I don't agree that eating fast food automatically makes you an unhealthy and obese person. At the same time, I also realize that being a ''Healthy'' weight and in good shape, doesn't necessarily make you healthy and mean your heart and body is working fine. I actually count almost all of my calories and I personally only eat drive thru caliber fast food occasionally, mostly when I'm home late from work and it's 9:30 or 10:00 and I don't have an hour to cook something, because I need to get to bed in an hour. And I'll only order enough to get the rest of the calories that I need for the day to maintain my weight. I only count calories though, I don't worry about fat or cholesterol, salt, sugar, etc. I notice no difference if I ate 2000 calories a day in fruit or 2000 calories a day in greasy burgers. For me, it's all about maintaining my weight and not being necessarily healthy. Though my blood pressure and all that is doing pretty great and I wouldn't say most of the food that I eat is particularly fatty or not good. I do eat pizza more than occasionally though. For what it's worth, 1 slice of pepperoni pizza and mushroom pizza has even more calories than one of Wendy's jr bacon cheeseburgers.
One other thing I wanna say in regards to my diet. When I order a soda somewhere, I usually order diet. And I know, someone's gonna say ''Well diet isn't good for you either!'' but like I said. For me, it's all about maintaining my body weight. Not being healthy. And aside from gatorade, I rarely drink any beverages with calories in them. My thinking is that a can of soda has 150-160 calories in it, 2 cans have 300-320 calories. I'd much rather EAT an extra 320 calories (that's almost a plain slice of pizza) than drink 320 calories. Because there's plenty of non-calorie choices for drinking. There's not many calorie-free foods. Even when I drink seltzer or tonic water, I drink the diet kinds.
Prefer BK, I guess. At Macs, the burgers are often barely warm. How 'bout those White Castle burgers?!
The sodium in all this crap is ridiculous! If it wasn't for past booze or weed related hunger, I wouldn't touch this shatt!
there was a McD's within walking distance from my house if you crossed the woods and a creek. on wednesday's for several months a year, they would do $1 triple cheeseburgers. it made my wednesdays so much better when i was a kid. good times. fyi i can add 10 lbs in teh winter no problem
We ate and drank much worse stuff a century ago. There were no health or quality standards, no refrigeration, no governmental oversight. Unless you lived next to a mountain stream, your water was always of dubious quality. People survived. Because the human biology adapts. It's the same reason why we go down to Latin America and immediately get Blazin' Raisins while the locals wonder what our problem is. Eating healthier choices is prudent, but too many people are obsessed about what they eat. Anecdotal evidence would probably show that just as many people with average crappy diets live equally as long as most vegans. Physical activity has more to do with longevity and quality of life than our food choices.
This is very much not true. Yes the human body is highly adaptable, but to derive from that there is no need to consider eating an optimal diet is absurd. It's actually true that most humans do not have optimal levels of many minerals and vitamins. It's also true that without these minerals and vitamins the body will shortcut a lot of biological processes. You can survive if you're deficient of magnesium (as most adults in the US are, and are ignorant of) but you will not thrive. Magnesium is incredibly important in many necessary biological processes. When your body is deficient in magnesium, many of the non-vital processes that require magnesium will be bypassed leaving your body in a living but non optimal state. Many people will fall into this type of state for most of their lives. If you don't consciously supplement zinc, magnesium, omega 3 fatty acids, just to name a few, and you don't eat a preposterously particular diet then you are not going to be optimally functioning as a human. There is a reason people like Ray Kurzweil have ridiculous vitamin regimes. If you look into Kurzweil you will see he barely looks to have aged for over a decade. He wants to keep himself healthy as possible until the technological singularity, but that's another topic. And ignorance is bliss. If you've never operated optimally, you will only ever know the best that you have felt. You might suspect that's as optimal as you can feel, that your body operates at that level normally. But you'd almost certainly be wrong. So again I would say your argument is ridiculous, and that it is incredibly important where you get your calories from. To be optimally healthy you are forced to either supplement a mineral and vitamin poor diet, or eat a diet that is rich in minerals and vitamins. Never in human history has such a balanced and nutrient rich diet been available to humans, and you are seeing many people wake up to the drastic impact a fully optimized diet can provide. Also vegan diets are terrible and I would expect most vegans to not live longer based on their diet. It's very difficult to eat a vegan diet and remain optimally healthy.
skinny != healthy A point I implicitly stated before but not explicitly is that your actual phenotype is changed based on your diet. If you don't have the necessary building blocks to express all of your genes, then the less vital ones will be suppressed (i.e. the proteins those genes encode will not be produced). So while genes are important, your genes expression (phenotype) is actually dictated on your availability of micro-nutrients. It's all very well understood at the bleeding edge of science.
If you've never read omnivore's dilemma by Micheal Pollen, that's an eye opening book. I'm not a nutritionist but I do have an undergraduate degree in biology, and beyond that a lot of personal experience in exercise and nutrition. My biggest advice to everyone is stretch a lot and, if you can, practice yoga.
Ah, a fanatic. With an undergraduate degree no less. So, in theory, if I live longer than you, then your hypothesis would be incorrect right? Pump said it best. It's all about the genes baby.
i like how all the health fanatics are saying to try yoga now. that's until something better comes along of course. i heard Kate Hudson't leggings will give you +5 yrs, hell it might even up your chances on beating cancer. that and not eating BK's Chicken Fries
Exactly. Thank you. I respect yoga, it's great exercise. Stretching is absolutely a necessity. But it's not for everybody, just as counting calories or magnesium is for everybody either. My point was, everybody is different and what works for you doesn't necessarily work for everybody else.
Why are vegan diets terrible? And why is it so difficult to eat a vegan diet to remain optimally healthy?
