They also have the politicians in their pockets through their Lobbyists. We’re doomed if we, as the public; don’t educate ourselves. It’s sad that the USA is no longer a land that lives by the mantra of “We the people.” Instead, we’ve been sold out by the very people who we elected to protect us.
Be your own Health Advocate. Even our Docs aren’t educated enough to know how to help us, thanks to Big Pharma and Big Food backing their industries too.
Thank you. What have you learned?
KetoQwepie
(Nicci)
#21
scaperdude
(B Creighton)
#22
I think you are being rhetorical, but yes, sugar actually is a nutrient with a purpose. Without sugar we would die, so we actually can make some - sort of like plants. However, the food companies have taken full advantage of the low fat craze to add sugar to virtually every processed food. It lights up the dopamine center of our brains. We get somewhat addicted to that dopamine hit very easily. They of course know that. I do not buy any “low fat” products anymore, because that is virtually always a synonym for added sugar… lol. The only yogurts I have are made from whole milk. I want the MCTs, and fat to fuel me for the day. I have very little other dairy. I have also started eating coconut milk yogurts. Again, I want the MCTs and other fats. I have found these fats give me a nice even energy source. I do not rely on coffee… another addicting product happily promoted. I now eat very little processed food… when I do, it is usually for dessert, unless you count whole wheat bread as “processed.” The xylitol and erythritol I guess is “processed.”
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#23
Glucose can be considered a food, but sucrose is only half glucose, and the other half, fructose, is toxic over the long term. It causes liver damage if consumed in any quantity. In that respect, it is like alcohol, though without alcohol’s short-term toxicity.
Fructose and alcohol also lack nutritional value. Neither plays any essential role in the human diet, and they can be broken down only in the liver. Nor is glucose required in our diet, either, come to that, since the liver can make the small amount of glucose that the body actually needs (in particular, our red blood cells require it, since they lack mitochondria and therefore cannot feed on fats or ketones).
scaperdude
(B Creighton)
#24
This goes without saying Paul. Yes, we need some glucose, but we don’t need the added sugars in the foods. That is the point. It is added to all the processed foods to literally addict us. It may not be the same addiction as nicotine or even caffeine, but that dopamine hit does cause us to want more… and more means we get hooked… and make them more profits.
And sadly the government has become somewhat complicit in this scheme by subsidizing corn which makes high fructose corn syrup cheap. When the issue with sugar was brought up to Bush, he told the person that it is was 500 million dollar issue… subsidized sugar… to a business that should be allowed to fail in the U.S. All the food subsidies got started to help small farmers, and are now all fed into the large agrifarmers which make all these products which are literally killing us. Yet, we can’t get congress to stop these subsidies, and our money just keeps flowing to them to make cheap processed carbs to kill us. And then we pay tons for drugs to continually treat these chronic conditions to keep us alive just a little longer on a kidney dialysis machine, etc. The system is so broken.
Shinita
#25
It seems this dopamine hit is something I don’t have just like coffee doesn’t make me awake and when I hit myself, I don’t get euphoria after the pain and chocolate has zero chance to make me any happier (beyond having a potentially tasty food with some nutrients)… Sigh. So boring 
But somewhat good.
Fortunately plenty of processed food has no sugar (here, at least) and many of them are 0 carbs or very, very close (but even then, it doesn’t come from added sugar in good cases) 
I like to buy such ones. But I can handle the ones with <0.5% sugar if I must, for a while until I learn to live without the item. No matter how much sugar I eat from natural sources (and sometimes even added sugar from certain too tempting condiments), I keep trying to lower my added sugar intake to zero, I know my body can handle a bit but still. I just hate added sugar. It does nothing good as I surely don’t like the taste beyond “it’s sweet”. And sometimes sweetness is a huge problem with it as the food item shouldn’t be sweet at all. I hate sugar in meat, I consider it a crazy idea to ever put sugar into anything meat but I know it’s me (and zillion other people. we don’t do sugary things with our meat here, at least not traditionally).
ctviggen
(Bob M)
#26
I attempted to grow tomatoes and hot peppers last year. I made the mistake of putting them on my deck, and they got burnt basically by the heat. The hot peppers loved it, producing so many peppers… The tomatoes just died.
Trying both on the grass now, in pots.
The best tomatoes I’ve had are from the local farm and are heirloom. They have a yellow version that is fantastic. Expensive, though.
SomeGuy
(Joey)
#27
@scaperdude Congratulations on your awesome success in turning your health around!
As for what I’ve learned about the food industry? It’s no different than any other industry. Follow the incentives. 
scaperdude
(B Creighton)
#28
Then you would be the exception. Dopamine addiction is real. They did an experiment on mice/rats by removing their taste buds. Gave them sugar water and regular water to drink. Guess which they kept coming back to? The dopamine center of their brains still got lit up. They drank sugar water till they got fat. That is what is happening to U.S. kids.
We use almost no sugar around the house now. I just don’t buy it. Every once in a while my wife makes brownies or a cake for a party, and the 5 pounds of sugar I bought 5 years ago gets pulled out… But, I’ve never personally really used sugar. I don’t drink tea or coffee, which I only ever drank sweetened, otherwise I can’t stand it. I do drink some herbal teas occassionally. I am not saying I never have any sugar… I have desserts often in the evening, but am becoming stricter there as well… like using whole fruits for dessert. Like I said I eat very little in the way of processed foods. It helps that they have gotten very expensive as of late…lol… makes me less tempted.$4 something for a box of crackers? Nope. I think I eat less overall doing low carb and keto because I am more satiated. Even with the higher price of food, my grocery budget seems surprisingly low. Not that much more than I spent 30 years ago as a bachelor. I don’t buy fruit juices, chips, etc, any more. I buy the fattier, undesired, but tastier cuts of chicken ie the thighs. The occassional turkey breast. My indulgence is the red grapefruit I usually have for breakfast. They are now about $1 each now. Wish I still had my grapefruit tree…I am not even tempted by the one soft drink I used to occassionally buy… Fresca… because they’ve started using aspartame in it, and I don’t touch the stuff.
velvet
#29
Almost all heirlooms rock - but not every heirloom every year. They are pickier about the weather than hybrids, and they have thin skins since they are not bred for transport. That exposes them to more issues.
I used to plant several varieties to get a couple at peak performance. And when they turn out well, and are picked sun ripe and warm, and eaten on the spot, they are good enough to make you swoon. Store bought tomatoes and even home-grown hybrids are not real tomatoes in comparison.
There used to be a short eating window for produce other than greens, everything used to be seasonal and regional. Another thing that supports that Keto is a more natural way of eating for us. The produce that is higher in carbs used to be very confined in consumption opportunity. Plus, it was available some years and not others, depending on weather and pests.
Pjam
(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat )
#30
I’d never grown tomatoes before, during lockdown I carefully nurtured every seedling. I harvested over 700 tomatoes 
That was just before my T2 diagnosis 
lol
Shinita
#31
We could buy wonderful tomatoes from the “egg lady” before but there comes some rain and she can’t sell much to us 
Or any. There was an awesome year, we bought a lot of tomatoes and I pressure canned them. We used them for years (we mostly use tomato puree for cooking but it doesn’t cut it for some dishes)… But they are gone now.
So I do my best to raise my own tomatoes. I like to grow my things anyway if it’s not too much work. Tomatoes are a bit work but again, I CAN’T buy tasty ones anywhere.
Tricky. Rain is the worst, this year I bought seeds of tomatoes allegedly not sensitive to that. We will see.
We have a very new farmers’ market in the village, maybe some will sell tomatoes this year…? I don’t have enough tomatoes to pressure can even in the best years… My veggie patch is very tiny and full with flowers. I put some tomatoes into flowerpots too (as big as I have), they are usually the best but where to put them? I kept some on the terrace last year but now I grow out my grapes and my terrace start to get close to zero sunlight. And as my property is almost fully a steep slope between a valley and the hilltop looking to north… Properly sunlit places are hard to come by. And most of the not slope part has the house. Or very shadowed areas. I have trees and tall bushes everywhere.
But this year I had my plan with tomato plants going almost everywhere in the veggie patch and my SO brought home corn seeds, coworker said it’s awesome… I have serious space problems. And I prefer tomatoes over corn. Corn is easy to buy anyway. And easy to live without… Even my SO does it almost every day! I prefer cornFLOWERS, mine are wonderful this year So many colors!
To some extent we still like to eat seasonally. We refuse to eat fruits off season (storing doesn’t count. my SO’s diet is heavily based on apples and all year is apple season…) and it’s true for many vegs, we barely eat a few in winter. (I am pretty good at it since I don’t need any Hail carnivore ;)) And it’s not just due to financial reasons. It seems logical and right to us. We do enjoy other off season items though. Raw vegs are quite lovely, welcomed by me (a bit, sometimes), badly needed by my SO.
But even he wouldn’t eat watermelon in May… Most fruits are excessively sugary anyway, season or not, too modified. But so awesome and if one use them well, it’s fine I think. Whatever “well” means for the one in question. It can be used for flavoring and sweetening a dessert. My old keto ice cream had banana, a wonderful choice. (My current carnivore ice cream uses cream for sweetening, that’s sugar too. My keto ice cream was dairy free and had erythritol as the banana was very tiny - but still helped A LOT, it’s a super flavorful fruit.)
By the way, I don’t have on/off season for tropical fruits either, I don’t even know if they have a season. But winter is my closer to carnivore time so I just try to avoid fruits except lemon (can’t skip lemon for long, it’s a wonderful fruit. I barely can handle the sweetness of fruits but lemon will work forever. I use them in tiny amounts and more and more rarely as time passes but I still love desserts and lemon is good in them).
Wow. Once, when I was a kid, we sowed some tomato seeds. Mom said they will just die, no idea why, we had good soil and she comes from a peasant family, the land was taken away when she was young…
We had insane amounts. And we never sowed tomato seeds anymore, the plants just popped up everywhere every year. They were late, we only had tomatoes in autumn, mostly in October but we had enough.
Lovely, juicy, small, sour ones, my favorite!
ctviggen
(Bob M)
#32
@Pjam 700 tomatoes is insane! What did you do with them?
@velvet Every time someone tells me I need to eat fruit, I think to myself how short that season really is in any single area. Where I live, the blueberry season is the longest, a few months, but that’s because places are using many different varieties of blueberries. If you had only one, you’d have maybe two weeks and that’s it.
(Though I guess technically, tomatoes are a fruit. But even the season for most of them is short.)
Shinita
#34
The combined fruit season in my garden (not this year when most of my fruits just won’t happen) is about 6-7 months but if I add wild fruits as well, it’s way more, maybe 10? May is fruitless (except maybe the end of it), maybe March too, it depends on the weather… My garden has little fruit in August (but it does have some and it may change later) and November tends to be fruitless as well (if we doesn’t count the apples left on the tree :D). I always have fruit in December but rosehip season is there in all winter and I technically could eat blackthorn…
I never even saw blueberries on their plants and ate it maybe once in my life in its normal (albeit frozen) state… Maybe I will buy some plants but I need soil too as this soil is bad for it. So I didn’t bother with it especially that I don’t even know if I like it. I did like the sugary fruit yogurts with blueberries in it - but found the mirelite ones tasteless…
The longest season here is PLUM It lasts for months. Pear and apple is long too especially counting the summer varieties.
Wait, no, the longest season is mini strawberry, its season lasts all summer and autumn, it starts at end of May and it still has fruits in November, they are just bad after frost so October is its last proper month. I love them as I can pick them every day, they are flavorful, lovely, pretty and even if I ate all of it, it would be negligible amount of carbs But I give most of it to my SO, of course. It’s fruit. What could I do with more than a tiny bit of fruit? 10g-20 mini strawberry every day when it yields the biggest amount (it’s very many pieces), eating half of it is doable but unnecessary and not desired. My SO appreciates it WAY more so it gives me way more joy to gift them to him I still can enjoy their looks (and the occasional piece).
I want to get raspberry plants with a very long season too since the day I learned they are a thing. I loved raspberries on keto though I never felt them really sweet there, I needed carnivore for it. Tasty, fruity, even slightly sweetish but not sweet. And they are ripe alright, I make sure of it. My tastebuds must be weirdos when it comes to this fruit. Whatever, LOVELY, super low-carb fruit.
Tomato is fruit and vegetable, they aren’t exclusive as one is a botanical word and one is a kitchen word but as I don’t like it in sweet dishes (normally. tomato soup is usually sugary here and it’s nice but it’s nice without sugar too and better), I consider it a veggie only. To me, fruit is the sweet thing I can put into ice cream (in tiny amounts as I don’t like fruity ice cream - except banana -, it’s just a tiny addition). And lemon is a fruit too despite not being sweet. But it’s hard to make ice cream without it (if one is me. I almost always make vanilla ice cream and lemon is mandatory).
700 small tomatoes are easy to pressure can, 700 big ones must be trickier.
My record is pressure canning 16 bigger jars of something (8kg?) per day. Not fun. I can’t let my fruits rot so when my apricot tree was enthusiastic, I had to do it.
It was in 2019. I still have some jars. I am careful with it lately (and I don’t eat it anyway so my SO is careful with it) as it was the very last year we had more than a few on that tree.
And I had 3 apricot trees originally. Big ones. The first year they all had a ton of fruit and I almost got a heart attack I learned some useful info about wasps (they are jerks! I was used to cute wasps) and drying apricots (nope, I can’t do it. if they don’t rot during the process - I used the sun there, not my dehydrator for reasons -, they rot later. or insects eat them) that year.
And 2023 is a horrible year for my fruits. Never had such a bad ones. Not in 2022 when we had close to zero strawberries and very little sour cherries, not in the previous years, maybe when all my raspberries (I had a lot!) died close to the house (we had more elsewhere). This year? We won’t even have quince and that fruit is super resilient. I love quince as it’s sweet but not inedibly sweet… I can’t do much with it so I have a lot canned but it’s a nice fruit and my SO has found some uses for it.
I still am easily triggered when it comes to fruit. Love the topic.
ctviggen
(Bob M)
#35
Where do you live, @Shinita? Where I live, the trees just got leaves. The last freeze wasn’t that long ago. Everything will end in a few months, certainly in September or latest October.
And to actually plant enough to eat, I’d completely need to revise my acreage. We have two blueberry plants, one apple tree, a few tomato plants, a few pepper plants, some herbs. None of the fruits or vegetables are anywhere near being ready to eat. Have at least a month or more until they are.
Shinita
#36
I live in Hungary, why? Some fruits doesn’t get ripen before frost arrives in November. Medlar, rosehip, blackthorn… They are winter fruits. Rosehip season ends when proper frosty winter ends (I think long warm periods are problematic too but usually not).
It’s earlier summer now, we just get our fruity month but this is serious. I get more fruit seasons every week, even in this horrible year.
Trees got leaves very long ago. Even black locusts and walnuts (they are very very late) have them long ago. I have problems with time but it feels long. We have fruits only since 1 month as developing them takes time.
October is very fruity still. November brings frost so the normal fruits will be gone but the winter fruits come. Yes, they are very few but important. I always consider it fun when I can pick fresh fruits from my garden mid-December…
I have plenty of fruit trees and plants. Now I have mini strawberry, strawberry (since a few weeks), raspberry (since 5-7 days?), this year is bad for sour cherry and cherry but we have those too (there are ones in May, not in my garden, those aren’t so nice), my white currants just started their seasons, gooseberries will be next. My honeysuckle is pathetic so let’s forget about it. I expect summer apples in a few weeks and my SO says our greengage (properly plum flavored when it gets some cooking, pretty meh without. it’s tasty and sour and only a bit sweet, ideal for me with my changed sweet perception) only need a few more weeks too… But summer is super fruity, it’s easier to talk about the first and last ones. The first was one my mini strawberry in the very end of May and my last fruit is medlar, it ends somewhere in December, sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the second half. I do have almost complete gaps as I wrote before but I could have more fruit trees and eliminate them altogether. One tree usually has a short season indeed. The other plants can be quick (it’s the common but if we consider a strawberry/raspberry path with all the plants, the season starts for a month) but some have a long season. Blackberries have only some weeks at a time but they tend to flower again. And very, very few has super long season, every individual mini strawberry plant brings fruit for 5 months straight. I heard about normal strawberries and raspberries being like that too but never had those so I have no experience.
I have a quite small property but I have too much fruit. A tree can yield very much… I don’t use chemicals, there are worse years so I don’t even have nearly as much fruit as possible but it’s still too much, very hard to eat for us (okay, I don’t really do much :)). BUT my SO buys very much fruit as we just don’t have a ton of apples and there is tropical fruits… But he mostly buys apples. Staple. I only have very very young apple trees - and my young but huge Granny Smith (my biggest fruit tree and it’s impressive from an apple tree, I have a big cherry tree, after all. not a HUGE one but a big one. I saw 2 super impressive specimen in my life but such ones are very rare. well my apple tree just refused to bring apples until it wasn’t higher than the old cherry tree next to it) is still not very enthusiastic about growing apples. We have 50 in a good year. It looks like it barely have any, it’s so very big compared to that measly amount… But it’s fine. We still appreciate its wonderful, hard, super delicious and very long lasting fruit.
Of course it will have almost none as 2023 is such a horrible year for our fruits.
I have 2 cherry trees, 4 (and some tiny) sour cherry trees, 3 pears, 1 apricot (I had 3), 2 summer apples, 2 apples, 2 quinces, 2 medlars, 1 greengage, 3 young plums and a few useless old ones and whatever I forgot about. I have 2 young walnuts as well, 2 hazelnuts… Never could keep almonds alive.
Several raspberries (many kinds, I have red, had yellow and they made pink but died out, red that allegedly has fruits 2 times a year, purple and black), many strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, one white currant (the red ones died and I dislike blackcurrant), honeysuckle and whatever I forgot about. But maybe I didn’t.
It’s a small property with lots of decorative trees so I can’t fit much more.
My precious fruits. I made it a mission to have as many as I can fit, providing great variety…
I must have some remnants of rosehip but I have too many thorny plants so I do my best to cut it out. There is rosehip absolutely everywhere if I go for a walk, I really don’t need my own.
I have dogwood too (I hope the names I googled are the right ones but some of them mean multiple things). With ONE berry, its first, I mentioned it somewhere on the forum these days. They are everywhere in the wildlife park, almost impossible to harvest them though but it’s very, very tasty and sweet. When ripe. You just need to pick them in the moment when they are red and on the ground but not rotten yet. Tricky. Blackberries are somewhat annoying too as they are black when unripe (in the end) and they are black when ripe (but the shine is different and we have touch, that’s needed). At least my black raspberries are red when unripe… And they aren’t nearly as painful.