I keep coming across this idea in the course of my daily rummaging, and it keeps poking me to write about it. When following a diet for health, weight loss, social conscience, whatever, there seems to be this idea that you shouldn’t have to “miss out” on conventional foods or those foods that got you fat and/or sick in the first place.
While watching the third installment of The 100 Mile Challenge, I was annoyed by how these folks who *volunteered* to only eat foods from within a 100 mile radius of their home were totally freaking out about not having wheat-based bread and pasta. This seemed especially wimpy to me for a variety of reasons, but the folks acting as guides and leaders, James and Elisa, thought that if they didn’t find some wheat, and soon, they would have too many drop-outs from the challenge. I realize that a lot of the problem is that people can’t cook, but how hard is it to just *let go* of it? The spices and the coffee would be a lot harder for me than bread, but then I’ve gone without bread before. Still, it’s only 100 days.
Another glaring example of this is what has become of Atkins Nutritionals. Atkins now seems to involve eating some Frankenfoods every day, right from the beginning. The original diet (Induction, first phase) was about eating meat or eggs, real cheese and several servings of non-starchy green vegetables (and there are a lot of those as options!). The diet now allows soy products and one to two servings of Atkins bars and shakes. The ingredients list on the shakes and bars is really alarming. They now contain peanuts, soy and milk. The low-carb baking mix (which I always found disgusting anyway) contains gluten. If you do the 1972 version of Atkins, you get a far more natural diet, and you might even find out that one of the common allergen foods is a problem for you. If you do it the way Atkins Nutritionals would have you do it, you’ll have no chance of that. Does the diet even *work* any more? Who knows.
The largest problem with Atkins is that people don’t seem to learn anything from the diet, go right back to eating all their favorite sugary foods and gain all the weight back. If they had to do a real re-think on what they were eating, maybe they’d, you know, develop some good life-long eating habits?
Most gluten-free cookbooks seem to be about cakes and cookies and especially cupcakes. The end product of gluten-free baking is even more calorific, sugary and fattening than the stuff made with wheat. It’s *very* hard to bake without wheat, but the hoops you have to jump through to make a cake rise are simply not pretty. Cupcakes are smaller and more error-free. I can make a decent flat bread/wrap kind of thing and a good pie crust, but I don’t eat these all the time. To make use of one of these cookbooks, I’d have to eat dessert every day! The other thing that bugs me about gluten-free flours: bean flours are actually quite hard to digest – they are not something you want to be eating if you can’t digest gluten.
And while were on the subject of sweets, what *is* it with Paleo and Low-Carb recipe sites? The seem to be about 75% desserts. A certain kind of Paleo-Diet-following-person seems to eat some kind of almond or coconut based pancake nearly every day for breakfast. Many seem to eat a lot of cookies or other desserts involving agave nectar and almond flour. I’ve never had agave nectar, but no matter what you want to say about where it falls on the Glycemic Index, it’s an intense source of sugar, much like honey. This is not something Paleolithic people would have been eating even once a month. There are so many hacks commonly used, but they really amount to eating processed foods that just barely fit into a rigid set of rules (grains, legumes, sugar, dairy or potatoes, though adherance on the potato thing varies and some people don’t count sweet potatoes). If you bake almonds into a cake or pancake, you are eating a huge amount of them – far more than you’d be likely to eat otherwise.
What are you really missing out on, and why are you missing it? If you gave those things up, you had a reason.
Amen, sister! Too many low-carbers try to cling to their old ways in phony forms. I say – embrace the fat! Forget phony carbs & weird fake sweets. If I want some sweet, I can always have some berries, which confers some benefits. It’s all about state of mind. Why nurture the desire for things that only get you in trouble?
The context leads me to believe that “Frankenfoods” != “genetically modified foodstuff” in your post.
I don’t know exactly what I want to say about the wheat thing. I’ve gone several weeks without yeast raised bread (all the time having access to wheat quick-breads, rice, pasta, corn tortillas…) and there is a hook there. I really missed having my daily bread. I also remember my SO at the time causing a mini-stampede once in a grocery store, several day after a heavy snowstorm. There had not been any bread deliveries in a week, but she pointed out if you had the skilz to put frozen bread dough in a hot oven, the supermarket had plenty of that stuff still in stock.
Yeah, I mean foods masquerading as something they are not.
I’m working on something about zero calorie sweeteners, but long story short, I don’t trust any of them.