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#1051
October 6th 06, 12:33 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
"gds" wrote in message oups.com... george conklin wrote: "Amy Blankenship" wrote in message . .. "george conklin" wrote in message ink.net... "Amy Blankenship" wrote in message ... "george conklin" wrote in message ink.net... "bill" wrote in message ... Amy Blankenship wrote: "Jack May" wrote in message . .. "Kevan Smith" wrote in message ... In article , (Matthew Russotto) wrote: Cholesterol is both. It harms you when you eat it, and there is no dietary necessity to eat it. Tell that to the hawk that is using my back yard as a supermarket for birds and squirrels. People have evolved over millions of years to eat meat. We know that gathering activities by women in tribes could not provide enough calories to keep people from starving to death. ...In the event that they're spending all their time savenging, which we no longer do. And keep in mind that these people did not eat a lot of meat, and much of the meat they did eat was in the form of worms and bugs. Anyone in favor of adding worms and bugs to the supermarket shelves because we're evolved to eat them? ;-) Hunting and scavenging meat was required to provide enough calories. Our millions of years of evolution as meat eaters would tend to make meat eating more than just a simple choice. We are omnivores, which means we can choose. If you look around you, there's no shortage of calories in most developed nations. Also no shortage of processed food that is now working to shorten people's lives. We are indeed omnivores but that part of evolution has locked us out of being vegetarians in the natural world, since we can't process grass the same way that cattle do. That is why we eat animals. They eat grass; we eat the animal which has processed the grass for us. Simple. That is the way it's *supposed* to work. But as you've often pointed out, grass is not what most meat animals are fed these days. Grain is among the more wholesome things they get. True Amy. But whan can we do about it? Any ideas? Support small farms that produce this way instead of trying to wipe them out  Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's population to death. That is not a solution except for death. I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound. A couple of points about this discussion. Frist, food is much safer today than at any time in history. There is no study that disputes this. Sure there are al osrts of issues with additives, pesticides, etc. but the negative impacts of these is far less than the positive efects of refrigeration and rapid transportatiion to market. Second, while I will not be trapped into arguing for fried foods and other choices that are sub optimum the reality is that many of the dietary problems in modern society as a much related to (non dietary) life style as to what is consumed. For example, in a study of Eskimo and Inuit societies it was found that the traditional diet was extremely high in fat. It has a been a long time since I read the study so I'm not sure what the exact number was but the tradtional diet had over 50% of its calories from fat. Yet there was virtually no obesity nor heart desease nor diabetes. Why? Because in the tradional lifetstyle these folks perfomred lots of hard, physical, labor in very low temps and without large amounts of fat in the diet they simply could not do so. Obesity and heart desese and diabetes struck these people with the advent and adoption of the snow mobile. As the amount of physical work went down drastically without a change in diet bad things began to happen. Similar findings have been show in other societies such as the Masai as well as tribes in the Amazon and South Pacific. The point is that biologically humans are quite able to eat and flourish when their diet is linked in a postive way with life style. If one wants to be sedentary then perhaps the solution is massive caloric deprivation. Anyway, poor life style choices far outweigh mass farming as a cause of human misery. Except that the poor lifestyle we are supposed to live today is correlated with much longer life expectancy. When the study which showed that you had to be about 50 lbs overweight before life was shorter was published, the establishemnt went nuts. They live on a crisis-per-day syndrome. But yes, you are right that we have safer food today than ever before. The textbook we use in Human Societies mentions that 75% of the world would die if we all went back to small-scale farming, so that figure is established well enough to be a standard exam item. 
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#1052
October 6th 06, 03:30 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
"george conklin" wrote in message link.net... "gds" wrote in message oups.com... george conklin wrote: "Amy Blankenship" wrote in message . .. "george conklin" wrote in message ink.net... "Amy Blankenship" wrote in message ... "george conklin" wrote in message ink.net... "bill" wrote in message ... Amy Blankenship wrote: "Jack May" wrote in message . .. "Kevan Smith" wrote in message ... In article , (Matthew Russotto) wrote: Cholesterol is both. It harms you when you eat it, and there is no dietary necessity to eat it. Tell that to the hawk that is using my back yard as a supermarket for birds and squirrels. People have evolved over millions of years to eat meat. We know that gathering activities by women in tribes could not provide enough calories to keep people from starving to death. ...In the event that they're spending all their time savenging, which we no longer do. And keep in mind that these people did not eat a lot of meat, and much of the meat they did eat was in the form of worms and bugs. Anyone in favor of adding worms and bugs to the supermarket shelves because we're evolved to eat them? ;-) Hunting and scavenging meat was required to provide enough calories. Our millions of years of evolution as meat eaters would tend to make meat eating more than just a simple choice. We are omnivores, which means we can choose. If you look around you, there's no shortage of calories in most developed nations. Also no shortage of processed food that is now working to shorten people's lives. We are indeed omnivores but that part of evolution has locked us out of being vegetarians in the natural world, since we can't process grass the same way that cattle do. That is why we eat animals. They eat grass; we eat the animal which has processed the grass for us. Simple. That is the way it's *supposed* to work. But as you've often pointed out, grass is not what most meat animals are fed these days. Grain is among the more wholesome things they get. True Amy. But whan can we do about it? Any ideas? Support small farms that produce this way instead of trying to wipe them out Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's population to death. That is not a solution except for death. I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound. A couple of points about this discussion. Frist, food is much safer today than at any time in history. There is no study that disputes this. Sure there are al osrts of issues with additives, pesticides, etc. but the negative impacts of these is far less than the positive efects of refrigeration and rapid transportatiion to market. Second, while I will not be trapped into arguing for fried foods and other choices that are sub optimum the reality is that many of the dietary problems in modern society as a much related to (non dietary) life style as to what is consumed. For example, in a study of Eskimo and Inuit societies it was found that the traditional diet was extremely high in fat. It has a been a long time since I read the study so I'm not sure what the exact number was but the tradtional diet had over 50% of its calories from fat. Yet there was virtually no obesity nor heart desease nor diabetes. Why? Because in the tradional lifetstyle these folks perfomred lots of hard, physical, labor in very low temps and without large amounts of fat in the diet they simply could not do so. Obesity and heart desese and diabetes struck these people with the advent and adoption of the snow mobile. As the amount of physical work went down drastically without a change in diet bad things began to happen. Similar findings have been show in other societies such as the Masai as well as tribes in the Amazon and South Pacific. The point is that biologically humans are quite able to eat and flourish when their diet is linked in a postive way with life style. If one wants to be sedentary then perhaps the solution is massive caloric deprivation. Anyway, poor life style choices far outweigh mass farming as a cause of human misery. Except that the poor lifestyle we are supposed to live today is correlated with much longer life expectancy. When the study which showed that you had to be about 50 lbs overweight before life was shorter was published, the establishemnt went nuts. They live on a crisis-per-day syndrome. But yes, you are right that we have safer food today than ever before. The textbook we use in Human Societies mentions that 75% of the world would die if we all went back to small-scale farming, so that figure is established well enough to be a standard exam item. Cool. Make students' grades contingent on swallowing misinformation whole without questioning it. No wonder you're so invested in believing and making others believe it's true. Because if it's not, you've miseducated a *lot* of students, and have written records of that fact.
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#1053
October 6th 06, 03:31 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
"Matthew Russotto" wrote in message t... In article , Amy Blankenship wrote: "bill" wrote in message .net... Trans fatty acids? Direct cholesterol intake, I.E. eggs? Commercial eggs are bad for you, but pastured eggs are high in good cholesterol and low in bad cholesterol. I've lost about 4 lbs since my hens started laying. The eggs you buy in the store come from hens same as the ones from your barnyard; they're not manufactured products. Nutrient content varies depending on the feed, but cholesterol content is fairly constant. good for an exercise oriented body. The obesity plague is a definite problem with many people developing diabetes early on. This is largely because processed starch is more easily converted to sugar by the body. The glycemic index of white bread is 100. The glycemic index of wheat bread is 99. Processing isn't the issue. That's standard processed wheat bread. Real wheat bread is when you mill the wheat berries just before baking. Got any figures on that?
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#1054
October 6th 06, 04:09 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote: Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's population to death. That is not a solution except for death. I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound. No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly, and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc. In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However, 75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such catastrophes at once. There are arguments in favor of small farming as well, in terms of controlling crop disease epidemics, pest control, animal health, ecological diversity, soil conservation, use of ecologically appropriate cultivars, etc. Large scale farming is massively energy inefficient and is viable so long as cheap petroleum is available. If memory serves, in the U.S. it takes about 16 calories of energy input to provide one calorie of food on your table. By comparison, hunting and gathering is of necessity a 1:1 ratio over time (else the hunters and gatherers would have starved to death). Obesity and heart desese and diabetes struck these people with the advent and adoption of the snow mobile. As the amount of physical work went down drastically without a change in diet bad things began to happen. Similar findings have been show in other societies such as the Masai as well as tribes in the Amazon and South Pacific. Sedentary lifestyles are unhealthy. That's not exactly news. It is the same phenomenon as seen in the U.S. of course, which has developed over 75-100 years. The effects are dramatically noticeable among relatively isolated groups that get rapidly introduced to technology and "modern" foods. The point is that biologically humans are quite able to eat and flourish when their diet is linked in a postive way with life style. Well, yes, of course. Eat a nutritionally balanced diet and not too many calories for your lifestyle. Yup. As is quite clear, though, humans can survive for long periods on a suboptimal diet due to being omnivores. If one wants to be sedentary then perhaps the solution is massive caloric deprivation. I'd say that's the wrong phrasing. It's simply that intake needs to be balance with expenditure. If I sit at a desk all day long in air conditioned comfort, I only need 1800 k-calories per day to keep my body weight constant. If I eat lunch at Burger King, I would be close to meeting that caloric need in a single meal. When I ride my bike 375 miles/600 km in a weekend, I need a few more k-calories (13,000 or so just for riding, plus basal metabolism k-calories). Anyway, poor life style choices far outweigh mass farming as a cause of human misery. That's true to an extent, but there are both individual choices and social factors to be considered. Social engineering in the U.S. has predisposed us to eat high calorie, high fat, low fiber diets with predictable health consequences. Except that the poor lifestyle we are supposed to live today is correlated with much longer life expectancy. When the study which showed that you had to be about 50 lbs overweight before life was shorter was published, the establishemnt went nuts. 50 pounds overweight is not unusual in America. I've been there myself, now I'm only 5 pounds overweight after resuming bicycling and changing my diet pretty dramatically. The study you cite was not definitive. They live on a crisis-per-day syndrome. But yes, you are right that we have safer food today than ever before. We have less acutely dangerous food but not necessarily safer food. The recent E. coli outbreak shows, however, that modern food is not "safe" in an acute sense. Dangerous bacterial contamination from poor practices has been the bane of modern food production. The events are rare but widespread when they do occur. Listeria contamination in meat, as well as E. coli in meat and vegetables; also hepatitis in some vegetable products, have hit the news in the past 10 years. There are also issues of longer term food safety- contamination with pesticides and synthetic chemicals, prion diseases, and possibly safety issues with genetically modified organisms (the latter not having yet been demonstrated "in the wild" as it were. With any luck it never will be). Heart disease and diabetes are more prevalent than at any time in human history. That is in part due to food not being safe, although this is not food safety as it is normally thought of. In this case it is the overavailability of poor food choices. The textbook we use in Human Societies mentions that 75% of the world would die if we all went back to small-scale farming, so that figure is established well enough to be a standard exam item. That "well-established" figure may simply be propaganda serving a specific policy end. Who paid for the studies, and who wrote/paid for/sponsored the textbook? Textbooks an excellent tool for creating a skewing the student's world view in a way that profits somebody. Read everything with a grain of salt (and perhaps you already do). Perhaps you should read Michael Pollan if you haven't. _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ is a good starting point.
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#1055
October 6th 06, 04:18 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
Matthew Russotto wrote:
In article , bill wrote: future due to the junk food plague and the fact that people actually think that sitting at a computer all day is *work*. Work is BTU output actually doing something like our parents did. Hey, I'm a second generation computer geek. Anyway, if you want to get strict about it, BTU output is neither necessary nor sufficient for work. Yeah right, I am an engineer who does a lot of crunching numbers and my work comes out of my brain except for maybe lifting a computer or two once in a while. If you think 'work' does not involve BTU or calories expended then you are just fooling yourself into an early "Push up the daisies" scenario. Bill Baka
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#1056
October 6th 06, 04:58 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net, "george conklin" wrote: Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's population to death. That is not a solution except for death. I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound. No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly, and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc. In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However, 75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such catastrophes at once. 75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where the United States is going to top 300 million around October 15. Compared to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to visit the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I grew up playing in are now built over with housing or "Condo-fields". If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper **** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion (max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about the only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think we are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is going to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many people. There are arguments in favor of small farming as well, in terms of controlling crop disease epidemics, pest control, animal health, ecological diversity, soil conservation, use of ecologically appropriate cultivars, etc. Large scale farming is massively energy inefficient and is viable so long as cheap petroleum is available. If memory serves, in the U.S. it takes about 16 calories of energy input to provide one calorie of food on your table. By comparison, hunting and gathering is of necessity a 1:1 ratio over time (else the hunters and gatherers would have starved to death). Obesity and heart desese and diabetes struck these people with the advent and adoption of the snow mobile. As the amount of physical work went down drastically without a change in diet bad things began to happen. Similar findings have been show in other societies such as the Masai as well as tribes in the Amazon and South Pacific. Sedentary lifestyles are unhealthy. That's not exactly news. It is the same phenomenon as seen in the U.S. of course, which has developed over 75-100 years. The effects are dramatically noticeable among relatively isolated groups that get rapidly introduced to technology and "modern" foods. This reminds me of an anecdote that I read once somewhere. You see really, really fat people, and you see really, really old people but you never see really fat and old people. I saw Rose Kennedy on television last night at 104 and she was skinny. You just don't make it much past 70-75 by being a sedentary porker. The point is that biologically humans are quite able to eat and flourish when their diet is linked in a postive way with life style. Only until we fish the oceans out of healthy fish and pave over just a bit too much farmland. Well, yes, of course. Eat a nutritionally balanced diet and not too many calories for your lifestyle. Yup. As is quite clear, though, humans can survive for long periods on a suboptimal diet due to being omnivores. If one wants to be sedentary then perhaps the solution is massive caloric deprivation. I'd say that's the wrong phrasing. It's simply that intake needs to be balance with expenditure. If I sit at a desk all day long in air conditioned comfort, I only need 1800 k-calories per day to keep my body weight constant. If I eat lunch at Burger King, I would be close to meeting that caloric need in a single meal. When I ride my bike 375 miles/600 km in a weekend, I need a few more k-calories (13,000 or so just for riding, plus basal metabolism k-calories). That is an extreme example. Maybe 1/100,000 people put out that much energy for the weekend. If you sit at a desk all day you should only need about 1,500 calories a day unless you are over 6 feet tall and have more mass to support. Maybe 1,200 for the average woman. I have to envy you that you can take the entire weekend for riding and not have to worry about wife/kids/house/car or whatever. I am married with all of the above and it is only rarely that I can sneak out for a 12-14 hour marathon ride/hike on a weekend. There is always something to be done at home, since it is my home and not just a rented bachelor pad. Anyway, poor life style choices far outweigh mass farming as a cause of human misery. That's true to an extent, but there are both individual choices and social factors to be considered. Social engineering in the U.S. has predisposed us to eat high calorie, high fat, low fiber diets with predictable health consequences. I would add here that poor lifestyle also includes having 4 or more kids and then wondering what happened to your life because you always have to be doing something to support the kids. The diets are still of our own choosing, like whether mom wants to cook or just gives the kids money to go to McJunk. Sit down restaurants have the same problem since they are cooking to be listed on the 5 star gourmet listings if they can and healthy food rarely makes the gourmet list. Except that the poor lifestyle we are supposed to live today is correlated with much longer life expectancy. When the study which showed that you had to be about 50 lbs overweight before life was shorter was published, the establishemnt went nuts. 50 pounds overweight is not unusual in America. I've been there myself, now I'm only 5 pounds overweight after resuming bicycling and changing my diet pretty dramatically. The study you cite was not definitive. 50 pounds overweight is pretty definitive to me since that is where I am right now due to too many things other than biking I had to take care of this year. Also a friend who ambushed me over the weekends and his idea of lunch was a Chinese all you can eat buffet. Chinese is good, sort of and I ate about 2 plates of Broccoli and a plate full or steamed fish and shrimp but still managed to gain weight with that as the only meal of the day. I think the Wok oil on the stir fry Broccoli got me. They live on a crisis-per-day syndrome. But yes, you are right that we have safer food today than ever before. We have less acutely dangerous food but not necessarily safer food. The recent E. coli outbreak shows, however, that modern food is not "safe" in an acute sense. Dangerous bacterial contamination from poor practices has been the bane of modern food production. I can attest to that since the only 3 times I have gotten sick in the last 30 years have been due to food poisoning and non of those cases was and fun at all. I used to eat off the 'Roach coaches' that frequent the S.F. Bay Area, but now I avoid them like the plague. The events are rare but widespread when they do occur. Listeria contamination in meat, as well as E. coli in meat and vegetables; Yeah, Just go to Mexico far enough beyond the border and eat anything with local vegetables thrown in. I did and got a bad case of "Montezuma'a Revenge". also hepatitis in some vegetable products, have hit the news in the past 10 years. There are also issues of longer term food safety- contamination with pesticides and synthetic chemicals, prion diseases, and possibly safety issues with genetically modified organisms (the latter not having yet been demonstrated "in the wild" as it were. With any luck it never will be). Genetically modified foods are and have been a fact of life for hundreds of years through selective breeding and grafting of orchard trees. Don't fool yourself that just because a scientist did it in a lab it is any different, cause it ain't what grows in the wild. Heart disease and diabetes are more prevalent than at any time in human history. That is in part due to food not being safe, although this is not food safety as it is normally thought of. In this case it is the overavailability of poor food choices. Heart disease is due to people becoming more and more spoiled through technology, plain and simple, with McJunk food coming in a close second. The textbook we use in Human Societies mentions that 75% of the world would die if we all went back to small-scale farming, so that figure is established well enough to be a standard exam item. And a 75% reduction in global population would be bad (("*how*"))? 6 billion is already way too high. Global destruction has begun, well 40 years ago, and just keeps growing. There will be a breaking point, maybe at 10 billion, maybe at 15, but it is coming. Population growth cannot keep going exponentially. City dwellers may have no appreciation of the outdoors but it is damned nice to be able to be the only person sitting in a forest under a nice waterfall with no people for miles around. At one with nature and out of cell phone range. Bill Baka That "well-established" figure may simply be propaganda serving a specific policy end. Who paid for the studies, and who wrote/paid for/sponsored the textbook? Textbooks an excellent tool for creating a skewing the student's world view in a way that profits somebody. Read everything with a grain of salt (and perhaps you already do). Perhaps you should read Michael Pollan if you haven't. _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ is a good starting point.
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#1057
October 6th 06, 08:58 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
In article ,
Amy Blankenship wrote: "Matthew Russotto" wrote in message et... The glycemic index of white bread is 100. The glycemic index of wheat bread is 99. Processing isn't the issue. That's standard processed wheat bread. Real wheat bread is when you mill the wheat berries just before baking. Got any figures on that? Unless some magic occurs during a delay between the milling of the flour and the baking of the bread, it makes no difference. Not surprising, really; the digestible carbohydrates in whole wheat bread are exactly the same as those in white bread; the only difference is the removal of indigestible fiber.
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#1058
October 6th 06, 09:02 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
In article ,
bill wrote: 75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. [...] now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion (max) OK, you first.
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#1060
October 6th 06, 09:05 PM
posted to rec.bicycles.misc,rec.autos.driving,alt.planning.urban,rec.bicycles.soc,rec.bicycles.rides
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THE GOLDEN RULE
"bill" wrote in message om... Tim McNamara wrote: In article .net, "george conklin" wrote: Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's population to death. That is not a solution except for death. I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound. No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly, and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc. In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However, 75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such catastrophes at once. 75% of the world's population is surplus anyway So volunteer to eliminate the problem with your personal action. Stop complaining.
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