Fast-5 Diet and Lifestyle: Re: [fast5] Fiber Menace.. Thoughts?

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Re: [fast5] Fiber Menace.. Thoughts?

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Churyl Zeviar <churyl@tmail.com> wrote:

Thank you, Heather. I really appreciate your perspective.
Your post brought up a few more questions...

==1. The bacteria in your lower intestine eat mainly semi-indigestible

polysaccharides, which are basically a kind of fiber. They don't get fed
UNLESS you feed them fiber, because everything else you eat gets

absorbed before it gets there.==

**I wonder how this ties in to the paleo idea that lush vegetables, and
most fiber have only been around for 10,000 years? It seems for millions
of years before that, most foods were meat and seafoods... some fruits.
The nuts were mostly poisonous, the vegetables bitter, the fruits
smaller and seasonal... Also makes me question some people on raw paleo
who exist on all meat and fat diets, and say they have been feeling
amazingly healthy doing that for years (some over 10)??

??? Who in the world believes that? (except certain people selling books maybe). We have coprolite samples of ancient human poop ... and yeah, they ate fiber! They ate lots of plants, most of them way more fibrous and harder to chew than what we eat now. One of the very oldest camps that has been found was basically a hazelnut-roasting place, and they also believe yams were cooked and eaten about as soon as there was fire. If you look at the foods the Native Americans it includes stuff like tree bark, arrowroot, and a zillion kinds of plants. In the tropics they have loads of wild fruits too.

The Inuit were reported as eating whole fish (including the scales and bones) as well as whole birds (feathers and bones). Most early peoples who ate meat typically ate a lot of small animals, lizards, fish, birds ... the whole thing, like a cat would. Talk about literal fiber! Have you ever seen coyote or cougar scat? Human scat looked a lot like that.

The only really low-fiber people I know about are the Maasai and some pastoralists, who live mainly off milk. But milk is a special case: it is the ONE food in the world that is clearly obviously made to sustain a small mammal with no other food supplement. And milk produces butyrate if more butterfat is eaten than can be absorbed readily.

==It is true they [japanese] are smart enough to not eat brown rice.

Basically they are noted for eating lots of "gooey vegetables" ... the

kind that are full of the right polysaccharides.==

So brown rice is not good because the brown part is bad fiber? The white
rice is good fiber?

White rice is pretty much zero fiber: the brown part is grain fiber, which is somewhat problematic. It is harder to digest, and interferes with some nutrients. The Japanese don't get much in the way of nutrients from rice. The nutrients (and fiber) come from things like whole baby fish (with the bones), vegetables, seaweed, shrimp (with the shells), sata-imo yams, konjac.

==Fact is though, your brain runs mainly on sugar, protein is essential
to your body, and your gut likes fiber, esp. certain kinds of fiber.==

Are you saying we should eat sugar, perhaps in the form of fruit and
honey and white rice for our brains? I am personally 2 weeks into
avoiding fruit, honey, and definitely all processed sugars in an effort
to reduce my nightly cravings for it... thoughts?

I'm not sure what the ideal diet is for human beings. My experiment is with the Japanese diet, because I'm fairly sure that it works for them, and because I'm fairly sure that human beings need a "cuisine" ... a set of food traditions and recipes ... not a list of "good foods" and "bad foods". And because it is food that I really do like. But yeah, your brain runs on glucose. It can run on ketones too, but that is an unnatural state for the body, and people who don't get many carbs (like the Inuit) eventually learn to make sugar out of protein.

So based on my experience, you need to experiment. My cravings for sugars went away when I stopped eating gluten ... which turns out to make me way more sick than I was giving it credit for. I do use some honey in my cooking, but I just cannot physically eat foods that are very sweet anymore.