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My uninformed stance: Eating grains is good, in moderation. Having about half of your calories come from corn (as is the case for most people in the US) is not
by pw0ncakes 17y ago
My uninformed stance: Eating grains is good, in moderation. Having about half of your calories come from corn (as is the case for most people in the US) is not good. Using corn syrup instead of sugar as a sweetener is not good.
Diversity good. Monoculture bad. For soil and for the body.
For the individual, the early (grain-based) agricultural diet was starkly inferior to that of the hunter-gatherer. Once the population gets to a certain point, people have to adopt agriculture; the alternative is fishing/hunting the available stock into extinction, and then starving. However, agriculture can support a larger population, by about an order of magnitude. Having 10 times as many people, in mediocre health, won out.
- gcb 17y agohe tries to arge that now we can have 10x in good health. But i fail to see too much science there... I will continue eating all grains, except corn and soy.
- pw0ncakes 17y agoGrains have their place, as a source of complex carbohydrate calories. They're low on nutrition, but high on calories, and as long as one understands this (useful) purpose I don't see a problem. Calories are necessary, to a point. Throughout much of history, high energetic content was an advantage. Medieval peasants ate 2-3 times as many calories as we eat today, because they worked them off in the fields. Especially now, it wouldn't be healthy to eat 2000 calories/day in red meat or fish, much less 5-6000. It's not really possible to eat that many calories' worth of blueberries. This is where staple crops come in. Of course, no one who is food-conscious should be eating refined grains such as white bread, because those are essentially pure sugar.