Byrain wrote:
MacMoney wrote:
Well, there is fruits and berries... Of course, there isn't nearly as much sugar in them as there is in chocolate bars or sweet pastries or cookies or cake, but there's sugar.
Those are different kinds of sugars...
Sure, but we were just talking about sugar, not different forms of it. And you can make chocolate bars, sweet pastries, cookies and cake with fructose if you want. It's just cheaper and easier with sucrose so the industry uses that and pushes it on people. There's a trend here in Finland to flavor soft drinks with fructose instead of other sugars these days. As someone pointed out, fruits are of course much healthier because they're not as rich in calories, but are much more rich in vitamins and minerals, but again, that was not the question, the question was whether the caveman had sugar or not as part of his diet. And well, he did, just not nearly to the extent as it is part of most people's diets today.
As for eating raw meat, well, eating raw poultry or pork isn't probably the best idea, especially the former (also, it tastes fowl), even if - depending on where you live - there's a diminishingly small chance of actually getting any parasites or diseases from it. Raw beef or game is another thing, especially if cured (though I'm not sure if it's actually raw anymore at that point). The thing is though, poultry and pork are farm animals that are kept. The caveman hunted, well, game. A lot of the parasites and bacteria that pork and poultry might carry are spread because they are housed close together so it's easy for them to spread. In the wilderness, not so much. Of course, the sicklier animals of the herd were easier to catch, but there were other hunters besides humans as well.
Napero wrote:
you'll have a very healthy diet left: meat, eggs, vegetables, berries, fruit, nuts, fish, root vegetables, insects (!), shellfish, all sorts of greens... Suddenly, even if you try, you will have very hard time actually overeating enough to gain weight, at least if you do even moderate exercise.
Oh, I could do this easy, at least with the supermarkets of today. Just bring me a huge bowl of peanuts and I'll go from t here. Or if money isn't a problem... Well, then it's just super easy.
Napero wrote:
Eating fructose in fruit is different from eating honey. If you can't see the difference, at least from the point of energy density, there's no point in discussing this further. The point is that if you ever end up in a discussion on this, promoting the idea I outlined above, someone is going to defend a manic candy habit of a pound a day with that reasoning. If a primitive man got more than a spoonful of honey annually, he was either a lucky bastard or a bee-stung pin cushion with an incredible pain threshold. He did eat natural fruit, probably, but that combines a moderate amount of fructose and glucose with plenty of bulk, fiber, nutrients and, well, effort.
Of course there's a difference between stuffing yourself with honey and stuffing yourself with fruit. Was just pointing out that the caveman did use sugar too. Just not to the extent that it is generally used today.
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I'm not following you. Why shouldn't we eat cabbages and beans?
Cabbage has loads of vitamin C (super essential for humans as we can't synthesize it) and glutamine. Beans are loaded with vitamin B9, complex sugars, iron, and fibres.
You can argue that too much cabbage is bad for you, but like someone else said, too much water can kill you as well. Humans learn what is good for them and in roughly what amounts. If a certain food is able to keep us alive without making us sick too often, chances are it shouldn't be a problem if it were part of our regular diet.
Why would you think that cabbage would be forbidden in the paleodiet? You can very well eat it raw. In fact, coleslaw, one of the best side dishes in the world, features raw cabbage. Also, aside from a flatulence and a bad breath and body odor, I don't think cabbage causes very serious problems. Unless you really go overboard.
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Nah, two things. One, there are chemical differences between the fructose in the peaches and the sucrose in the candies (fructose is a monosaccharide and sucrose is a disaccharide). Your body has to use an enzyme to break sucrose down into fructose and glucose. In other words, sugar from fruits is immediately available for use in the cells, but sugar from candies has to be digested a bunch first. Two, more importantly, the candy is calorie-dense and nutrient-sparse. The peach is calorie-sparse and nutrient-dense. So, in other words, while they do both have sugars in them, the fruit sugar is simple for our bodies to utilize and comes alongside a bunch of vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc. The candy just comes with a more complex sugar and nothing else, except artificial color and flavor and crap.
Funnily enough, more than half of the sugar in a peach is sucrose instead of fructose or glucose. Yes, sucrose has to be broken down, but it is done by the gastric acids as well as enzymes in the intestine so it is a rather quick process. It's the fact that the candy bar has such a huge load of the sugars packed into tiny space that makes it such a wallop. Candy bars give a big surge of energy after consumed, but blood glucose levels crash quickly from that surge as well.