, hay), it is possible to have a continuous flow of fresh meat into markets. If we relied on pasture or forage animals would have to be slaughtered seasonally, when their meat was at its peak due to the forage quality. With grain you can fatten aseasonally.
Also, after only a few days of high fat high salt high protein dining (like a week of eating out in Germany, which I just did), I crave only fresh vegetables and raw fruits. I feel I could go a long time without viewing any schnitzel or bratwurst or potatoes in salty vinegar. But perhaps that’s just me.
Not just you. I spent 10 days in Vienna at a conference and all I want was fresh fruits and veggies (not slathered in mayo). Desperate for the crunch of a cucumber or a bit apple.
So? The fat asses of the people all over this country are hard to avoid, no matter WHAT aspect of grains is really to blame. ROFL
Its already been covered, but we evolved in an environment where salt, sugar, fats, etc were hard to find. So we crave them (the salt craving is because a paleo diet is high in potassium but low in sodium). Have you ever heard stories about people who were poor their whole lives and always wanted expensive stuff but could never afford it? Imagine that they win the lottery, then they go on a spending binge for a month or so. That is us, evolution hasn’t caught up to the fact that we aren’t living in the savannah and we are in the middle of an unhealthy binge. In fact, obesity has really only been a problem for the last generation or two (and is only a recent problem in developing countries like China). I’ve heard stories about human ancestors who had to kill their newborns because they didn’t have enough calories to feed them. In that kind of environment people are going to crave foods high in calories. I don’t expect evolution to catch up to us (the diseases of western lifestyle don’t affect mating much since they don’t occur until your 50s or so). We will probably invent a technological solution in the next few decades.
Not only that, but a lot of processed food is ‘pre-digested’ meaning it has been manufactured to almost melt in your mouth and be broken down by the body with ease. That is another thing we like, the easier something is to digest the better. A cooked, tenderized steak is better than a raw untenderized one.
And it really isn’t bad. When humans discovered fire the fire pre-digested our foods for us in a way, requiring less energy and less jaw power to consume meat. This allowed us to grow bigger brains.
On another note, a pound of carrots has 200 calories which is roughly what a donut has. Its easier to eat 3 donuts than 3 pounds of carrots. A lot of diet books consider that a ‘benefit’ of healthy eating, that you get to eat more food since it is less calorie dense. But our ancestors who enjoyed eating foods with low calorie density and engaging in unnecessary exercise aren’t our ancestors, they died off in the first famine that came about. All our lazy, high calorie eating ancestors survived.
Also keep in mind the fruits and vegetables you do eat have been bred to be tasty. Wild fruits and vegetables (not manmade one from seeds that have been engineered over generations) aren’t nearly as good tasting, so I’ve heard. This is the best they can do, and it still isn’t impressive.
This is absolutely not supported by the facts. Primates had been evolving bigger brains for millions of years before the use of fire. In addition, the tendency toward larger brains has been a rough trend for literally hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs were headed in that direction before they were wiped out, for instance. Your source has mixed up causation and correlation.
And it’s not the fats and sugars that are doing the bulk work of making people fat. It’s the grains. They’re bland, especially when refined and cooked, and make a deadly combination with foods used along with them. Pure fat and sugar by themselves are not all that appetizing…but throw some refined grains in there to cut the richness, and suddenly you can put away 2 or 3 times the calories.
Umm…this is a LOT of incorrect info packed into one paragraph. ROFL
First off, some wild fruits actually taste BETTER than their cultivated counterparts, like wild strawberries.
Secondly, some fruits are absolutely wonderful in their completely wild state, and compete will with cakes/pies/sweets in terms of flavor. Mainly these are tropical fruits, like mamey sapote. A good mamey sapote can taste just like coffee cake, even down to the texture.
Some other tropical fruits are also pretty amazing in flavor, although none have the almost-universal appeal that the mamey does, IMHO.
Far be it from me to argue with someone who uses all caps and ROFL in their arguments, or who extrapolates evolutionary trends in dinosaurs 100 million years ago to humans. Nonetheless:
PS if you are so convinced fruits taste amazing then go start a company to sell them as competition against sugary fatty foods. See what happens.
Correlation does not equal causation. You can get mad and try to personally insult me, but that won’t change the facts.
And fruit will never compete with pastries, etc. on price. Why? Grain subsidies, plus the fact that ripe fruit doesn’t travel well.
It’s true that a craving for salty, sweet fats is probably a consequence of it giving us an evolutionary benefit.
But I’m not sure we’re unhealthy today because those foods are widely available in quantity. It’s not like our ancestors (except Methuselah, etc) lived longer than we do.
To the extent that we are fat and have obesity-related pathologies, I’m inclined to blame inactivity more than diet. I suspect that if we had to keep moving all day long at some sort of moderate pace, our sweet fat proclivity would not be particularly deadly.
I’ve got to disagree, at least partially.
I’ve done a number of jobs that involve a fair amount of physical activity. Not aerobic activity, just plenty of walking, some moderately heavy lifting, etc…
I used to wonder why SOOO many of the guys who do these kinds of jobs have such huge guts spilling over the top of their pants. Not necessarily fat all over, just really big guts.
After a while, I realized it’s because the physical activity just ramps up your appetite. You end up eating so much more because you’re hungrier, that it sort of balances out, really. The only reason I’m not fat is because I almost never eat grains. I definitely get about 5-10 pounds heavier when I’m doing a more physical job, though, just because I’m so much hungrier that I eat a lot more.
In that mix of sugar, fat and refined grains to “cut the richness”, which of the three make up the bulk of the calories? Do you find refined grains by themselves to be appetizing, and could someone “put away 2 or 3 times the calories” if they ate grain based food without the fat and sugar added?
Your lack of rigour in choosing arguments is making it difficult to figure out what you mean by the imprecise “doing the bulk work of making people fat”.
You know who else are fat? People who don’t do a lot of physical activity. You’re arguing causation where there isn’t even correlation.
And arguing causation from a single, uncontrolled non-experiment.
Nobody wants straight-up grains. The mixing of the fat, sugar, and grains all together is what tickles the taste buds and stimulates people to eat far too much.
I mean, try to eat a bowl of brown rice by itself. Not so great, unless you’re really hungry. Add some butter and sugar, and suddenly it’s much easier.
Wow, aren’t you hostile?
I’m not basing my entire conclusion on my lack of excess fat. I’m also basing it on the fact that cows/pigs/poultry are all fed HUGE amounts of grain specifically to make them fatter. It’s not done that way because it doesn’t work. It’s done because it works.
In fact, if you’d have bothered to read my posts above, you’d see where I mentioned the grain-feeding of livestock as proof of the fattening potential of grain.
As far as your first comment, again, I’d direct you to my above posts. I was refuting the false claim that exercise can completely counteract the effects of an extremely fattening diet. Please pay attention to context.
It’s done because it’s cheap. If you could fatten them on concentrated blueberries for less that’s what they would use. Plenty of cattle are raised on grass instead of grain but it takes longer and is more expensive.
Many excessively-processed foods would work, absolutely. However, you will never get a cow as fat on grass as you will on grains.
But you made an excellent point about cost. We’re sickening and killing ourselves because grains are so cheap (and they’re cheap partly because the government subsidize them so heavily). It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I might spend a lot on my food, but I look 8-10 years younger than my age, and I feel more like 15 years younger than my age. That certainly wasn’t true before I started eating better. In fact, my joints/muscles are in much better shape and recover much more quickly from injury than they did 15 years ago. The only thing that changed was my diet. I’m more flexible, my muscles recover from heavy exercise more quickly, and I have a LOT more energy.
Another aspect of why junk food is so addictive is that food scientist are consonantly testing modifications of existing popular junk foods to make them even more appetizing. Food psychology is big business. Taste, texture, portion size, visual appeal of the product and of the packaging of the product is studied and examined out the wazoo. These results are then test marketed to fine tune the price point to something that the company can make more profit on. They do the same with their so called “healthy option” snacks but the bottom line is the same, what’s best for their bottom line is what matters. The fact that consumers are willing to pay more for something they perceive as being healthy is the driving force behind behind a lot of new products these days; not the fact that they are actually good for you.
Sure. A food energy surplus will make livestock, or humans, fat. No one’s arguing this. But grains are not the only substances on the planet that can create a food energy surplus; they’re merely the most commonly overeaten thing today (including the various heavily processed uses like HFCS, which is no better or worse than plain ol’ sugar, but it’s far too large a component of the average diet).
Now, naturally, if you cut out an entire category of food, your diet is likely to include less food energy than before. This is a big confounding factor that makes your “this diet works great for me, and they use grains to fatten livestock, ergo grains are The Devil’s Foodstuffs!” argument less than compelling. “People should eat fewer processed starches and sugars”? Great, I’m on board! “Grains are evil”? Not so much. The science doesn’t back up the latter argument.