For us non-US people that "S&W" was an obscure reference.

What do them USA types like?
Guns.
What is a popular gun in the US?
Smith & Wesson.

... or is it even more obscure?

I thought that the most interesting part of Taubes' book was the historical aspect.

I quite liked, when it comes to books on diets, the Kurzweil book Fantastic Voyage. It is wonderfully (naively) titled how to live long enough to live forever. The main aim of it is to wrap up a whole bunch of interesting recent science on food and diet to help people make dietary changes that will help them live longer and healthier, so they will still be around at that point in time where we beat death by aging.

Of course the latter isn't going to happen... I once thought it might... I once thought we'd see the technological singularity and staggering rate of technological change. Now I think we'll never get there and it'll be one more near miss because of our greedy short sightedness overpopulating ourselves before we make the sort of future breakthroughs that might have helped us manage some of our growing pains.

But I digress... point is I thought there were many interesting dietary points in there if you are reading on diet.

Oh gosh... I missed the far bigger point.

I don't pop in every day to the Oil Drum. I didn't know that OilManBob had passed. That is sad to hear.

I wonder, that's really interesting. I wouldn't put it past agribusiness to do that. Another scenario is the switch to N-P-K fertilizer reduced the variety of nutrients and bacteria in the soil, reducing the overall nutrition of the oranges.

So? Just eat sauerkraut.

That's just too much of a conspiracy. The fact is that sugar content in fruits has been going up through breeding to make them better sellers. In this process to reduce the acidity, vitamin C has probably been reduced as well.

My great-grandmother, who was an born an Italian peasant so she knew some stuff about living off the land, lived to 98 never suffered any debilitating disease and could still thread a needle after she turned 90.

My mom tells me she always kept a chicken coop and vegetable garden in her city backyard her whole life and ate an egg every morning and raised a couple of chicks. Once the chickens got too old she took them to a butcher.

My mom said she hardly fed the chickens as they found worms and other bugs in the backyard that would try to get at the fruit in the fruit trees.

The best diet for us isn't bad for the planet as long as we're hunter-gatherers with a low worldwide population compared to now.

If we returned to more traditional farming methods, where meat was raised on fallow fields and land not suitable for crops, we could still eat meat, and with the animals exercising and eating their natural diet, it would be much healthier. It would just be less available and more expensive, so we'd be eating less of it.

A common trend has been to make food more "healthy" by removing the fat and substituting more sugar. I went to the store yesterday to buy yoghurt (which I haven't done for a while). The "standard" yoghurt (i.e. not the "light") had 0 grams of fat and 28(!) grams of sugar in a 6oz container. The "light" yoghurt had Splenda added, which cut the sugar to 7 grams; it still had no fat.

Overweight people are drawn to these so-called healthy foods and wind up eating huge amounts of sugar. More recently it has been high-fructose corn syrup, which I assume will get a big boost with from the corn-based ethanol mandates.

Recent evidence is that certain fats are positively healthy. The reduction of fat in our regular food has, I believe, caused people to go in search of fat in junk food, effictively substituting bad fats for good fats, coupled with a big increase in sugar in both regular food and junk food. Add to that a sophisticated mass marketing campaign that starts with pre-schoolers and never lets up, and it is no wonder that Americans are obese. The rest of the world shouldn't be too smug, either. If/when American mass market consumerism comes to your country, the same thing will happen to you.

I like animals, some of them more then people, and yet think that if the DOG's hadn't meant for people to eat animals they wouldn't have made them out of meat.

If 8% of the calories in human breast milk are protein, why do adults need, say, 35-40% of their calories from protein? Until contrary evidence is presented, I think such an amount of protein would be injurious to human health.

"I would even venture to wonder if vegans/vegetarians eating a lot of highly processed "health food store fare" might actually be not faring quite as well as those in traditional cultures eating entirely homemade meals cooked entirely from scratch with whole foods."

Exactly. A well-balanced diet of natural (unprocessed) food is what is good. And you could probably eat a lot less if you are a westerner.

That's it. Anything else is just someone trying to sell an idea/product or trying to make themselves feel better.

Reality must take precedence over public relations - as Feynman notes.

I work in an SDA hospital. 2 questions always come to my mind...

How do so many of them get so fat eating only veggies, and no beer?

How come they all get sick every year, and I don't? They don't eat enuf meat.

I was just kidding.

People look at weight all the time, but that doesn't take size into consideration. On paper I would be way overweight, but my body fat is only around 10%. As long as you can keep that in check you are fine.

Good food like fish that tastes good raw and grass fed beef is getting very expensive. IMO the most important thing is to stay away from sugar, but with the notation that all substitutes are even worse.

People in South America generally eat enormous amounts of food compared to Americans, are equally lazy, and yet stay in shape well into old age.

Until recently, I used to eat, on average, a pint of Hagen Daz ice cream every night. I've never been overweight and since high school have consistently weighed between 170-175lbs. When we moved, I stopped eating ice cream and now weigh 160lbs. Over the holidays I ate lots of sweets and gained 8lbs. Got sick (from the sugar?) and lost it all. Go figure.

But potato chips, sandwich cookies, and ice cream are *not* food that you could find in Mrs. Ydnurg's thot experiment. These things have been created very recently, as evolutionary time goes. Humans do not have 'evolutionary experience' eating these things, and it should be no surprise that humans have trouble eating these things.

Never underestimate the Iron Triangle. Another thot experiment: suppose there were huge corporations that sold meat and dairy. Wouldn't they do whatever it took to increase sales? And us human primates, not being born with the knowledge of what to do with these novel items, and born with the knowledge that food is *scarce!* I am sure that none of my distant ancestors ever passed up the chance to eat calorie rich, nutrient dense meat! And I am also sure that these chances didn't come often.

Another thing to worry about is bioaccumulation or biomagnification. Way back in 1962 Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring" and was the recipient of much bad press, even though her science checked out. DDT went from algae to zooplankton to small fish to large fish to large predatory birds, and the birds showed symptoms like infertility first, as they had the highest level of DDT in their systems. The DDT (and its breakdown product DDE) would not break down very fast, and higher and higher levels would accumulate-fastest and highest in animals with long lives and at the top of food chains. Dmitry Orlov, in his essay "The New Age Of Sail" shows that he understands this, and projects a bleak future:

The vegans abstain from eating animal flesh not because of their tastes or their sense of ethics, but because most animal flesh has become toxic. The increased mining and burning of coal, tar sands, shale, and other dirty fuels, dust storms blowing in from desertified continental interiors, and the burning and degradation of plastic trash, have released into the biosphere so much arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, dioxins, and numerous other toxins, that the vast majority of predatory species, non-vegan humans among them, have become extinct. Since toxin concentrations increase as they travel up the food chain, certain top predators, such as belugas and orcas, went first, followed by most non-vegetarian animals. Along with chemical toxins, the biosphere became inundated with long-lived radionucleotides from derelict nuclear installations left over from the hasty attempts to ramp up nuclear power generation. Those built near the coasts are still bubbling away underwater due to rising ocean levels. And so the only surviving humans are those clever enough to realize that only the plants remain edible.

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