[Marxism] Re: atkins

[Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan <wenhuadageming@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:14 AM 3/26/2004, Waistline2@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Why do the Atkin's diet work and Atkin's is dead and died as a fat man?

atkins wasn't really all that fat of a person, by american
standards.  also, his death was the result of a hematoma caused by a head
injury he sustained after slipping on a patch of ice.

these "low-carb" or "high-protein" diets are marketed as fads, but there is
_some_ basis to their claims (though they use gimmick phrases like "carbs
are the enemy", which is only a deceptive half-truth).  what they attempt
to do is more closely approximate the dietary makeup of the paleolithic
hunter-gatherer.  if you think about it, the neolithic age (advent of
agriculture) is only 10,000 years ago in human evolutionary history - a
heartbeat in relative terms.  for adequate digestion, grains and [mature]
legumes require either a gristmill or earthenware cooking vessels, which
only appear in abundance in the archeological record in the
neolithic.  prior to this, carbohydrate sources were found mainly in fruits
and tubers/roots.  (might also be interesting here to think of the
allergies people have to wheat gluten, soy, and peanuts)

the human body has only one hormone to deal with blood sugar:
insulin.  meanwhile it has myriad of methods for regulating fat and protein
(hgh, glucagon, epinephrine, cortisol, etc).  i personally think this
indicates that humans evolved to need only one blood-sugar-regulating
system, while it developed redundant methods for the more commonly
encountered fats and proteins.  there is a reason why many predatory
animals and hunter-gatherer tribes value most highly not the flesh, but the
blubber, brain, heart, and liver of their prey - FAT, not carbohydrates,
was the primary source of calories.  even with early agriculture, the
insulin probably helped with the seasonal feast/fast cycle, making use of
the availability of carb sources by shuttling it all into your fat cells in
preparation for the oncoming deprivation.  it's when you get a surplus, as
an attempt to deal with scarcity, that things start to change - as marxists
should probably know, hehe.

trying to go "low-carb" in an industrialized society however, usually means
consuming the flesh of feedlot animals, which are fed an unnatural (and
wasteful and ecologically unsustainable) diet of soy and grains in order to
speed their growth for the purpose of selling on the market.  by nature
cattle are meant to consume greenery, and that's pretty much it (although
in temperate climates, the winter diet sometimes needs to be supplemented
with hay and a minimal amount of grain).  the problem with feeding
livestock with soy and grains is that the balance of omega-3 fatty acids is
therefore thrown completely out of whack, as soy and corn contain almost no
omega-3 in proportion to omega-6, whereas in nature the ruminant digestive
system is meant to extract and over time accumulate the small amounts of
omega-3 that exists in vegetation.  as a result, you get meat that's
unnaturally high in saturated fat and omega-6 fats.  a hunter-gatherer diet
gives you an omega-3:omega-6 ratio of at least 1:1; the traditional inuit
diet for example is as high as 2:1.  a typical american however, gets a
ratio of about 1:10, or sometimes even as high as 1:20.

anyway, more information can be found on the net about all this.  in
conclusion, i nonetheless agree that the diet of modern humans is totally
out of sync with what we evolved for.

xzy


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