About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight but simply because it dawned on me that for the same amount of sugar in one soft drink that I drink without any afterthought, I could enjoy a really good pastry that I can slowly savor.
I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
More recently, I'm starting to apply this to meat as well. I really enjoy meat, but I'm not one for quantity since I'm on the skinnier side. So I'm trying to enjoy meat more, and in doing so, get better quality, prepare it better, etc. while at the same time eating less of it. This is still a work in progress, and eating in restaurants can be challenging as they usually favor quantity over quality—except for the very high-end & costly places.
>I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
We are increasingly moving away from looking at fat as an indulgence, towards understanding it as an essential nutrient, with a large variance in fat types and their benefits. E.g. some people would avoid eating nuts, because they are high in fat, and not as tasty as something similarly fatty, like a pastry. This seems wrong both intuitively, but also from empirical findings about the impact of certain omega-3 fatty acids (such as in nuts) versus that of, say, omega-6 fats, which are way overrepresented in our diets due to being so cheap.
This. People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads. It's sad, because as you mentioned some days are indeed essential nutrients. Especially for kids and pregnant women.
"People are getting the message that "sugar is bad" but the public health messaging of "fat is bad" still lingers in many people's heads."
If this is true then what the hell is going on? We knew this about sugar with certainly at absolute minimum a half century ago when I was a kid (I know as I remember the message).
The message—even as told at school—was that 'excessive and repeated amounts of sugar (especially the refined type as in drinks and sweets) causes diabetes'. QED!
So what the fuck has happened, how was this once well-established message erased from the collective consciousness of more recent generations?
The message back then was so all pervasive that everybody knew it.
So many important facts have been lost to recent generations that I'm beginning to think education is going backwards fast. What happened to health lectures in primary school where we were told these facts?
We only really recently have evidence for sugar, on its own, causing diabetes.
We had a lot of evidence for sugar causing weight gain. And higher weight is strongly correlated with type II diabetes. But from a public health standpoint, we were worried about fats. We realized that many fats caused health problems even without weight gain and also viewed fats as having a more primary role in weight gain.
It's only recently (in the last couple of decades) that we've gotten evidence that sugar on its own can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes--even if you are of normal weight.
"We only really recently have evidence for sugar, on its own, causing diabetes."
OK. But first let me say most of what follows about health I learned in the 1960s, back then it was common knowledge and discussed in schools, newspaper reports and on radio talk shows, etc. As I was reasonably healthy I wasn't given any special advice or instructions so the info I received was essentially the same as everybody else.
The big questions are how strong or irrefutable does evidence have to be before we act on it or take it seriously, and what disruptive factors interfere with our considerarion of said evidence. It's probably best to illustrate this with a couple of examples from when I was at school. Around that time carbon tetrachloride/CCl4 was commonly used in dry cleaning shops and one could wiff it as one passed by. It was also the time when health worries about using CCl4 for cleaning became a prominent issue and phasing it out for safer alternatives started.
In highschool chemistry we were instructed that CCl4 was toxic and to avoid getting it on one's skin and not to breathe its fumes. This led some kids including myself to ask why is it toxic when it's so inert (with four Cl atoms and no hydrogen versus say DCM/CH2Cl2—with its two hydrogens DCM would be more reactive, thus it would seem to be more harmful but whilst still harmful it's less so). The teacher said he wasn't sure why CCl4 was so harmful but went on to say it affects the liver and probably has something to do with upsetting fats as they are very soluble in it, he did not mention it was a likely carcinogen. We accepted that answer.
Then there was the matter of benzene/C6H6, he said it was very toxic and a known carcinogen, and it could be absorbed through the skin and its vapors breathed in. To make matters worse it is often a constituent of other solvents and fuels, gasoline for instance. He stressed repeatedly that we must handle it carefully and take precautions especially so if we were to become chemists as we'd likely have access to it more frequently and in higher concentration than most others. I still recall him holding up a small sealed bottle of it while he spoke about it.
This raised similar questions as to why C6H6 was dangerous whilst many compounds containing benzene rings are either not poisonous or are much less so than benzene (and of course some are even more so).
This is where the teacher was out of is depth and said we're not toxicology experts so we just have to accept the evidence that many of these chemicals are dangerous and especially so benzene. He then went on to state a general safety rule that we should always apply which is to treat all aromatics, petroleum-like chemicals (which back then also contained Pb/TEL) and chlorinated hydrocarbon compounds as toxic, dangerous and flammable. This applies to everyone, not just chemists—painters and industrial workers are also at risk of exposure to many different types of volatile solvents. That and related safety mantra was drummed into us often.
That general rule I've applied ever since and I'm still a living member of this planet despite the fact that I've used many different toxic solvents over the years.
The point of all that is we are often not fully aware of the dangers of these chemicals but there is a 'smoking gun' that manifests out of observation and statistics, that is the harm they've caused to others. Even back in the '60s when the biochemistry of chemicals such as CCl4 and C6H6 was much less well understood than today toxicologists and biochemists considered the causal link between past exposure to them and illness strong enough to warn and where necessary act to minimize harm. Definitive proof wasn't need to act.
Similar but less forceful instructions were applied to smoking. Back then cancer was hardly mentioned (despite evidence from the early '50s of the link) but we were told at school not to smoke because we would likely get lung disease which would shorten our lives. (BTW, I don't smoke.)
And there was a similar message with NaCl. 'Do not use or put too much salt on your food' was a common lecture of the time from both parents and teachers—'you'll get hardened arteries and high blood pressure if you do.' Moreover, this understanding was around long before I was born yet in the 1980s some authorities modified this to say it only applied to a percentage of the population who were susceptible and that most of us didn't have to worry about our salt intake levels. This dangerous message was reversed in the '90s. One wonders how much damage it caused. A question remains about how this wrong and corrupt message took hold in the first instance when the 'facts' as stated were so evidently wrong (so contrary to longstanding evidence).
I'd note it seems not much has changed since the reversal as so much commercially prepared food still contains hugh amounts of salt. Forget health effects for a moment, I find much of this food too salty for my liking and in some instances it's just too salty for me to eat.
On the matter of fat, you're right. By the 1960s fat was a hot ropic mainly because it was linked to heart disease. I recall in our household my father switching to margarine which later turned out to be questionable but the rest of us continued to use butter, albeit sparingly. My mother always discouraged heavy butter usage and spread it thinly. With meat-based soups etc. she'd always let them settle and skim off the fat. Same with fried foods, they'd be patted with paper towels to remove any excess fat (note she was not faddish about the practice because she was concerned about getting fat—she was naturally skinny—but rather because she was following long-held advice). I say that because my mother's concern with fat long predated the 1960s fat scare as my grandmother did exactly the same. Clearly my mother had learned the 'dangers' of fat from her mother so that meme goes back at least a century I'd reckon.
No doubt misleading information from vested commercial interests pressured much of society to act not in its best interests but two things stand out in these debates. The first is why the medical profession, health departments, statisticians, etc. didn't speak out in unison and with more force as it would have saved many lives (and on evidence they still don't do so). Medical statistics alone ought to have been a sufficient smoking gun for governments to act, but they didn't.
Second, education in these matters from a young age by both parents and schools is essential. In my case, one thing stands out which is that we kids were not only told what was bad for us but also we were given clear reasons for why they were so. Logical reasons for why we should act in our best interests are much more effective than some nebulous edict without explanation saying 'don't do it'.
I am still unclear as to exactly why these health messages became so derailed from around the 1970s onwards. It's always been clear to me that health issues surrounding fats and sugar were always separate despite them having many common factors and interactions. So why was such a simple notion so hard to explain to a lay public? (I have my theories but I'll leave them for now.)
With sugar we kids were taught all the usual facts at school: rotting teeth, getting fat and the risk of diabetes, but perhaps what made those facts sink in and last a lifetime was that as the same time we were taught the heroic story of how Charles Best and Frederick Banting separated insulin in 1922 and immediately saved lives. This history was even more poignant to us as one our classmates had type-1 diabetes and it was obvious to all that he wouldn't be alive but for them. Both facts sharpened our minds about the dangers of high sugar intake.
Again, for me it seems something went wrong with the education system, and it was made worse when professionals went off course and changed health messages midstream, they made the disaster worse.
The big issue with public health is that everything is dangerous and people will only comply with so many rules and society will only work towards so many goals.
Public health decided dietary fat was the big problem to focus on, despite imperfect evidence. Three things screwed this all up:
* Dietary fat wasn't nearly as bad as everyone thought, because eating lots of fats was correlated with lots of other negative lifestyle choices.
* It looks like dietary sugar was actually worse than the evidence of the time said.
* Policymakers didn't understand that an emphasis on reducing fats would cause food chemists and others to add more sugars and salt to food to make it more palatable.
In the end, we need to go where the evidence points. The earlier evidence that was hopelessly confounded was much more clear that fats and salt are universally bad; later evidence painted a much more ambiguous picture. It is so dang hard to measure what actually happens in real populations.
> With sugar we kids were taught all the usual facts at school: rotting teeth, getting fat and the risk of diabetes,
And the last we only have evidence of in the past couple of years, and it's relatively weak evidence.
> but perhaps what made those facts sink in and last a lifetime was that as the same time we were taught the heroic story of how Charles Best and Frederick Banting separated insulin in 1922 and immediately saved lives. This history was even more poignant to us as one our classmates had type-1 diabetes and it was obvious to all that he wouldn't be alive but for them. Both facts sharpened our minds about the dangers of high sugar intake.
Well, sugar intake isn't a risk factor or cause of type 1 diabetes.
"And the last we only have evidence of in the past couple of years, and it's relatively weak evidence."
Perhaps so, but it turned out to be good advice—I heeded the advice and have always limited my sugar and salt intake. As I said, at what point or how much evidence is need to heed such advice. Leaving it until factually certain could mean it's too late.
"Well, sugar intake isn't a risk factor or cause of type 1 diabetes."
That was known at the time (and to me also—in fact to all of us). The instance further highlighted the sugar/diabetes issue as we kids actually knew someone who had diabetes and who had to inject insulin (even if we didn't have diabetes, we knew we could still develop it and that excessive sugar would likely be the cause).
The thought of having to inject insulin daily focused our minds. That seems obvious doesn't it?
> As I said, at what point or how much evidence is need to heed such advice.
This is like a Pascal's wager. There's a bazillion things we could be doing that there's a little evidence for or a plausible explanation. And we can't do them all, or believe in every God, or whatever.
And even things that we had a lot of evidence for (like dietary fat) turned out to be harmful when given as public health advice.
In the end, things are tricky. Best to do whatever seems like it's reasonably careful to you, and for science to try and figure more of this out and decide the best things to give advice on.
Also, it's "obvious" (but completely wrong) that if you don't want to be fat, you shouldn't eat fat.
So "low-fat" products were (still are...) sold as a "diet" option. In fact processed carbs, and sugar in particular, are a far more direct cause of weight gain.
Fats do contribute to weight gain, but they're much more complicated. Sat vs unsat, trans vs ordinary, and so on all have very different health effects.
Put directly, the sugar industry lied and is now responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
"Put directly, the sugar industry lied and is now responsible for tens of millions of deaths."
Frankly, the dishonesty of the Sugar Industry and the effects of its deception are utterly appalling. Tragically, this industry is not alone in deceiving both public and supposedly august (professional) authority—the tobacco industry is yet another, and there are many more.
The question I keep asking myself is why are both experts and governments so easily hoodwinked by these miserable Cretans when it's not that difficult to see though or undermine their bad arguments. Scratch the surface of false and or propped up arguments and they quickly fall apart. If any key proposition is proven false then it's likely the whole argument/case is a sham.
With regard to sugar, I'd have thought the long history of diabetes together with patient histories and their lifestyles ought to have been enough evidence alone to bring the Sugar Industry edifice down. No doubt the playing field wasn't level.
Re the Guardian article in your link, why for example was the author of Pure, White, and Deadly, John Yudkin so ostracized by his professional colleagues? If they had his or similar training and had checked the evidence then they would have known that he was correct and come to his defense. Given the enormous implications—the death of millions—they all should have been up in arms against the Sugar Industry, but they didn't act.
In a way I hold these professionals almost as culpable as the Industry itself. I've asked myself for years what motivates people to be such utter bastards (trouble is one of my subjects was philosophy but unfortunately I didn't study its other half—psychology, perhaps if I had I'd be somewhat the wiser).
You've mentioned millions dead, little doubt this is correct, although it'd be good to firm up those numbers with factual evidence. Perhaps over time AI could crunch the numbers together with all relevant docs and history and we could end up with a statistically accurate number of deaths together with error bars.
A definitive number of deaths would put an actual measure on the Sugar Industry's culpability and those companies still in business would be forever tarnished. But to conclude the Sugar Industry alone is responsible for the harm and deaths is not good enough, we also need to link to those people who were actually responsible. Whether dead or alive we need to tarnish and destroy their reputations as a lesson for others. These corporate bullies need to learn that they can no longer hide behind corporate walls.
This is not the first time this week I've raised this matter, if interested see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42629712. Also, note its thread below. Incidentally, the post received both up and down votes and currently stands at just one vote. It seems the notion of holding those responsible to account isn't overly popular with a significant percentage of the population. Perhaps guilt racks too many and this could be part of the reason why so many professionals failed to come to John Yudkin's defence.
I've also posted a similar rave about this in reply to mlyle.
The replies are talking about sugar industry advertizing and actual scientific discoveries that point to causation which I'm sure are real. But I even I remember just 10 years ago the common rhetoric being (even if it wasn't validated) "eat too much sugar and you'll get diabetes". Where I think the impression I had was, "Well people with diabetes have to be extremely careful about their sugar intake -> sugar causes diabetes."
I will conceed that's not how science or the cause and effect works, but that's what I and everyone around me thought.
I mean, the "fat is bad" thing isn't completely wrong: it is definitely possible to overdo it. It's extremely calorically dense, and most fats are bad for us in other ways.
But society didn't replace some of the fat with increased intake of vegetables and lean meats.
Food manufacturers compensated for less fat with more sugars and salt, which we've been finding are even worse.
> About 15 years ago, I stopped drinking soda. Not out of a desire to be healthy or loose weight[...]
Same thing happened to me at probably around the same time. I realized I could just have a lollypop, and it would be a tenth of the sugar. Most of the sweetness in soda doesn't even get a chance to touch your tongue before it's going down your throat. If I want candy, I should just have a piece of candy. If I'm thirsty, I should have a glass of water.
Also, the carbonation in soda enables them to get twice the sugar into it. Drinking a flat soda is like drinking maple syrup.
It's probably a risky line of thinking, if you're addicted to sugar, to substitute in some other source of sugar. Best to avoid pastries, lollipops and sugary sodas.
It's a risky way of thinking to reduce every act to a moral choice. ie I could have used the energy that I burned making this post, to hand out a dollar to a homeless person.
Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
The brain can run well on ketone bodies (which the liver makes from fatty acids). In fact, causing the brain to run on ketone bodies is used by doctors to treat illness (and not just epilepsy).
The human brain can run on up to 70% ketones overall (this is not only safe, but it appears to have additional therapeutic benefits) and your body can synthesize glucose in your liver and kidneys from fats and proteins though gluconeogenesis to supply the remaining parts of your brain that can't metabolize betahydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate and acetone.
I agree with all you said but I also guess our ancestors mostly die from infection, hypothermia, viruses… certainly not from brain stop working because carbs deficiency.
"You have to have carbs for your brain to run" doesn’t make sense. You have to have sugar in your brain to run, but that sugar surely can comes from fat as well.
Some of our ancestors might have done keto some times, but I'm not sure most of them did most of the time? Humans are decidedly omnivorous, and most of them would eat whatever they could get their hands on, including plants and mushrooms (and sometimes honey!) etc.
They also had carbohydrates in their diet. Meat naturally contains carbs. Pretending that the human body is misunderstood and that it worked very differently is a common pitfall of these discussions. Largely it was the same, with the amounts differing.
Meat contains only insignificant amounts of carbs. The human body can convert protein to carbs (glucose specifically) but the rate at which it can do it is limited, and my guess is that if it can't burn glucose, a metabolically-healthy body will burn fat (rather than glucose made from protein) until the diet has been quite deficient in calories for at least 3 days.
> Beyond how ridiculously reductive this becomes, it's impractical. You have to have carbs for your brain to run.
No. People live on no-carb diets just fine and enter ketosis. (And in any case, the comment you replied to only talked about sugar, not carbs in general.)
'A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.'
The number of people in this study is surprisingly large!
Alas, it doesn't have much bearing on the part of the comment I wanted to focus on 'You have to have carbs for your brain to run.' Because the diets in question here still have some carbs. (And the changes in mortality rates are fairly modest, too.)
What I wanted to say is that even if you eat no carbs at all, you brain will still get its energy. You won't just keel over after a while, like if you didn't eat anything at all henceforth.
Of course, there might be second order health effects, like the study you linked suggest.
There are other metabolic pathways to produce glucose (or produce ketones). The other pathways ‘push’ the body more since they have to do some conversion. This ‘extra effort’ is considered to be more healthy.
Yes there are. You still need carbs and you get them (ie celery has carbs), regardless. Repetition wont convince someone arguing in bad faith, so I will bow to your religious beliefs.
If I have soda cravings, I can take a single Tic Tac. It doesn't satisfy my soda cravings, but crucially, it prevents the soda itself from satisfying those same cravings if I do subsequently drink it.
Usually I crave soda after a high salt/fried food. Giving myself a tiny amount of sugar (Tic Tac has 0.5g) removes the salt/fried taste, and I just can't get the good soda effect I know I would have gotten without the Tic Tac. There just isn't a point for me to take soda after a Tic Tac.
So yes, substituting a small amount of sugar for a large one can be very effective.
If I go to a restaurant with fill your own drinks (rare in the UK), I generally get soda water with about 10% coke. It's remarkable how much it tastes (to me) just like coke, albeit palatably sweet. I always thought the sugar tax should be a sweetness tax to change people's perceptions.
>In most cases you could eat multiple pastries and still have significantly less sugar than a soda.
yep. The can of soda has something like 10 spoons of sugar. In that volume i stop feeling the difference after 2nd-3rd spoon of sugar. I do drink soda - by diluting it about 1:5. For the pastries and other bakery products - it does depends where it comes from. The standard American bakery sill puts a lot of sugar into pastries, cakes, bread (especially the fast-rise), etc. while some of the ones trying to do European style do use sugar more moderately (they also usually use more fat like butter thus making the taste better, more balanced, and probably also thus more healthy - my personal impression/opinion - as the more balanced content (fat/carbs vs. low-fat-high-sugar approach somehow more popular in the American bakery) seems to me to be better).
Very true. However, consuming oils and fats make one more quickly satiated compared to sugars and other carbohydrates, leading to less overall consumption of calories.
I knew a guy who did this with chocolate. He used to get a candy bar from the vending machine at work like every day, but something happened, I think he either got a health scare or saw a documentary or maybe a combo of things and was like, "Gotta stop eating these shitty chocolate bars every day."
Started setting aside the coins he was using at the vending machine and at the end of the week would get a bar from a higher quality brand at the grocery store. Learned he really liked dark chocolate. Started upgrading to nicer and nicer chocolate. Last I heard from him he was going to some of the bougie chocolate shops downtown every few months.
Not that no sugar variants of soda are exactly a shining health food staple or better than going to healthy drinks lik water but...
For me I was absolutely shocked at how a soda being sugar free didn't have to imply it was like drinking horse piss. I had tried Diet Coke a few times and assumed that was what you had to deal with if you went sugar free. One day someone gave me a Coke Zero and it was actually not bad, even if not quite being as good as Coke. This led me to try some others like Dr Pepper Zero Sugar for which I thought "what the hell, this tastes better than Dr Pepper???".
Obviously which are better will vary by person and most people will, overall, like sodas with actual sugar more often but if everyone tried a few different options they might be surprised how little they'd have to trade down on the soda for, if anything, to drastically drop their sugar intake.
> We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage
I note that "normal" here should be read as "common during the last 50years (or less)", where the last 50ears is quite reductive in human dietary habits.
This paper you linked does not even involve aspartame. The only sweetener they experimented with is saccharin. You can check out the main figures from the link below:
I would be very reluctant to read too deep into this given saccharin is known to behave very differently in animal models - for a long time it was thought to cause bladder cancer, but follow up studies proved that it’s an idiosyncratic reaction only found in female lab rats and no other gender/species combination. Not to mention the dose used was unrealistic to begin with.
It’s entirely plausible that sugar analogs like sucralose and non-calorific sugar alcohols such as erythritol and maltitol can cause long term changes in the gut biome but high quality evidence is still lacking.
I think for meat especially, there's a difference between the stuff people talk about (like premium steaks they almost never eat) and the reality of what ends up on their plates which is a lot less glamorous.
A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one. For me the cheap and nasty stuff is easy to skip on a daily basis and it's not like I eat the expensive premium stuff that often anyway. I love a good steak, but I don't splurge on paying 3x the other items on the menu when I'm at a restaurant typically. Which is what it takes typically to get a nice premium cut of meat.
I do enjoy cooking with meat but I'll make an effort to make the most of it. E.g. I made a nice beef stew over the weekend. That's a bit of of work and a humble/affordable cut of meat. And very tasty.
If you like Indian food, try having or making a dal. As it turns out, Indians know a thing or two about making very tasty vegan food from cheap/simple ingredients. And this can as nice as some chicken curry with a few chunks of cheap chicken that is maybe a bit overcooked and dry (I've been served that in many Indian restaurants). Those curries actually still taste fine if you don't eat those chunks of meat. And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India. Fridges are a fairly recent novelty too.
And the meat doesn't even add a lot of flavor; they just add it last minute typically. Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat. The only difference between eating meat or vegan in such places is literally what protein is added to the dish at the last minute. The rest is basically vegan or vegetarian by default.
Anyway, I skip sugary drinks mostly. And I've cut down on my alcohol intake as well. Most of what I drink has basically very little or no calories.
Most of my remaining food challenges are unhealthy snacks, unnecessary carbs and the temptations of unhealthy restaurant food, or late night shopping in super markets and the associated bad decision making.
Restaurants bulk out their dishes with carbs and they make things taste good by adding salt and fats. It's hard to eat healthy in restaurants. So, I try to limit my restaurant food intake. And like with meat, most of the restaurants people visit aren't actually that great anyway. At least where I work, Michelin stars are not a thing for the typical lunch options. Quite the opposite actually. I'm only an OK cook but I can cook tastier/better versions of a lot of the shit I get served in places like that. It's not that hard.
I recently actually started just skipping lunch entirely at work mainly for this reason and I'm training myself out of having a Pavlovian craving for food just because the clock says so. I don't actually need the calories. Or the post lunch dip in productivity. I especially don't need the lousy food choices imposed by that one person that wants to go to the burger place. There's a lot of group thinking inspiring unhealthy choices around lunch time. I took part in that for years. It's stupid when you think about it and I've suffered the health consequences as well. There's a cumulative effect if you do that for a few decades.
My brother worked for multiple (very) good restaurants here in France. I’m always super chocked when I see him throwing a good portion of the butter brick in almost any meal. His dishes are super delicious. His current restaurant is a a very good vegan one and he does the same with plant butter.
> A typical fast food burger just isn't that great in terms of texture, taste, looks, etc. and IMHO almost always disappointingly unsatisfying and slightly uncomfortable afterwards. I'll eat that once in a while; usually because there's nothing more convenient and never because I crave one.
The "Big Mac Attack" is real. I used to get one about every six months or so. Then I would eat a Big Mac, and the attack would be sated, but the GI discomfort reminded me of why I don't get Big Mac Attacks more often.
These days I just avoid fast food. I live in a part of the country that's actually rather persnickety about good food, and there are much fresher options available nearby that are rather cheap. Plus I'm stocked up on low-carb soups, lunch meats, and other yummies most of the time now.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime.
My dad used to tell me stories about roadside chili houses in Texas. They kept a big pot of chili constantly going, and added whatever meat they could find, together with beans, spices, etc. to keep the pot full as the chili was served to customers. Roadkill was, supposedly, one of the most convenient sources of meat for the pot.
The weirdest thing for me is that when I was young I used to live off fast food. A few Jack in the Box burgers and I was good to go (my girlfriend at the time looked at me somewhat strange the first time I asked her how many burgers she wanted). But now when I eat a fast food burger I just don't feel very good afterwards. Curious how many others also seem to get the same thing. I always thought I was just being a bit more snobby than when I was younger and it was some sort of psychosomatic thing.
Part of it is age. Part of it is, I think, the fast food companies are lowballing what they can get away with serving in order to keep costs down. It's said that some Diné (Navajo) refer to Burger King with a word that means "just enough food to get strength from". I think that's the fast food joints' specialty: compromise the food till it's barely enough to tolerate and derive nourishment (calories) from to sell the stuff cheap and quick to a ravenous but indiscriminate clientele. With the passage of time comes more efficient ways to produce less delicious or satisfying food, so BK today is not as good as BK 30-40 years ago (which in turn is less good than BK shortly after its founding). Some burger joints e.g. Whataburger can differentiate themselves with higher quality, but they don't achieve the volume of McD's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc.
Man, as an Indian, this is hard to read. You're spreading a lot of misinformation about Indian food.
> Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
First, while there are a lot of tasty Indian vegetarian dishes, vegan food is decidedly not a cultural thing. We use butter and ghee pretty commonly in food: definitely not vegan. India is the world's largest milk producer; also not vegan. That dal you refer to will often have a "tadka" of ghee and spices on top. The "dal makhani" - another popular restaurant dish - literally means "buttered dal".
And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
> Lots of Indian restaurants usually have vegan or vegetarian versions of most of their curries where they toss in some tofu or paneer instead of meat.
If it's India, you're talking about, you're unlikely to find tofu being used in a restaurant. Paneer is made from milk, so...not vegan. Maybe restaurants abroad do it differently.
> And the whole point of heavy spicing in countries with warm climates like India was historically to mask the flavor of cheap cuts of meat that were maybe a bit past their prime. Which is possibly also a reason why vegan food is popular in India.
OK, this annoying canard is the worst. [1] Spices and meat used to be both historically expensive. A bit of research will tell you that. You know, that whole "spice trade" thing. Malaysian, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, food also use spices and they're not vegetarian cultures at all. (For that matter, only some 30% of Indians are vegetarians, despite the stereotype, but that's a discussion for another day.)
TL;DR India has lots of good vegetarian food, but hardly any of us are vegans.
Hi, thanks for this cultural sharing. I don't understand something about Indian culture -probably because of prejudices- and would be glad to know more. Hindus in India venerate (or respect?) cows such a way they let them live in free roaming. Also they eat a lot of ghee and milk derivatives. Where does those milk comes from ?
A. Is it ok to eat a cow if someone else raise the cow?
B. Is it ok to eat milk raised by someone else
C. Is it ok to 'milk' a stray cows while they looks skinny?
D. How do they regards the calves needed once in a while for milk production?
E. Does Hindus only eat chicken (and so) but no milk while muslims eat everything?
F. Where goes the dead free roaming cows cadavers? Is there enough vultures?
Note I'm not trying to find logical incoherencies or logical fallacies, I'm very aware there's many think that can been seen as inconsistant or very consistent depending on your knowledge on a subject - which is never 100% reachable.
> And the reason pre-cooked meat pieces are added to curries in restaurants is that we need to get the food to you in 5-7 minutes. We can't cook it leisurely for 25-30 minutes in the gravy like we would do at home. It's called "mise en place" in the restaurant business.
Some years ago I fell into a Youtube rabbit hole of British Indian Restaurants. (Actually most seemed Bangladeshi) In Britian Indian cuisine has a far more "takeout" status. Hence BI restaurants started to deconstruct popular dishes into components which can be prepared in advance and combined into different dishes. It may not be original but I found the process of adaptation rather fascinating.
(Here in Germany it seems rather worse. Also takeout status, but I suspect a lot of takeout orders are simply microwaved stuff.)
I'm actually well aware of this and didn't mean to offend people. And 30% is actually quite a large percentage.
I actually make ghee myself sometimes from butter (easy and a lot cheaper than buying it from the super market).
A lot of (british) indian restaurants use cooking oil instead and I'm well aware that that's not the same as what people in India would consider Indian food and that something like a Tikka Massala is not actually a thing you'd find in a proper restaurant in India; which is a country I've never been to and would love to go to to experience the food.
But anyway, a lot of these restaurants use cooking oil because it's cheaper and because it makes everything they cook with that vegan by default. Which at least in places with a lot of vegans is a nice feature.
Here in Berlin, finding decent Indian food is a bit of a challenge in any case. Germans are hopeless with spicy food. And I know only a few Indian places that add more than homeopathic amounts of chili. Most of the Indian restaurants in the more touristy spots are owned by one family and those aren't great. I've gotten some tips from Indian colleagues over the years for better options.
Anyway a lot of dals indeed don't use a lot of spices or flavoring. And that's just sidestepping all the different regions and food styles. Which are a thing as well of course.
As for Malaysian/Indonesian style cuisine; I'm Dutch and got exposed to a lot of the Dutch Indonesian food which, similar to British Indian food is not really that authentic. Lots of meat in there indeed. And quite spicy.
I do the same for fats. The way I look at it, I want to maximize the "enjoyment per kcalorie". :)
More recently, I'm starting to apply this to meat as well. I really enjoy meat, but I'm not one for quantity since I'm on the skinnier side. So I'm trying to enjoy meat more, and in doing so, get better quality, prepare it better, etc. while at the same time eating less of it. This is still a work in progress, and eating in restaurants can be challenging as they usually favor quantity over quality—except for the very high-end & costly places.