12 ms·

Jack Lalanne (American fitness guru) stated "If man made it, don't eat it". I recall reading that and scratching my head at the sheer number of food products th

• neotek 11y ago
  A fairly high percentage of the fruits and vegetables you're eating are man made, insofar as they've been genetically engineered through selective breeding to produce things more palatable to the average consumer. Fruit in particular should probably only be eaten in moderation like any other sugar-filled treat. And exercise, while useful for building muscle mass and increasing your capacity for physical exertion, isn't particularly useful for covering up a poor diet - it would take more than two hours of jogging to burn off the calories in a small Big Mac meal from McDonalds, for example. If you want to lose weight, it's far, far more efficient to simply eat less.
  • scott_s 11y ago
    Even the fruits and vegetables from centuries ago were "man-made". The wild versions are mostly inedible. What we eat is the result of millennia of breeding and cultivation. There is no bright and shining line between "natural" and "man made" for most of our food. Ever since we started practicing and depending on agriculture, all of our food is, to some degree, "man made". By the way, I am unaware of any evidence that fruit should be eaten in moderation.
    • 55555 11y ago
      I tend to agree even though it goes against a common paleo claim. Just go to a deserted tropical island and you'll find mangos and coconuts seemingly every bit as sweet as those which have been bred for their sweetness.
    • pitchka 11y ago
      There is no evidence. This whole thread is filled with misinformation and anecdotal evidence. The article lays its foundation on Lustig claims while his Bitter Truth talk had outright wrong claims. There have been studies pointing out fruits even help decrease symptoms of diabetes. http://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-12-29 http://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-28... The conclusion of the randomized study above was that the intake of fruit should not be restricted, despite the fear that sugar makes you die. http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19711408038.html;jsessionid=FAD3BBA2AC247F7EA033CE905BAA1A2C http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19711408038.html;jsession... This one has a mainly fruit diet for its participants. 2500kcal of fruits per day. No one had any serious side effects. These "not man-made", paleo, keto, low-carb and other diets are all fads. All of them. They promote an unhealthy relationship with food. Not unhealthy as in philosophy but unhealthy scientifically (orthorexia + the humongous evidence that food is not poison). It's a much higher chance that the American population is extremely orthorexic and that they avoid fruits and veggies thinking that pesticides and sugar will kill them. This unhealthy relationship results in overeating highly caloric foods like meat, dairy, eggs, drinks etc. I highly recommend In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/Defence-Food-Nutrition-Pleasures-Eating-ebook/dp/B002RI99LY/ http://www.amazon.com/Defence-Food-Nutrition-Pleasures-Eatin... The Gluten Lie http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Lie-Other-Myths-About/dp/1941393063/ http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Lie-Other-Myths-About/dp/194139... for anyone thinking they have an unhealthy relationship with food that could cause them to have an unhealthy diet.
      • maxerickson 11y ago
        Eggs aren't all that high calorie. 3 eggs swimming in added cooking fat (2 tablespoons of butter) would be about 450 calories and would constitute a significant portion for all but the heartiest eaters. There is of course no need to bath them in fat, 1 egg has ~80-90 calories, they are mostly water. They are certainly higher in calories than vegetables, but if you consider the typical diet, they are not towards the high end of calorie density.
• ceejayoz 11y ago
  Most of those fresh fruit and veggies are man-made, too. Modern tomatoes, corn, squash, broccoli (check out what we did to wild mustard plants: https://nicolecooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/f2104.jpg https://nicolecooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/f2104.jpg), etc. are nothing like what's found in nature. Your wine's probably closer to naturally occurring than they are - we get drunk squirrels from fermented fruits every year.
• wtbob 11y ago
  > My only (dietary) vices are coffee and the odd glass of wine (both very much man made). I don't think I'd consider either of those man-made in the sense of being heavily processed: coffee is simply roasted coffee beans with hot water poured over, and wine is pressed grape juice allowed to ferment.
  • jzwinck 11y ago
    If wine is just grapes, it must be vegan-compatible, right? But it isn't! Not only is wine sometimes made with products like nuts and milk, it can even be made using fish guts! https://www.organicwine.com.au/what-makes-a-wine-vegan https://www.organicwine.com.au/what-makes-a-wine-vegan A French wine maker told me this. I had no idea...these "extras" are not on the label.
    • RodericDay 11y ago
      Alcohol producers have fought really really hard against nutrition labels on their products.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • masklinn 11y ago
      > Not only is wine sometimes made with products like nuts and milk, it can even be made using fish guts! Wine is even made with people!
    • wl 11y ago
      If you're vegan for moral reasons, isinglass is a problem. If not, the isinglass falls out and isn't actually present in the finished wine in a significant quantity.
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      Wow! Do you know of any specific labels made using fish guts? This sounds interesting.
• torgoguys 11y ago
  >If man made it, don't eat it That's way too simple. It's a kind of naturalistic fallacy as applied to food. If you think your produce area is where you should be getting your calories (not disagreeing), it fails the "if man made it, don't eat it" test spectacularly. Basically everything you see there has been shaped by man. A (stunning) example: one species of plant, brassica oleracea, has been selectively (i.e., artificially) bred to produce a wide range of different cultivars including, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, and more. NONE of these produce items are "natural." Getting back to the linked article a bit, if you think fructose is bad, you should know it is very natural. Obviously it occurs in fruits and honey has more fructose than refined sugar and about the same as high fructose corn syrup. (As a side note, I'm of the opinion we should be engineering foods to make them better for us. We as a species have been doing similar things to our food for thousands of years.)
  • wutbrodo 11y ago
    It's simple because it's a heuristic. I'm pretty comfortable with my nutrition, but when friends ask me to summarize it it's very difficult for me because I've spent an unholy amount of time researching it. Things like Pollan's famous quote or "avoid man-made things" are targeted at the 99% of people who aren't as obsessive about it as I was at one pt, but still very much want to eat healthy. It has its false positives and negatives obviously, but it has a pretty great trade off between correctness and complexity. If you consider it as a heuristic instead of taking it literally, your objection about artificial selection of produce is also more or less irrelevant. Man had a hand in shaping those plants' current genome, but if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making (most of) them. It's still easy to distinguish from, say, donuts and still useful as a heuristic.
    • torgoguys 11y ago
      I replied to a sibling with what I meant to reply to yours. See there. One quick thing I would add is, "NO" nature would not keep making them. It is only our direct action that props up these artificially selected species (q.v., hybrids that require us to actively produce them, or your favorite variety of apple which is a clone of some great-grandparent tree or the fact that these crops would not compete well with other plants because we've selected them for their food production, not overall hardiness. They'd be out competed. They put too much of their energy into producing stuff that doesn't optimally help produce a new generation, and thus require our tending). Your statement is a bit like saying "if we disappeared tomorrow nature would keep making sheep." Probably not (at least medium term). Sheep generally require our protection to avoid being killed. It probably wouldn't take long for a predator species to take hold in a given area and kill them all.
• hyperchase 11y ago
  "When I hit the grocery store I skip the middle aisles and head straight for the fish and meat counter" Those pretty packages of meat are just as much "man made" as the foods you demonize. If you want to eat meat, I suggest hunting and only using your teeth and hands (claws?) to kill your prey and to eat the meat raw; gotta eat all of it too, no picking and choosing what parts you want either. "If you want to eat that cupcake or enjoy that cold glass of beer be sure to exercise it off." This is HORRIBLE advice. Treating exercise like a punishment for enjoying food is like a one-way ticket to Eating Disorder Town. Diet and exercise are important, but they should be used to compliment each other and not to negate being bad at the other.
  • leonroy 11y ago
    There's a world of difference between a 'package' of meat and a corn dog. I love eating meat, I see no need to 'hunt' for the thing. In the same way I love apples, I'm not going to grow an Apple tree in my yard and only eat apples from that. To be honest there's a big problem with seeing exercise as a 'punishment'. I enjoy exercising just as much as I enjoy a cold glass of beer (before or after) and to be frank my advice suggest the two are complementary.
    • hyperchase 11y ago
      That wasn't my point. My point is your distinction between "man-made" and "not-man-made" food is completely arbitrary and based on your personal preferences.
      • Tharkun 11y ago
        Your point is nitpickery. You know perfectly well what OP means when he refers to processed food as man made food. No one would misunderstand it. What you consider to be an arbitrary distinction (which in itself is an arbjtrary distinction), is in this case rather clearly defined.
• Shivetya 11y ago
  I prefer the idea of, if it comes in a box or bag or bottle it should be avoided. If you do choose to partake then read the ingredients and if you cannot find them separately in the store you most likely don't want the item you are considering.
• leshow 11y ago
  Judge each food on it's nutritional merits, not by some arbitrary naturalistic fallacy criteria.
• npsimons 11y ago
  > Jack Lalanne (American fitness guru) stated "If man made it, don't eat it". He also said "if it tastes good, spit it out" which is just retarded, as there's plenty of things that taste good that are good for you (bananas, apples and broccoli jump immediately to my mind). I respect the man for his accomplishments, but those two quotes aren't among them. > The lymphatic system which helps rid the body of waste substances is 'pumped' by respiration and physical activity. This I've always "felt" to be true, as it seems to me that my allergies get better with exercise. That being said, you can't outrun your fork, and even if you're eating "healthy", if you eat too much, you will gain weight. I'm not saying you can never have a tasty treat again, just don't try to compensate for it via exercise. Work it into your daily calorie budget.
• mohaine 11y ago
  You are skipping the fact that most meat and produce products for sale ARE man made was well. Cows as they currently exist never roamed the wilds. Most fruit and veggies are so different form the wild forms that we wouldn't even identify them as the same fruit. Not saying these are not better for you then Fruit Loops, but it good to keep some prospective as how man made or man "designed" ALL our food is.
  • ssalazar 11y ago
    > You are skipping the fact that most meat and produce products for sale ARE man made was well. Did a man (or machine) literally put it together with two hands? This is the distinction being made.
• xiaoma 11y ago
  >Grains and milk are relatively recent to our diet (past 10000 years) People have been eating wild wheat for at least 50,000 years and archeologists published a paper in the December, 2009, issue of Science on their discovery in Mozambique of stone tools with wild grain residues dating some 105,000 years ago. Also keep in mind that most of humanity is lactose tolerant now while less than 1% was even 10k years ago and the prevalence of blue eyes has increase from a rounding error to over 6% of the human race. Human evolution is 100 times the rate it was in prehistoric times according to some estimates.
  • ashmud 11y ago
    Common wheat of today is probably not what people were eating 50k years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wheat
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      Definitely true! Ditto for a lot of plants and animals we eat.
• inglondon 11y ago
  Tha simplest and best advice I've read was in an article called 'We should all eat more DNA' [http://blog.oup.com/2016/01/we-should-all-eat-more-dna/ http://blog.oup.com/2016/01/we-should-all-eat-more-dna/]. It follows one simple guideline 'Avoid anything that lacks DNA.'.
• brashrat 11y ago
  You believe that humans evolved to eat certain foods, but you ignore that we also evolved to be lazy and avoid unnecessary exercise. Maybe we evolved to eat everything we could get our hands on and to live to 40 years old in order to propogate. What about the fact that we evolved to carry and support tons of parasites? (look up the guy who walked barefoot around latrines in the 3rd world to pick up worms which he carries and is willing to sell you... he'd not a crackpot, either) What about the fact that we did not evolve to be immune to smallpox (and all the others), maybe we are supposed to get it. I'm not taking sides here, I'm saying that you are being selective about what you choose to believe in a way that is not entirely supported by science. Yes you can selectively come up with science to support your beliefs, but what this article is about is how for many many years in modern times we all arrogantly believed the wrong science. Your comment strikes me that you are not reading the news story about sugar as a cautionary tale against believing things that could quite well not be true. I myself doubt that there is a magic diet that makes us live a long time, because living a long time is not something we evolved for; rather, we evolved to eat anything we could get our hands on because living thru times of shortage was more important than maybe having an allergy that made us gassier. 2nd order effects have a lot of trouble overcoming firsts. And if you enjoy exercise, great! but if you don't enjoy it, remember that the hour you spend running will not lead to you living an hour longer, so you just shortened your overall enjoyable life, while you also increased your carbon footprint which is a socially selfish thing to do. See what I mean? these things just cannot be reduced to formulas for how we should live.
  • cholantesh 11y ago
    I disagree with the parent, but there are several issues with your post as well. For starters, it's wrong to suggest that there's a direction or purpose to evolution[1]. The current shape of human life is no indication that we have 'progressed' from where we previously were, or where we will be in the future (as far as evo bio is concerned). As such, to suggest that we were 'supposed' to get smallpox because we did not evolve a natural immunity to it is not a statement that conforms to our understanding of evolution. Neither does it make sense that, because in the developed world, people have tended to become more sedentary, it is a desired end goal for humans to become 'lazier'. If that were the case, we should also be willing to argue that childlessness is the desirable state for living organisms, as the more education and wealth humans accumulate, the less likely they are to have children[2]. I don't fully follow your reasoning on exercise, but as it is intended to counteract the documented effects of overeating, I'm not sure it is a sound thesis to suggest it won't increase your lifespan. 1: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/teleology.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/teleology.html 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSO9pOVpRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSO9pOVpRM
• ALee 11y ago
  I find there is cognitive dissonance here for a lot of folks - I personally agree that fresh, natural ingredients are good, but at the same time I'll drink soylent. I don't know where I stand on all this because I am afraid that in future years, I'll find out that I have small intestine cancer because of all the soylent I drink, but at the same time - we SHOULD be able to understand how the body works and that all things are knowable. Would just love to get folks thoughts on this.
  • leonroy 11y ago
    Yeah it's always tough challenging every preconception society has created in us - I of course am not immune to that by any means. Whilst I can imagine soylent is nutritionally dense and quite possibly very sound from that point of view the work of Weston Price would strongly suggest a major problem with lack of good mastication. The skull isn't as static a structure as we might believe it turns out and lack of effective nutrition AND chewing caused many problems in people (weakening of the jaw and facial muscles and subsequent narrowing of the palate and skull) according to his studies. Basically we can try and stray from the path our ancestors took but not too far too quick! Our bodies only evolve so fast so yep, even soylent probably has its downsides.
• agumonkey 11y ago
  Man made food IMO is the victim of .. men. As soon as we could cook and eat for pleasure we optimized for it. This era is just going too far (lots of industrialized food is scrapes coated in sweetener and whatever to make it tongue friendly). I can't help but to think it's all a consequence to our desires and lifestyles. We have more time to do nothing so we do them to tickle pleasure centers. Everything is unbalanced, you don't walk or run to catch food, you sit, and so you don't care about getting nutrient but satisfying the needs for thrill. Loop.