Thank you. What have you learned?

(B Creighton) #1

I just want to thank you for your help for my wife and I. As you all know I did keto starting in the fall of 2021. I lost 20 pounds to 175 while gaining probably about 10 pounds of muscle, so lost about 30 pounds of fat. I did keto again this fall, but was only up about 5 pounds. I am now at 177-178. I started as a size 40. I just bought a pair of size 36 shorts, which I can slide on and off without unfastening - maybe I should have bought 34s, lol. When I started this most recent health journey I was borderline hypertensive. I started taking vitamin K2 and when I started keto I had gotten my BP down in the 120s/70s. After about 4 months of keto, my BP went to 110s/60s. This year it just got measured as 100/64!. I attribute most of this to my change in eating habits - cutting out the vast majority of sugar and junk carbs. Also changing my food purchase and preparation habits. I have learned a lot from you guys, and just want to say thank you! Weight loss, muscle gain, low BP, literally stopped choking on my food, feeling healthy, and lower inflammation I attribute to keto, low carb, learning about what I am eating and other new health habits. I feel like I have cut through all the misinformation we have been fed about diet for decades. Rather than it being the hard process I thought it would be, I have enjoyed learning a lot of new things, and improving my life. I have a brighter future, and now know I can actually gain weight in a healthy way, that will contribute to my future health and happiness.

What have you learned about the food industry that has helped you?

(Eve) #2

It has a myriad of ways of hiding sugar! And does not have our health as tye number one priority!

(Chuck) #3

The required labels on processed foods here in the USA, don’t tell the truth and the whole truth 99% of the time. The companies work through loopholes in the regulations to hide the crap they make.

#4

The processed and fast-food industries are purposefully getting us addicted to sugar. It’s in everything, from baby formulas to processed meats and ketchup etc. It gives you a short burst of energy, and then a crash. So, you have to eat more and more often. Eating 5 times a day is the common mantra. Shame on them!

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #5

A great person once said ‘The body knows what to do, if you don’t poison it with carbs’.

No so much about the food industry but worth repeating

(B Creighton) #6

Yep. Here is one I learned. I bought a no sugar sweetener labeled as stevia sweetener. It was a store brand. The label read 0 carbs. However, when I got it home, I looked at it closer. The maltodextrin in it is really a horrible carb, but they allowed to put 0 based on the small serving size being under a 1/2 gr of carb from maltodextrin. So the maltodextrin is sprayed with stevia, and sold as a carbless sweetener. In actuality a couple of tbsp of the stuff will spike your blood sugar and insulin. So, now I am stuck with the stuff, and can only use it when I want to spike my insulin. So, that involves adding it to my protein smoothies when I want to raise my insulin to push creatine and amino acids into my muscles. This is pretty much only after a workout.

#7

Or not even that. Sugar never gave me energy as far as I know… Not even satiation, hence my very high fat intake on high-carb. I needed something besides high protein…

But OMAD on high-carb is easy for me - if I focus on doing it. Not automatic, sadly. Normally I still needed my 2-3 meals (2 of them felt very natural with their own mealtimes, I felt that all my life) and that was MASSIVE overeating… My less carby meals tends to be smaller and sometimes I need a lot of them. But my actual food (and some other) choices matter a lot there. I still need much more focus on lower-carb if I want decent sized meals. It’s almost completely automatic with more carbs (unless I eat way too early when I am still satiated but get tempted. that messes things up).

I already had problems with food industry… I got more choosy when I went low-carb and I just got choosier since. I have found it’s very easy to avoid added sugar almost completely (it’s very simple to avoid it completely too, of course but even I am not ready for that. I could do it but I don’t care about a really minuscule amount if that gives me more joy and needed variety. I do WAY worse sometimes but my standards for my normal days are quite different, I would be in trouble without that) but I need to look at labels if my food has it. Most of my food don’t, it’s good as it would be annoying to focus on labels much. Focus (if it’s needed often) annoys me. I want to chill, doing things simple and easy (even if I can’t stop myself from complicating my diet. I still desire and enjoy simple).

And a tiny bit after I went low-carb and then keto but especially after I tried out carnivore, I realized sweetness is overrated :wink: I ate lots of sweets on keto but of course I can’t do that on carnivore and that’s great. Not always but usually. And even if I do use sugars or sweeteners, I make it a point to try to keep it to the minimum where it actually gives me some benefit (like joy, helping me to get nutrients when I can’t stomach my normal food). Unnecessary high amount of sugar/sweetener? I really hate that. But people and food industry, well they use insane amounts of sugar. Or little but in things where I wouldn’t ever think about using any…
I am so glad I can buy many lovely processed meat items without sugar… What could I do without processed meat items? I need them for fun and variety! The amount is tiny but they still are needed.

Of course there are other questionable or just obviously bad ingredients…

And I really find it very wrong that not every countries have proper labels. We always have the macros (and details) for 100g and it’s often not rounded so we have things like 1.2g sugar or 3.1g salt ("<0.5g sugar" is very common). The labels can’t always tell me the net carbs though (there is a poliols line if the product contains them but they don’t have the same net carb content). It doesn’t matter to me much as I almost never eat such things but it may be important for others…?

#8

Sugar is absolutely not satiating. That’s why it is used to create an addiction - you need more and more of it. You don’t get satiated from it - ever. Just a feeling of energy that most people feel. You are not habituated to sugar, so you don’t feel it. You have to eat x amount of it to become addicted. That’s why they start with feeding it to babies…

#9

I heard from people who they only can get satiated by sugar (fruit) so it’s very individual but yep, it’s usually not satiating as far as I know. While protein usually is. With exceptions, of course.
By the way, WHY is an apple considered a proper meal in so many fanfics I am reading? (And I saw that all my life so it’s not just in fanfics.) That always perplexed me. But a piece of bread and an apple (I saw that too) isn’t much better to me… It just makes me MUCH hungrier and the nutrients seem very poor too. It has this and that but seriously lacks things like PROTEIN (I know grains have it but not very much). That is my biggest problem with meals I read about all the time, almost no protein. I need a protein rich meal to have any chance at satiation, the body needs a decent amount of it so it’s so strange to me that many other people apparently isn’t like that at all… Even though I understand many differences between people.

I don’t get it. If it’s not satiating (and we want to get satiated), we need to find something that is satiating… Why would we try to add more of something that makes us hungrier (as I have it with carbs)? I still ate my carbs, yes as everyone did it and I needed a long time to realize one can just not do it but I had lots of proper food too so I got satiated at every meal (and that kept my carb intake from being really insane)… I NEEDED satiation so I ate in a way that ensured it. It was far from ideal but I was satiated and content for a while.

I half-lived on sweets and sweet dishes all my life until carnivore and I was pretty much used to sugar before low-carb. But I doubt I was addicted to it as cutting out sugar was the easiest and best thing ever. I was addicted to sweets though. Well maybe it was more like habitual? And tasty… It’s lucky there are tastier things than my fav sweets but they are still extremely good. With or without sugar (well table sugar definitely makes them less palatable for me especially when it’s overused but some are still tempting that way due to their other ingredients). Only a subset stays great unsweetened (and carnivore ones are even more rare) but I am training.

(B Creighton) #10

Yep. I didn’t realize this, but when the gubbermint started cracking down on tobacco, the tobacco companies diversified into food! RJ Reynolds bought Nabisco, and the largest tobacco company bought General Foods and then Kraft. So guess what they did to our food? Why, they made it as addictive as they could. I believe that was intentional. Addicting is the exact truthful word for it. About 12 companies now own the vast majority of food labels in the store. Their processed packaged foods have all been engineered to make us want more. You are right they should be ashamed of themselves, but when profit is the motive, shame is not in the vocabulary. The bigger shame, I believe is that now they have so much control, that it has been hard to get the truth out. They control the advertising dollars at the networks which would report the latest science - not too surprising that it doesn’t get reported anymore.

(Alec) #11

We all have to understand one key point about mainstream media… we are NOT their customers. Their customers are the advertisers… they are the ones paying the bills and generating the profits… we (the consumers of the media) are simply the medium by which the media deliver their product to the advertisers. The media are NOT on our side, they are on the side of the pharma and food vested interests.

We should never forget this… and it ain’t changing any time soon. For consumers of mainstream media, it is Consumer Beware! Ie be very discerning and judgemental in your consumption… in other words, don’t believe a word of it!

(Jane) #12

Of course it is intentional and increases profits, which is the only thing most companies care about.

They even have a term for it in their food labs - bliss point. Hitting the pleasure centers of our brains.

I have never been a binge eater but years ago I discovered I couldn’t put down a bag of Bagel Crisps. It unnerved me because even my favorite junk foods like potato chips I could limit myself and put them down.

I had to MAKE myself not eat the entire bag of Bagel Crisps so I stopped buying them. They obviously hit my bliss point!!! :grimacing:

(Jane) #13

Pre-grated cheese is a convenience but you should avoid because they add flour to keep it from clumping more than it does.

Yes, I am guilty of occasionally grabbing it but it is not the rule.

Also if block cheese molds you can slice it off. If a bag of grated cheese molds you have to toss the entire bag and is wasteful.

(Rossi Luo) #14

In the past a hundred years, the first priority of the food industry is to make sure every human beings has enough food to tackle starvation problem, healthy was not the concern yet.
As I know, 100 years ago, everywhere on this planet has many people suffering from starvation. Because there were not enough vehicles to transport foods or chemicals to keep foods for a long shelve time.

#15

Shelf life and transportation - that is what the produce growers have been hybridizing for a long time now. The result? Young people have no idea what produce is supposed to taste like, or what nutrition it is supposed to contain. To me, most of it tastes like cardboard anymore. That’s because I know what old varieties, sun ripened and grown naturally, are supposed to taste like. There is not a thing in the produce section that has maintained its flavor. At least most meat still tastes like meat - as long as it is not deboned and had all the fat removed before you cook it. There is still a big difference in flavor between pasture raised meat and dairy and the caged stuff. But it is not near as drastic as what they have done to produce.

(Alec) #16

I have worked in the food industry for the past 40 years. I can tell you that in that time I have seen precisely zero food businesses interested in helping all human beings have enough food. Every single food business that I have encountered have had one interest only: making the most money as possible.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #17

Alan Carr, author of ‘The Easy Way to Stop’, believes they also diversified into nicotine patches and gum, to keep smokers addicted to nicotine.
So I’m not surprised by the addictive food story. Is sugar a food?
Sorry for the side note

#18

Yes - except if it’s hard cheese as that doesn’t need it :slight_smile:
I buy grated Grana Padano, tasty and just cheese! 0g carbs in 100g.

I can’t even eat the starchy thing as it tastes raw flour and it’s horrible… May work in cooked things but I use grated cheese without cooking in many cases.

The extended version is that we just should read the ingredients list. Even if we think it’s obvious, nope, food industry puts the most baffling items into too many things.

Most are still fine but TOMATOES… They ruined them. The pretty, hard ones are grown and they have NO TASTE whatsoever (they have a tad when it’s proper tomato season but still very little. and sometimes one can find more special ones, that’s a bit better too. often too sweet though). I don’t eat store-bought tomatoes, my SO does, he feels something… (I prefer soft, sour ones anyway.)
It’s a struggle for me to grow tomatoes in my soil (it definitely costs more money that buying tasteless tomatoes - but mine are tastier :D) but without it, I can’t get proper tomatoes. I can buy tomato purree, that’s tasty but sometimes one needs proper tomatoes. Not me, anymore but I still want to grow them. Tomato is one of the few vegs I still kind of like and growing tomatoes is tradition…

When it comes to meat, pork is tasty, chicken is tasteless. There is a HUGE difference between chicken raised properly and not while it’s little in pork. According to my experiences in my country. Beef is like pork in that regard. And turkey is nice. Chicken is the problematic item. Potentially good chicken costs about 4 times as much as the cheap one.
But decades ago I felt normal supermarket pork tasteless too. IDK what changed. I find it super tasty now. Food industry just can’t make any food more delicious than a perfectly fatty pork chuck, roasted or fried with a bit of salt. It’s just impossible if the one in question is me.

(Bob M) #19

You got it measured at a doctor’s office? That’s even more impressive. Mine is always higher at the office.

(Jane) #20

I agree nothing from the store tastes as good as my own vine-ripened tomatoes in the summer - HEAVEN!

Until I bought a package of cherry tomatoes at Walmart - brand is Hiiros. They still have the vines attached but I have bought other tomatoes like that and… meh.

I popped one of the Hiiros tomatoes in my mouth and was amazed at the flavor! Was really as good as my own. I gave one to a neighor who stopped by to visit and he got the same amazed expression so wasn’t just me.