"Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Dr. Weston A. Price

[Alexis]

"Eat more fresh and less processed food" doesn't seem to be dreadful advice. Certainly not harmful.

As food goes through more stages of processing, we tend to have (proportionally by weight) more calories and less nutrition (fibre, vitamins and minerals). From wholegrains to wholegrain flour to white flour to doughnuts quite a bit is lost. Which does not mean nobody should ever eat doughnuts, but it does mean that someone who lives their lives more on the processed than the fresh side is probably going to consume more calories and have less vitamins and minerals.

Which happens to be what we see in the West. The result is people living quite long lives, but ones in which they do not always enjoy good health, and are often on fad diets and popping lots of vitamin and mineral pills.

We can endlessly study the scientific details of it, but what it comes down to is four basic guidelines,

1. stop smoking
2. eat less junk food; "junk" is generally speaking any food where the packet is more colourful than the contents
3. drink less booze
4. eat more fresh fruit and vegies

Almost everyone who follows these guidelines finds that they fairly quickly look, feel and perform better. If you doubt this, consider what would be likely to happen if you started smoking (or smoked more), ate more junk food, drank more booze and ate less fresh fruit and vegies - would you expect to look, feel and perform better as a result?

This is the 20% of nutritional effort which gives you 80% of your results, for most people. The other 80% of stuff giving 20% of results is stuff we can seriously argue over. We make this stuff more complicated than we have to for practical purposes. It's like when someone who has never squatted agonises over the low bar vs the high bar vs the front squat - just start fucking squatting.

I couldn't agree more Kyle.

[Rama]

I totally agree to what Kyle said. For Protein you could add sprouted seeds and soaked groundnuts or soy, you could even have cashew or almonds. For calcium you can add sesame seeds. The protein in Sprouted seeds and groundnuts are more than the amount of protein in meat.

[veryhrm]

...
The protein in Sprouted seeds and groundnuts are more than the amount of protein in meat.

It's true that there is as much protein in 3lbs of alfalfa as in a 6oz steak.

[Dastardly]

I have never been able to understand what is actually bad about well processed flour from grains. It doesn't contain any of the anti nutrients from the husk/germ, some gluten though.

How bad can this be? Pretty much all the animals in rainforests, including mammals and primates consume a diet of very poisonous plants. The Sloth is an example of an animal whose diet is so hard to digest that it barely has the energy to move. But all these animals deal with the poisons in the diet. As long as these things are within the limitations of the bodies filtering systems and organs, I dont see what the problem with regularly eating mildly poisonous food.

Like Spinach for example, which contains oxalic acid. Why would this be ok and not the mild 'anti nutrients' in grains?

Also it does not acknowledge that the MORE processed these natural plant based foods are, the more easy they are to digest. Soaking, washing, hulling, fermenting, cooking etc..

[Kyle Aaron]

My view, Dastardly, is simply that while the processing loses a lot of the (supposedly) bad stuff, it also loses a lot of the good stuff, too. As I said, we have only to look at the Western world to see what are the results of a mainly processed food diet: people do live a long time, but their quality of life is not great, they are weak and stiff and diabetic.

Of course there are other factors, too, such as being sedentary. But people living on mostly processed food do not look, feel and perform as well as they could.

I think the reason that so many very different diets work well to help the person lose fat or gain quality weight is that when following this diet, it's actually the first time in their lives the person has been conscious of what they eat.

[Simma Park]

I have never been able to understand what is actually bad about well processed flour from grains. It doesn't contain any of the anti nutrients from the husk/germ, some gluten though.

How bad can this be? Pretty much all the animals in rainforests, including mammals and primates consume a diet of very poisonous plants. The Sloth is an example of an animal whose diet is so hard to digest that it barely has the energy to move. But all these animals deal with the poisons in the diet. As long as these things are within the limitations of the bodies filtering systems and organs, I dont see what the problem with regularly eating mildly poisonous food.

Like Spinach for example, which contains oxalic acid. Why would this be ok and not the mild 'anti nutrients' in grains?

Also it does not acknowledge that the MORE processed these natural plant based foods are, the more easy they are to digest. Soaking, washing, hulling, fermenting, cooking etc..

The issue from the pro-paleo folks' perspective is that sloths did not suddenly introduce hard to digest plants as the major portion of their intake into their diet 10,000 years ago. Big difference. Lots of animals eat poisonous stuff with which they co-evolved for long periods of time.

Not that the Weston Price philosophy is paleo. It most certainly is not. AT ALL.

And WPF does promote the processing of food, sometimes heavily, through soaking, sprouting, fermentation, and other means harnessing natural organisms and processes. WPF is neither anti-grain, nor anti-dairy. WPF promotes traditional dietary strategies, which means pre-industrial foods and food preparation, not pre-agricultural.

We should all try to do a little basic research before we chime in on topics. I realize this is a lot to ask of the Internet.

[Alexis]

I can't think of a clearer evidence that man is indeed an omnivore.

[Dastardly]

The protein in Sprouted seeds and groundnuts are more than the amount of protein in meat.

Which sprouted seeds are these? I have often heard it claimed that alfalfa is high in protein but the nutritional data websites tell me it is 4%, of that the quality would be questionable also.

[Simma Park]

Which sprouted seeds are these?

None. Rama is a documented idiot.

[Corrie]

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