Fortunately there are blood tests and other measurable parameters to make sense of such messy, cherry picked, contradictory information and prove to ourselves that whathever we're doing is as good as it gets for our health and that obessive compulsive food phobias and extremisms are useless.

I like what Claudia Merek says about food: "research deep enough and you will find major complaints and associated health risks with just about every food except some very expensive pristine-grown and protected versions of organic or imported fruits and vegetables. Even then, look deeper and the concerns will be there"

We should have learned from the manipulation of information by low fat extremism that science is not made by cherry picking studies. Studies in that sense are pretty useless and you can prove anything with a bit of practice. A couple of studies matters nothing and mean nothing only the bigger picture emerging from many evidences and counterevidences and years of clinical investigation. Those who had a bad experience with their low fat past should be allergic to cherry picking to begin with.

I didn't start this thread to say vegetables are bad for people in general. I was just trying to find out if anyone else felt better not eating them and if it was possible to be healthy without eating a ton of them. Vegetables do have some poisonous qualities to them though. Some people think these tiny poisons are good for you because they turn on some of your natural healing genes.

I personally love apples and pretty much all fruit and I don't think the sugar in a granny smith apple will hurt you much even though they are still quite a bit sweeter than what would have been found in nature before people started selecting for sweetnes. I was basically just talking about veggies (cruciferous, leafy, stalky types) and the way they are really hard to digest and maybe aren't really meant for human consumption.

I don't remember where I read this but I think Plains Indians thought vegetables were not people food and it was considered morally wrong to eat them because they were there to feed their food source (bison and buffalo.) They ate berries and fruit though.

Peter does have a rather colorful way of putting things, doesn't he?

To me, a granny smith is not sour. It is very sweet. A lemon is sour, but also a little sweet. A granny smith is bathroom torture. If you can tolerate it, then it's not an issue for you, but you can't claim that it's healthy for me. Apples make my kids into hyperactive nightmares with diarrhea.

It's a matter of weighing the benefits against the risks. Obviously you can sustain your health much longer on apples than you can on white flour and sugar, but for some of us, that's not enough. I tend to take the opposite of Nietzsche's point of view - "what doesn't make me stronger kills me."

I've heard the argument that "you can find something wrong with any food," but in my opinion, a lot of those "wrong" things are incorrect. Especially the ones about meat and fat. I notice that this Claudia Merek doesn't even mention meat. It's the "healthy foods" fallacy - when people think of "healthy foods" they don't take that to mean "foods that make you healthy," they think of a predefined list of foods that have received the healthy designation by some higher authority. So it's not ironic to say that orthorexia is "an obsession with healthy foods that, in extreme cases, can lead to malnutrition."

I'm with you on this one. It gets me a bit nuts when I see stuff like this one.

Fructose Malabsorption - on wikipedia. Just say no to apples, bananas are ok. Very will put capmikee.

Claudia Merek is a low carb advocate so she doesn't think of healthy foods as food that have labelled healthy by the industry. But even meat applies to what she says. As she said if you cherry pick studies you find lot of studies showing problems with meat. Not only that but I know people who are allergic to meat and egg proteins and again who have troubles digesting meat or get cramps and constipation from eating it. So scthgharpy is right, if you have intolerances and sensitivies you should remove the foods that affect you and this includes fibrous veggies for some and meat for others. Still it doesn't mean that they are unhealthy foods not that we should waste time cherry picking short term studies to prove a preconception. Claudia is right, cherry pick enough studies and will reach the conclusion that no food can be eaten safely and it's better to starve ourselves.

Of course she is right. We have to decide what we are going to do about it.

My grandfather said there were two ways to eat a healthy diet. You could stay up-to-date on every last bit of nutritional research, so that you really understand it without getting caught up in fads or popularized oversimplifications, or you could eat a traditional diet. I think those are both great responses.

I know people with meat and egg allergies too. I've even suspected that I have them. But I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to figure out what works for me. I'm glad to know of the potential hazards of everything that I eat. We here have the opportunity to really examine the accusations that are made against our food and decide for ourselves which ones make sense, and which ones apply to us. Believe me, I didn't start out thinking that fruit can be harmful! I didn't want to believe it! I did a lot of reading and a lot of paying attention to what I eat and how I feel before I came to that conclusion. Is it cherry picking if you weigh the evidence of your own experiments on your own body preferentially?

Interesting article in the Times today about anti-oxidants:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/h...html?ref=health

Seems somewhat germane to this thread, so I thought I'd post it!

Of course it's not. But in your situations I would've easily believed that fruits can be harmful, because "individually" every edible food can be harmful. The problem is that if we combine all the intolerances that make for each individual certain foods harmful we would conclude that no food is safe to eat. But the point is that what is harmful for someone is healthful for another person and viceversa. The problem is when people extrapolate their own problems and intolerances to the whole world and dig out a couple of obscure limited studies to prove with wrong conclusions their absolutism.

Did you know about the boy who is allergic to everything?
He can only eat chicken, carrots and potatoes.
That's is, whatever other food is poison to him.
He has a very good attitude, the boy could have started lecturing his classmates out of envy claiming that they're poisoning themselves and will die young, but instead he claims to be glad that other are enjoying more foods but he doesn't crave those because he knows they will make him sick.

I admire people who have that kind of attitude. That's why Sandor Katz is one of my heroes.

There's something going on with allergies that doesn't really make sense. I think the issue of food sensitivities really complicates things because some of the most nutrient-dense foods are also the ones that people are commonly allergic to - shellfish, eggs, and dairy. I've never read anything that satisfies my curiosity about why and how people get food sensitivities.

Fructose malabsorption, however, is not an allergy or a food sensitivity. And it affects a lot of people - it's known that about 1 in 3 Europeans has it.

Perhaps!

Despite its well-deserved infamy, cyanide does have medical applications. The cyanide compound sodium nitroprusside can quickly lower a patient's blood pressure in an emergency.

Bo

a cyanide compound is not cyanide. sodium chloride as a compound is a necessary mineral to proper body and brain function, but sodium and chlorine as individual components, in their raw form, will kill us.

regardless of whether moderation will work for you, personally, individually, you must also accept the fact that moderation does not work for everyone. to some, shellfish and peanuts in moderation will kill them. to some, grains in moderation will have them constantly sick and dramatically worsen their quality of life. your body is not the litmus test for the entire human population. so do what you want to do with your body, but don't insist that what's acceptable for you is the template for the rest of us.

I'm in total agreement with your observations.

Best wishes.

Bo

Most vegetable disagree with me. The sweet ones like beets, carrots, peas and sweet potatoes give me rapid hypoglycemia and a ravenous hunger. Most fruits do this to me too. Crucifers mess up my stomach big time. Romaine lettuce just sucks. Potatoes (highest ranker of any food on the satiety index) don't bother me.

From what I've read, the reasons for vegetable/fruit problems can be an individual allergy (celery allergy is common), problems with fructose or intolerance of certain kinds of salicylates, amines, and/or glutamates.

Isn't it funny how potatoes keep coming up? They may have a sky-high glycemic index, but their high-starch and low-fructose content seems to work well for a lot of people.

I was feeling fine eating potatoes when I started Atkins, but they weren't allowed on induction and I haven't tried them since. So I've never had any reason to believe that they cause me a particular problem. I've been thinking about trying the Optimal diet, and if I increase my carbs, I expect some of them will be from potatoes.