Argall Family wrote:
> Klaus
>
> I enjoyed your thought-provoking piece but the long two part argument (from
> John Coleman?) seemed to finish up running back to simplicities. Almost like
> an undergraduate exam essay, where the student, with 10 seconds to go, and
> enough cards dumped on the table, finishes quickly by saying "so eat less
> meat".
>
> When looking at the terrible impacts on the health of indigenous peoples,
> and there are a number of references to the South Pacific (there are no
> 'Great Barrier Reef people' but I suspect that the reference is to a
> particular former mission community of Australian aboriginal people) I think
> regard has to be had for the undermining of health not just by diet but by
> efforts at their overall cultural destruction, loss of land, loss of
> lifestyle, loss of identity. The condensed milk and canned fish and other
> store goods that seem to have contributed to health decline in the South
> Pacific need to be seen in broader context.
>
> I think there are problems associated with the balance of the 'meat' we eat,
> in its modern focus on muscle meat, and the general exclusion of offal from
> food offered in stores, but I would not try to run on official figures.
> According to the WHO, the average person can survive on about 40 grams of
> good protein per day, but I understand, second hand, can't cite source, that
> according to MIT graduate students, they all lost body protein when they
> tested a diet of 40 grams. Protein deficiency is probably the most common
> main cause of hypothyroidism, especially when combined with use of the
> thyroid antagonistic foods, cabbage-broccoli, beans, unsaturated oils. (One
> of the many ways in which those oils are antithyroid is that they neatly
> block protein digestion.) So to look at an amount of protein on a kitchen
> scale and say 'that's the right amount' is likely to fall short in a normal
> diet with foods in combination.
>
> To argue against gelatin and sugar seems a bit naive, especially on the
> basis of saying that they are no good because they only contain sugar and
> gelatin. Is oxygen bad because it only contains oxygen? Gelatin and sugar,
> in modest amounts, are wonderfully supportive for invalids, for good
> biological reasons. Arguments in favour of starches rather than simple
> sugars are simplistic, ignoring the extent to which the former can create
> problems of bacterial endotoxin in the gut, etc. To the extent that the
> paper argues for fruit and against grain, this seems good, but the muddle
> arises with the tut tut over sugar. Oranges, an exemplary food, if not drunk
> from a bottle containing preservatives, contain the simplest of sugars.
>
> Being 'organic' doesn't say much about nutrition, of course, anyway. You can
> grow tobacco, opium and coca organically, just like canola, foxgloves,
> oleander...
>
> The issue of junk foods, with all their additives, is something else again.
> There was mention of the impact of preservatives on the environment.
> Anecdotal evidence from the funeral industry in this country is that bodies
> just don't rot like they used to. If oxidation is blocked in dead people, we
> should presume that healthy electron transfer processes. The New Scientist
> contained an article early in 1998 on the swamp creating effect of sulphur
> dioxide on the gut. Even some mineral waters are marketed here with sulphur
> dioxide added, no doubt to save money on batch checking for contamination.
> So, if we are going to talk about the merits of foods kids like to eat, we
> have to look at the fine print too.
>
> I commend Ray Peat's paper on Junk Foods, available at
> http://www.efn.org/~raypeat/ , from which I append an extract.
>
> Dennis
> =============
>
> "Years ago, I noticed that Oregon was one of the few states that still had
> real whipping cream and cottage cheese without additives, so I have been
> trustingly using cream in my coffee every day. Last week, I noticed that my
> cream listed carrageenan in its ingredients. Over the years, I have avoided
> carrageenan-containing foods such as apple cider, hot dogs, most ice creams
> and prepared sauces and jellies, because they caused me to have serious
> allergic symptoms. Carrageenan has been found to cause colitis and
> anaphylaxis in humans, but it is often present in baby "formulas" and a wide
> range of milk products, with the result that many people have come to
> believe that it was the milk-product that was responsible for their allergic
> symptoms. Because the regulators claim that it is a safe natural substance,
> it is very likely that it sometimes appears in foods that don't list it on
> the label, for example when it is part of another ingredient. In the 1940s,
> carrageenan, a polysaccharide made from a type of seaweed, was recognized as
> a dangerous allergen. Since then it has become a standard laboratory
> material to use to produce inflammatory tumors (granulomas),
> immunodeficiency, arthritis, and other inflammations. It has also become an
> increasingly common material in the food industry. Articles are often
> written to praise its usefulness and to claim that it doesn't produce cancer
> in healthy animals. Its presence in food, like that of the polyester
> imitation fat, microcrystalline cellulose, and many other polymers used to
> stabilize emulsions or to increase smoothness, is often justified by the
> doctrine that these molecules are too large to be absorbed. There are two
> points that are deliberately ignored by the food-safety regulators, 1) these
> materials can interact dangerously with intestinal bacteria, and 2) they can
> be absorbed, in the process called "persorption."
>
> "The sulfites (sodium bisulfite, potassium metabisulfite, etc.) have been
> used as preservatives in foods and drugs for a long time, even though they
> were known to cause intense allergic reactions in some people. Fresh
> vegetables and fish, dried fruits, ham and other preserved meats, hominy,
> pickles, canned vegetables and juices, and wines were commonly treated with
> large amounts of the sulfites to prevent darkening and the development of
> unpleasant odors. People with asthma were known to be more sensitive than
> other people, but the sulfites could cause a fatal asthma-like attack even
> in someone who had never had asthma. Even when this was known, drugs used to
> treat asthma were preserved with sulfites. Was the information just slow to
> reach the people who made the products? No, the manufacturers knew about the
> deadly nature of their products, but they kept on selling them. The FDA
> didn't answer letters on the subject, and medical magazines such as J.A.M.A.
> declined to publish even brief letters seriously discussing the issue.
> Obviously, since many people died from what the drug companies called
> "paradoxical bronchoconstriction" when they used the products, the drug
> companies had to be protected from lawsuits, and the medical magazines and
> the government regulators did that through the control of information. I
> think a similar situation exists now in relation to the effects of
> carrageenan."
>
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