I watched the documentary "Fat Head" ....

[Wifezilla]

Really, just exaggerating.

Yeah...but not much!

I know this was your experience, too, WZ.

Absolutely

My best friend gets fatter and fatter by the month, and it is getting frightening to me. She maintained a healthy weight for many years and suddenly, without diet changes, boom! Fat!

That is happening to two of my friends right now. One is a big Oprah/Dr Oz fan. She went vegetarian and got fatter. Now she is pissed off but still thinks I am nuts. The other one claims she doesn't eat a lot of sugar but every time I see her she is drinking a Dr Pepper.

My new method is to cook lovely gourmet meals (what we eat every day) and invite these people to join me. I can do a wonderful ovo-lacto vegetarian meal with no trouble. They always rave over it. Always. Sometimes it opens the door a tiny crack.

My vegetarian friend has been won over a bit with my quiche. She wants the recipe, but I don't know if I should give it to her. I use heavy whipping cream in with the eggs

 

[bibliophile birds]

Carbs from industrial corn, wheat, soy, potatoes, rice, etc.. Carbs from sugar. Carbs from high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, or the hundereds of other products that end in "ose" and are derived from corn, carbs from anything that comes out of a box...especially the boxes with a cartoon character on the front.

ok, this i can agree with you on. for me it's "avoid industrialized food" rather than "avoid carbs" so i think we were just using different vocab to say basically the same thing. the posts referencing what is meant by carbs here were posted while i was writing mine up.

i can get on board with most of that philosophy, but i will never be able to give up bread and pasta completely (nor do i think it should be the goal for everyone). i love it. but i know to eat it, like everything else, in moderation. and i, of course, would aim to make most of it myself, but that's more because of my SS goal than any particular dietary guideline.

i guess i was really reacting to the whole forager vs agriculturist issue more than anything. prehistoric foragers ate lots of grains, either in meat dishes, as bread (or whatever their equivalent was), or as alcohol (us Southerners definitely don't have the historical market cornered on moonshine). i mean, people have been eating maize for something like 4000 years.

 

[freemotion]

Bee, don't your folks eat wild turkey in abundance once a year? This is a healthy way to be a vegan most of the year, IMO. They certainly don't approach it the way most do.

 

[freemotion]

i mean, people have been eating maize for something like 4000 years.

Yes, but they prepared it with nixtamalization techniques. Otherwise, they got pelegra. (spelling? Where is spellcheck when you need it? )

 

[FarmerChick]

LOL
if ya eat turkey even once a year you sure aren't vegan.....you are just a person on a vegetable type diet with occasional meat..LOL

a little of everything ain't gonna kill ya (usually)

anything like fructose, glucose, all the other "ose"
there isn't a person standing that doesn't eat some during a period in their lifetime. And there isn't a person on a perfect diet ever. No one is perfect in their foods. Sure we eat good, we are SS people and know our fresh farm foods is better over the processed junk --but there isn't anyone going to give it all up. No one does. Sure, severly limiting some foods as we all do, but never cheat and eat junk, nope, we all do at some point

 

[Beekissed]

I wouldn't say "in abundance" as they usually only get two turkeys and eat the breast only....and have to share with the rest of us hogs, normally!

But, yes, they do indulge...well, they did. Now they don't hunt since Dad's decline these past few years.

I am now introducing Mom to my eggs and she is starting to add this to her vegan diet....go figure! She says she has never tasted better eggs...even the ones we had while growing up. I think she has just been deprived for too long....

No, they don't approach it the way most do. When they first started this lifestyle they were already low-fat junkies and has multiple health problems. They had always been physically fit and watched their weight. They went into this vegan thing whole-heartedly and only started breaking over with the wild turkey consumption in the past 5 years...it was kind of funny to us.

When they started this new thing, they lost weight down to an optimal level and then never lost another pound, nor gained any, for 15 years. Daily wt. bearing exercise and eating mostly raw has been so beneficial to them that, other than Dad's ALZ, they have no physical health problems.

 

[bibliophile birds]

In my travels, I've found that most vegetarians are carbo-tarians in reality. Actually, every single one that has shared their diet with me eats mostly carbs and soy.

unfortunately, soy seems to be the silent terror these days. lots of people are starting to realize that there is corn in everything and that it might not be so good for them. i mean, the corn industry is so panicked that it ran those terrible "HFCS is great for you!" commercials. but soy sneaks by mostly unobserved, and it's so bad.

i've been instructed by my doctor to avoid soy as much as possible. since i'm mostly avoiding industrial foods, that's easier all the time, but still no walk in the park. it just seems like most consumers are set up to fail. "want to avoid the BGH in regular milk? switch to soymilk instead! oh wait, soy is wrecking havoc on your body? drink this organic milk. oops, that organic milk is still factory farmed and the cows are fed nothing but corn and soy (but at least it's organic)!" the only answer, for me at least, is local, organic, pastured raised everything.

so many vegetarians i know have APPALLING diets. nothing but processed soy cheese on their processed soy burger on their processed, bleached bun with a side of fries. ick.

 

[abifae]

*

 

[bibliophile birds]

seriously. yes. lol. i want to be able to grow everything i eat so i know it's healthy. that'd be awesome.

i've not eaten pork in 11 years and i'm DYING for some. i stopped eating commercial meat when i was 16 and didn't know anyone who had pigs (nor were my parents about to buy me a whole butchered pig when they were more than happy to eat the crap from the supermarket). so i have been dreaming of pork tenderloin for a very, very, very long time.

this year, i am raising pigs if it kills me. if my very last bite of food before perishing is pasture raised, organic pork from my own yard, i will die with a huge smile on my face!

 

[Wifezilla]

Yes, but they prepared it with nixtamalization techniques. Otherwise, they got pelegra

"The traditional food preparation method of corn (maize), nixtamalization, by native New World cultivators who had domesticated corn required treatment of the grain with lime, an alkali. It has now been shown that the lime treatment makes niacin nutritionally available and reduces the chance of developing pellagra. When corn cultivation was adopted worldwide, this preparation method was not accepted because the benefit was not understood. The original cultivators, often heavily dependent on corn, did not suffer from pellagra. Pellagra became common only when corn became a staple that was eaten without the traditional treatment.

Pellagra was first described in Spain in 1735 by Gaspar Casal, who published a first clinical description in his posthumous "Natural and Medical History of the Asturian Principality" (1762). This led to the disease being known as "Asturian leprosy", and it is recognized as the first modern pathological description of a syndrome(1). It was an endemic disease in northern Italy, where it was named "pelle agra" (pelle = skin; agra = rough) by Francesco Frapoli of Milan.[3] Because pellagra outbreaks occurred in regions where maize was a dominant food crop, the belief for centuries was that the maize either carried a toxic substance or was a carrier of disease. It was not until later that the lack of pellagra outbreaks in Mesoamerica, where maize is a major food crop (and is processed), was noted and the idea was considered that the causes of pellagra may be due to factors other than toxins."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra