5 ms·

This has been the case in the UK for many years as well. One of my earliest memories at the tender age of 3 (very early 1980s) was wearing one of those blue an

This has been the case in the UK for many years as well. One of my earliest memories at the tender age of 3 (very early 1980s) was wearing one of those blue anoraks with a fuzzy collar and being wheeled to the greasy caf'[1] in a buggy and fed bacon, beans, chips (French fries) and tea. This was in Islington in London. I can't think of a single week I haven't eaten bacon since. That's just normal here. No crazy or macho rubbish. Food staple. And as I've had this argument before (on reddit...), to the Americans, we don't eat that shitty Canadian bacon or the streaky stuff you get in the US here. We use the latter to add flavour to other foods and eat the nice lean back bacon: http://www.clancysofchester.co.uk/back%20bacon.jpg http://www.clancysofchester.co.uk/back%20bacon.jpg . The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries. [1] Not café. Caf' innit (local dialect)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Chevalier 12y ago
Just to update your nutrition information, the streaky stuff is great for you. Fats, especially animal fats, are pretty wonderful for human health. You lose both flavor and nutrition when you remove it from your diet. I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.
- 001sky 12y ago
  There's plent enough fat in back bacon. Its unclear why the US doesn't sell it readily. Streaky bacon is more of a condiment than useful protein source.
- sudowhodoido 12y ago
  Not too much. Coronary heart disease wiped out a big chunk of my family and it wasn't because they ate sugar - it was the lard on toast and chips cooked in lard... Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Toast and chips are still simple carbohydrates.
    - sudowhodoido 12y ago
      Aware of this. My point was purely derision. A lot of nutritional fads are indistinguishable from religion. Scales are always balanced, not necessarily visibly.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Chips are made from potato. That's a complex carb. Wholemeal toast would he a complex carb. White bread would be a complex carb in the form of a refined starch - still not a simple carb.
      - eropple 12y ago
        Sorry, yes. Wrote "carbohydrate", deleted it, phone suggested "simple" because autocorrect, and like a dolt I went right ahead. :-)
  - Chevalier 12y ago
    Personally, I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto. I've lost nearly 100 lbs over the past year by switching to a high-fat, moderate-protein, and ultra low-carbohydrate diet. I really can't endorse it enough. If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes. That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.
    - michael_h 12y ago
- zzleeper 12y ago
  Are you sure, or is the medical community changing its mind in 10-20yrs now with a "oops, we just realized its only good when you eat a tenth of what you are eating", or something like that. Also, is both the fat of the pork, and all the oil it is cooked in healthy, or just the first? I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)
  - mark-r 12y ago
    I've never found a need to use oil to cook bacon, it generates plenty of its own in the first few seconds.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The belief that the human nutritional optimum is narrow and deep, so that "complete elimination of food X" and "total focus on food Y" will enormously enhance your health is a crypto-creationist argument, as it requires a complete rejection of everything we know about evolution in general and human evolution in particular. Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.
  - Chevalier 12y ago
    I'm not sure that equating creationism with nutrition makes sense. Nor does the rise of grain necessarily signal evolutionary adaptation. It seems quite possible that humans can survive and thrive on sub-optimal nutrition. In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.
    - revelation 12y ago
      I think you didn't exactly read the answer? Humans can survive on much any diet, and the differences between them are mostly insignificant, certainly as it pertains to criteria that apply to people sitting most of the day doing mental work.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  It's great once a week. Stay on nuts, beans and other sources of fat and protein for the rest of the time. Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines. I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit. For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it. What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.
cgh 12y ago
"Canadian bacon", as you call it, is back bacon, same as the UK. In the US, it's often salted and cured kind of like a packaged deli meat or something and it's pretty awful and bears little resemblance to the genuine article.
jessaustin 12y ago
The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries. Citation needed.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Chevalier 12y ago

Just to update your nutrition information, the streaky stuff is great for you. Fats, especially animal fats, are pretty wonderful for human health. You lose both flavor and nutrition when you remove it from your diet. I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.

001sky 12y ago
There's plent enough fat in back bacon. Its unclear why the US doesn't sell it readily. Streaky bacon is more of a condiment than useful protein source.
sudowhodoido 12y ago
Not too much. Coronary heart disease wiped out a big chunk of my family and it wasn't because they ate sugar - it was the lard on toast and chips cooked in lard... Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.
- eropple 12y ago
  Toast and chips are still simple carbohydrates.
  - sudowhodoido 12y ago
    Aware of this. My point was purely derision. A lot of nutritional fads are indistinguishable from religion. Scales are always balanced, not necessarily visibly.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Chips are made from potato. That's a complex carb. Wholemeal toast would he a complex carb. White bread would be a complex carb in the form of a refined starch - still not a simple carb.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Sorry, yes. Wrote "carbohydrate", deleted it, phone suggested "simple" because autocorrect, and like a dolt I went right ahead. :-)
- Chevalier 12y ago
  Personally, I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto. I've lost nearly 100 lbs over the past year by switching to a high-fat, moderate-protein, and ultra low-carbohydrate diet. I really can't endorse it enough. If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes. That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.
  - michael_h 12y ago
zzleeper 12y ago
Are you sure, or is the medical community changing its mind in 10-20yrs now with a "oops, we just realized its only good when you eat a tenth of what you are eating", or something like that. Also, is both the fat of the pork, and all the oil it is cooked in healthy, or just the first? I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)
- mark-r 12y ago
  I've never found a need to use oil to cook bacon, it generates plenty of its own in the first few seconds.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
The belief that the human nutritional optimum is narrow and deep, so that "complete elimination of food X" and "total focus on food Y" will enormously enhance your health is a crypto-creationist argument, as it requires a complete rejection of everything we know about evolution in general and human evolution in particular. Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.
- Chevalier 12y ago
  I'm not sure that equating creationism with nutrition makes sense. Nor does the rise of grain necessarily signal evolutionary adaptation. It seems quite possible that humans can survive and thrive on sub-optimal nutrition. In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.
  - revelation 12y ago
    I think you didn't exactly read the answer? Humans can survive on much any diet, and the differences between them are mostly insignificant, certainly as it pertains to criteria that apply to people sitting most of the day doing mental work.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dzhiurgis 12y ago
It's great once a week. Stay on nuts, beans and other sources of fat and protein for the rest of the time. Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines. I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit. For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it. What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.

cgh 12y ago

"Canadian bacon", as you call it, is back bacon, same as the UK. In the US, it's often salted and cured kind of like a packaged deli meat or something and it's pretty awful and bears little resemblance to the genuine article.

jessaustin 12y ago

The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries. Citation needed.