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Cellar Scribblings
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on July 04, 2023, 11:46:51 am ---The general rule seems to be, If something tastes good, it's bad for you.
--- End quote ---
My first reaction to this was, "You must not have spent much time in Italy then." Everything tastes heavenly in Italy and the vast majority of it is good for you. After having gelato in Italy, I stopped eating U.S. ice cream altogether. There's no comparison. Even pasta and pizza are much more nutritious and taste better too.
In the U.S., we load down our snacks with the Four Horsemen of the Nutritional Apocalypse: flour, fat, salt, and sugar. These are mixed together in various different ways but it's always the four ingredients. Oh, in the case of chips (crisps) it's potato flour which is a bit more nutritious, but just a bit. In Italy, the breads for crosstini or bruschetta are smaller and thinner. Even the pizza crust is thin. And the other ingredients are vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, nuts and so on. Everything is more in balance.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on July 05, 2023, 10:04:53 am ---In the U.S., we load down our snacks with the Four Horsemen of the Nutritional Apocalypse: flour, fat, salt, and sugar. These are mixed together in various different ways but it's always the four ingredients. Oh, in the case of chips (crisps) it's potato flour which is a bit more nutritious, but just a bit. In Italy, the breads for crosstini or bruschetta are smaller and thinner. Even the pizza crust is thin. And the other ingredients are vegetables, fruit, meats, beans, nuts and so on. Everything is more in balance.
--- End quote ---
Of course, what I'm talking about is the typical American diet, not an Italian or Mediterranean diet, which is known to be healthier.
Very few of us Americans are fortunate enough to be able to spend time in Italy.
Front-Ranger:
The thing is, if most Americans cut out that junk food from their diets, they would save so much money in less food, less prescription medicines, less doctors' and hospital costs that they would be able to go to Italy several times!
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on July 05, 2023, 11:49:47 am ---The thing is, if most Americans cut out that junk food from their diets, they would save so much money in less food, less prescription medicines, less doctors' and hospital costs that they would be able to go to Italy several times!
--- End quote ---
Of course, then, what do we do about people trapped in "food deserts," where they have limited access to food that isn't high in all that stuff like fat, sodium, and so forth? :(
serious crayons:
Unfortunately, the concept of the Mediterranean diet was introduced by Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota physiologist whose research has been at least partly discredited as cherry-picked. The low-carb community (of which I'm a member) disputes his conclusions, especially. But of course many health institutions (e.g., the Mayo Clinic) promote his ideas. From Wikipedia:
--- Quote ---Keys has received criticism from the low-carbohydrate diet community, who have argued that his Seven Countries Study excluded countries that did not fit his hypothesis. Critics raised four primary objections to the Seven Countries Study, including (1) countries were selected and excluded based on a desired outcome; (2) France, a high-fat, low-heart disease country, was purposefully excluded from the survey; (3) dietary data in Greece taken during Lent introduced a distortion; and (4) sugar was not considered as a possible contributor to coronary heart disease. In response to this criticism, on August 1, 2017, the True Health Initiative released a 65-page white paper entitled "Ancel Keys and the Seven Countries Study: An Evidence-based Response to Revisionist Histories," correcting what they felt were historical inaccuracies and errors that low-carb advocates had perpetuated.
--- End quote ---
I think in general the Mediterranean diet is healthy, though. There's a lot of pasta, bread and (in Spain) rice, but those won't kill you when you also eat a lot of vegetables, etc. The second time I went to Italy I was in a group of 8-10 friends, two of whom were tri-athletes, who had to stop and rest climbing the stairs in Montepulciano. Meanwhile, gradmothers carrying groceries would just march on up. Europeans don't eat as much junk food and I believe they also get more natural movement exercise.
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