When I was six, I moved from Minnesota to Tennessee.
At one point soon after, I was walking with my brothers and female cousins and said "hey you guys...", which was a common form if addressing multiple people in Minnesota.
One if my cousins, who had probably never heard that idiom before, replied "We're not guys".
Afterwards, I switched to the common southern idiom of "y'all".
My dad's dad had a sweet tooth, my dad has one, and I do too.
About a month ago I resolved to eating at least 100g of protein per day (1.2g/kg) to see if that wouldn't help me with some recovery and healing. It was a real chore to eat that much. I would eat three eggs and black beans for breakfast to get ~30g, then shoot for 30-40g for lunch and another 30-40g for dinner. I was eating a lot of cottage cheese to make up the extra protein I wasn't getting.
I was constantly so full I lost all desire for sweets. Not eating dessert is effortless, probably in part because I'm beyond satiated.
I tried eating just steaks for a few days, and it absolutely blew my mind (1) how stable my energy was, how energetic I felt (2) how I wouldn't get hungry at all for 8-10 hours. Normally I start thinking about food an hour or two after eating!
The key to a good diet is balance. Too much red meat has equally severe health implications, leading to a higher risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death.[1][2]
Mankind evolved to eat red meat. We developed fire for it. We invented spears and bow hunting for it. It's one of the healthiest foods you can consume, has been part of the human diet for over 2 million years... and besides the noted protein, it contains B12, Zinc, Selenium, Iron, Niacin, B6, Phosphorous and many other valuable nutrients. You can live exclusively off a diet of just red meat and live a long, healthy life. Many tribes do, including the Maasai in Kenya, the Sami in Finland, and the Inuit.
Well if you want to take a retrospective, we also did not consume it every day. We grazed on other things, including veg, fruit and grains, not unlike traditional societies today.
The Inuit don't eat the way they used to, but it was a good deal of fish along with game and berries (ditto for Sami). Their CVD profile has never been reported to be particularly good. Maasai consume mostly milk, and are in a perpetual state of caloric deficit.
We are omnivores. Junk food hacks an instinct to eat dense vegetarian calorie sources. But we will eat anything we can get our hands on, and that seems to start even earlier in the family tree than the hominids.
Meat is a target of opportunity, one that helped us build much larger brains. But it’s not the only thing we’re tuned to eat.
> Mankind evolved to eat red meat. We developed fire for it.
I read somewhere that in some sense minkind devolved to eat red meat. Some gene was damaged, which helped humans to do a marathon activity to track red meat running away (IIRC something to do with an ability of blood to carry oxygen), but humans lost a key enzyme to process fatty acids from red meat. So mankind got more proteins but started to die from heart desease. Probably it was no so bad then because an average lifespan was too short to develop severe symptoms.
Mankind rarely lived beyond 25 until very recently so the long-term effects of high red meat consumption have never been part of the evolutionary equation. There have been numerous long term studies that have found strong links between diseases, esp. heart disease, diabetes, cancer. These diseases take years to manifest normally thus wouldn't have existed then.
Life expectancy being 25 doesn't mean nobody lives past 25. Estimates that low for early humans is skewed by huge infant mortality rates. IIRC living into the 40s or 50s was typical for an early human that survived to adulthood. 60s or 70s not uncommon.
We can't actually tell the age of death of human fossils past the time that wisdom teeth grow in. There's no way of telling whether a fossilized skeleton was 30 at death or 50 at death. Even then, we don't necessarily have a representative sample.
The Sami, as I mentioned, have been studied. They are a tribe of reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia. They eat a diet consisting of almost exclusively reindeer meat. They have lower cancer incidence than Finns (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.10486).
> They eat a diet consisting of almost exclusively reindeer meat.
Very far from a typical meat diet (quoting from your link):
"The dietary habits of the Sami differ from those of the other Finns. Reindeer meat (low in fat) and fish have been important foodstuffs in the diet of Sami people. Intake of vegetables and fresh fruits has been low, but berries were eaten, especially by the North Sami. Although nowadays dietary habits have become more similar to that of the rest of the population, still more than 90% of male Sami reindeer herders eat reindeer meat at least 3 times a week and almost 50% eat fish at least twice a week. Reindeer meat and fish contain high concentrations of healthy lipids, trace elements (e.g., selenium), minerals and vitamins. Arctic people usually rely on blood, liver or kidneys from animals to obtain adequate nutrition."
All of these types of studies are being debunked: it's not the red meat that's the problem - it's 1) the quality of meat you're eating, and more so 2) the other crap people are eating. The first Carnivore Conference happened last year, and the movement is growing.
Edit to add: Look up Dr. Georgia Ede videos on YouTube for some of this debunking.
Being in a ketogenic state allows your body to have constant access to your fat reserves, so that's where you can get the constant, stable energy from - and any excess calories, say from meat or the other keto foods you're eating will of course store as fat for later use. There's an One Meal A Day (OMAD) movement that's starting, where people are doing intermittent fasting but instead of a 6:18 ratio - 6 hours where people eat, 18 hours not eating - they'll do a 1:23, where they eat all they need in an hour or so.
I don't eat proteins but I do fill my stomach with raw veggies. The desire for sweets is really boredom turned into nutrition. When you're full you barely want anything anymore. Also the less sweet (and processed food which are allegedly heavy on fat and various sugar) you start to feel subtle taste better. Carrots are sweet.. I feel like eating candy, but it's not strong. Even lettuce has some delicacy to it.
There's an irony to our nutrition, we pay for industrial _ _ _ _ that is bad for us then pay for solutions. Just eat basic stuff and go do something fun.
These are interesting comments. My normal diet of mostly starchy carbs leaves me without any cravings for sugary things even if they're just lying around near me. The moment I start eating sugary things I get hungry so fast, not just for sugary things but anything and it's hard to concentrate.
I also have a weird condition where I'll forget to eat to the point of low blood sugar, sometimes drastically so--speech or vision impairment. I've learned to recognize physical changes associated with very low blood sugar (e.g. nausea, feeling hot/cold/sweaty at normal room temp, extreme indecision) to remember to eat. Haven't found a way to stay in a normal middle ground.
You might try the keto diet for a while and see how you like it. There are two ways in which it might help you.
1. Very low carb means your blood sugar never rises sharply, and then your body doesn't over-correct which can lead to that hypoglycemic feeling.
2. Adapting to utilize primarily fat means that blood sugar largely doesn't enter into the equation and urgent eating to raise blood sugar can go away. It usually takes people days to weeks to get adapted and feel back to normal.
It's a pity there aren't many foods with a sugar level that tastes well to people who aren't acclimated to eating sugary things. The food industry has decided it's either no sugar or lots of sugar, so it seems.
Try Korean/Asian markets. I worked with a few Koreans and they thought treats sold in the USA were way too sweet. They had sweet bean curd things that tasted great when I was doing Keto and while it wouldn’t be good to eat every day they were a nice snack sometimes.
It's surprising to look at the nutrition labels for anko/sweet red bean paste. It seems like it'd be a healthy alternative, but it's basically concentrated sugar cake.
I live in Japan. I've eaten plenty of it. It's the health equivalent of cake frosting in Asia.
Make it yourself. Make all of your food yourself. My regular gym routine, which was part of my life for years until a few months ago when I was forced to stop, involved lifting heavy weights followed shortly afterwards by a bowl of porridge. It's a big bowl of porridge and I would put about 2 tsp of sugar in it to sweeten it. I considered this sweet because it was, in fact, the only sugar I was consuming. Now since lockdown I've had to stop my porridge because my muscle was becoming replaced with fat. I've had to lose weight to stay lean. But I've replaced that small amount of sugar I had regularly with other sweet things and noticed that I'm consuming far more sugar now. I've decided to stop completely now. If you consume ready-made things with sugar, it very quickly becomes an addiction.
I'm struck by the resemblance between the rule of CouplingAndCohesion and Alexander's formal treatment of the "main" problem of design - hierarchical decomposition of the set M of misfit variables (the "things which might possibly break") into subsets which
maximize the connections between their components (high cohesion) but also
are minimally connected with each other (low coupling)
In other words, the issue of CouplingAndCohesion isn't just central to software design - it is central to all design, if Alexander is to be believed.
What did it say?