- Tech blogger announces he’s leaving the ‘Net for a year. Oh, the freedom. Oh, the boredom! (Tip o’ hat to PT)
- “Eating well without the flavor of shame.” Not primal per se (who cares about the labels?), but influential people are increasingly walking away from the fedgov’s disastrous notions of “healthy” eating.
- No longer just something from one of your weirder dreams: xkcd meets Gilbert & Sullivan.
- An in-depth look back on a Joe Arpaio arson and puppycide.
- In somewhat lighter dog news: a scientist has figured out a way to read dogs’ minds. Well, read their brain activity, anyhow. Training pups to put up with MRIs must have been an interesting trick. (H/T MLS.)
- And speaking of reading minds … Since inventing the Internet (sorry, Al Gore), has DARPA ever done one single thing that isn’t creepy and totalitarian?
- “Fellow travelers and purity tests.” (Oh, Libertaria!)
Have you gone Primal, Claire?
My better half has, and often Paleo too, even Super Paleo at times. [Among other stuff, Super Paleo (to me) means Primal plus No sugar or added futrose or added sweeteners of Any kind.]
Me, I’m doing the 80/20 thing. Someday maybe I’ll be 100% Primal.
Since doing this Primal stuff three years ago or so – and taking lots of vitamin D3 – we’ve not had a single cold of any kind. And we’ve been around plenty of sick People. YMMV.
And wow can I ever taste additives in food now, I don’t miss those one bit.
clark — Good for you guys. I’d say I’m about 80/20 also, and I don’t put my feeble little brain through the distinctions between primal, paleo, etc. I just keep down the grains and sugars and emphasize nuts, seeds, veggies, fermented foods, meats, fish, healthy fats, and berries and don’t worry much about which system I’m following. Or not following. 🙂 I still put honey in my (homemade) yogurt and stevia in my tea, and anybody who doesn’t like it can … go do whatever they like as long as they leave me alone.
I’m with you; it makes a difference in energy, quality of sleep, and a lot of other ways.
And yes, over time I’ve also discovered I can taste “wrongness” in some foods I used to love. I eat homemade guacamole, for instance, and what’s guac without tortilla chips? Must have corn chips! Yet I’m sometimes shocked by the obvious rancid taste of some chips, as if the industrial oils they’re made with spoiled some time back.
Re: the diet article. I don’t know about the no shame part, it sounds like white (food) guilt to me.
Claire: I didn’t hear you mention beans. I know there’s some controversy about them in the Primal diet (or inconsistency, in my view). Have you deleted them entirely, or are they just a part of the 20%?
Pat — Oh yeah. Beans. Legumes. All kinds of fuss and controversy over those, isn’t there? I haven’t seen any good reason to stop eating those. (What, and give up Mexican food? Nevah!) But I see why some have. I’ll call ’em part of the 20%.
One reason I still eat them is that in an emergency or hard-times things like refries or beans & rice are such naturals. I’ve found that if I’m housebound and on emergency rations for a few days, canned pineapple and cold canned refries is what I want to eat. Might not be primal, but it gets me by; it’s simple, filling, and moderately nutritious.
So I’m not going to de-condition my body to beans. Might be that pintos and rice is all I can afford or all I have on hand one of these days.
Pat, just curious: What do you find inconsistant? This isn’t a subject I’ve looked into very deeply. You probably know more than I.
Claire, I don’t really know the answer to that – I just don’t think it makes sense that beans weren’t around way-back-when. The major thing about Paleo diets is that the food was growing _naturally._ The major thing about cavemen was that they ate whatever they could get their hands on that didn’t kill them. So if wild beans in some form were growing fresh – like peas, limas, or green beans today, even black-eyed peas – it seems reasonable they would have been eaten.
I can understand that researchers today have found bad factors in dried beans, so we now know they can cause, say, a ‘leaky gut’. But those factors are diluted the longer beans are soaked. And some beans are worse than others (red worse than white, for example). If beans and peas are eaten FRESH, without drying, would they be so bad for us? (The only reason we started drying them was to preserve them until we were ready to eat them. Drying is not necessary today; we can can or freeze them ourselves.) And are canned beans, which have been multi-processed, as bad for us as dried beans?
I don’t eat red beans anymore (except occ. refried with a Tex-Mex meal); I do still eat white beans, and all fresh beans, though not as frequently. But I think there is more proof forthcoming before beans are universally condemned.
Sorry for the long-winded answer.
Primal diet = only eat raw T. rex meat! Grrrr!
xkcd is picking on underwater basket weaving? I used to, thanks to my dad using that as an example of the absurd things a college might teach- but then I learned that it is actually a real skill and the best way to weave baskets from some materials that you need to keep soaked while you weave them. Oh well. I can still make fun of most college degrees…
Pat- Also, most wild varieties of peas/beans are toxic, so primitive man might have been wise to just avoid them all. I do wonder if beans were not added to the human diet until fairly recently (evolutionarily speaking).
Do Mesquite and Palo Verde tree beans count as Paleo? They were probably eaten by most of the prehistoric groups in my area.
Kent, I did not know that they were toxic. (Where have you heard that?)
Then that presents a problem of when and why beans were cultivated. It seems to me that cultivation wouldn’t have originally taken place if 1) there were no prior beans (wild or otherwise) to cultivate; and 2) they didn’t like or want to eat the beans in the first place. (And #3: if beans were so toxic, why would they try to cultivate them?)
The toxins in store-bought beans are destroyed by cooking. Once in a while people still get sick or die because they cooked beans in a slow-cooker that didn’t get hot enough to destroy the toxins, but still got hot enough to cook the beans. Usually it’s an older slow-cooker, but not always. The amount of toxin per bean is pretty low, but a bowl full would make for a very unpleasant experience.
There are some wild legumes, and plants that aren’t legumes but have bean-like seedpods, that really are poisonous, but they’re not the ones that cultivated beans were bred from. They are however the reason you shouldn’t go nibbling on something just because part of it looks like something from the store. Know your vegetation!
The exception to all the above is the fava bean, which contains a toxin related to quinine. Most people are able to eat this just fine because the amount is so low, and in fact it gives a slight resistance to malaria. But, there are some people (usually of Mediteranean or north African descent) who have a gene that messes up their body’s ability to deal with this substance. For them, any quinine or fava beans can be enough to cause an overdose, which means that their blood cells self-destruct.
This is all from memory, and I’m a little tired, but I hope it cleared that up.
Matt, another- When I eat mesquite I only eat the pulp out of the pods, not the seeds. I’m not sure what others do.
Ellendra- I’ve eaten multi-bowl servings of undercooked beans* on a couple of occasions, and while the results were very unpleasant for me, they could only have been considered toxic to anyone within a few hundred feet of me.
Pat- Many of the things we eat are also in the nightshade family, but people discovered edible examples and cultivated them. Some people are either very brave or foolish about things they eat. (cough * Bear Grylls* cough) And some toxic things are edible after cooking in a couple of changes of water. Humans are experimental and adaptable.
*(first ex-wife was NOT a cook- maybe someday I’ll share the tale of the Thanksgiving turkey that was full of ice crystals)
Curiosity got me and I checked Mark’s Primal website and found this:
“The type of legumes we’re wary of are dried beans – beans that are allowed to dry on the vine until they rattle in their pods.”
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/are-peas-and-green-beans-healthy/#ixzz1uKsJ18yx
And also this:
“Legumes (beans, lentils, chickpeas, split peas, etc.) aren’t, by any means, the worst thing you can eat, but they don’t make the ideal meal either. In my estimation, legumes fall into the “O.K.” category with wine, chocolate, cheese and other dairy, etc.”
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/beans-legumes-carbs/#ixzz1uKsdFLgN
I’ve never heard of Mesquite and Palo Verde tree beans. Do they rattle in the shell?
One other thing, instead of corn chips, these *might* be a good replacement (if you like them) most of them are primal:
http://www.terrachips.com/our-chips/terra-exotic-vegetable-chips/72822912375
Oh and I forgot to mention, since going Primal and taking D3 we don’t have any more allergy symptoms either. No Springtime allergies and no fall hayfever allergies, we’re almost totally sneeze free. Hope you are too.
@Kent: Here’s a reference: http://www.foodreference.com/html/artredkidneybeanpoisoning.html
My communication skills aren’t the greatest when I’m tired, so any misundserstanding was probably my fault there. Now if only I could sleep…..
Thanks, Ellendra and clark, for the links and info on beans.
~~~
On another subject –libertarianism: “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
I seem to recall that animosity truly raised its head among libertarians about the time that Rand objected (sorry about the pun) to the term “libertarian” being applied to Objectivism’s political position. She wanted to stay within the Republican-Democrat orientation, and away from the anarchist label, which she interpreted libertarianism to mean. From that moment on, EVERYBODY got into the act, and split the definition of libertarianism wide open. There’s never been agreement since.
OK, I admit complete ignorance of any “named” diets. We grow lots of our own food, kill our own game and generally don’t eat store bought canned goods (tuna and salmon excepted), snack foods, mixes, prepared foods, bread or other baked goods. We eat store bought chicken, turkey and pork in addition to our venison and other wild critters.
In this discussion I have seen the terms Grains, Seeds, and Beans used. Are not all of those seeds? If you claim not to eat grains how can you eat seeds? If seeds are good how is it that beans are bad? Curious minds want to know!
Woody — Easy. A grain is a type of seed, yes. A bean is a type of seed, yes. But beans are not grains and seeds are not always (or even usually) grains.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/grain
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bean
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/seed
If you get right down to it, lots of things we eat are “seeds.” Nuts. Eggs.
Lots of overlap there, Woody. First of all, most grains are grasses (which you didn’t mention).
You’re absolutely right – grains are seeds, beans are seeds, even nuts are seeds. But they’re in different families, are utilized in different ways by humans, and harbor different properties (calories, carbohydrates, protein, nutrients, etc) at different stages of their plant life.
The real culprit, as far as your question is concerned, is nomenclature, i.e. it’s our terminology and our usage of the plant at various stages of its life that’s confusing. Luckily the plants know what they are and act appropriately. 🙂
Just like how pumpkins and peppers are botanically fruits :p
Mesquite and Palo Verde are native to various parts of the South West. Mesquite grows heavily in Texas, Palo Verde shows up more in the Sonoran Desert. The green bean pods are eaten raw (small quantities), boiled or steamed. The dried beans are historically ground into meal and used as flour for thickening soups, small ash cakes etc. Mesquite beans are also used for livestock feed.
Just from what Matt, another wrote, I’d say the raw boiled and steamed “green bean pods” are Primal, but when they are dried and ground up they are not. Jmho though.
I wonder why only small quantities are eaten raw? Stomach cramps like from eating too much raw rhubarb?