If I were the parent I would've phrased that differently. But, as long as we're being pedantic, eating from plants is possible without killing the organism.
Spaghetti Squash really surprised me. You need to figure out how to cook it right or else it gets a bit too "wet/oily", but it can really be quite amazing.
Eating carbohydrates spikes your blood sugar and therefore insulin response, which has several problems: one, it makes you hungry again very quickly, and makes your energy levels spike and dip more than if you avoid them. Enough simple carbohydrates cause diabetes.
It is also very easy to eat a large number of calories via carbohydrate. Essentially, carbs make you fat.
I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.
This is very black and white and borderline incorrect. There's nothing inherently bad about carbohydrates. Eating anything will make you more fat; simple carbs are just easy to eat.
Unrefined carbs like in potatoes and (whole)wheat and oatmeal etc. are not bad; those foods provide many good nutrients and do not cause the negative carb effects you mentioned.
It's the same as fruits containing sugar (which is a carbohydrate actually I think) but not causing the same ill effects as eating the same amount of sugar from Sour Patch Kids (candy which is ~80% sugar by weight).
But without fat it's pretty hard to eat a lot of potatoes; they're just too bland.
That's the thing that everyone in this discussion seems to be missing: taste. There are good reasons to believe that better-tasting food may have physiological effects beyond just being pleasurable to eat [1]. This is not controversial when it comes to other substances but with food it's a much tougher battle.
A steak spikes your insulin harder than a plate of whole wheat pasta. Complex carbs, particular when eaten along with vegetables, are perfectly healthy.
The problems start when you refine all the fiber away and load them up with oil.
If you do not consume any fats, you can handle the blood sugar spike easily. With fat in your blood you become less insulin sensitive. Thus it is the combination of fat+carbs that it the diabetes causer.
> I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.
Is it carbs or is it starches? We, as a species, are not used to eating starches as a main component in our diet. We as a species are used to eating much like bonobos, chimps and utangs: thus lots of carbs but from fruits instead of starches.
Start with unhealthy high-carb refined grains and add anti-nutrients like lectin and phytates, plus fiber that you would probably be better off getting from whole fruits and vegetables and you don't end up with something healthy.
Pretty much any of the myriad resources on paleo / low-carb / grain-free diets will cover most of the reasons and point to research backing up why whole grains are not healthy. Nutrition science is a weirdly controversial topic however so for every study that points in one direction you'll find someone passionately committed to a different theory who will dig up conflicting evidence.
Having read a lot on the subject over the years (and through personal experience) I'm persuaded by the evidence in favour of a low-carb, largely grain-free, high fat paleo style diet but I've largely given up trying to convince anyone who feels differently on the Internet as for whatever reason nutrition debates are as heated and futile as political ones.
“Lectins and phytates” are the black box doom and gloom ingredients of the paleo world. Let’s straighten up a couple misconceptions:
1. Lectins. Lectins are substances found in many raw foods, like tomatoes, lentils, beans, and whole grains. Some lectins are toxic (like those in kidney beans) and some are completely harmless (like those in tomatoes). Toxic lectins are completely destroyed by proper cooking. Some high lectin foods (like lentils and beans) are strongly correlated with longer lifespans, so diets suggesting they be avoided are probably worth scrutiny.
2. Phytates. Phytates can bind to vitamins and minerals and make them biologically unavailable in digestion. In practice, this is only problematic in already nutrient deficient diets. And like most dietary concerns, the picture is more complex. Phytates also have remarkable positive effects, such as decreased rates of cancer, kidney stones, diabetes, and heart disease.
The paleo diet (basically rebranded Atkins) runs contrary to every developed nation’s dietary guides. To believe it’s healthy is to believe in conspiratorial thinking as silly as flat earth or faked moon landings.
To believe the typical developed nation's dietary guidelines are the best advice on a healthy diet is to show a level of credulity and lack of critical thinking as silly as thinking paleo is rebranded Atkins.
What is "healthy"? Whole grains provide me with carbs, carbs provide me with sugar, sugar is burnt for energy. Eat the amount you actually need and, unless you've got Celiac, you're gonna be fine.
Some of you people sound like you should just become Breatharians instead of burdening the rest of us with your tiresome dietary restrictions. For those of us that can eat real food without it ruining our lives, you're like so many annoying flies always pushing your strange food fads when the rest of us just want a reliable source of clean meat and bread.
If you don't think "healthy" can be quantified and you're satisfied with your demonstrated level of ignorance about nutrition then why are you engaging in a discussion about nutrition on the Internet? I don't give a crap what you eat. I do somewhat object to people spreading misinformation about nutrition but I also recognize that trying to stop it is a King Canute level exercise in futility.
Your body will break down protein and fat into carbs if it isn't supplied with enough carbs. Your body has developed a mechanism to make carbs from other things because it needs carbs so badly. It would seem folly to think we should rely on this round-about disaster-mitigation mechanism instead of just supplying it with what it wants, which is partly carbs.
The premise of the keto diet is that the human body is adapted to function best when deriving most of its energy from fat (dietary or stored). This makes a certain amount of sense from an evolutionary perspective as regular meals with an abundance of easily digested refined carbs were not a feature of our ancestral evolutionary environment. The evidence that "fat-burning" is a healthier default is persuasive but not conclusive at this point I would say.
I think there has been some dietary research that showed people, especially those of European ancestry, have been exposed to grains long enough to have adapted. And, like with lots of nutrition information, there's counter examples of ancestral diets comprised largely of carbohydrates.
I think people need to realize there probably isn't a one-size-fits-all diet because humans are so varied genetically and well adapted to many different environments
I haven't tried the chickpea pasta so I can't comment there, but my wife and I found some edamame (soy) based pasta at Costco that's not bad. It's 7 net carbs for a 2 oz serving and so far I think it's the closest thing to a regular noodle that we've had.
As I understand it, assuming we are talking about carbs, fats and proteins, as in their whole-food forms, not as in say a cookie, no, it's easier/quicker for your body to store say fat as fat than carbs as fat, which it will have to transform into fat first. Carbs are also loaded with water and fibers which makes digestion even slower to make this effect even better.
> Carbs and sugar are the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, not meat
Processed food as well as particularly overeating of delicacies like meat, cheese, eggs, fish, and oil and sugar prepared plant-foods, is the mayor culprit, I believe.
Nobody got fat from eating plain potatoes, beans and apples. It's also very hard to overeat on those kinds of foods because of the high water and fiber content. People get fat by eating too much dairy, meat, eggs, and plants prepared in oils, or other highly processed plant-foods, which are easy to overeat on.
> it's easier/quicker for your body to store say fat as fat than carbs as fat, which it will have to transform into fat first.
It's not that simple. Dietary fat doesn't spike insulin levels and that is a primary signal to the body to store excess calories in fat cells. High carb foods tend to spike insulin but to what degree depends on the food.
>CONCLUSIONS: Fish-eaters, vegetarians and especially vegans had lower BMI than meat-eaters. Differences in macronutrient intakes accounted for about half the difference in mean BMI between vegans and meat-eaters. High protein and low fibre intakes were the factors most strongly associated with increasing BMI.
Correlation rather than causation, would be my first thought. A randoml vegan is vastly more likely to be getting regular exercise and be generally health-conscious than your randomly selected traditional diet person. This study tries to downplay non-dietary lifestyle factors, but can't help conceding that:
> Vegans tended to report higher levels of physical activity; there were no clear patterns for education level across the diet groups; vegans were least likely and meat-eaters most likely to be married and almost the whole cohort reported ethnicity as white. Nulliparity was most common in the vegan women and least common in meat-eaters, with meat-eaters tending to have a greater number of children than the other diet groups. Some of these differences in lifestyle factors between the diet groups are likely to result from the disparity in median ages.
So, more exercise, less marriage, fewer children, and younger age for the vegans...
Converting carbs into fat is very ineffective, losing about 40% of the calories in the process. You can get fat just from carbs but it’s not easy. But start adding empty fat calories like oils to those carbs and you’ll store the fat directly and just burn the carbs for energy.
It’s pretty hard to gain weight eating boiled potatoes but you’ll pack on pounds eating fries.
Thats because you haven't had proper potatoes in their season then.
In Denmark it's a national delicacy to have same day potatoes cooked or in salads. They are silky smooth, super easy to peel (you simply just rub the skin off) and are amazing with dill, creme fraîse and any meat you can think off.
Maybe not. Maybe in Denmark you have tasty heirloom varieties. Here in North America, most of the potatoes you see in the store are white, waxy, starchy, and bland. If you're not going to fry them then you usually need copious amounts of butter and salt.
Having said that, have you tried your potatoes completely plain (no fat or salt)?
I live in the US now and you can easily get potatoes if you go upstate in New York where I live. The problem is that they are way too long to get to the dinner table :)
I don't think meat per se is fingered as the cause from what I read in these and similar comment threads, but the fat that usually comes with most affordable cuts of meat, so meat gets tarred with the same brush.
Yeah, Jordan Peterson is a fraud and a charlatan. I'm sorry you got snookered by him, but it's not too late.
That all-meat diet sure isn't helping you. Your attention span didn't even last for your whole post before you got confused, hit send, and wandered off.
