angelka71 wrote:Isn't it amazing to be able to eat these w/o feeling carb guilt???
sandwiches...REAL sandwiches on hoagie buns, sour dough, etc.
Sure, just go live someplace else!
I have a cute cartoon that I found in a local newspaper aimed at natural health practices. It shows a slim Chinese person with a big bowl of rice in front of him; a slim French woman surrounded by loaves of bread; an Italian with heaps of pasta in front of him. The caption under each is "slim eating ____" whatever it is they were eating. The last frame is a heavy American who is saying "I'm so fat -- it must be all the carbs!"
Last week in a post I mentioned an article I'd read in
Prevention magazine in the mid-1990s called "How in the World to Stay Slim" and it gave the eating habits of people in various countries. At the end it summarized their habits -- which were much the same, though the foods were obviously different. One of those things were that starches were the "star" of their meals rather than meat. In northern Europe it was potatoes and bread, in Italy it was bread and pasta, in Asia it was rice.
A few of the vegans here have mentioned the McDougall Program -- it's a vegan, starch-based diet for regaining your health and weight loss, based in large part on the traditional diets of Asians. Dr. McDougall's premise is that around the world, people eat starch-based diets and remain slim and healthy. The only thing that differs is the starch.
Two or three years ago I received an email from one of the vendors at my local farmer's market at Thanksgiving time. He was promoting what he had available for the holiday. I remember thinking "no wonder this meal is so heavy on starches" because it was potatoes, sweet potatoes, squashes and very little in the way of green vegetables -- just the hardier ones.
It occurred to me that Dr. McDougall is right. People thrive on starch-based diets. Nearly everywhere in the world there are a few starches that are abundantly available, cheap and store well. This forms the basis of the local diet. The biggest difference between the McDougall Program and how people traditionally eat is not only do most people add small amounts of meat, poultry, fish, dairy and eggs (not to mention added fats) to supplement the available starches, they also eat more or less of the starch depending on what vegetables and fruits are available. In the summer when fresh produce is abundant, they eat more of that and less of the starch -- probably because the stores of it are low. In the winter they eat more of the starch and much less fresh produce (or what they have put up from summer's bounty).
Interesting article from his web site:
http://www.nealhendrickson.com/mcdougal ... pucarb.htm
There's a lot of similarity between what Dr. McDougall teaches and what Michael Pollan says: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Just recently I came up with an analogy: carbs are to the human body what gasoline is to a car: the necessary fuel. Fats and proteins are like engine oil and coolant: necessary, but in much smaller amounts. It takes all of them to make a car or human body to work properly, but one is needed more than the others.
The biggest differences between us and others around the world who consume starch-based diets is that we consume far less of the fiber-rich foods and far more food than we need. We eat to excess. We also generally aren't as active.
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do. Not that the nature of the thing itself has changed but our power to do it is increased." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You are what you eat -- so don't be Fast, Easy, Cheap or Fake."
