Posted on 02/01/2012 2:55:04 PM PST by EagleUSA
Among some, the attitude seems to be “We know so much now, but people don’t care or won’t listen or aren’t changing fast enough. What can we do to change things now?" The yearning appears to be for some universal remedy. This may be “nice”, but is hardly practicable, let alone even conceivable. It would require an understanding of life and society beyond the capability of any individual or group. Universalist approaches in the realm of economics and government have proved uniformly disastrous.
Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.
This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly.
This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.
Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries’ response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.
The question should not be the degree of insult the victim is able to take without expiring. It should be how free of the parasite he can be and still get any survival advantages it may convey. He needs to ask constantly what those advantages are and to question what the State and its advocates claim them to be. The danger comes from his turning over to it the control of larger and larger areas of his life, believing that he will then be free from insecurity, pain, and poverty. It is a misplaced trust.
Many, if not most, of the modern state’s most intrusive and manipulative ventures (Social Security, the EEOC, the EPA, and OSHA, to name a few) have come into existence by someone promising that they were only trying to help society. In this way regulatory agencies prosper and extend their spheres of influence in ever more self-aggrandizing roles of protectors of society, yet limiting the ability of society to respond to its own changing conditions.
Given the complexity of life, the narrow range of understanding possessed by any particular group is guaranteed to fall short at some point. Given the concentration of power exercised under a centralized system, the failures are guaranteed to have widespread and crippling effects. By contrast, the multiplicity of successes and failures over a wide range of scale that appear so chaotic in a state of liberty have the benefit of limiting the damage and of spreading throughout society successes which can be emulated and modified to fit local conditions.
Sugar (carbohydrate) has 4 kcal per gram.
Protein has 4 kcal per gram.
Alcohol has 7 kcal per gram.
And the winner, fat, has 9 kcal per gram.
Except for the alcohol, none of these can be eliminated from the diet without some pretty severe consequences. None of them are responsible for weight gain. Consuming more calories than one uses is the only factor which has been shown to cause weight gain.
If only losing weight could be so simple as the elimination of a specific food; no one would eat that food, and we’d all be thin.
No, the winner is sugar.
Simple carbohydrates need virtually no digestion, hence the reputation for "instant energy". Sugar and carbs are cheap and are contained in practically all processed foods.
Fat and protein are much slower to digest and don't have the addictive characteristic of sugar. Without the sugar-high/carb-crash syndrome, a person is not as likely to consume as much per day.
Yes, and that "food" is simple carbohydrates. There is no real need for them in your diet. Your body can craft the exact nutrients it needs from meats, seafood, nuts and green vegetables. Like you said, if we were all on a low-carb diet, we'd all be thin.
(See: High-glycemic index foods)
Those who have adopted this concept can tell you that.
Yes, of the PhD type. I am a medical researcher.
I'm glad you got over your alcohol problem. Alcoholism is a real killer.
(See: High-glycemic index foods)
Those who have adopted this concept can tell you that.
In reality, I'm not sure how anyone can actually avoid eating simple carbs; they're present in any plant product and some animal products. And even if they weren't, starch (from plants) and glycogen (from meat) are broken down to simple carbs anyway.
The truth is, it doesn't matter if you go all out to avoid any simple carb. Eating 5,000 kcal/day of just the foods you mentioned above will make you just as fat as if you ate 1,000 kcal/day of those foods and another 4,000 kcal/day of Snickers bars and milkshakes.
As I said above, if elimination of a specific food or a specific macronutrient (carbohydrates, lipids, or proteins) from the diet were the magic answer to becoming and remaining thin, no one would eat that food or macronutrient, and we'd all be thin. Unfortunately, losing weight isn't that simple. People actually have to watch what they eat and exercise.
Thanks. And an ex-Dem too? I used to be one myself. I’m never really ‘’over it’’. Any recovering alkie only gets a 24 hour reprieve.
At 16% the stuff is rocket fuel. A few gulps of raisin mash and you’ll be rolling naked in the dirt and howling at the moon!
I believe it does matter, for the simple reason that the sugars instantly elevate your blood sugar. The other, harder to digest foods work more like a time release agent, and allow you to use the glucose up as they are broken down.
As you prompt an insulin reaction by tasting sugar, your system stops consuming body fat and begins to run off the "instant sugar rush".
Plus, the high carb foods induce a sugar-rush/carb-crash cycle, which causes the individual to feel a need to consume more sugar.
Steak...not at all.
Most people wouldn't be as likely to consume 5,000 calories of lean meat and green vegetables as they would sugar based foods.
I'm not sure how anyone can actually avoid eating simple carbs; they're present in any plant product and some animal products.
Well, you can't. You can't eliminate the rain either, but you avoid wallowing in the puddles.
There are varying amounts of sugars in food, you can avoid processed sugar and white flour foods, bread, pasta, starchy vegetables etc. I know people harp on how good fruit is for you, but I don't know what nutrient they hold which are not available in vegetables.
Most fruits are chock full of sugar.
This is not to say you need to ban these foods, just use caution....and I certainly don't want any government conducting social engineering on my diet.
‘’you get blotto a lot faster’’. As I said.
I really don’t know how to say this.
Many many people attribute all kinds of special properties to foods, or food types. And they think that because they read about one specific metabolic pathway concerning that particular macronutrient (whether it’s carbohydrate, protein, or lipid) in a book or article that someone else managed to get published, which is usually accompanied by some description of how that one pathway is responsible for all their ills, they have the magic answer.
The reality is that weight control and good nutrition do not have a magic bullet answer. Is there really such a thing as a “sugar-rush/carb-crash” cycle that is documented in the medical literature? If such a thing has really been documented, was it established through studies that were more sophisticated than simple correlation studies (which, unfortunately, take far more space in the medical journals than their actual contributions merit)? Is the belief that eating mono- or disaccharides leads to eating greater quantities of mono- or disaccharides founded in actual controlled studies, and is there a biochemical mechanism established and characterized that accounts for such a phenomenon?
The fact that insulin levels rise and fall in response to sugar consumption doesn’t really mean much, in terms of being the “magic bullet” for weight loss. Other hormones also rise and fall in response to stimulous—that is how the body is supposed to work. It is when they fail to adequately respond that problems such as diabetes arise.
The only simple truism as far as weight control goes is that when kcals in exceed kcals out, weight gain occurs.
You, personally, may have no desire to impose your own magic answer on others. However, there are too many people, especially liberals, who share your belief system about nutrition who think they have a duty to impose their beliefs on others “for their own good”.
I personally think that trying to deny sugary treats to kids is a fantastic recipe for obesity. Because doing that increases the allure of those foods, and kids never learn to eat them in moderation, when those kids find themselves in an environment where they can freely access those foods, they then have no self-control. And obesity results.
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