Dairy

[ex]

What isn't debatable is for ultimate health, you should include dairy in your diet.  Eating the RDA of healthy versions of ALL food groups is ideal.  Skim milk for dairy, low-fat meats drained of oil after cooking, vegetables (fresh is best), fresh fruits, healthy multi-grain breads & brown rice, and believe it or not, a little bit of candy/sugar, and healthy oils like olive oil.

What's interesting is when any one of these groups is avoided, including the candy/sugar category, your health takes a dip.  The idea used to be, just eat lean meat and vegetables, cut out everything else for ultimate health.  We now know that actually CAUSES health deterioration.  The healthiest people on Earth oddly enough eat a mixture of mostly healthy foods and a little bit of crap, but they NEVER cut out any food group.

I guess I get a little irritated at our culture.  Dr. Atkins is the main culprit that caused many people to eat meat only and cut out everything else.  I don't get how anyone could eat like that for very long and survive.  You miss out on too many key nutrients when you focus on meats only.  The health effects from eating a meat-hardy diet:  high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart problems of all kinds, non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome, and digestive tract cancers just to name a few, all caused by eating meat only.

Of course, the douchey vegetarian/vegan culture gets on my nerves just as bad.  Avoiding meat has been proven over and over to cause growth problems, strength issues, size deterioration, and brain shrinkage, as well as lacking key proteins that you just can't get any other way other than eating meat.  The veg's don't get that the only reason homo sapiens survived was because we were omnivores.  If you look back at the 23 other homo- subspecies, we were the only ones that survived, and there's a reason for that.  It's because we were the most adaptive, and understood eating combinations of plants and animals made us stronger, faster, and smarter.  Proof of this is in nature today as well.  If you look at monkey species, the omnivorous subspecies grew bigger, while the plant-only species remained small and lacked strength, as well as had far smaller brains, proportionately speaking.

Moderation is the key to health.  Anyone on any "extreme" side won't be able to take full advantage of their health.

[peewee_RotA]

Of course, the douchey vegetarian/vegan culture gets on my nerves just as bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSLQu-d6ZQ

[QwazyWabbit]

There is nothing "natural" about humans drinking the milk of creatures other than humans.
Humans are also not evolved to consume human milk beyond infancy once they are weaned.

[peewee_RotA]

There is nothing "natural" about humans drinking the milk of creatures other than humans.
Humans are also not evolved to consume human milk beyond infancy once they are weaned.

Does any mammal continue to drink their mother's milk after infancy?

All of this natural human state crap is getting annoying. Humans have high intelligence. Humans invented farming and cooking. All of these things are a product of farming and cooking. Humans also invented breeding and domestication.

Humans are also the only animals that cook. We almost exclusively can't safely eat meat without cooking it. If you're going from a "what are we meant to eat" only perspective, then we have to be vegetarians. (Even though our eating of many fruits and vegetables require tools or further cooking anyway). To me it's a very silly exercise to ever discount the fact that humans are naturally smarter, naturally use tools to do almost anything, and naturally need to cook to eat when compared to other animals.

[|iR|Focalor]

If you're making an effort to lose weight, the Atkins method can work. Carbohydrates/straches found in breads and starchy vegetables are broken down into sugar inside the body, and you aren't active enough to burn those calories, it turns into fat. It's not what I would call a "lifestyle" diet, or something I'd do on a permanent basis, but if you're going on a temporary diet in order to slim down, it can be quite effective. But in the same way, starvation can be even more effective, which is basically the point of that type of diet, to greatly decrease your sugar and calorie intake to force your body to melt off your stored fat. That kind of thing isn't "healthy", but it works as far as the weight loss objective.

But if you wanna get really technical about it, probably even more effective than an Atkins diet OR starvation would be becoming temporarily bulimic. Eating a lot of food and then puking it back up tricks your body's metabolism into functioning faster as if you still have the food in your system. If you starve yourself, your body's metabolism slows to conserve energy and keep you alive longer. I'm not saying bulimia is healthy at all, obviously it isn't. Stomach acid can damage your esophagus and speed up or cause tooth decay, not to mention that not eating and digesting anything can fuck your blood sugar levels all to hell and leave you feeling weak, jittery, and sometimes cause you to pass out where you stand.

There is nothing "natural" about humans drinking the milk of creatures other than humans.

Well there's nothing "natural" about the ingredients in 98% of the food found in your local grocery store either. Regular milk is probably closer to "additive-free" than most anything else you'd purchase there. And yes, I'm aware that they do sometimes give milk cows hormones to increase their milk production, although recently many dairies have discontinued the practice due to consumer complaints. Even when they do give them hormones, you're ingesting MORE unnatural things by eating the beef than drinking the milk.  

[ex]

Yeah, the natural state of humans is very bad.

We average 23 years old in nature.  That's equivalent to a 76 year old man, or an 80 year old woman now.  That means we've extended our lifespan well over 3 times as much, just as an average.  There's damn near nothing natural about us anymore.

However, in nature our bodies were more adept to eat raw meat, "relatively" safely.  I say relatively because there are always microbes in meat that can potentially make you sick, but in nature (at least in our short lives in nature) our immune systems were built to withstand raw meats better than they are now.  Now, we use vaccines and medicines to defeat nature.

We have always been omnivorous as homo sapiens, especially in nature.  It's the main reason we survived where other human subspecies didn't.  In nature, we were definitely meant to eat both plant and raw animal meats to survive.  23 species whittled down to 1 is pretty much the proof of that.

The only other human species that didn't go completely extinct are Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthalensis, which we now think got infused into homo sapiens some late tens/early hundreds of thousands of years ago.  That explains the wide array and variance of humans now, IMHO. 

[ex]

If you're making an effort to lose weight, the Atkins method can work. Carbohydrates/straches found in breads and starchy vegetables are broken down into sugar inside the body, and you aren't active enough to burn those calories, it turns into fat. It's not what I would call a "lifestyle" diet, or something I'd do on a permanent basis, but if you're going on a temporary diet in order to slim down, it can be quite effective. But in the same way, starvation can be even more effective, which is basically the point of that type of diet, to greatly decrease your sugar and calorie intake to force your body to melt off your stored fat. That kind of thing isn't "healthy", but it works as far as the weight loss objective.

But if you wanna get really technical about it, probably even more effective than an Atkins diet OR starvation would be becoming temporarily bulimic. Eating a lot of food and then puking it back up tricks your body's metabolism into functioning faster as if you still have the food in your system. If you starve yourself, your body's metabolism slows to conserve energy and keep you alive longer. I'm not saying bulimia is healthy at all, obviously it isn't. Stomach acid can damage your esophagus and speed up or cause tooth decay, not to mention that not eating and digesting anything can fuck your blood sugar levels all to hell and leave you feeling weak, jittery, and sometimes cause you to pass out where you stand.

That's my main problem with the Atkins approach.  It harms more than it helps.  I remember idiots telling me "Atkins is the shit, you're stupid if you don't do it!" and these same idiots 10 years later (now) have high blood pressure, heart problems and early-stage atherosclerosis.

The main thing that really pissed me off is when my doctor told me it'd be a good idea to think about it to lose weight.  I remember telling him off about how he needed his medical license revoked, because I know I'm not the only one he told that BS to.

Losing weight is important if you're overweight, but not the Atkins way.  Or the starvation way, or bulimic way either.

I lost 100 lbs. in a year a long time ago by eating lower amounts of everything and exercising my ass off.  That's the real-deal way to ensure ultimate health, not some bogus diet which shortens your lifespan.

People are idiots.

[QwazyWabbit]

Let me extend my comment about what is natural human food. When we are born, the only natural food we can digest is human milk. All mammals survive best when fed their mother's milk. There comes a point in that creature's life when milk is no longer normal nor sufficient for that creature. In the case of humans, the natural food becomes fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains. Mostly raw. Meat is another but if you observe the great apes, especially gorillas, you will observe they do not eat meat. There is no evidence to believe early humans need meat in their diet to live a healthy life or that natural selection caused mankind to mature faster because he ate meat. Meat just tastes good and hunting gave the "boys" something to do all day while the women tended camp and rested from a strenuous night of being fruitful and multiplying. They also got to gossip with each other about what the Jone's were doing next door, which is why we evolved as talking apes.

In the mean time the men learned that it was easier to capture game and fence it in than to chase it around all day long in the hot sun just to kill it, drag it home to momma to cook, only to do it all over again the next day. Cows, pigs and goats in the mean time became "slaves" to humans desires. Unless you were a Muslim, then you neglected the pig in favor of the goat. In that case, goats were handy to have around when the harem was all in sync and you didn't want to deal with all that PMS shit. Men then discovered the interesting dangly bits underneath the cows and what fun you could have when the bull had done his job and the cow was lactating, post-partem. The part of the milk that make it tasty is the fat - same as in the meat - so that's why we like it. Take the fat out and all you have is some dirty water with a white hue. Goats milk is even more tasty because it has a higher fat content can bovine milk.

As far as essential nutrients are concerned, everything an adult human needs, including protein, LDL, BHA, calcium, phosphorus, vitamins and all essential trace minerals, can be obtained by eating green vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes. I am not a vegetarian, so don't think I have an agenda. But the FDA and all that propaganda about milk and the four essential food groups is just that, propaganda. We have learned to pasteurize milk because whole milk full of listeria can kill you faster than a bad piece of meat full of maggots. In fact, maggots have proven useful in cleaning necrotic tissue out of severe wounds where other treatments would have failed. Maggots don't like fresh meat, they like the dead stuff. So if you are starving in the savanna and you stumble upon a dead gazelle, eat the meat the maggots aren't into yet, that will be the freshest stuff. But check for lions and hyenas first, otherwise you will be the freshest meat on the dinner table this evening.

But don't drink the milk, you don't need it.

P.S. I also enjoy a nice bowl of cereal with bananas and 2% for breakfast.

[|iR|Focalor]

In the mean time the men learned that it was easier to capture game and fence it in than to chase it around all day long in the hot sun just to kill it,

I disagree. Have you ever met a cow? They basically beg to be fenced to and fed. You really don't need to "hunt" them, you can dig a big hole and wait and one will eventually wander over and fall the fuck in on it's own. Literally, cockroaches are smarter than cows.

[QwazyWabbit]

In the mean time the men learned that it was easier to capture game and fence it in than to chase it around all day long in the hot sun just to kill it,

I disagree. Have you ever met a cow? They basically beg to be fenced to and fed. You really don't need to "hunt" them, you can dig a big hole and wait and one will eventually wander over and fall the fuck in on it's own. Literally, cockroaches are smarter than cows.

Have you ever corralled a wildebeest? A gazelle? A water buffalo? Notice i used the word "game" not cow. Bovine are the product of thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding, they are stupid because they are born that way as man designed them to be. Cattle, genus Bos taurus, are descended from Aurochs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

The American Indians had thousands of years to domesticate Bison but they didn't do it, probably because it was just as easy to stalk them from the periphery of the huge herds. BTW, those pictures and statues of the Noble Native Americans riding ponies up to the side of the thundering Bisons to lay and arrow into his shoulders? Total falsehood until the era of the great westward migration of the Anglos in North America. The horse is not indigenous to North America and NNA's didn't use them until the 18th century. Horses are from Europe. Wild mustangs? An invasive species bread from escaped/released horses from European ancestors. The Sioux people had never seen a horse until the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804.

"By about 15,000 years ago, Equus ferus was a widespread holarctic species. Horse bones from this time period, the late Pleistocene, are found in Europe, Eurasia, Beringia, and North America. Yet between 10,000 and 7,600 years ago, the horse became extinct in North America and rare elsewhere. The reasons for this extinction are not fully known, but one theory notes that extinction in North America paralleled human arrival. Another theory points to climate change, noting that approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with unpalatable plants."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse

The Mongols, renowned horsemen of Northern Asia and the Stepps of Eurasia, drink a liquor made from horse milk. From what I understand it makes for a good buzz.

[peewee_RotA]

Meat is another but if you observe the great apes, especially gorillas, you will observe they do not eat meat.
...
Unless you were a Muslim, then you neglected the pig in favor of the goat
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The part of the milk that make it tasty is the fat - same as in the meat - so that's why we like it. Take the fat out and all you have is some dirty water with a white hue. Goats milk is even more tasty because it has a higher fat content can bovine milk.
...
In fact, maggots have proven useful in cleaning necrotic tissue out of severe wounds where other treatments would have failed. Maggots don't like fresh meat

I've always known that primates eat primates. It's one of those facts that mean teachers throw at children to scare them.

If gorillas do eat meat, they wouldn't be the first great apes to do so.

Chimpanzees and their bonobo cousins are known to hunt and eat other mammals, including monkeys. (See "'Loving' Bonobos Seen Killing, Eating Other Primates.")
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100305-first-proof-gorillas-eat-monkeys-mammals-feces-dna/

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And the Jews. (Cleffed hoof animals was the criteria that included pigs)

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Milk is an important part of cooking. I'm not sure how long it's been but milk and eggs are almost exclusively irreplaceable ingredients in baking. It's not just a food source, but a tool for cooking. Something that is a natural human process.

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Wild maggots shouldn't be ingested. Any food with maggots in it is rife with disease. Since, as you mentioned, maggots feed on rotting meat, they carry plenty of ways to kill us. What you're referring to is a recent type of alternative medicine which involves maggots that have been bred and sterilized in order to make their use safe. Letting a fly from the wild lay eggs in some gangrenous toe is probably a death sentence.

[QwazyWabbit]

Wild maggots shouldn't be ingested. Any food with maggots in it is rife with disease. Since, as you mentioned, maggots feed on rotting meat, they carry plenty of ways to kill us. What you're referring to is a recent type of alternative medicine which involves maggots that have been bred and sterilized in order to make their use safe. Letting a fly from the wild lay eggs in some gangrenous toe is probably a death sentence.

I never suggested you should eat the maggots, I specifically said you should eat the meat NOT infested with the maggots because it was the freshest of a carcass.

As for wild maggots and gangrene being a death sentence, it's simply not true.

"Military physicians have observed that soldiers whose wounds had become colonized with maggots experienced significantly less morbidity and mortality than soldiers whose wounds had not become colonized. These physicians included Napoleon’s general surgeon, Baron Dominique Larrey. Larrey reported during France's Egyptian campaign in Syria, 1798–1801, that certain species of fly consumed only dead tissue and helped wounds to heal.

Dr. Joseph Jones, a ranking Confederate medical officer during the American Civil War, is quoted as follows, "I have frequently seen neglected wounds ... filled with maggots ... as far as my experience extends, these worms eat only dead tissues, and do not injure specifically the well parts." The first therapeutic use of maggots is credited to a second Confederate medical officer Dr. J.F. Zacharias, who reported during the American Civil War that, "Maggots ... in a single day would clean a wound much better than any agents we had at our command ... I am sure I saved many lives by their use." He recorded a high survival rate in patients he treated with maggots."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy

Modern maggot therapy uses sterilized maggots not specifically because it's safer but because it keeps doctors and hospitals from getting sued for osteogenic infections if they DIDN'T use sterile maggots.

[quadz]

The only other human species that didn't go completely extinct are Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthalensis, which we now think got infused into homo sapiens some late tens/early hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Also, the recently-discovered Denisovans: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-sex-neanderthals-denisovans-gave-healthy.html

[ex]

The only other human species that didn't go completely extinct are Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthalensis, which we now think got infused into homo sapiens some late tens/early hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Also, the recently-discovered Denisovans: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-sex-neanderthals-denisovans-gave-healthy.html

Damnit, I was just reading that earlier too!  Thought I got them in there.  Denisovan humans are a very close ancestor to us time-wise.  Helps bridge that "missing link" a little bit more. 

[peewee_RotA]

I never suggested you should eat the maggots, I specifically said you should eat the meat NOT infested with the maggots because it was the freshest of a carcass.

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Modern maggot therapy uses sterilized maggots not specifically because it's safer but because it keeps doctors and hospitals from getting sued for osteogenic infections if they DIDN'T use sterile maggots.

You had strung it together with a comment about eating raw meat which made it an ambiguous statement. I wasn't sure how else to take it other than: "You don't need to be afraid of maggots. See they are your friends!"

...

I read the same article yesterday because my comment was based on some old discovery channel documentary. They're usually half-right on their best of days.

Some other interesting facts. Maggot therapy came to a halt after penicillin went into wide-spread use. Only specific types of maggots can be used which is why they are bred for use. Parasites introduced by wild insects (including flies) are a huge source of disease in the world. Here's one of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onchocerciasis