Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword (1999) [pdf]

http://www.2ndchance.info/birdlover-cerealsword.pdf

by primroot • 11 years ago

43 48 11 years ago

2ndchance.info

quelsolaar• 11 years ago

Everything is a double-edged sword. Even a single-edge sword is a double-edged sword.

knodi123• 11 years ago

ouch, my brain.

gyom• 11 years ago

Nice !

It's not really a paradox, though, because "being a double-edged sword" is a comparison that's being made with regards to the decision of using that particular single-edge sword.

And "being a single-edge sword" here is a technical description of the physical object.

But that quote is something worth writing down somewhere.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

It's written down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNtgdspXypo (NSFW)

It's from a Louis C.K. routine.

pierrec3• 11 years ago

So in countries where nutritionally varied food is not widely available, people are so reliant on cereal sources that they become afflicted by deficits in many nutrients. Doesn't have any easy solution.

But the paper also raises multiple times the point that vegetarian diets tend to be too reliant on cereals, such as here:

"Because the bioavailability of zinc from meat is four times greater than that from cereals [113], it is clear that the displacement of animal-based foods by cereal-grain- and plant-based diets is not only responsible for impaired zinc metabolism in developing countries, but also in western populations adopting vegetarian diets [114, 115]."

It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you add a bit of meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients. This can be challenging if you only use "traditional" food, but it's made easier by products like Vega powder (which I've been having recently, pretty good!), which specifically try to compensate frequent shortcomings of a vegan diet, or I suppose HN favorites like Soylent and Mealsquares. I'm not sure the last two are really appropriate as vegetarian complements, though.

rancur2• 11 years ago

I, personally, began experiencing this myself. If I'm eating healthy, I can add in cereal. If I'm not, I feel physically horrible eating cereal. So I just avoid it and try to eat healthy meals all the time. Keeps my productivity and mood high, and you would not believe how good my skin looks when I've been eating plenty of vegetables for the last week.

magic_beans• 11 years ago

Note: cereal grains are not "cereal" (I'm assuming you mean breakfast cereal)?

bane• 11 years ago

At the moment, believe it or not, Soylent is vegan.

One thing I've noticed in lots of diet advocacy literature is that you'll find statements like "this nutrient is available in that food" without ever specifying the amount or how much you have to eat to make up for the lack of meat/gluten/whatever the diet is trying to keep you from eating.

Quite often people will then build up meals in that diet thinking that they'll have all of the various nutrients they need, but it turns out it doesn't have sufficient concentrations of certain important ones. And you would have to eat multiple kilograms of the replacement food to get enough of the nutrient to be useful.

The amount of nutrition and food science somebody has to know to live healthily on an alternative diet can sometimes be staggering.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

"Cadmium" is not, in fact, made with real Cadmus.

logn• 11 years ago

I found the same thing. The best blog-like sources I found are livestrong.com and whfoods.com.

By far the best source of info I've found is http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list which is a database of all foods, even pre-packaged ones.

And this is helpful too to know daily intake recommendations: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/DRI_Tables/recommended_inta...

I had no part in this app, but have used it too, and it's based on the gov data from above: cronometer.com

Spooky232• 11 years ago

The crowd is generally right about things. Over the last 10,000 years or so, everyone with the resources to do so has adopted a omnivorous diet. You offset the cost of meat and fresh fruits with grains. There's a reason that you'll get a potato and asparagus with your $50 steak at a restaurant.

In our society today, we've created a desert in a sea of abundance. We have the ignorant and lazy getting by on a diet of cheap bread, ramen and sugar fortified with vitamins. Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.

stevoski• 11 years ago

How do you explain the roughly 500 million vegetarians in India?

quonn• 11 years ago

Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.

What does skin color have to do with veganism? Nothing at all. And most vegans are actually brown, as the sibling comment has pointed out. This is not a "first world" problem, since in fact the first world is clearly consuming the most meat. (+)

Want to know what's decadent? The scale of industrial meat production. Keeping animals who never see any daylight in a much too small space for example. Eating beef everyday despite climate change.

(+) And, by the way, I have always disliked the term "first world problem". On average, life tastes pretty much the same for everyone, though obviously it's different in extreme circumstances. Suffering and pain and real and imagined problems feel essentially the same for everyone. By all means, let's improve the economic conditions in the third world but let's stop pretending economic abundance somehow equals happiness and a lack of problems.

SwellJoe• 11 years ago

You're conflating a "vegetarian diet in a developed nation" with a "diet that has severely limited food options", and making it seem as though a vegetarian in a developed nation would have a hard time remaining healthy. This is misleading.

It is at least as easy to be a healthy vegetarian in a developed location as it is to be a healthy omnivore in the same location.

You are also conflating "vegetarian diet" with "cereal-grain heavy diet" which is also misleading when applied to the developed world. Vegetarians in much of the developed world have effectively unlimited access to non-cereal grain foods, and there are many excellent vegetarian zinc sources (nuts, seeds, and beans among them).

In short: This paper cannot usefully be applied to the eating habits of people in developed nations in the way that you are applying it, because it is based primarily on the premise of a diet that is heavily cereal grain based, by necessity, which is not a description that matches the population you're attempting to apply these results to.

It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you eat meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients.

And, this one is just inaccurate. A balanced vegetarian diet in the developed world is no more difficult than a balanced omnivorous diet in the developed world. A fully vegan diet does introduce the necessity to think about B12, as it is not readily available in a vegan diet.

There's vast swaths of solid science indicating that reducing meat consumption has positive health impacts. Only when you read it through the lens of a "paleo" diet fanatic does one interpret the data to mean the opposite.

metric10• 11 years ago

The quote you gave refers to cereals specifically, not vegetarian diets in general. Fruits and vegetables are very high in a wide variety of nutrients and I would argue that it's far easier to eat an all vegetarian diet vs an all meat diet. Sadly, bacon just doesn't have the nutritional profile of spinach.

EDIT: Just for the heck of it, here's spinach vs bacon at similar calorie counts:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=spinach+2.3lb http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bacon+0.1lb

And I'm just using spinach as an example...A vegetarian diet should have a wide range of fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. and you should do your research on it before starting.

pierrec3• 11 years ago

The quote you gave refers to cereals specifically, not vegetarian diets in general.

That's wrong, the last sentence refers to "western populations adopting vegetarian diets" in general, and cites references that suggest this. That's why I chose it. I'm not arguing that vegetarian and vegan diets are quintessentially malnutritious. I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.

jshen3• 11 years ago

It depends on how you define meat. I'm a vegetarian, and it doesn't seem to be hard to get enough zinc without eating beef, chicken, etc.

http://bembu.com/foods-high-in-zinc

Eat some shrimp, spinach, peanuts, etc and you should be good. I've been test a number of times and haven't had a problem with zinc.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Eat some shrimp

Sure, if you're a vegetarian who eats seafood, it's easy.

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

I know that multivitamin pills have bad rap in various circles. But the bioavailability of many simple vitamins is very high when given in tablet form.

So what I'd really like to know is what happens with

   cereal / vegetarian / vegan diet

plus

   cheap, easily available multivitamin
   and mineral supplement pills

Maybe that's most of what's needed? The article does mention supplements, but only piecemeal.

Of course, people still need protein. You won't get that from a cheap vitamin pill, and it's tricky to do right with a vegan diet. Fortunately I live in the USA and beef is relatively cheap. "Beef. It's what's for dinner".

BTW I have vague recall of Northern vs Southern diets in the US Civil War. The claim was that this played an important part in the health and strength of the soldiers. The Union soldiers had more beef and wheat in their diets. The Confederate soldiers had more pork and corn. The Union won.

Spooky232• 11 years ago

The civil war claim is pretty weak. There was no refrigeration in those days (at least in the field). The soldier's provided nutrition mostly came from hardtack and salted pork/bacon/beef. They also had stuff like dried peas and beans. At some point the union soldiers had some access to condensed milk.

The soldiers bought stuff (or were preyed upon) by various camp followers selling more stuff.

Generally speaking, the South had a weak supply chain, so they were more often to go without. I think that fact spoke more to the eventual Union victory.... industrial economies can absorb more punishment than a agrarian slave economy.

a_c_s• 11 years ago

Bioavailability is rather complicated: for any given nutrient it can be enhanced by the presence of certain other nutrients but diminished by others.

Your comment also ignores phytonutrients* (which includes flavonoids and some anti-oxidants) and the effects of diet on gut flora, both of which topics we are just beginning to understand.

This is why, until we really understand the nitty-gritty of all of the hundreds (thousands?) of chemicals contained in food and how they interact, the best recommendations involve eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked.

* http://extension.psu.edu/health/news/2012/the-importance-of-...

Scaevolus• 11 years ago

Have there been any meta-analyses on the effects of phytonutrients? A recent analysis on antioxidants failed to disprove the null hypothesis (no effect) for most of them other than Vitamin D.

primroot2• 11 years ago

And then, there's the (IMO certain) outcome that, when we come to "really understand," we'll realize that "eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked" is the most economically viable option for keeping optimal health, when there is access to a healthy natural environment.

pierrec3• 11 years ago

This article points out problems with unbalanced vegetarian and vegan diets. A balanced one is not that hard to achieve, there are many good resources that give you examples of such varied diets. If well done, supplements are unnecessary apart from vitamin B12. Even B12 doesn't need to be in pills: vegans can get it from marmite/vegemite, and vegetarians from eggs and diary.

That being said, it's still advisable to check for deficits, of course.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

I hope the claim was based on more than "The Union won". Otherwise we can say:

The Union soldiers wore blue. The Confederate soldiers wore grey. The Union won. The conclusion is obvious.

GordonS• 11 years ago

Of course, people still need protein. You won't get that from a cheap vitamin pill, and it's tricky to do right with a vegan diet

Not really - lentils, beans, peas, seeds, nuts, tofu and tempeh are all good sources of protein.

caligastia• 11 years ago

There is a set of tools here that allow for a hyper-efficient lifestyle based on a new kind of wheat bread superfood:

http://breadflower.com/

iand675• 11 years ago

You're kidding, right?

ComteDeLaFere• 11 years ago

Except...

The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682587

primroot2• 11 years ago

I cannot access that link, but I think it's important to note that the subject of the publication is mainly cereal grains (seeds of gramineae). Other sources of carbohydrates (such as root vegetables) have very different nutritional profiles (e.g. many are a source vitamin C). Chris Masterjohn has written about the consumption of starch among hunter-gatherers.

Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword (1999) [pdf]

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