Ratios and amount are the most important thing in healthy eating. For reference, vegetables should be more than half your food intake, the rest split between whole-grain carbs and protein (either meat or plant based) in order to be healthy. And we need to pay attention to how much total food we eat too since our monkey brains that evolved under extreme food scarcity don’t do a good job of moderating nutrient input.
No I can’t keep myself to that either.
White bread, cheese (at least not the one on burgers) and red meat aren’t exactly known as healthy foods. Definitely not in the proportions of a burger. Even more definitely not when you boil the meat in oil (often together with the onions).
Look my internal butter system carries oxygen to my cells that’s why the doctor says I have IBS
I know it’s a shipost and this meme is at least 15 years old. But meat, cheese, and white bread (especially the ones in the US with added sugar) were never healthy
Specially processed meat, cheese and bread. In the case of fast food these ingredients are basically “hacked” to make us crave more and consume more. These industries have “food scientists” working on exactly that.
Meat, cheese and bread in their more natural form is definitely healthy when consumed in moderation.
Since when is meat unhealthy?
Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?
“Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.
It’s harder on the system doing the digestion.
I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)
But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit
There’s nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information
Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?
That’s sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week “probably” (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a “Group 1” carcinogen.
Flip-side, grains and legumes have been tied to cancer as well. I can’t find exactly what category, but they seem fairly convinced they are carcinogenic.
It is, sadly, like the California Cancer joke, where almost everything causes cancer if taken to excess.
Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say
- Meat is hard to digest (when in fact carnivorous animals have the shortest gut; we’re omnivores and have a medium gut, we also have the most acidic stomach acid of the mammals which is an adaptation to eating meat)
- Grain is the healthiest food (the only type of animal that does well on seeds is birds, they don’t have teeth for bread to get stuck between and rot. The ancient Egyptians lived on bread and had the worst dental health)
- That humans need a balanced diet of many different things - which we do when we’re eating nutritionally poor foods like bread, but many thrive on simple diets of fatty meat (Inuit before they adopted the standard American diet; Buffalo hunting native Americans; modern followers of lion, carnivore, zero carb)
The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death
This is a common explanation but is unfortunately propaganda in itself.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation
Long story short on what you wrote - meat is a nutritionally rich food option and kind of nutritionally acceptable if your people have been living in the tundra for a few thousand years & have actually managed to genetically accommodate it, since there isn’t much else food the further you go north (although it’s very much overly simplistic to depict Inuit diets as entirely meat-based). But for modern people, in temperature or tropical regions, it makes no sense at all, plant-based diets give you the best balance of nutrients without extremely high fat and cholesterol content…there’s a real anti-scientific hubris going on with people trying to brush away this basic fact.
Especially the US white bread which contains a carcinogen.
Take care not to make statements so inaccurate they are effectively meaningless.
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“US white bread” isn’t a singular brand and most brands don’t “contain[s] a carcinogen”…
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You never mentioned what the carcinogen was. Probably because it would compromise your argument that “US white bread” as a whole contains it when it does not. (It’s Potassium Bromate/Bromide (it’s used interchangeably online sometimes), for those wondering.)
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It’s not limited to white bread in where it can be used. It was an additive to flour in general.
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A lot of the fear mongering blogs, written by ‘influencers’ whose research consists of 10 seconds of Googling but not verifying a single fucking thing they write about, name brands that contain potassium bromate… but actually don’t. Example: Wonder bread (https://wonderbread.ca/our_products/white-bread-675g/) Chex Mix. Looking up their ingredients list shows the item in question is not used at all. https://www.chexmix.com/products/chex-mix-traditional/
TLDR: Think before you repeat vague, meaningless shit next time.
BTW, You should look into the horrors of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
My statement is far from meaningless. Mild carcinogens are still carcinogenic. Sure, a small dose as a one of will not cause problems short term, but long term build up is a thing.
- It’s a preservative widely used in US white bread, but banned in Europe and other places.
- I don’t know the specific carcinogen off the top of my head, I’ve never bothered to remember it, and didn’t look it up earlier while I was half snoozing being driven home.
- So you do know what I’m talking about.
- My source was Dr Joel Fuhrman. I’m not sure if you’d call him an influencer. While I do turn my nose up at some of his preaching, I think much of what he says is backed up by solid science. Not that I follow it myself. If it’s since been removed from most products then good for you and other people in the US.
Your link to Wonderbread is from Canada.
Chex Mix doesn’t contain azodicarbonamide (I’m guessing this is the one we’re talking about? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others), but it does use butylated hydroxytoluene, which is also classed as GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) by the FDA based on a study from 1979. Yet both chemicals have since been called into question for their links to cancer. From a cursory glance, azodicarbonamide has a more proven link, while butylated hydroxytoluene has yet to be properly studied and the link is questionable.
Too much dihydrogen monoxide can kill you.
Alcohol is also carcinogenic - more so than bread additives - but I’m definitely having some of that tonight.
Also, Joel Fuhrman had a podcast talk about lemmy’s favourite, BEANS.
Edit: Bloody kbin users, breaking lemmy threads. Supposedly there’s a comment underneath mine, but it won’t load, and there’s nothing on kbin.
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meat, cheese and bread were never healthy, says a man descended from 10 thousand years of meat cheese and bread eaters
So if I come from a lineage of smokers it means smoking is healthy? I take your word for it, science man.
it’s about the scale at which these items are consumed - eating meat every day was pretty much unheard of until the advent of capitalism
In some circumstances you’re absolutely right. In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve. In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
Was it capitalism or was it refrigeration?
There are hundreds of ways to preserve meat without a fridge
Fresh or preserved (salted or dried) meat has existed as long as people have paid for them. Even ice was used for a while prior to refrigeration.
Salting and dehydration is not as efficient as refrigeration. Not even close.
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
Science suggests that meat consumption always comes with risks e.g. of genetic mutations. So if you can meet your demand of nutrients and trace elements without meat you probably should.
Science also says the primary sources of essential vitamin B12 come from meat and dairy.
Here is some fun reading:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890/
Vitamin B12 is an essential vitamin with largely non vegetarian source.[1,2] Indian population, with largely vegetarian food habit, is more prone to harbour deficiency of vitamin B12.[2,3]
Interesting. I guess you could still supplement b12
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
Proof you only have to live 15 years to reproduce doesn’t mean much for someone wanting to live 80 years.
Nobody ate meat before very recently. And cheese was not your typical daily treat. Remembers it takes a long time to produce
Humans have been eating meat for at least two and a half million years.
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.
I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don’t need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don’t even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it’s way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it’s usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.
But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.
None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm
I always thought it was the proportions that weren’t healty. You get 50% bread, 50% meat, with a tiny slice of lettuce in the middle.
Of course. The unhealthiness of food is an emergent property arising from the arrangement of their constituents components relative to each other. The next time you have a burger and want to be healthy, just take it apart! Taps head
In all seriousness, for anyone confused by this, whether or not something is healthy for you is all about quantities and ratios. Specifically, that of your diet as a whole, not of individual items. So while I don’t agree with this sentiment, burgers can be considered unhealthy because:
- There is very little vegetables in relation to meat and bread
- It is very calorically dense
- Red meat is considered by many to be unhealthy in its own right, and burgers tend to have a lot of that
- It is usually consumed with large portions of fries and drinks or other sides that are also very calorically dense with little diversity in micronutrients
I am extremely sure if you make a burger by yourself with good ingredients it will be just as healthy.
Beware of the added sugars in things that aren’t supposed to have that much sugar.
Step one is to ask yourself what you think healthy means. Generally it’s used as a catch-all by people to justify whatever shitty diet they have.
It’s really only unhealthy if you’re eating that every time you eat. And mostly what makes it unhealthy is the fat/lean ratio. Hamburgers usually use fattier hamburger. You can make them with leaner meat tho. They just don’t taste nearly as good.
Hamburgers use hamburgers
Yogurt is an accepted and perfectly healthy snack, unless you put it in the freezer first, then its bad for you for some reason.
Unflavored Greek yogurt is great for you. Its the sugars and fructose they add that is bad for you.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why burgers are unhealthy if beef, grain, and vegetables are healthy.
First of all there’s a huge gap between home made hamburger and, well, anything else tbh. Actually, let’s expand it, there’s a huge difference between home made anything and any other kind of food, be it restaurant or assembly line made.
Backing up a little though, if you make a hamburger at home, with lean good quality beef that you grind up yourself or ask them to grind it for you at the counter, lots of veggies and very little oil, on a home made bun or on actual bread (the kind made with flour, water and salt, that’s it), then it’s quite healthy. Still wouldn’t eat it more than once a week since red meat yada-yada, but still, not that bad.
What you get at a fast food though is very low quality meat with lots of fats, dipped in other fats, sugar and spices to mask the flavor, processed bread, processed cheese, very little veggies and, usually, a side of french fries and a soda, which are a meal onto themselves. Let’s take McDonald’s, looking at their website a quarter pounder is 500+ kCal, the medium fries are 300+ kCal and a medium coke is 200+ kCal. That’s 1000+ kCal for a “meal” full of fats, sugar and processed food. Also it’s a huge spike in insuline which will lead you to a huge crash just a few hours later leaving you hungry and craving for more.
Restaurants are also a bit guilty of this. They tend to add much more fats than you’d ever do at home in order to drastically improve the flavor of their dishes. Can’t even fault them for it, if I wanted a bland healthy meal, I’d have eaten at home. If I’m going to the restaurant it’s because I want a great tasting dish. Ready made meals you can get at a supermarket are also full of fats, vegetable oils and preservatives in order to mask the shitty flavor.
So at the end of the day I’d say the best thing is to avoid as much as possible processed foods, avoid all take outs and deliveries, go out to eat maximum once a week and cook all your meals yourself starting with simple ingredients. It’s not that hard either and cooking can be fun.
Very helpful and interesting too!
Because the stuff is heavily processed using a lot of sugar, saturated fats and salt. Also the gravy the meat is fried in. Also the poor quality of the meat, being made from god knows which scraps of the animal, that couldn’t sell otherwise.
The grain/carbs is the unhealthiest part. The low quality fat is next.
I’ve thrown away all the carbs in my pantry and went from keto to now carnivore. My wife’s diabetes is reversing and I’ve lost 35lbs this year!
Look, I’m not gonna tell you how to live your life, but you should consider eating some nuts and veggies. Your guts are going to fall apart if you eat nothing but meat, and you’re simply not going to get enough nutrients. The entire carnivore diet is unfortunately pseudoscience and no different than other fad diets of the past.
Just balance your diet and you’ll likely see many of the same benefits, but you’ll a) have less negative impact on the environment and b) have fewer long term health issues down the line.
Afaik the least healthy part of that is the grain. Most breads, aside from a handful of micronutrients, are pretty close to empty calories. The killer with fast food is the soda and fries, usually.
I think it’s because of the quality of the ingredients. If you make a burger with homegrown vegetables and high-quality meat it would be healthy
Replace meat with bean burger
Replace cheese with guacamole or other sauce
Replace white bread with whole grain bread
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It’s not just the dying earlier, it the feeling like crap all the time before it gets bad enough that you die from it.
Have you seen old people? Eating cheese to eliminate the last decade of “living” basically as a zombie that shits itself sounds like a win not a loss.
It’s not as if your health will be optimal before the last bit of brie clogs your artery
*calling meat, cheese, and bread healthy*
wow that food pyramid propaganda really did a number on you all didnt it.
Edit: im talking about the meat and dairy industies lobbying too, not just bread
Well, they sure have necessary nutrients
i love the greatest source of carcinogens in an average diet 🤤🤤
It seems odd putting meat in the same category as bread.
In terms of pure health, there’s not much out there better than most meats. Yes, beef is a bit lower than pork and chicken, but properly portioned (looking at most of us Americans) it has very few downsides.
Bread on the other hand can be one of the worst foods we can eat. Of course, it is still all about moderation.
EDIT: Why the reddit-like downvotes folks? There’s really no cohesive argument that puts meat below bread healthwise in most situations. If you want to avoid meat, avoid meat. If you want to be morally opposed to anyone eating meat, so be it. Facts are still facts and misinformation isn’t the right way to fight that battle.
Bread can be healthy, just make sure it’s wholegrain. Read meat is acosiates with bad health outcomes..
But yeah nobody is going to put a wholegrain bun on their hamburger.
I’m fat by nature (and environment) so I have examined and tried many diets, and I think I can only say for sure a few thing about healthiness of diets:
- if you eat carbs, fats beyond what is necessary to eat, are unhealthy
- If you don’t eat carbs you need to eat fats, some fats are better than others
- If you don’t eat carbs and you don’t eat fats you starve - to thin then to death
- Sugar is unhealthy and wrecks your teeth
- Highly processed foods are not healthy
On the sugar note: Meat you buy in the store (for instance bacon) often have sugar additives. Better to visit the butcher.
Butchers won’t save you from sugar in bacon, many bacon brine recipes call for sugar, but a butcher will be able to tell you what the bacon was pickled in
Raw, unprocessed meat (steak, chops, chicken) is generally fine
Ah didn’t know that, thank you. I’ve just started to read the ingredients list on most of the products I buy from the store and realised I can’t even buy ham or many other kinds of meat, because of the sugar additives that they syringe into it.
additives that they syringe into it.
It’s usually only water they syringe into meat - so they can sell a 1.5kg leg of lamb as a 1.7kg ;) but only if your food supply is really badly regulated
The sugar in bacon is from the brine it is soaked in; in ham it’s from the glaze it was coated in before it was sliced - the sugar on sliced ham is all in the edge
Salami might have sugar to promote fermentation
Glazed sliced ham? No I’m talking a bout a big piece of meat without glace. I’m not in the states though so might be different there.
Sliced ham is cut from the big piece. And you’re right, aside from Christmas, ham isn’t usually glazed. I guess there’s sugar in the pot when the ham is cooked, so I think my advice is right - the sugar will not have penetrated far
I guess I haven’t thought much about sugar in smallgoods, as it was within the 20g allowance on keto (even with a bowl of salad) and now I’m on “zero carb” I don’t bother with ham because it doesn’t have enough fat
I’m also not in the states, g’day from Australia
What about protein? There’s a whole other macro you can use to make up for calories with if you cut out carbs. Eating near exclusively protein probably isn’t good for you, but you won’t starve. From what I’ve seen there can even be a lot of advantages to eating a little more protein, especially if you’re doing some strength training.
