Selfsufficientish.com

I heard a comment on the radio the other day from a doctor who said the biggest risk factor in cancer is old age

Cancers appear to be more common nowadays but it is merely because we live longer. Previously people died of other diseases long before they got cancer

Lifestyles do play a part too -- if you don't eat enough fibre, then you are at risk of a number of health issues, colorectal cancer being one of them. If you smoke or breathe polluted air then lung disease & lung cancer risks are increased

If you avoided everything that has been associated with cancer at some time, then your diet & lifestyle choices would be so limited & boring you would probably die of malnutrition a lot quicker than you would die of cancer by eating a sensible diet

Cant link anything (too complex) but inspired by this thread did read excerpts from China Study,I have decided as a result,to give up eating everything.
Found interesting critique of China study (which initially I'd confused with a film starring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas ,when he was good).You should find it if you tap in Raw food SOS the china study Fact or Fiction.It seems to be by a lady with the unfortunate name of Denise Minger.

oldjerry wrote:Cant link anything (too complex) but inspired by this thread did read excerpts from China Study,I have decided as a result,to give up eating everything.
Found interesting critique of China study (which initially I'd confused with a film starring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas ,when he was good).You should find it if you tap in Raw food SOS the china study Fact or Fiction.It seems to be by a lady with the unfortunate name of Denise Minger.

yes, iv read that one. shes pointing out all the flaws. its unusual to get a raw foodist who bashes the psudosciene behind the whole raw food movment. i was talking with her on a raw vegan forum, she got banned for challenging them, i got banned about a week later too

I can't link to any specific study, but it does seem to me that merely living is what does the damage - and we do live much longer now than we would in a wholly natural environment (i.e. about a half-million years ago). As far as our mechanical "design" goes, we should probably all be dead by the age of 30 or so. If we were machines, then the artifical extension of our design lifespan would inevitably increase our failure rate, which is pretty much akin to what we actually see happening.

As we get older, something - even if it's absolute decrepitude - is going to get us in the end. What "civilisation" has done by extending our allotted span is introduce us to many more somethings which would not be of concern if we died young.

Mike

oldjerry wrote:Cant link anything (too complex) but inspired by this thread did read excerpts from China Study,I have decided as a result,to give up eating everything.

Yes that was pretty much how I felt, so I shall read the ironically named Ms Minger, thank you, and hopefully she has nailed it (so to speak) ;-). Although actually I'm too late to save because I'm veggie again now (not for health reasons though).

Demi, was it 30 bananas a day you got banned from? (Good for you if it was, I find them scary).

(And was Michael Douglas ever good? God, I learn something every day ).

[quote="Susie
Demi, was it 30 bananas a day you got banned from? (Good for you if it was, I find them scary).

(And was Michael Douglas ever good? God, I learn something every day ).[/quote]



yes it was!

yes they are a bunch of crack pots! every time i questioned somthing and linked to somthing which contradicted what they were saying, everyone would pounce on me defending their beliefs and my posts would quickly be removed. they dont take well to critasism, in that they deal with it by puting their fingers in their ears and shouting 'lalalalala i cant hear you!'
they, and many others, are cult like, with their leader durain rider and that anorexic girl ( cant remember her name ).

it actualy says somthing in the forum rules about not being allowed to critasize their way of life, which is why anyone that does ends up getting banned. look here: http://www.30bananasaday.com/forum/topi ... -procooked

I took a look. They are scary. Leaving aside the ethical, practical & scientific arguments against their ludicrous lifestyles, would you want to go for a pint with any of these people? Not that they could drink it, mind. And even if they do live for a long time, would they have any fun doing it?

Is 'fun',in their dictionary? Poor choice of word I guess,but some people on that site are seriously anal!

Actually for lefties of a certain age,it seems like a re-run of the faction fighting of the early seventies( SWP vs. IMG etc.etc),yet instead of having tantrums over various translations of dead Russians,they're kicking off over cooked carrots!

It seems to me this and similar bizarre diets can only be the end result of a decadent society (think 21C version of "peel me a grape" ). It must cost an absolute fortune, unless they have their own industrial size orchards, growing tropical fruit - judging from the sheer number of bananas, mangoes and papayas they seemed to be shovelling down in the one thread I looked at.

I had 12 cup smoothie made with:
4 lbs of bananas,
a big slice of pineapple,
4 ozs of strawberries,
1 golden kiwi,
1 large mango juice from
1 large grapefruit,
1 large navel,
3 pixie tangerines.
This baby truly is delicious AND nutritious.
1800 calories worth of high carb nutrtion and it is marvelous.

I started my morning off with 712 grams of yummy watermelon.

I'm having a salad tonight with spiralized cucumber and tomatoes
and home grown sunflower greens with 1/2 lb of some greens and a
lucious whirled vegie dressing of some sort. Spur of the moment thing.

I couldn't afford to eat like that! But even if I could, 12 cups of anything, especially that sweet, would make me barf (or maybe that's the point - I saw a few references to Bulimia!). And have they lost the ability to chew? The number of smoothies they consume between them must keep their dentists fat and healthy.

I found the avatars scary, not to mention the attitudes. An eating disordered persons dream 712g of watermelon - who weighs it?

their main 'theory' behind why they eat raw is that raw foods contain digestive enzymes which are killed by cooking which appaerntly makes is difficult for your body to digest the food itself. even though our own bodies have loads of our own digestive enzymes ( amylase, pepsin ect ) for digesting our food, apparently this isnt enough ergo making cooked food bad for us.


and yes all that fruit dissolves their teeth and they're all on vitamin and mineral supplaments because they are deficient in B12 ect from eating a limited diet.


i like the idea of eating loats of fresh food. it is healthy, yes. but not if thats all you eat. you have to include a wide variety of foods, cooked and raw, to be able to get a balenced diet. i think the healthiest diet is one which doesnt leave you deficient in anything, where your body can obtain all its nutrition from healthy natural foods, cooked and raw.



i like this sentence from the forum rules:

"Whether or not there is overwhelming scientific evidence to support the claim that steamed veggies are bad for us, experience and reason suggests that they are not part of an optimal human diet."

in other words there is absoultly no scientific evidence that steamed vegges are bad for us because they are not bad for us!

There's actually a pretty good argument that the invention of cooking was a key factor in human evolution: Did Cooking Make Us Human?

gregorach wrote:There's actually a pretty good argument that the invention of cooking was a key factor in human evolution: Did Cooking Make Us Human?

yes, from my understanding cooked and raw foods contain the same amount of energy. but cooking the food breaks down its structure so its easier for us to digest and therfor we use less energy from our bodies for the prosses of digestion. raw foods are not broken down so our bodies have to use more energy to digest them. so your body burns more calories in the prosess of digesting raw foods than it does with cooked foods, so if you want to loose weight eating the equivalent in raw food your body will actucally burn more calories digesting 10 raw apples than 10 cooked apples.
iv even heard ( although im not 100% sure this is true ) that certain things, celery being one of them, contain less calories in them ( raw ) than your body spends to digest them. so theoretically, you could eat loads of these foods and the more you eat the more weight you loose. but i dont know if that actuly true or not, might just be another fad.

Had a quick glance - it looks quite interesting, I'll have a better look later.

A couple of things occurred to me about that other site. I saw references to eating what chimps eat - unless it's been more recently debunked wasn't there a famous study that revealed chimps were cannibals and also ate insects? Not cooked, I'll grant.

They seem to base their entire diet on bananas - is it just me that finds a beautiful irony in basing one's diet on a plant that is doomed to extinction.

As for digestive enzymes. My understanding is that most raw vegans have to supplement them because humans actually can't digest an entirely raw diet. Which chimps can.

Green Aura wrote:They seem to base their entire diet on bananas - is it just me that finds a beautiful irony in basing one's diet on a plant that is doomed to extinction.

There's also a wonderful irony in basing your raw-food paleo primate diet on a plant that's pretty much only edible by humans as a result of careful selective breeding and extensive cloning...

yes thats true!


yes chimps and some other apes and primates hunt and eat meat including other monkeys and even members of their own species from different family groups when they come into contact with them over teritory. they are certainly not vegan