To me "eating clean" means eating mostly vegetables by volume and mostly fat and protein by weight. For instance typical ketogenic/paleo diet. Eating "dirty" is theoretically doable. If one prototypical example of eating "dirty" is having a standard supermarket cake slice or mound of cereal and milk to fulfill daily caloric needs, then it is actually harder to maintain a "dirty" diet. Satiety becomes an unattainable goal. We simply cannot handle the insulin spikes well. We get hungry and cravings are more intense with such a diet. It is essentially impractical. It may also explain why there are so many obese in the world. "Eating clean" can be used as a marketing term to get people to fork over huge bucks for an oversold concept. But fundamentally, "eating clean" the way I define it is very cheap, tasty, and pragmatic. Especially for losing weight and maintaining a low weight.
This is how I eat, with the addition of nuts, seeds, and legumes.
I focus on are cruciferous vegetables, of which there are many, and buy only what is on special.
When maintain this eating plan I have boundless energy and am emotionally stable. When I don't I am tired and letharg all the time and prone to angry outbursts.
Non-GMO and organic is mostly BS of course, but it's a fact that refined carbs are cheap and plentiful, so the poor consume proportionally more of them. They simply can't afford fruit and meat. This is in part because of the infinite shelf life of processed carbs, and in part because they're heavily subsidized by the government. Also, government dietary guidelines still push people towards relatively high carb diets, and snacking is encouraged from kindergarten and up, causing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. The point being, the nutritional situation in the US is a clusterfuck, and GMO and organic stuff are kind of orthogonal to rectifying it.
What makes the fructose in your (selected for top sweetness over hundreds of generations) apricot so different from the fructose in the sucrose of your Snickers bar?
Try eating 2500 calories (1 pack) of Oreos vs 2500 calories of apricots (150 medium).
I could easily mow down a whole pack of oreos and a quart of milk (500 more calories). I have done so many times. I might do it tonight. I dunno about 150-180 apricots. That is only 200% of daily recommended fiber intake tho.
The point I was trying to make is that apricots and Snickers have both been engineered (both by humans and nature) to contain maximum sugar levels with minimum fiber content (plus to be grown as quickly as possible). There are other fruits which have a higher GI level (grapes). We need to step away from the food dogmas and understand that an apricot is heavy in fructose, low in glucose, doesn't have many good lipids and because of intense farming probably does not have much iron and magnesium. It is probably better than a Snickers bar, but that doesn't suddenly make it 'good', or 'clean', or whatever.
(Just for the record, I never eat snacks like Snickers, haven't been to a McDonalds for over a decade, grow my own food, regularly eat nuts and work out thrice a week. I focus on balance in my food, with the right intake at the right moment. So, eating sugar isn't that bad, but your body needs to be able to use that energy directly.)
They have different glycemic indices. A bar of snickers or similar will likely have a higher glycemic index relative to that of a fruit, meaning that it has a higher impact on the blood glucose.
In addition to what others have said, I suspect part of the difference is that "all things being equal" the snickers bar and apricot may not be so far apart, but in real life "all things are not equal" and the person that eats a snicker instead of an apricot statistically makes many more decisions in a similar vein.
Aha, that's an interesting position and one I completely agree with. It points to the core of the matter:
It lifts the individual food-items towards a more socioeconomic, structuralistic philosophy of society. Eating the Snickers bar is communicating "I do not care about my food-choices". It is about carelessness and sloth, a stigmatic act.
And even though there is a kernel of truth in your argument, it introduces more dogma into the whole food situation.
Snickers will contain high fructose corn syrup with different metabolism properties, and will likely contain more total sugar (plus other gunk) than the equivalent snack of (non-dried) apricots would.
Fun fact: HFCS that you'll find in drinks has nearly the same proportion of fructose and glucose as honey. Yet one is considered "good" by most people, and the other is universally considered bad. News flash: they're both bad unless consumed in very limited amounts.
> What makes the fructose in your (selected for top sweetness over hundreds of generations) apricot so different from the fructose in the sucrose of your Snickers bar?
The quantity of it per unit volume or mass of the apricot, which affects satiety and the total quantity you are likely to eat of it, as well as other ingredients consumed alongside the sugars. For instance, a 44g snickers bar has 20g of sugars and 0.8g fiber; 165g of sliced apricot has only 15g of sugars and 3.3g of fiber; so less than a quarter of the sugar density by mass, with in the ballpark of the same fiber density, or about a four times higher fiber-to-sugar ratio for the apricot.
Maybe this differs per area, but in most places i know, fruit is significantly cheaper than processed snacks. I can eat 4 apples for the price of one Mars bar.
I've been hearing similar things for a time now, like e.g. poor people eating at McD because it's cheaper to get a caloric and macronutrient-full meal there than to assemble it from fruits and stuffs.
This disagrees with my daily experience in Europe, so I conclude it's a US-specific thing.
> This disagrees with my daily experience in Europe, so I conclude it's a US-specific thing.
It is. Having lived in both places, it's astounding how expensive good food is in the US and how cheap crap food can be. $1 for a single apple or for a McD burger? Tough choice.
Add to that the fact that most of the US poor are time poor as well. Working 3 jobs and/ot commuting 3hrs per day doesn't leave a lot of time to prepare meals.
Agreed. In my midwest small town, the $1 apple isn't even the good apples. Bananas are preposterously cheap though. I'd still rather east two double cheeseburgers or two breakfast burritos than 5-6 bananas.
> I'd still rather east two double cheeseburgers or two breakfast burritos than 5-6 bananas.
Probably healthier to eat two double cheeseburgers than 5-6 bananas too. Bananas are really really really packed with sugar.
14 grams per 100 calories (banana) versus 7 grams per 440 calories (McDonalds double cheeseburger).
Now whether it's healthy to eat 800 calories for breakfast ... eh, probably not. But that's a different problem. Also depends on what you intend to do all day. Physical labor? Eat away. Sit at desk? Maybe try a quarter of a double cheeseburger instead :D
A double cheeseburger may have only 7 grams of "sugar", which is defined by the FDA as a mono- or di-saccharide, but it has 29 grams of carbs, most of which is white flour, which is almost as unhealthy as sugar.
It's also much less calorically dense. It's not just snacks though. It's also nearly anything you can buy in a store that's made of wheat or corn. Whole aisles of stuff, packed floor to ceiling. People keep eating it between meals, and they get fat.
> Maybe this differs per area, but AFAICT in most places i know, fruit is significantly cheaper than processed snacks
Fruit is bulkier and spoils faster, this means it takes more storage space and more frequent shopping trips (and/or more refrigerated space.) These have costs.
Further—for basically the same reasons—the corner convenience store that will carry processed snacks often won't carry much, if any, fresh fruit, meaning it takes many who are poor longer shopping trips, as well.
I'm not sure about meat but fruit is definitely affordable. Especially bananas and apples. Bananas are far cheaper than any other food. Yet, people snack on chips/crisps and other refined carbs.
First of all, this is discussion about people eating too many calories from bad food. Bananas probably beat most of the snacks otherwise discussed.
And protein deficiency? A 70kg male needs something like 55g of protein (WHO figures) unless they exercise. You are not going to go below that unless you fill a substantial chunk of your calorie intake by eating pure fat.
I eat a plant based diet and weigh about 67kg. On 2500kcal I get about 95-110g of protein, and that is without trying. Had I been a meat/milk eater, this number would have been higher.
Protein intake is generally a problems if you are either starving or very serious about building LOTS ofta muscle.
The most appealing benefits of organic foods, in my household, are not to do with our own health. Instead, we adopt the practice under the information that organic farming is more sustainable and better for the environment. Top three search results for "organic food better for environment."
Regarding it being a "rich [white] people thing," either way, that may very well be, in practice. Is caring about sustainable farming and the environmental impact of our savage resouce consumption also a rich white people thing?
On the other hand, if you search "organic food worse for environment" you get results which explain why organic farming is less sustainable. Your search results are dependent on your query so if you search "vaccination schedule bad for children" don't be surprised when you get some highly placed anti-vax stuff.
In any case, assuming you eat a diet typical of an organic shopper with far less meat and more vegetables compared to the general population then organic farming is merely as carbon intensive and uses only 40% more land. If you buy organic but have a pretty normal diet then it's even worse. Is it a rich person thing? Switching to organic for everyone would require massive deforestation worldwide and probably still wouldn't get us enough arable land so not only would the price of food go up, we'd likely be hit with large food shortages that would probably disproportionately hit the developing world. Yeah, it's a rich person thing. They're the people who can afford organic and they're fine when food shortages come along.
What about the pesticides used in organic farming? I'd jug some Roundup (LD50: 5,600 mg/kg in rats) before eating Copper sulfate (LD50: 30 mg/kg in rats) used in organic farming.
My main problem is, that the whole thing is just a big appeal to nature. More natural does not mean safer for consumption or better for the environment.
I am sorry but GMO is actually bad for you.... Monsanto tried to spread gmo corn in France, they tested it on rats for a year and the rats developed multiple tumors the size of an egg.
I thought the article was talking about eating food contaminated with dirt reading its title. Which I happen to agree with, small doses of bacteria do wonder for my immune system. It turned out to be an article of counterargument against antiGMO and organic food though.
"100-percent organic, locally sourced, non-GMO, and free of antibiotics"
Even if it does not have an effect on your health, three of those four (100-percent organic, locally sourced, and free of antibiotics) are at least good for the environment.
The fourth (free of antibiotics) is maybe even good for your health, in the long run: Over-use of antibiotics by farmers (not using them to cure sick animals, but to make animals grow faster) seems to be a big problem (creating resistent bugs)...
Edit (after reading a comment): I left out non-GMO here because I have ready about some evidence that - at least some GMOs - can be better for the environment and for your health.
There are many ways in which organic and non-organic affect the environment other than land use (which is likely a marginal difference). Big agro, most associated with non-organic farming, does lots of bad things for the environment. Pesticides that are linked to decline of bee populations, pesticides that yield local imbalances in what animals/bugs are around to eat each other, synthetic fertilizers that thrash the land from being able to grow diverse crops into the future, chemical run offs into local water sources, exposure of workers to high concentrations of pesticides and their subsequent-related illnesses, GMO seeds spreading farther than the intended land mass mating with other species producing unknown effects (and lawsuits), etc.
Organic food raised like industrial food will often take more land. But organic food raised in polyculture can sometimes take dramatically less space. Look up Land Equivalent Ratio and intercropping.
Organic is definitely not better for the environment than non-organic, by default:
>Not only are organic pesticides not safe, they might actually be worse than the ones used by the conventional agriculture industry. Canadian scientists pitted 'reduced-risk' organic and synthetic pesticides against each other in controlling a problematic pest, the soybean aphid. They found that not only were the synthetic pesticides more effective means of control, the organic pesticides were more ecologically damaging, including causing higher mortality in other, non-target species like the aphid's predators. Of course, some organic pesticides may fare better than these ones did in similar head-to-head tests, but studies like this one reveal that the assumption that natural is better for the environment could be very dangerous.[0]
I think your "by default" is a bit misleading here. This is one paper, comparing pesticides for one pest in one crop. But I guess you are right - Organic is not always better.
But, AFAIK, at least here in Austria, buying organic will at least improve your chance that you get some sustainably-produced food - and animals that are kept in a somewhat species-adequate environment...
But thanks for making me question my assumptions ;)
Non-organic farming typically involves a lot of petro-based fertilizers being used that deposit large run offs of nitrogen, ammonia, and other goodies that “burn” the soil and run off into streams which then causes many other issues.
Organic farming typically involves a lot of manure-based fertilizers being used that deposit large run offs of nitrogen, ammonia, potassium, E. coli and other goodies that “burn” the soil and run off into streams which then causes many other issues such as algae blooms, water poisoning, et cetera.
> Even if it does not have an effect on your health, three of those four (100-percent organic, locally sourced, and free of antibiotics) are at least good for the environment.
Locally sourced may be good because of avoiding transportation impacts (preference for it may lead to types of agriculture being performed in places less well suited for them which may be bad, and might even increase transportation impacts of necessities to support agriculture, so net it might not always be good; there's a reason certain crops are grown in certain places, and preference for “locally grown” without reversing the preference for cosmopolitan variety may produce perverse impacts), and free of antibiotics is probably generally a positive environmental trait.
Organic is, OTOH, not something that there is much reason to believe is good for the environment, despite its cult virtue signalling status.
The argument that locally sourced is better for the environment is a generally spurious claim based on incomplete understanding of modern logistics. For one, food production efficiency is extremely dependent on climate suitability for the crop. Two, transportation only accounts for 11% of food energy use...production (which again is highly dependent on climate) takes far more. Three, transportation energy usage is highly dependent on utilization and relatively independent of distance...A Californian eating a kiwifruit shipped in a packed container from New Zealand might very well produce less CO2 than a similarly sized Tomato grown 30 miles away and driven via pickup truck to a farmers market.
I eat organic fruit and vegetables mostly to avoid synthetic chemicals, and because you have more heirloom varieties which can offer better taste, but I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm okay with the blood meal and bone meal that goes into the product.
This article seems to be making the implicit claim that "clean eating" refers to eating organic products. On the other hand, I've always understood the expression to just mean eating healthy, especially including plenty of vegetables. Has the meaning changed or have I just always misunderstood it?
This article smacks of narrow-minded contrarianism for its own sake.
The cheapest thing one can do -- and healthier than the option of eating Lucky Charms daily -- is to grow one's own food. The space requirements are actually tiny -- it's possible to grow all of one's own veggies in something like 300 sq ft of space (in a mid-latitude region) and all one's own calories in something like 800 sq ft of space. It's cheaper to do it without sprays too, so you end up organic by default. I'd recommend interested folks check out ... Grow More Vegetables ... by John Jeavons and One Circle by David Duhon for how to do space-efficient veggie gardening.
Edited to add: I should have mentioned: I'm opposed to the fad diets that the article is attacking as much as I am to the contrarian posture the article takes. Growing food and eating it, and eating a variety of such homegrown foods with a mix of other things, seems sensible to me, and it's also cheaper than either highly-processed industrial food products or fad-oriented yuppie foods.
Im glad you've found something that works for you, but you must understand that you have quite the unique circumstance there. There is no gardening out there that would ever be able to replace the exercise that I do...gardening is extremely mild cardio at best. And 300-800 sqft of sun-exposed space per person in the city where I live would undoubtedly cost an order of magnitude more than I currently spend on food.
If it were really that easy to grow one's own food, industrialization would have never happened.
I think the author researched this article after selecting his position rather than vice versa. He keeps claiming health benefits have not been shown to be true. He goes so far as to say: "...organic produce tends to have more antioxidants—but those differences haven't been shown to improve health outcomes." Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they do. In my experience being around a good number of athletic people, the ones who look really good, as in others do double takes or give gratuitous compliments, are not the ones work out the most but instead the ones who eat the best.
All of our fitness and nutrition advice is troubled by the cargo-culting, marketing-driven, personal-religion factors: if I go to a yoga class I spend a lot more time and money to get effects roughly similar to doing a high school gym class stretching regime each morning and evening. I paid $14 yesterday for the experience of a burger with a fancy name and an overly sweetened bun that was ultimately less satisfying than Burger King. If I buy and use supplements marketed by a bodybuilder, or try to follow their training program as printed in a magazine, I'm not going to look like the bodybuilder, and I will probably overtrain, because they weren't using the supplements at all, they were using a PED stack to train harder, eat more, and recover faster without overloading their system. Worrying about my body weight, BMI, or aesthetics is similarly Quixotic in that my body will prefer to stay in a certain range regardless of how I eat or train, and the numbers I can consistently improve tend to be "weight and reps" or "time and distance", while aesthetics and vanity numbers are much harder to aim towards.
To wit, it's more important to develop your own feedback loops for each of these things. There are serious concerns with fitness and nutrition in the U.S. but they aren't necessarily because it's impossible to get at the good stuff: it's just that eating beans and rice and oatmeal, making a habit of stretching and bodyweight exercise, and studiously logging one's training are all unfashionable, implicitly discouraged by most workplaces, and not well served by market forces.
Long "crunch" work hours with little or no enforced break, laissez-faire approaches to lunch and break room snacks, occasional encouragement to drink alcohol, lengthy car commutes to office parks, heavy preference towards in-person over remote. These are just some of the things workplaces do to lifestyle that are too small to be a topic for regulation but big enough to impact lives.
this kind of thinking is just another iteration of self-serving anti-intellectualism (akin to climate change denial and anti-vaxxing). there is absolutely hard exercise science you can read in order to exercise more effectively than "stretching" (an activity whose value has never been empirically proven) and "body-weight" exercises (slightly more effective than nothing but pales in comparison to real weight training and cardio). protein supplementing does work[1], creatine does work[2], caffeine+ephedrine does work[3] (though you can't buy that anymore). the hard science is in exactly the same place it always is: research journals. for starters I always recommended exrx.net.
Possible problems with GMO:
- Harder to digest proteins
- Possible new allergies for some people (because if slightly different proteins, or mixes from other plants)
- Plants with build in pesticide
- Patents
- Plant monoculture
- Plants that grow faster and are cheaper, but not optimized for taste.
Is the above list inherit to GMO's: no. Do I know if the GMO I am eating is suffering from this: no. As such until I get detailed information about your GMO, I prefer to avoid it.
You don't know if modern non-GMO crops have these problems, either; transgenic (“GMO”) crops actually have greater controls than modern non-transgenic (“non-GMO”, though their genetics are, in fact, artificially modified) crops in many ways.
To me eating clean means avoiding preprocessed food, the author is taking a much more extreme view which to me feels like a straw man.
If someone is used to junk food and switches to more fruit, veggies, lean meat and fish, I'm pretty sure they'll start noticing a difference after a little while. I know it worked for me (n=1).
This is the long standing definition, which has been used in the athletic community for much longer than it has in the "wealthy yoga mom" community described in the article.
Clickbait title leading to poorly written article by a mid 30s man-child wanting to justify eating Lucky Charms everyday because he left mom's house too soon.
"Eating clean is useless" is such a terrible statement to make, especially today. You want to eat crap, good for you, but don't try to avoid feeling bad about it.
I never understood the hate toward GMOs themselves, considering that genetic modification is practically the definition of agriculture as it's existed for thousands of years. Granted, we relied on artificial selection instead of, say, CRISPR, but still.
I do understand the hate toward companies like Monsanto, however. Hating all GMOs because of some unethical company peddling them seems heavy-handed and broad-stroked to me, though.
I'm always interested in people's perceptions of Monsanto considering that to me they seem like an entirely pedestrian and boring GM crops company with a couple of cool products. Perhaps you could explain why you dislike them and think they're unethical?
I don't like their intellectual property policies. Suing small farmers because their crops were inadvertently exposed to patent-encumbered Monsanto pollen is, suffice it to say, a dick move.
Monsanto is basically to agriculture as Oracle is to IT.
Perhaps you could link me to an example where that happened? Probably the most famous cases of Monsanto suing farmers were Bowman v. Monsanto and Monsanto v. Schmeiser. In both cases the infringement was entirely purposeful.
Schmesier's case is one where the seeds were initially blown onto his property so that may be what you're referring to. From Wikipedia:
As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997. He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
Regardless, to me that's a distinction without a difference. Suing a farmer because he used seeds that blew into his property is still a dick move. Too bad the Canadian courts don't seem to agree (though considering that the Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 split, I'd argue that the legality of contaminating someone's field with genetically-modified seeds and then suing farmers for using those seeds or the products thereof is still very contestable, and for good reason).
A little straw man here, a little twisting of the meaning of clean there and voila: trying to eat healthy is classist and racist.
Junk food is being marketed at poor uneducated people. Yes! That is even more reason to fight it, not find escuses to indulge in it. And if you are really into social justice and the like, that yoga guy and the whole white middle class is not the enemy of the poor black guys. They are not the owners of junk food mega corporations, nor do they pass laws to subsidize corn syrup.
If you want to "stick it to the man" stop buying his horrible products.
"Fuck you white middle class yoga guy, I'm eating all the Nestle shit I can find, take that!" - how dumb is this?
Most people prefer to find justifications for their generally poor diet choices (ie eating Lucky Charms every day) rather than being objective. Food is really an emotional thing for most of us.
Except the author didn't call actual healthy eating classist/racist, nor did he promote the consumption of junk food. It was argued that the use of the label "clean" was classist/racist, and that pursuing it alone is pointless because science.
Is there a single definition of "clean"? The author has one definition which seems based on items commonly found on labels, like "non-gmo" or "certified organic", that gives consumers an easy way to feel good about what they are about to eat. The commenters here, however, seem to each have their own different idea. Is it keto? Is it organic/"chemical-free"? Can someone point me to one single definition of "clean" eating that isn't just what you feel is "clean"?
If there is, how does it line up with the author's definition? How does the actual definition fit with the content of the article?
If there isn't one definition, I'm sort of with the author on this one. "Clean" is whatever labels the consumers use to feel superior through what they are eating.
I have a pet theory that food ideology is/has replaced conventional religion for a lot of folks. There is a need to feel 'virtuous' in our daily lives and since we gotta eat it's a convenient place to go. So we get all these strange ideologies and dogmas which don't seem to make us much healthier physically but maybe helps fills in some accumulated spiritual decay.
In respect to value, at least, bio/organic (real, not just misleading labeling) is suppose to be free of pesticides, and that's actually a good thing... I'm sure.
Regardless, I don't think even the WHO suggests there's a preference to organic food, but clearly indicates the danger of food contaminated with pesticides.
Even if most pesticides are now forbidden in most developed countries, we can see that in the USA legislation and regulation is being again "relaxed", which is not a good thing.
While the article is somewhat correct in that 'clean eating' is useless, what the hell is up with every single US News outlet literally stirring up racial tensions?
Back to the clean eating part - all my ancestors that I know of (grandparents, great-grandparents) at relatively unhealthy food. Tons of butter, lard, and carbs. True, it was natural-ish, they all grew up on a homestead, but far from the 'clean eating' ideal.
As for the racial tensions, WTF? Does every single article in every single outlet have to bring it up? All this does is make it worse in my experience.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadI think you mean "hypothetically", unless you have some references to scientific research?
I focus on are cruciferous vegetables, of which there are many, and buy only what is on special.
When maintain this eating plan I have boundless energy and am emotionally stable. When I don't I am tired and letharg all the time and prone to angry outbursts.
It's very difficult for a person eating normally to not get enough of their daily vitamin intake, so please specify the type.
Quick Google search: apricots and Snickers both have 2% fiber content.
I could easily mow down a whole pack of oreos and a quart of milk (500 more calories). I have done so many times. I might do it tonight. I dunno about 150-180 apricots. That is only 200% of daily recommended fiber intake tho.
What ultimately matters is the glycemic index. An apricot has a GI of 34, whereas a Snickers bar is ~70.
(Just for the record, I never eat snacks like Snickers, haven't been to a McDonalds for over a decade, grow my own food, regularly eat nuts and work out thrice a week. I focus on balance in my food, with the right intake at the right moment. So, eating sugar isn't that bad, but your body needs to be able to use that energy directly.)
It lifts the individual food-items towards a more socioeconomic, structuralistic philosophy of society. Eating the Snickers bar is communicating "I do not care about my food-choices". It is about carelessness and sloth, a stigmatic act.
And even though there is a kernel of truth in your argument, it introduces more dogma into the whole food situation.
The quantity of it per unit volume or mass of the apricot, which affects satiety and the total quantity you are likely to eat of it, as well as other ingredients consumed alongside the sugars. For instance, a 44g snickers bar has 20g of sugars and 0.8g fiber; 165g of sliced apricot has only 15g of sugars and 3.3g of fiber; so less than a quarter of the sugar density by mass, with in the ballpark of the same fiber density, or about a four times higher fiber-to-sugar ratio for the apricot.
https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/perils-snacking-hormo...
It's not snacking that is causing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Snacking is good if you eat healthy snacks.
Maybe this differs per area, but in most places i know, fruit is significantly cheaper than processed snacks. I can eat 4 apples for the price of one Mars bar.
This disagrees with my daily experience in Europe, so I conclude it's a US-specific thing.
It is. Having lived in both places, it's astounding how expensive good food is in the US and how cheap crap food can be. $1 for a single apple or for a McD burger? Tough choice.
Add to that the fact that most of the US poor are time poor as well. Working 3 jobs and/ot commuting 3hrs per day doesn't leave a lot of time to prepare meals.
Probably healthier to eat two double cheeseburgers than 5-6 bananas too. Bananas are really really really packed with sugar.
14 grams per 100 calories (banana) versus 7 grams per 440 calories (McDonalds double cheeseburger).
Now whether it's healthy to eat 800 calories for breakfast ... eh, probably not. But that's a different problem. Also depends on what you intend to do all day. Physical labor? Eat away. Sit at desk? Maybe try a quarter of a double cheeseburger instead :D
So I dunno. Bananas are not the best example, great after and pre workout, not thaaaat great as something you'd eat all the time.
Fruit is bulkier and spoils faster, this means it takes more storage space and more frequent shopping trips (and/or more refrigerated space.) These have costs.
Further—for basically the same reasons—the corner convenience store that will carry processed snacks often won't carry much, if any, fresh fruit, meaning it takes many who are poor longer shopping trips, as well.
Can you expand on this?
I'm not sure about meat but fruit is definitely affordable. Especially bananas and apples. Bananas are far cheaper than any other food. Yet, people snack on chips/crisps and other refined carbs.
I love this list, but I doubt it's accurate to more than an factor of 2. http://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/
Bananas are not a cost effective source of calories, have very little protein, and boast a fairly high glycemic index.
basically, bananas are trash at being fruit.
And protein deficiency? A 70kg male needs something like 55g of protein (WHO figures) unless they exercise. You are not going to go below that unless you fill a substantial chunk of your calorie intake by eating pure fat.
I eat a plant based diet and weigh about 67kg. On 2500kcal I get about 95-110g of protein, and that is without trying. Had I been a meat/milk eater, this number would have been higher.
Protein intake is generally a problems if you are either starving or very serious about building LOTS ofta muscle.
Sources ? I got hundreds of studies proving the exact opposite if you want
Yet this works: https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/d385ak/eating-clean-is-us...
http://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/is-organic-agr...
http://www.thechicecologist.com/green-living/food-drink/is-o...
Regarding it being a "rich [white] people thing," either way, that may very well be, in practice. Is caring about sustainable farming and the environmental impact of our savage resouce consumption also a rich white people thing?
In any case, assuming you eat a diet typical of an organic shopper with far less meat and more vegetables compared to the general population then organic farming is merely as carbon intensive and uses only 40% more land. If you buy organic but have a pretty normal diet then it's even worse. Is it a rich person thing? Switching to organic for everyone would require massive deforestation worldwide and probably still wouldn't get us enough arable land so not only would the price of food go up, we'd likely be hit with large food shortages that would probably disproportionately hit the developing world. Yeah, it's a rich person thing. They're the people who can afford organic and they're fine when food shortages come along.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria_Nordborg/publicat...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652617...
What about the pesticides used in organic farming? I'd jug some Roundup (LD50: 5,600 mg/kg in rats) before eating Copper sulfate (LD50: 30 mg/kg in rats) used in organic farming.
My main problem is, that the whole thing is just a big appeal to nature. More natural does not mean safer for consumption or better for the environment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair
Even if it does not have an effect on your health, three of those four (100-percent organic, locally sourced, and free of antibiotics) are at least good for the environment.
The fourth (free of antibiotics) is maybe even good for your health, in the long run: Over-use of antibiotics by farmers (not using them to cure sick animals, but to make animals grow faster) seems to be a big problem (creating resistent bugs)...
Edit (after reading a comment): I left out non-GMO here because I have ready about some evidence that - at least some GMOs - can be better for the environment and for your health.
It often takes more energy to grow food locally (greenhouses and fertilizer) than transported food.
Antibiotic-raised foods grow faster and thus have better caloric ratios, and less farmland per pound of beef.
There are many ways in which organic and non-organic affect the environment other than land use (which is likely a marginal difference). Big agro, most associated with non-organic farming, does lots of bad things for the environment. Pesticides that are linked to decline of bee populations, pesticides that yield local imbalances in what animals/bugs are around to eat each other, synthetic fertilizers that thrash the land from being able to grow diverse crops into the future, chemical run offs into local water sources, exposure of workers to high concentrations of pesticides and their subsequent-related illnesses, GMO seeds spreading farther than the intended land mass mating with other species producing unknown effects (and lawsuits), etc.
> - organic food is less space efficient to grow > - organic food may have lower crop yields
These are the same thing. If you have to generate X calories, and you generate fewer per acre, then you need more acres of crop.
>Not only are organic pesticides not safe, they might actually be worse than the ones used by the conventional agriculture industry. Canadian scientists pitted 'reduced-risk' organic and synthetic pesticides against each other in controlling a problematic pest, the soybean aphid. They found that not only were the synthetic pesticides more effective means of control, the organic pesticides were more ecologically damaging, including causing higher mortality in other, non-target species like the aphid's predators. Of course, some organic pesticides may fare better than these ones did in similar head-to-head tests, but studies like this one reveal that the assumption that natural is better for the environment could be very dangerous.[0]
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[0]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
But, AFAIK, at least here in Austria, buying organic will at least improve your chance that you get some sustainably-produced food - and animals that are kept in a somewhat species-adequate environment...
But thanks for making me question my assumptions ;)
Locally sourced may be good because of avoiding transportation impacts (preference for it may lead to types of agriculture being performed in places less well suited for them which may be bad, and might even increase transportation impacts of necessities to support agriculture, so net it might not always be good; there's a reason certain crops are grown in certain places, and preference for “locally grown” without reversing the preference for cosmopolitan variety may produce perverse impacts), and free of antibiotics is probably generally a positive environmental trait.
Organic is, OTOH, not something that there is much reason to believe is good for the environment, despite its cult virtue signalling status.
The cheapest thing one can do -- and healthier than the option of eating Lucky Charms daily -- is to grow one's own food. The space requirements are actually tiny -- it's possible to grow all of one's own veggies in something like 300 sq ft of space (in a mid-latitude region) and all one's own calories in something like 800 sq ft of space. It's cheaper to do it without sprays too, so you end up organic by default. I'd recommend interested folks check out ... Grow More Vegetables ... by John Jeavons and One Circle by David Duhon for how to do space-efficient veggie gardening.
Edited to add: I should have mentioned: I'm opposed to the fad diets that the article is attacking as much as I am to the contrarian posture the article takes. Growing food and eating it, and eating a variety of such homegrown foods with a mix of other things, seems sensible to me, and it's also cheaper than either highly-processed industrial food products or fad-oriented yuppie foods.
Plus don't forget about the seasonality of the crops, the effort of preservation, etc.
If it were really that easy to grow one's own food, industrialization would have never happened.
To wit, it's more important to develop your own feedback loops for each of these things. There are serious concerns with fitness and nutrition in the U.S. but they aren't necessarily because it's impossible to get at the good stuff: it's just that eating beans and rice and oatmeal, making a habit of stretching and bodyweight exercise, and studiously logging one's training are all unfashionable, implicitly discouraged by most workplaces, and not well served by market forces.
What do you mean?
[1] http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/96/6/1454.short
[2] https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-4...
[3] http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/1318281
Is the above list inherit to GMO's: no. Do I know if the GMO I am eating is suffering from this: no. As such until I get detailed information about your GMO, I prefer to avoid it.
But what do I know. I'm a food contrarian - if I see two items, one labeled "no GMO" and one without such label, I pick the latter...
When did they do this?
- [list of possible problems with GMOs]
- Are they inherent to GMOs? No.
- Do I know if a given GMO has them? No.
- Conclusion: I will avoid GMOs.
It's completely irrational to focus on “GMOs”.
If someone is used to junk food and switches to more fruit, veggies, lean meat and fish, I'm pretty sure they'll start noticing a difference after a little while. I know it worked for me (n=1).
n=2
"Eating clean is useless" is such a terrible statement to make, especially today. You want to eat crap, good for you, but don't try to avoid feeling bad about it.
I do understand the hate toward companies like Monsanto, however. Hating all GMOs because of some unethical company peddling them seems heavy-handed and broad-stroked to me, though.
Monsanto is basically to agriculture as Oracle is to IT.
Schmesier's case is one where the seeds were initially blown onto his property so that may be what you're referring to. From Wikipedia:
As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997. He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#As_plaint...
Regardless, to me that's a distinction without a difference. Suing a farmer because he used seeds that blew into his property is still a dick move. Too bad the Canadian courts don't seem to agree (though considering that the Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 split, I'd argue that the legality of contaminating someone's field with genetically-modified seeds and then suing farmers for using those seeds or the products thereof is still very contestable, and for good reason).
Junk food is being marketed at poor uneducated people. Yes! That is even more reason to fight it, not find escuses to indulge in it. And if you are really into social justice and the like, that yoga guy and the whole white middle class is not the enemy of the poor black guys. They are not the owners of junk food mega corporations, nor do they pass laws to subsidize corn syrup.
If you want to "stick it to the man" stop buying his horrible products.
"Fuck you white middle class yoga guy, I'm eating all the Nestle shit I can find, take that!" - how dumb is this?
I somehow got downvoted for saying that growing one's own food is a great alternative to the narrow perspective the article is pushing.
If there is, how does it line up with the author's definition? How does the actual definition fit with the content of the article?
If there isn't one definition, I'm sort of with the author on this one. "Clean" is whatever labels the consumers use to feel superior through what they are eating.
Regardless, I don't think even the WHO suggests there's a preference to organic food, but clearly indicates the danger of food contaminated with pesticides.
Even if most pesticides are now forbidden in most developed countries, we can see that in the USA legislation and regulation is being again "relaxed", which is not a good thing.
Back to the clean eating part - all my ancestors that I know of (grandparents, great-grandparents) at relatively unhealthy food. Tons of butter, lard, and carbs. True, it was natural-ish, they all grew up on a homestead, but far from the 'clean eating' ideal.
As for the racial tensions, WTF? Does every single article in every single outlet have to bring it up? All this does is make it worse in my experience.
A lot of media/activist/political activity makes a lot more sense through this lens.
At 30 years of age, your habits haven't caught up to you yet. A 30-year-old smoker could make the same claim.