My thoughts on what "Food" means

Article attached below on 'White Bread is "dead" bread', as an example of many such articles that we keep coming across.  While this one is correct in what it states, or at least the conclusion is correct (don't eat white bread), the problem with such information is also that, with food industry lobbies, government lobbies, allopathic lobbies, so-called scientific lobbies, sheer misinformed lobbies (like modern day nutritionists who don't know what they are talking about) controlling a lot of the research in the world, you don't even know what to believe. Plus the fact that some of the "accepted truths" about food and health, the postulates if we want to call them that, that are based on the "modern allopathic western" construct, are faulty. Any theorem built on faulty postulates is likely to be faulty as well, and most of the "wisdom" on food and health out there are theorems built on faulty postulates.

 

Most of the research on health and nutrition out there is absolute junk, and actively contributes to the deterioration of health standards the world over.  Is it a coincidence that health standards in the US, which is the country with the most processed/ industrialised food, and with the most research as well, and the biggest per capita "health (sic)" budget by far, are among the worst in the world - one-third of all US people are obese, and they don't know what positive, vibrant good health really means.

 

So what are some of the fundamental stuff about food that I consider "self evident truths" (self-evident at least to me)?

 

Listed below are some of the rules about food and health that I believe in and follow (at least substantially if not completely or fully, and for the record, I am not in the least fanatical about following these rules)  - all of these conclusions are based on a lot of reading over the years, distilled wisdom of natural-health experts, sifting and sieving, and eliminating all that is contrary. If you want more "proof" for each of these assertions, I cannot oblige because that would be a huge waste of time! 'Tis better to be considered dogmatic, than to waste time trying to prove your faith to non-believers (saying that I just made up)!  

Suffice to say that there is enough material to support each of these assertions - google, and thou shall find!  There is also enough material to support exactly the opposite assertions, and many other shades of assertions in between, as well. But then, "the essence of faith is to ignore the nay-sayers, the liars, the agents of the devil, the provocateurs, the saboteurs, who will sway you away from the true path" (another saying I just made up).

 

 

1) Eat only what nature gave, as close to what nature gave. In other words, eat "food". Manufactured products are not food. Examples of manufactured products, is anything that comes out of a packet or a bottle! That includes breakfast cereals and juices whether called "Real" or not.  

 

2) The body is a chemical factory, and breaks down food into its components and rebuilds the components into what the body needs. Therefore, food needs to be easy to breakdown. All natural foods are easy to break down, since they "spoil" - any foods that don't spoil  are by definition, not food.   "Only eat foods that spoil fast, but eat them before they spoil"

 

3) Do not count calories. It is a useless wasteful exercise. 

 

4) Drink lots of water. (Not soda)

 

5) Foods to avoid: those foods that are actually dangerous and highly harmful to health: white sugar; refined flour; any foods with high fructose corn syrup (which means most of what passes off  as food in western supermarket shelves); too much salt, dalda / hydrogenated vegetable oil; any kind of junk food - that includes pizzas, burgers, and all things of their ilk; white bread; carbonated drinks; ice-cold water / water from the fridge; all bakery products; all milk products (except butter and ghee which are good for health)

 

6) Foods to preferably avoid:  old food, stale food, food that has been cooked more than a few hours back, reheated food. Food kept in the fridge after cooking would by definition belong to this category

 

7) Foods to avoid at any cost: microwaved food. Avoid the microwave at all costs

 

8) Let your diet consist predominantly of plants / plant-based foods. In other words, fruits, vegetables and their ilk.

 

9) Minimize the consumption of grains - rice, wheat - as far as possible while increasing the consumption of fruits, vegetables, etc. as a proportion of the diet

 

10) Super foods - foods that are most excellent for health: all vegetables, all fruits, sprouts

 

11) Foods that are brilliant for maintaining health and have a lot of medicinal value as well (just a brief list, there are many): amla, honey (not the store bought honey that is processed, but raw unprocessed forest honey), flax seeds, fresh fruit juice (freshly extracted, less than five minutes old, since most of the nutrients get oxidised very fast), fresh vegetable juice (ditto)

 

12) As far as possible, buy seasonal, locally-produced stuff. It is not harmful to not do so, but generally better for health to follow this principle. Also, do not keep raw vegetables, etc. stored for too long – the extreme ideal is to buy directly from the farmer and cook the stuff immediately – though for logistical reasons one may need to buy for a few days at a time. In short, "Preferably ensure that the distance (and time) from farm to the table is as short as possible"

13) Eat sparingly. The less you eat, the less your body needs, and the healthier you will be

14) Fast frequently, for more and more extended periods.

 

15) Ignore fad diets. Following the above rules should be enough.

 

 

The above is a top-of-the-mind partial list.  There's more, but you get the general idea...

 

Also, I am not even getting into the science of food combinations (trophology) or into organic food.  Those are different dimensions of what good food means...

 

Would love to hear your reactions (which, by the way, it's enough to state, you don't have to prove your assertions!)

 

Dinesh

PS - forwarded article on 'White Bread' attached below

 

 

 

 

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White Bread is "dead" bread  (author unknown)

The Swiss government has been aware of the dangers of eating white
bread for decades and in order to get its populace to stop eating it,
Switzerland has placed a tax on the purchase of white bread. The tax
money is given to bakers to reduce the price of whole wheat bread to
encourage people to switch.

The Canadian government passed a law prohibiting the "enrichment" of
white bread with synthetic vitamins. Bread must contain the original
vitamins found in the grain, not imitations.

Essentially, white bread is "dead" bread. Frequently, consumers are
not told the truth about this and so called "enriched" flour.

Why is the color of white bread so white when the flour taken from wheat is not?

It's because the flour used to make white bread is chemically bleached
, just like you bleach your clothes. When you are eating white bread,
you are also eating residual chemical bleach. Flour mills use
different chemical bleaches, all of which are pretty bad. Here are a
few of them: oxide of nitrogen, chlorine, chloride, nitrosyl and
benzoyl peroxide mixed with various chemical salts.

One bleaching agent, chloride oxide, combined with whatever proteins
are still left in the flour, produces alloxan. Alloxon is a poison and
has been used to produce diabetes in laboratory animals. Chlorine
oxide destroys the vital wheat germ oil. It will also shorten the
flour's shelf life.

Good Nutrition: You Won't Find It In White Bread
In the process of making flour white, half of the good unsaturated
fatty acids, that are high in food value, are lost in the milling
process alone, and virtually all the vitamin E is lost with the
removal of wheat germ and bran. As a result, the remaining flour in
the white bread you buy, contains only poor quality proteins and
fattening starch.

But that is not the whole story as to the loss of nutrients. About 50%
of all calcium, 70% of phosphorus, 80% iron, 98% magnesium, 75%
manganese, 50% potassium, and 65% of copper is destroyed. If that is
not bad enough, about 80% thiamin, 60% of riboflavin, 75% of niacin,
50% of pantothenic acid, and about 50% of Pyridoxine is also lost.

Scientific Study Has Confirmed What The Swiss Have Known For Years
These horrific numbers are the results of a study run by the
University of California, College of Agriculture.

It is obvious, from what we have learned, that white bread should be
avoided. Whole wheat, rye, and grain breads made with whole wheat
flour is a better way.

It is a good idea to always read the labels and never buy foods that
contain artificial flavors, colors, bleached flour, preservatives,
hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils.

--
Dinesh Gopalan

mob: 9845257313; blog: http://www.dineshgopalan.com

The Cauvery dispute

The Supreme Court asks the two Chief Ministers to meet and agree!  How naive. What happened when Jayalalitha and Shettar met was as anyone would have predicted...

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee

the two of them, could never agree.

Cauvery, Kolaveri, di,

Nanni adige dhaani ki,

meeru yovar andi?

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee,

sat together to have tea,

The Court wants them to agree,

across the table, over some tea!

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee,

have played this game for many years.

They don't really want to agree,

Some problems are not meant to be solved.

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee,

lob the ball back to the court.

If it decides, they don't agree,

for they have voters who support.

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee,

have roused thousands with ire.

If they say they agree,

Both their states will be consumed by fire.

The sides send their champions to fight,

if they lose, they can't return.

Who wants to listen to the other side,

When their own lives are threatened?

No one else wants to handle,

the hot potato thrown at them.

governments and courts fear this squabble,

for no one listens to reason.

Meanwhile Tweedle dum and Tweedle dee,

have elections to win, rabbles to rouse.

Nothing on earth can make them agree,

threatening blood, they enact a farce.

Dinesh Gopalan

30 November, 2012

--
Dinesh Gopalan

mob: 9845257313; blog: http://www.dineshgopalan.com

The increasing clamor against gold

Over the last few months, coinciding with the time Chidambaram took over as Finance Minister, there is an increasing lobby calling out for curbing gold imports into India. 60 billion dollars of India's annual import bill is due to importing gold.  One of the ways of shoring up the domestic currency is of course to discourage dollar outflows arising due to imports. Subir Gokarn, deputy Governor of RBI seems to be at the forefront of this campaign – he can be frequently seen deploring the love of Indians for gold, and exhorting banks to come up with innovative schemes to divert this money into some innovative schemes 'linked to gold'.

 

It is being reported that finance ministry mandarins and bankers are considering introducing 'gold linked deposits / schemes' where people can invest in financial products whose price will vary with the price of gold. Whether the underlying investments of the scheme will actually be in physical gold is hard to guess. What the government really wants to do is to pander to Indians' appetite for gold – it knows it can do nothing to curb that – while at the same time appropriating the money for its own uses.

 

The financial industry seems to have taken this cause up with enthusiasm. There is suddenly a spate of learned articles appearing in dailies extolling the virtues of investing in 'fictional derivative' (the term is entirely mine, they never use it) products linked to the price of gold.  To those who followed the 2008 financial meltdown, this could evoke a sense of déjà vu. Synthetic credit default swaps, anyone?

 

Of the approximately 2400 tons of gold produced worldwide annually (of which India contributes a negligible part since India never produced gold in any significant quantities), India imports about 800 tons every year.   Indians' appetite for gold dates back to ancient times when India imported gold and precious stones in exchange for spices exported out of the country. It is estimated that one-third of all gold ever mined and existing above ground – i.e. one-third of about 160,000 tons – is resident in India.

 

Gold while being intrinsically useless – it has no utilitarian value worth talking about – has always been considered a very good investment. The primary reasons are: it is scarce thus preserving demand, it is 'dense' thus taking up very less space, it does not react with most chemicals or corrode thus preserving value over time, it can be easily divided into small pieces or melded into large ones, and it has value around the world and has been considered valuable through the centuries.  All qualities that made it ideal currency material till the governments of the world conspired to move away from the unsustainable (to the profligate) gold standard.  Indians have always understood this instinctively – you don't need to hold a class to explain all this to the most illiterate villager. She understands the value of gold, and does not get swayed by specious arguments against it, smart woman!

 

Witness what happened when Morarji Desai, then finance minister, tried to place restrictions on Gold in 1963 following the India China war. The Gold Control Act, 1962, banned gold loans given by banks, banned forward trading in gold, and banned production of gold jewelry above 14 carat fineness.  This did not have any significant impact and was followed by the Gold Control Act, 1968, which prohibited Indian citizens from owning gold in the form of bars and coins! Goldsmiths were not allowed to hold gold more than the bare minimum required to make jewelry. Did the demand for gold drop due to these measures? Not at all. It is estimated that about half of India's imports in those days were of gold!  This is about the time when smugglers became the new badshahs.  Those who grew up in the seventies will remember the Hindi films where the hero entangles with crooks landing contraband gold on a suitably desolate coastline.  Moral of the story?  It is easy for governments to control imports of elephants. But it is somewhat more challenging when it comes to a commodity like gold!

 

The US has also had its fling with banning gold. In 1933, the Roosevelt government made it illegal for private citizens to hold gold, and ordered them to hand over the gold they had to the government. The measures met with a little more success in the US than in India, but then they are not genetically wired the same way as Indians; in fact I would go further and say that US citizens are more naïve and  prone to accept things at face value! It also goes to show that governments are wary of gold in private hands – no institution likes power being distributed widely in so many hands that it cannot exercise control over.

 

What has been the performance of gold recently as an investment? In the last five years, gold has increased 200% in value while the sensex has dropped 6 percent. While this need not always be the case, and one needs to take a longer term view, it is true that gold is at the very least guaranteed to protect your money against inflation. And against debasement of the currency which is a real risk nowadays with all governments indulging in a race to the bottom, by printing more notes.

 

Real estate and gold are the two things one can physically control, without other people determining their fate. By gold in this context, I mean gold held physically by you in your own hands. What is to prevent governments from commandeering all gold and giving you currency notes in return under the excuse of a real war or an imagined crisis?  I am not wishing to sound alarmist here, but historically that has happened. Of the two, gold is more easily 'hideable' and transportable than real estate, thus making it ideal for holding against extreme eventualities. 

 

As to 'gold linked derivative' products, I have no faith in them.  The total outstandings of such products out there in the market are far more than the actual quantity of gold available. Also, financial instruments, whatever the underlying may be, and whoever the guarantor may be, are prone to default or expropriation.

 

It is good to continue holding gold for a certain proportion of your net worth. Gold in physical form. In your own custody. Not as a financial instrument.   But then, if you are an Indian, I don't have to belabor that point. You understand that instinctively, don't you?

Who are they trying to protect us from?

 

 

A recent news item talks about how authorities in Los Angeles are thinking of introducing a legislation mandating that porn stars should wear condoms in their movies!  While I am sure wearing condoms is a good thing, maybe this is a case of taking things a bit too far. Or, at a deeper level, it is what happens when we let Big Brother take over all aspects of our lives.  Big Brother in this case is convinced that HIV and AIDS are a menace that need to be controlled (no arguments there – except that worldwide they anyway seem to be more under control now than a decade back), and that wearing condoms helps prevent the spread of AIDS (better than advocating complete abstention at least). So far so good.

 

Then is where it begins to get interesting.   Big Brother – in this case whoever is the competent authority in the city of Los Angeles – has decided that it wants to ram this message home to the target audience. And who would the primary target audiences be? – people who have more sex, in other words not friaries and nunneries(again an assumption). And people who have more sex, or likely to have unprotected sex, are most likely to watch porn videos (once again, I wonder if that is the case). So voila, ensure that everyone wears condoms in them!  And then you pass a law to do that!  No one in Big Brothers’ councils can oppose it since it would not be considered politically correct to oppose a measure of this sort and thus the law gets passed.

 

It was very interesting to see a statutory warning pop up in large type whenever someone lit up in the latest James Bond film “Skyfall”. It certainly took away a little from enjoying the movie, and it is debatable whether this measure will in any way help to reduce smoking. In any case, who was Ramadoss trying to protect us from? From ourselves? Why is he forcing his views on me when I am watching a James Bond flick?

 

And who is the government to decide what is good and what is bad? Are they the final arbiters of good taste, or for that matter, health?  What is to prevent them from decreeing that every time a character drinks a cola, he/she has to turn to the audience and announce “to reduce calories use aspartame in instead of sugar” (when in fact diet colas could turn out to be more harmful than the sugar-filled one because of this very chemical); or every time the family sits for a meal of desi paratha with ghee there is a message saying “ghee is full of calories, replacing it with mono-unsaturated, non-transfat ,HDL filled, vegan, refined, fatty acids is good for the heart (when in actual fact most of that rubbish is bad, and ghee is good!)?

 

Do they have the right to interfere with our right to enjoy things we want, unadulterated with someone’s views of what they think is good? Do we allow Big Brother to invade all aspects of our lives, and reach out to us both overtly and subtly through every means that we reach out to the world with? Will we let every lobby or powergroup out there try to manipulate our thinking?

 

Why can’t they too put out their views out there like everyone else and let us decide what is good or bad? As individuals shouldn’t we be left to decide on our own what is good for us?

 

The irony is that the US is the nation that professes to believe most in individual liberty, but it is the place today where being politically incorrect and airing contrarian views is the least accepted.  There are more and more holy cows which cannot be questioned… and Big Brother wants to ensure that we all subscribe to those views…

 

A further irony – the porn industry in the US is the only place in the world where the incidence of AIDS / HIV is zero.  Yes, zero. That’s because they have taken self-regulatory steps to ensure this!

 

Power, pollution and the internet: article on data centres

A very informative New York Times article on data centres, carried  in today's Mint (link at the end).

The transition from 99% reliability to 99.99999.... percent reliability in most fields is not considered worth the effort. It results in too much wastage of resources that could be productively used elsewhere. The human brain which is the most efficient computer imaginable runs on a minuscule amount of electricity, but is never 100% reliable. It has though, an inherent capacity to sift through loads of information and focus on those bits which are most relevant. 

The modern craze for big data, internet of things, and digitization goes against this fundamental maxim. Google is storing all the data in all the books of the world, all the data on continuously changing landscapes and streetscapes, and generally all the data it can lay its hands on, indexing, classifying and sorting it and making it available through increasingly intelligent search engines. Social media sites such as Facebook derive their valuations from all the data they hold about trillions of human interactions - which are only going more and more online and generating more and more data. Companies and other networks where humans interact want to store all the data that they generate, for all the time, and some of this is even mandated by law. From simple text it moved on to pictures, and then to videos and from there to storing 3d movies - and one does not know where it will head from here, only that it will be more data intensive and growth will be more exponential.

If all the people in the world were given a unique number or identity, all their characteristics identified and stored, all their interactions indexed and logged; if all the things in the world were similarly indexed; if one took a photograph every second of the state of the world through a zillion cameras; if all the communications between all these elements were recorded and stored; if there were algorithms capable of extracting threads of meaningful information out of them; there is no end to the amount of data that can be generated. Which is where we are heading - the amount of data sloshing around the world's computers now is nothing compared to what is in store in the future.

And you need to store all this information of course. Maybe in future data centres will come with their own nuclear power plants attached. With the enormous 

amounts of electricity needed to power them, there will be no other option. 

We don't need this much data, of course. Maybe at an individual level we can take a philosophical call to resist this explosion. But as with all advances in technology, the group or nation that pursues the technology enjoys too much advantage over those who don't - the only way to equalize is not for everyone to agree to moderate their pace (which will never happen) - rather, everyone competes with each other in a race to the finish line. The finish line in many cases, is a sheer drop over a cliff - but then, lemmings are not the only animals that are known for collective insanity.

Dinesh

link to article : http://origin-www.livemint.com/Industry/DsOcbFupQ1t1iDV0OTq4cP/Power-pollution-and-the-Internet.html