Quote:
Originally posted by fodus8
If it were somehow strangely necessary for all mankind to eat Dr. Atkins' diet, most of the people on the earth would have to starve, as it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.
|
Well, yeah. That goes without saying, and has absolutely nothing to do with Atkin's plan. The article talks about going back to diets from biblical times and 5,000 years ago, but that's not far enough. The Atkins diet is closer to what humans ate before the invention of agriculture. It's been 15,000 years or so since then and that's a very small step in the time scale of evolution so basically we are still the same animals now, that we were then. However, before agriculture there were not 7 billion of us. So we could feed everyone, most of the time, by just hunting, gathering, and scavenging.
Now, bring in agriculture. I think it could be a bit of a chicken or the egg thing, where its not clear if we developed agriculture from the need to feed a growing population of humans, or if we developed argriculture, which made food that much more available and allowed for a rise in population. Regardless, where there was more food, there were more people. An acre of land given to agriculture can support more people than an acre of land given to hunting, gathering and scavenging. Follow that down the line far enough, say 15,000 years, and you have a world population that has vastly exceeded the capacity of the land to support it without agriculture. So yes, today if the entire world switched over to Atkins, most of us might starve.
BUT that says nothing about whether we are biologically inclined to eat low-carb.
The fact that he attemps to connect these ideas makes me very skeptical of the entire article.
If you want more info on stuff like this checkout "Guns, Germs and Steel." Not much on diet in it, but its a great source for looking at the advent, impact, and spread of technology and societies.
Quote:
|
Half the people on earth have an income of less than two dollars a day and could not afford a heavy meat diet.
|
This is economics and says nothing about whether or not we should be eating this way, biologically. Now, if you want to argue the morals of consumption, he may have a point.
Quote:
|
The only known problem with white flour is that fiber and many nutrients are also lost in the milling process, which has been partially corrected by enriching the flour.
|
True, unless you are looking into foods that convert quickly to glucose in your body. From a low-fat perspective white flour is merely nutrient-deficient. From a low-carb stand point it might as well be straight glucose.
Quote:
|
White rice has been the customary rice of China since the time of Confucius, about 500 BC. It has thus been the standard food in Asia for about 2,500 years. Like white flour, it is produced by milling and thus has lost some of the nutrients and fiber of brown rice. It has been enriched to partially correct this problem, but it has not been chemically altered in any way. White rice has not created obese and diabetic Asians. Few people in the US eat large quantities of rice.
|
Again, change your persepective, and it's not such a good food for a low-carber.
The guy who wrote the article appears to be an avid cyclist. Even Atkins says that athletes don't need to be as concerned with carb intake and the more active you are the more carbs you can eat because you will use them up. It seems likely that he doesn' need to diet and is making the mistake that many people do in looking at low-carb as a quick weight loss fix for the readers of his web site.