Everyday Systems

DeneMi wrote: With Sugar Busters my mind has been pretty much trained to think that sugar, white bread, white rice, white flour and white potatoes are basically poison and to be eaten rarely, if ever. So it sounds totally amazing to me to think that I can lose weight on a diet which i actually can have a breakfast burrito on a white flour tortilla and some tater tots or hashbrowns for breakfast if thats what I want! Or that I can bring a sandwich on white bread for lunch if I want. Or that I can choose to eat dinner out at a restaurant without having to study the menu for 30 minutes trying to find something "legal" to order, only to have to pass up the entree I really wanted to settle for something that I didn't enjoy. And to think that I can have some real sweets sometimes! This diet seems so do-able!!

Martha Rose Shulman wrote:
Rice is a thoroughly sustaining food. According to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid in "Seductions of Rice," a beautiful, well researched survey of rice traditions around the world , “Rice has the highest protein digestibility and energy digestibility among all the staple foods.†In most rice-consuming cultures, rice is supplemented with vegetables and legumes, small amounts of meat and fish, and oil.

I don’t share the current national aversion to white rice. True, nutritionists prefer brown rice because the high fiber content slows down the carbohydrate absorption rate. But you can get the same benefit by combining rice with high-fiber vegetables and legumes.

Mr. Alford and Ms. Duguid make another interesting point about the nutritional quality of brown rice:

“It is true that brown rice has more calcium and iron as well as higher protein levels and significantly more of the B vitamins [and] more fiber than white rice. But brown rice is less digestible than white . . . rice. The aleurone layer and embryo, still present in brown rice, contain phytate phosphorus, which seems to interfere with the absorption of calcium, zinc, and iron.â€

Bottom line: if you prefer white rice, just make sure you’re also eating lots of vegetables or beans with it.

Mireille Guiliano wrote:Dieting shows off America’s extremism. And, of course, if dieting worked, there would not be so many heavy and obese people. Our diet gurus of the moment are the grand marshals of our endless parade of “scientifically†devised regimens based on the radical elimination of particular foods in favor of others. When you consider the range of foods that have had their moment in the sun--cabbage soup, grapefruit, low fat, high protein, low carbs--it’s hard to believe that each magic-bullet was aimed at the same human metabolism.

In advocating regulated gastronomic pleasure instead of diets as the most powerful tool of weight control, I have made an unexpected observation: Americans, while still committed to weight loss in principle, are answering diet fatigue in two ways. The obvious one is surrender. The other, oddly, is to stay the course: diet indefinitely in an attempt to lose weight and keep it off. Now that’s a grim thought; no pleasure, no fun. Americans are being pushed to the unthinkable: perpetual dieting to be perpetually overweight.

Blame it on the Puritans.

If you wonder why the French, the most food-obsessed people on the planet, can eat all that cream, butter, and egg yolks and struggle far less with excess weight than Americans who dutifully take home shopping bags of sugarless and fat-free, the answer is: the Puritans. The French never had any; the Americans did. The French had Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles de Gaulle, and Brigitte Bardot.

But no Puritans.

Back in 1620 when the Puritans stepped of the Mayflower, they brought with them the intellectual baggage that if something feels good and makes us happy, it is bad. Discomfort and sacrifice are good. The more uncomfortable and unpleasurable something is, the Puritans thought, the better for you...

...The French seek equal pleasure in a well-prepared meal as in a session of passionate lovemaking. Actually the French favor alternating one with the other. But everything in moderation. The French, after all, coined the phrase la douceur de vivre, the sweetness of living. Americans coined the phrase "No pain, no gain." The way this works, you go through the pain of dieting. Then you gain it all back.

THE NOUVEAUX PURITANS

In recent decades American Puritanism has undergone an evolution. Activities no longer prohibited for religious or moral reasons, are now on the no-no list as unhealthy. This has given the Puritan mentality an in-road to spoiling our previously okay pleasure in eating. The rules are simple: Anything that tastes good, like grilled steak, cheese enchiladas, fresh-brewed coffee, or Key lime pie, are poisons, guaranteed to kill us. Foods such as tofu, bean sprouts, and plain low-fat yogurt are cure-alls promised to put the medical profession out of business and make us all live to 110.

Most new products the food industry has put on the shelves recently carry some (mostly overhyped) health claim. And whatever the fad health food, they add it to everything. During the oat bran craze about the only products on the supermarket shelf without this gritty little addition was laundry detergent and disposable diapers.

These Nouveux Puritans have studies to back up their claims. But my faith in "studies" is weak. I remember one study that concluded that wearing lipstick caused cancer. However, to ingest as much lipstick as they had pumped into those poor little research mice, a human had to eat 90 tubes of lipstick per day!

Across the Atlantic the French hear the results of the American Nouveux Puritan food studies, pause a moment from eating their pate de fois gras, cut a bite of bifteck, sip their Beaujolais, and contemplate the cheese tray as they shrug and say, "Il sont fous, ces Americains." They're crazy, those Americans."

wones wrote:NOUVEAUX PURITANS