What we eat

[Dax]

If you have no heath issues and take no form of medication, why would you change your diet.

 

Only those who take pharmaceuticals and have health problems should be looking at changing their diets, because unless you have a genetic disorder, you have a dietary problem if your body is not functioning properly and you need to take something to cover the symptoms.

[old man emu]

I must admit to not being conscientious about the foods I ingest, and that I haven't look down on the unemployed for ages, but I have stopped relying on take-away mainly because of the unpleasant aftertaste that most have, especially the meat-based products. I also find that I can make the same type of foods cheaper and less expensively than any store-bought food. Being stuck at home, first with lockdown and now with the missus still bed-ridden, I find a great deal of enjoyment in spending time making "plain" food. I learned how to make pork pies and Cornish pasties. According to my grandson, my chocolate brownies and spag bol are to die for. My pièce de résistance is my muesli which has more fibre than a bale of wheaten hay, protein and oils from nuts and seed and carbs from dried fruit. Not only filling, but gets me moving between 10:30 and 11:00 am each day.

[Yenn]

I used to eat corn flakes years ago and now I reckon they are not good food, too much sugar, but back in those days I would be burning umpteen calories at work. Now I have home made muesli, which has less sugar and fruits than the bought stuff. I need less calories but muesli is a carbohydrate rich food. I think the difference is that my muesli is basically rolled oats. No refined stuff.

I still haven't managed to make a pork pie to equal the British version, Cornish pasties, yes I love them but am too lazy to make my own and my wife doesn't make them.

The one thing that I think keeps me healthier than the average person is that I have no desire to drink soft drinks. Much prefer the juice of fresh squeezed citrus.

[Old Koreelah]

On 27/10/2021 at 1:57 PM, Dax said:

That's an industry fallacy, the highest rates of osteoporosis are in countries that consume lots of dairy products. As is cancer, bad mental health, heart and coronary disease, obesity and the list is never ending..

Dax I suspect those countries may also be where people are most sedentary, with lots of effort-saving devices, so their bones are not getting the weight-bearing workout needed to stimulate bone health.

They’re also not burning off those calories like our hard-working ancestors did.

 

 

 

 

[willedoo]

The corporations must be cacking themselves watching us line up to buy the crud they call food. Not only are they feeding us shite, but they're getting a big slab of our money by doing it. One way is to think of your body as a very expensive car. You can treat it with respect and look after it, or fill it with dirty fuel; the choice is yours.

 

If it wasn't so serious it would be funny. One good example is nutrigrain. Long advertised as the athletes choice, real iron man food. If you read the packet, It's 30% sugar. The other 70% would be flour, food dyes and other chemicals. The sugar hit might give iron man some energy but a few years eating that garbage and he'll be jabbing himself with insulin.

[old man emu]

We don't have to go back to what has been labelled the Paleo Diet. We simply need to go back to the foods that sustained our ancestors during the Medieval Period. Medieval peasants mainly ate stews of meat and vegetables, along with dairy products such as cheese, according to a study of old cooking pots. Researchers analysed food residues from the remains of cooking pots found at the small medieval village of West Cotton in Northamptonshire. The pottery covers a period of around 500 years during the Middle Ages.

 

By identifying the lipids, fats, oils and natural waxes on the ceramics, the team found that stews of mutton and beef with vegetables such as cabbage and leek were a mainstay of the medieval peasant diet. Dairy products such as cheese also played an important role.

 

But we need to be careful of taking those research results as the absolute answer. Fish, both fresh water and salt formed a major part of the peasant diet. Fish wouldn't be likely to show up in cooking pots as the salt water fish coming into Northamptonshire would most likely be dries, smoke or salted at the coast. Freshwater fish would have been more accessible as the nobility did not ban the catching of fish and eels. In fact, a typical peasant's meal would have been much more healthy that what was served in the Manor House or Abbey. And then there were cereal dishes just to keep things regular. 

[Marty_d]

I laugh when I hear "paleo" diet.

 

As a comedic neighbour of mine likes to say -  if you brought a human back from the paleolithic period and sat a sponge cake laden with whipped cream in front of him, he's not going to knock it back and ask for a nice healthy bowl of bone broth.

[onetrack]

OME - As regards the diet of the Medieval period, one has to keep in mind, the average lifespan was about 40-45 years then - although a few people got to over 70.

But diet wasn't a problem in that era, the problem was simply endemic diseases, a lack of hygiene (both food and personal), a lack of refrigeration for food, and a lack of satisfactory medicines and health treatments, when you did catch some disease.

[spacesailor]

" The lack of refrigeration "

Smother the rancid meat in ' Curry powder '.

You wan,t taste or smell how rotten your food IS. LoL

spacesailor

[facthunter]

Methusula lived 900 years.   Nev

[nomadpete]

Why don't we get the "Methusela" diet published in Womans Weekly?

That'd trump a Paleo diet anyday

[old man emu]

It is definitely true that Mankind was ignorant of disease prevention and control up to the last quarter of the 19th Century, and that ignorance resulted in short average life spans. You have to add to that the physical effort that went into every activity, from carrying water from stream to hut to hunching over a desk in a scriptorium reproducing documents. The only people who lived to ages we accept as normal (three score years and ten) were the aristocracy, and even then they fell to the diseases of the Common Man.

 

For thousands of years Mankind has been skilled in treating broken bones and wounds as these are commonplace. They also had medicinal products based mainly on plants.  Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny the Elder, and others knew that willow bark could ease pain and reduce fevers. It was used in Europe and China to treat these conditions. This remedy is mentioned in texts from Ancient Egypt, Sumer, and Assyria. The Cherokee and other Native Americans use an infusion of the bark for fever and other medicinal purposes. The problem was that they knew that using the plants gave results, but they were not aware of dosage rates, so didn't concentrate the good bits enough for really rapid results. The active extract of the bark, called salicin, after the Latin name for the white willow (Salix alba), was isolated and named by German chemist Johann Andreas Buchner in 1828.

[Marty_d]

4 hours ago, nomadpete said:

Why don't we get the "Methusela" diet published in Womans Weekly?

That'd trump a Paleo diet anyday

Are you getting your diets mixed up?

 

Paleo diet is a haunch of woolly mammoth.

Trump diet is McDonalds.

Methusela diet is never going to hit Women's Weekly, can you see any 900-year old woman admitting her age?

[Yenn]

I have hear it said that the time of greatest fitness in Britain was during WW2. I lived through it and can remember that fat people were scarce. There was a shortage of food especially meats and dairy products, but also sugar.

The super abundance of high energy foods and the lack of exercise seem to me to be the cause of our current obesity epidemic.

I have watched the SBS show with Michael Moseley, where he seems to be able to turn around the effects of obesity and type 2 diabetis.

[spacesailor]

yenn

that starvation diet lasted untill 1953, Coranation year.

A bludi long time for a severe diet. Not just lack of food But those ration books, that were sold on the black market. ( so the rich could have it all ).

spacesailor

 

[onetrack]

The greatest advance in human lifespan was from 1942, when penicillin was invented. Before that, millions died from simple blood poisoning, which the doctors could do nothing about, except wait and hope the patient recovered.

My grandmother died from septicemia in Scotland, in the middle of WW1, she was only in her late 40's.

 

Edited October 29, 2021 by onetrack

[spacesailor]

I died in 1945 !.

I had the ' terminal disease ' Osteomyelitis.

The only cure before Penicillin was amputation.

MY story is.

After or during another operation on my left thigh, l saw myself floating above the operating table, above the huge lamp. ( that had words drawn in the dust ),  l was told years later that l woke up in the morgue, with my three year old voice, screaming the place down.

Two nurses passing, one fainted & the other ran for her life.  ( but it seems quite common in that Era, to stop breathing ).

They gave me, three injections of Penicillin, three times daily, AND another shot if l ate anything !. That went on for about five years.

I even had to relearn how to walk again. Same dammn hip had to be replace two years ago.

BUT hardly a scar this time, that 45 scar went from my knee to my ass. The new one only a cressent shape that is almost invisible alread.

spacesailor

 

[facthunter]

You got pretty good life out of it even when it was damned.  Every cloud has a silver lining or It's an ILL wind that blows nobody any good and if you aren't Scottish the bagpeeps are an ill wind that nobody blows any good. Nev

[old man emu]

4 hours ago, facthunter said:

Every cloud has a silver lining

Now who's quoting from literature? https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining.html

 

The use of 'ill wind' is most commonly in the phrase 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good'. This is first recorded in John Heywood's A Dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546:

"As you be muche the worse. and I cast awaie.
An yll wynde, that blowth no man to good, men saie.
Wel (quoth he) euery wind blowth not down the corn
I hope (I saie) good hap [luck] be not all out worn."

[facthunter]

If you are a flyer don't go looking for silver linings in clouds and cyclones are ILL winds to everyone affected if they are severe enough. A lot of this stuff doesn't stand critical evaluation and there are some situations where it would be extremely inappropriate to quote such sentiments.  I think they are to cheer people up, primarily. Nev