The shambles of the modern American diet.

I don't know what any of those abbreviations are, but I've always wondered why it is the government got in the business of pushing junk science on us to change our eating habits. This high-grain low-fat bullshit is just that: bullshit.

But I've always wondered why, despite evidence to the contrary from 99.9% of human history and eating activity, we were suddenly being told to eat like this? And, has anyone else married the timeline between the increase in high-carb low-fat diets, and the increase in type II diabetes, heart disease, and obesity?

 

There's a lot more science behind it all. For istance, back in the day we ate seasonly. You couldn't get watermelon in winter, it was out of season and our bodies were used to seasonal diets for thousands of years. Nowadays everything is farm and readily available 24/7 365 days a year in a relatively short time.

Even when I was kid the thought of buying cherries in winter was stupid. But I can now. I can get anything I want any time I want it, but my body and digestive system have not gotten used to this. It's all farmed quickly too, we now feed ourselves all the chemicals used to produce this mass market on world wide scale.

Food is imported left, right and centre. I know fast food is a killer, but at the end of the day if you can feed your family on a low budget from MacDonalds for 20$ rather than buy fresh food and meat that'll cost you more then that's what people will do. I don't blame them for it, it just stinks that MacDonalds is trash and there aren't any healthy financial viable franchises out there willing to give good fresh food a chance without adding 500% price tag to it.

 

thank you!
it's like with my celiac. I've found my trigger is the altered gliadin that entered the modern american wheat from the intercrossing of goatgrass in the mid 70's. it made the plants shorter (for easier machine harvest) and higher yielding, but it altered the storage proteins, and my body reacts like crazy to it. (a pinhead sized crumb leaves me sick for weeks, more than that's put me in the hospital)

I experimented with einkorn (an unmodified precursor to wheat. such a distant relative, it wont' even crossbreed with wheat now) and despite it having gluten storage proteins, it's non-reactive in my guts. (I can literally eat a fat stack of einkorn pancakes without a single bit of issue.) The difference is the way the proteins fold.

but for the most part, I eat like a caveman. seasonally, and I do my best to not eat 'cheap shit' food. it's hard, though, because like the modern wheat is something like 40 cents a kilo, which my einkorn is about 5$ a kilo. but it won't poison me and leave me strapped to an IV and bleeding from the guts. makes one wonder what other effects the american diet has. hence I try to eat like I'm in the pre-industrial period when I can. lol

 

I feel you. I have IBS and tested for ceiliac and crohns but all clear there and yes I also have certain trigger foods, usually rich flavoured sauces which sucks as I love Asian food lol.

 

yeah, and it's worse with having the celiac (absorption issues) and having a hot-shotted metabolism (my base metabolic rate to be in a coma is somewhere north of 3200 calories. reasonably, I'm sitting at about 4k if I want to be any kind of active. if I'm suffering a celiac flare, and have.. say.. a 50% deficit, due to intestinal damage.. that means I need to snarf somewhere close to 6k a day to keep my body from going nuts. luckily, so long as I avoid modern wheat, barley and rye, I'm pretty good. I do have a couple 'allergies' but I can drop a benadryl and be ok (like, since I'm allergic to latex, I'm cross-reactive to tapioca, which is a staple for most premade gluten free foods)

it gets to be a pain, though, eating so much. it's so horribly expensive to eat 'clean' (well, clean for me. thankfully my body is fat adapted, so I wind up using that for fuel, but it's still a lot of chewing and a lot of calories, just to maintain this 110kg (ish) on the 198cm of height.) worse still that not all my hormones shut off when I hit the end of puberty, so i'm still growing just under a cm a year, and likely will til I'm 55-60.

I need to live on a farm. lol

 

I'm not going to put down poor diets etc. as I know it's hard, not going to put down American food either but I personally found it hard to find veges and good food. I mean I lost a lot of weight for that trip expecting a put on weight and I ate a lot of burgers lol but every second day I would get a salad. I'm used to a plate of mixed veges when I order veges but in most places I could only find asparagus or green beans. I missed broclli and even simple carrot.

A waitress in Asheville SC told me it's really hard to get fresh produce like that, a salad is lettuce, tomato cheese and a ton of nasty sauce.

I loved American food though just after 3 weeks of it.. I was feeling horrible.

 

yeah, with the industrialization of america, many places have turned into food deserts. nothing but prepackaged or tinned vegetables, if you're lucky, frozen stuff.

in small towns like the one I live in, we don't even have a farmer's market, and if you live in a HOA area, then a lot of times gardens are utterly disallowed.

I mean poor food is better than none, but it's not so easy to eat well, and I'm sure you noticed that a burger and fries are cheaper than even a crappy salad.

a lot of people in my generation and younger actually haven't been exposed to much in the way of fresh fruit and veg, and enjoying them. we've lost a lot of the variety of our heirloom vegetables, because they don't ship a thousand miles to market well. and stuff's been modified for aesthetics and shipping over nutrition and flavor.

small farms are dying out, and almost nonexistent, and its getting harder to garden. here in texas, the weather's been so erratic the last several years that I haven't been able to grow anything. late freezes, early triple digit days, flash flooding followed by a month of drought and water restrictions... it's been horrible, even trying to grow my own.

kind of depressing, because I grew up with my adopted gramma, following her around the garden, (here in this same little town) shelling beans, snapping green beans, helping her home-can and preserve stuff, and eating all the fresh things too. (I teethed on jalapeno peppers out of her garden)

 

I know exactly where you are coming from. Most of the farms in my area now are only open because it is their traditional livelihood and since they cannot commercialise, they tend to only service smaller towns now. Which is actually fantastic to see. Our family farm now is not like is used to be 20yrs ago, it would be almost void and bare landscape compared to when I was a child. Now we spend more time fixing fence lines than we do farming.

 

yeah, and as the small farms shut down from going broke, the big commercial ones buy up the land, even if they're just gonna leave it idle..

here in texas, there are 10,000 acre tracts owned by commercial concerns that've sat fallow for 10+ years, because it's cheaper to just sit on it than farm it, and it keeps competition out of the area. good for the rabbits and coyotes, I guess.

 

I've been eating a lot of fruit lately. Some fruit stores are open 24/7 here. It's funny, the entire street will be pitch black and closed down, except for the random fruit store with a few people buying stuff acting like it's 2 in the afternoon.

 

that'd be nice. especially to be able to get fresh farmer's market stuff, not the crappy mass-grown cardboard and tasteless non-nutritious slop.

 

So its Nixons fault you are all fat?

 

^^^...I Was Of The Opinion All America's Problems Stemmed From Russia Nowadays......



Cheers Glen.

 

This surprises me though, there's a big farm to table movement (that phrase has always sounded pretentious to me but i dunno what else to call it) in this region of the country and particularly in Asheville, i've never had a problem finding a healthy restaurant with locally sourced veggies

But generally speaking when you're traveling in the US it is really hard to find a healthy meal. I always feel like shit after a few days of traveling and eating on the go

Its pretty easy to find seasonal produce and to eat healthy when i'm home though

But the standard nutritional guidelines in the US is completely backwards. 9 -11 servings of carbs a day? What is that?

 

It was just a hotel waitress at some hotel on a Golf course? It was pretty fancy though. Which surprised me because we ate at hotels and yeah.. Just.. I wanted broclli and cauliflowers and carrots and corn.

Not having a dig. And even my favorite subway, I did not like the chicken. And then mostly bar food. Except in Denver I tried this one meal because of veges. Chefs choice. Came out with brussel sprouts.... and that's just not on. Lol.