In Jordan, an ancient bread tradition rises again
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
This was a revelation in taste and health in my 40's :) I realized that all the no carb / low carb fads of the past few years could be replaced with eating what people were eating thousands of years ago, before economic optimization turned wheat into nutrient-free, calorie dense commodity.
(Similar things happened with rice and corn -- the heirloom varieties are amazing; the commodity stuff is highly processed and has fewer nutrients)
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Remember there was that trend of people eating a McDonald's hamburger without the bun? Do people still do that?
They were onto something (processed wheat makes you sick), but the sad thing is that the real solution isn't available because of economics. You could eat it with real bread from heirloom wheat, and it wouldn't cause the health problems.
But you don't have that option. (Although obviously the meat leaves something to be desired too)
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Another random anecdote: the first episode of Chef's Table: Pizza on Netflix now tells the story of an Italian guy from NYC who discovered amazing wheat in Arizona and makes acclaimed pizza there :)
Sweet corn traits have little to do with the rest of the corn crop.
Any corn (maize) is unrecognizable compared to its unmodified form and has been for hundreds or thousands of years.
It wouldn't make economic sense to use the same thing for corn on the cob vs. doritos / Frito Lay vs. high fructose corn syrup, and it likely isn't
In the last case, it's mostly chemistry and it doesn't even matter what the original plant was
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that said the corn at the farmer's market is way better than supermarket corn :) And just as cheap (when it's in season), unlike some other produce
Does it? How? Are we assuming a diet with no other sources of fibre or vitamins?
If you get a varied diet you can have fast food once in a while, but it isn't very healthy alone.
Poor people eat garbage in the US.
I think as adults people tend to not be able to metabolize that kind of diet. In populations, it repeatably causes a typical set of chronic diseases ("Western diet disease", obesity, diabetes, etc.).
And there is more processed wheat/corn/rice in 2020 than there was in 1980, due to economic optimization. It's just harder to avoid
So there was a trend away from carbs and bread in the last decade or 2, and those people could have also just avoided processed wheat / soft white bread of the type talked about in the original article.
Carbs can be GOOD if they come from a good source, which the original article is talking about
IIRC, it's like milk - if you're descended from a population where X was a staple, you're less likely to have issues digesting it, because that got selected out over the years.
> In populations, it repeatably causes a typical set of chronic diseases ("Western diet disease", obesity, diabetes, etc.).
Except a diet with excessive fat also correlates strongly to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Which makes sense, because insulin resistance is about how your body interacts with glucose, and every source of energy ultimately becomes glucose in your body.
(And there's increased risk with high levels of triglycerides in your blood and low levels of HDL)
> Carbs can be GOOD if they come from a good source, which the original article is talking about
Carbs aren't good or bad, they're just a complex sugar. Yes, it's defibitely better if your source of carbohydrates also includes vitamins and fibre, but if you're eating sufficient vegetables, white bread or traditional Jordanian durum bread, it really makes no difference.
And as our conversation has demonstrated, it's not just "white flour makes you sick".
And everything is bad for you in excess.
Try going to a Mongolian circa Chinggis Khaan diet where 40% of your inputs are protein (near the limits of protein dominant diet the human body can take) and you'll have great fun not shitting for a week, then shitting uncontrollably for a week or two.
As Joe Rogan found out...
So, I fully agree that gaining most of your energy from white bread is very bad for you, but I do not agree with the statement that "processed white flour makes you sick", as that requires so many caveats you'd need a conveyancing lawyer to sort through them all.
I believe the most salient issue, the most predictive one, for a wide range of health issues is food processing, due to economics.
Comment thread from 20 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32979216
Especially this on why processing is the issue, and not a particular macronutrient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32987219
But I also do think that there is a very typical "Western diet" that causes chronic diseases, and it contains a lot of processed wheat (and corn). The comment in this thread about the receipts of going to Walmart and then McDonald's is exactly what I'm talking about. (And it's just sad that people don't have more options; they live in food deserts.)
Except a diet with excessive fat also correlates strongly to obesity and type 2 diabetes.
I believe it's processed fat! i.e. there is a huge difference between
1) a pure white chicken breast with all the natural fat dried out of it, frozen and unfrozen, and then smothered in mayo (every fast food franchise sells some version of this)
2) a chicken cooked in its own fat
The latter has nutrients that the former doesn't. You have to eat more calories of the former to feel full
If you subscribe to the notion that sugar is poison[2][3], then highly refined, processed, wheat flour is also poison.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22206-insulin...
[2] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/104177/sugar-poison-says-u...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM (see 35-39min)
Meanwhile, pasta made from white flour has a lower GI than white bread, but also lower than sucrose.
Which also makes sense, as bread has sugar added to it as part of the baking process, and also to enhance consumer uptake in certain markets.
(US bread contains more added sugar than bread in my country).
So, this leads me to a clarifying question or two:
1) What is the incidence of type 2 diabetes in Italy and SE Asia? Given the prevalence of pasta in the former, and rice in the latter.
2) In your country, is white bread really the main source of daily carbohydrates?
I totally agree that eating huge amounts of refined carbohydrates is unhealthy, but I haven't seen anything here that shows that white flour as a part of a balanced diet will inherently make you sick.
The glycemic index from that table just shows that a certain kind of white wheat bread is digested faster than pure sucrose, but slower than boiled potatoes.
The effect of any food that contains starch or sugar depends not only on the glycemic index, but also on the ingested amount. Moreover, the effect of eating bread depends on the other food that is ingested at the same time, which will slow down the digestion and lower the glycemic index in comparison with eating just bread alone, without anything else. Sweet food with high sugar content is much more likely to be eaten alone than bread.
While the digestion speed for any pure sugar or for boiled potatoes or rice is about the same for any kind of sugar, potatoes or rice, there is a huge number of varieties of bread, which are digested at different rates and which have different glycemic indexes.
From a table like that it is not possible to know what kind of bread has been tested.
For example, I make at home a special kind of bread with very high protein content (about 40% protein, while the commercial breads have less than 10% protein). It is made using only white wheat flour and water, but the dough is washed to remove about 75% of the starch, enriching the dough in gluten.
I can bet that such a white wheat bread has a glycemic index much lower than sucrose.
Have you any evidence for that actually being a real thing?
Isn't wheat... It's an entirely different family of grasses (millet, teff, sorghum are all types of millets).
Most of our longevity comes down to antibiotics and better childbirth.
A huge amount of today's food is basically bland, over-processed, mass produced, Round-up soaked, hormone-addled, preservative-laden, antibiotic and micro-plastic filled sludge that uses fat, salt, sugar and colorants to pass as edible.
Claiming this as superior to the local, artisanal, organic produce filled diets with a variety of meats from wildlife that hadn't been exploited to extinction is a very, very, very hot take.
But the diet that Americans eat today is worse than that of the past, adjusted for income
i.e. we are > 1000x wealthier now, but eat poorer quality food than somebody with the same wealth 1000, 2000, or even 10,000 years ago.
This is because the entire food industry has "scaled" and become economically optimized
It's mistake to think we can't regress, or haven't regressed and forgotten valuable knowledge -- architecture is another good example
Wow that's brutal. Not news that the IMF is used in this way but it's rare to see the specific mechanisms and their side effects so clearly.
If my memory is correct both institutions and the European equivalent are overrun by Chicago school types.
Varoufakis is not brilliant but his critique of how international finance regimes treat national banks who step into another paradigm is brilliant, and worth reading. It may be self serving, but that does not (to me) undermine how duplicitous the world banking leadership can be. Regarding Greece their only concern was "save germany"
Lebanon's loss of their grain store should be a wake up call. There are domestic reasons why it happened and international consequences of why they wound up there.
Oh, and we're forcing a 20%+ cut across the board on pensions and welfare because you need more poor people.
Just sucks when it's your country we're testing our theories out on.
Strange that they ended up there given that the entire rationale of the CAP was continent-wide security in food.
Or asked the other way round: Why do countries join the Euro when neither Sweden nor Great Britain do and (almost) all economists say that it doesn't work if you have a weak economy?
Politics. If you have a weak economy it's perceived by the population that switching to a strong currency will instantly increase their purchasing power.
To me, that undermined the mutuality which is presumably why the EU exists.
Both Sweden and Great Britain looked at national specific economic things. GB I think in the main it was for city of London finance sector reasons and parochialism about the pound. Sweden, it was put to referendum.
However, who has to pay is not my point. That 'secret' €2.8 billion loan doesn't fundamentally change the analysis of the Greek economy. 'They must have known' cannot be ignored. The Greek situation fulfilled economic theories that are broadly known.
So why did banks willingly underestimate the risk? If you look at Piraeus [3], crushing Greece cannot be a long term strategic target.
*edit: The mutuality was crushed in the setup. There was no perspective for Greece to develop inside the Euro. Subsidies to compensate the strong Euro don't work because the economy aligns to those subsidies and not to market demands. The mutuality is that the richer countries keep paying subsidies and the 'lucky' individual receivers have a good life within their poor community. That's not a good outlook.
Question remains: Can something be done to allow for economic prosperity in Greece within this framework? How can the startups be selected that rebuild the Greek economy so that every citizen benefits?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2
[2] https://gm-media-library.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/image_7f...
(We still subsidise it in other ways, like Crown funded R&D, although that's viewable as an investment, especially around methane emission reductions, but also implicitly subsidise it by not making polluting industries pay for their externalities, but these are minuscule in comparison to the market interventions present overseas).
The US, UK, and EU make heavy usage of both subsidies and tariffs. The IMF is renowned for their endorsement of "free market for thee, but not for me".
We haven't manufactured cars here since the early 80s when tariffs were dropped, although to be fair, by then it was Japanese companies manufacturing cars here, not Kiwis in particular, our automotive industry is ahem renowned for the Trekka[0], Duzgo[1], and of course, the Bob Semple "Tank"[2].
Likewise, our clothing manufacturing industry has shrunk to a few niche companies that focus on export.
When subsidies and tariffs were removed from the agricultural sector, it forced quite a few farmers into bankruptcy and there were some suicides. It caused very real pain, but it now means that our agricultural industry is strong enough to be competitive in markets where their domestic producer competitors are getting significant assistance from the government.
Our neoliberal phase did a lot of harm, but there was some good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekka
Putting pressure on certain essential markets so they aren’t entirely lost to foreign competitors in different situations is necessary for a healthy local economy. Balancing greed and necessity is hard, but the only people advocating for totally free markets are the winners in those arrangements.
It was ironic to watch his character even suggesting conspiracy theories that the IMF assassinates presidents opposing them, while the real world Zelensky is now under the biggest danger of assassination.
Good pun.