My guess would be he stuck to zero calorie drinks and avoided fries.

Had a quick on their nutritional website, a Big Mac is 520 calories, which is not great but not absurd. The issue is, you add a large fries (500) and coke (280) to that and you've added exactly 150% more calories on top.

All up being 1300 calories or about 2/3rds of your daily intake in one meal. Provided you avoided the sides though, it wouldn't be too hard to stick within the limits.

The issue is that MCD makes the minimum mandated attempt to educate customers. Australia legislates that food energy levels be published in a prominent fashion alongside the rough recommended daily energy intake of 8700kJ. They usually publish most of these on the side in small font. Having been over in France recently they didn't have them, I'm sure that's the case in most countries.

The larger issue with MCD and other fast food is the use of trans-fats and excessive sodium.

Trans-fats act as an insanely effective preservatives that keeps their produce looking like it'd been cryogenically frozen even years on. They're also have a reputation for clogging arteries causing heart attacks, strokes and the like.

Sodium which boosts blood pressure when ingested is a flavour enhancer which is probably why it's used in excessive amounts (e.g. a Big Mac has 40% of recommended daily Sodium). Even if this guy kept within calorie limits he would have easily been breaching recommended Sodium levels and in the long term would be elevating his risk of high blood pressure, stroke or various kidney diseases.

... How the hell does this help feed 7 billion people? It is the exact OPPOSITE idea needed to sustain large growing families. I guarantee you, that printed food will be totally devoid of any real nutritional value. Best foods have always been and will always be a large assortment of raw veggies.

Still cool tech, don't get me wrong.

And if they were less cute and provided decent nutrition, we'd eat them, so what?

Fighting starvation is not a great indicator of anything, you might eat another human or yourself if you were in a situation that warranted it. I don't think I need to defend against the circle of life, we're the very last species that can frown on another animal for eating something smaller than it.

Enjoying and giving affection is not an exclusive condition, you don't have to *always* and *only* love your one owner constantly. That'd just be annoying.

I believe in research, it suggests cats are quite affectionate to their owners, it is simply not displayed in ways that humans typically understand. Experiments done by people who actually want to understand cat behaviour and not just contrast it to that of a dog, find that cat expression is rather complicated and subtle. It requires long and repeated observation, cats are not suited to these 10minute experiments.

It's an ongoing study, some if it is really quite new, you can look it up or you can continue not caring, I'm not particularly fussed. Thankfully I don't need validation to enjoy the relationship I have with my cat, I don't think it wants only me and I don't have a problem with that, I do think she feels we're rather good friends. That's something I'm happy with.

Just read through this whole damn thread. And damn was that tiring. It's been a while since I've spoken up about anything on ye olde 'Sift, and now seems like a good time to do so.

Hi there, I'm a Type 1 Diabetic, and completely dependant on a regular dosage of insulin via a pump. I've been Diabetic for the last 15 years (diagnosed at age 15 during March Break of Grade 9). Thirteen years ago I was put on a pump because I was taking 9 shots a day to try and manage my wildly out of control "beetus". I was on a good diet as well, with few heavy carbs, but my body has a hard time maintaining a good balance of insulin sensitivity.

Now, on to the idea that Type 1 Diabetes can be "cured" or "treated" without insulin... Bollocks. Plain and simple.

Almost two years ago I set it upon myself to get fitter and healthier. I have never been overweight, just the less-than-average amount of fat I would say, but I was bored with how things were going and decided to try something new for my fitness routines; I went 100% Paleo.

Yeah, for almost two years I have rarely (and I mean rarely) eaten anything aside from fruits (one serving a day, two if I'm deserving of it) veggies, nuts and protein. Nothing processed, as little preservatives and chemicals as I can manage (I read *a lot* of nutritional labels when shopping for new foods) and I buy most of my meat and veggies from local farms and farmer's markets.

Has this helped my Diabetes? Extremely marginally. My insulin sensitivity has increased by a fraction... But that's it. Has my pancreas started creating its own insulin? Not a chance in hell.

While doing this whole paleo eating lifestyle I've also been doing a lot of intervals and weight training, and I've made some great strides. But back to the original idea of getting back to "natural" ways of living/eating and "curing" my diabetes? Yeah, no dice there, ladies and gentlemen.

I cannot be without my pump hooked up to my body for more than two hours before I would need to be sent to the hospital. Nothing I have done, with all my dedication, determination, and strong will, has made my Diabetes any "better" than it was when I was first diagnosed. If anything, it has taken more of my time and money and energy to get where I am now, with nothing to show for it from my condition's perspective.

If anyone, anyone at all, thinks they can cure Diabetes Mellitus by eating better and taking better care of themselves I'll suggest this: remove your pancreas and see if your body builds you a new one while you're testing out your hypothesis, because in all seriousness and fairness, that's what it's like to be Type 1. My body killed my pancreas making it a useless, lifeless organ. It will *never* awaken again to produce my own insulin without the help of true science and excellent doctors.

So, you know what I've done, and can take it from me that it will not cure you of your Type 1 Diabetes. Now I want you to tell me what I'm not doing to help "cure myself".

I'm an open-minded skeptic.

... But I'm not so open-minded that my brain will fall out.

Juice = sugar. anywhere from 12g- 24g.

that fat piece of shit needs to stfu. She doesn't know jack shit about nutrition. Her gut rolls shows her YEARS of poor eating habits.

@enoch, thanks for your comments. I thought it better to respond directly to your profile than on the video, about which we're no longer discussing directly. Sorry for the length of this reply, but for such a complex topic as this one, a thorough and plainly-stated response is needed.

You wrote: "the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"? NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?"

The free market works best for any and all goods and services, regardless of their aim or purpose. Healthcare is no different from any other good or service in this respect.

(And besides, tell me why there's no money in preventative care? Do nutritionists, physical trainers/therapists, psychologists, herbalists, homeopaths, and any other manner of non-allopathic doctors not get paid and make profit in the marketplace? Would not a longer life not lead to a longer-term 'consumer' anyway? And would preventative medicine obliterate the need for all manner of medical treatment, or would there not still remain a need to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases, even in the presence of a robust preventative medical market?)

I realize that my argument is not the "popular" one (and there are certainly many reasons for this, up to and including a lot of disinformation about what constitutes a "free market" health care system). But the way to approach such things is not heuristically, but rationally, as one would approach any other economic issue.

You write "see where i am going with this? It's not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time."

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The purpose of the healthcare system is to provide the most advanced medical service and care possible in the most efficient and affordable way possible. Only a free competitive market can do this with the necessary economic calculations in place to support its progress. No matter how you slice it, a socialized approach to healthcare invariably distorts the market (with its IP fees, undue regulations, and a lack of any accurate metrics on both the supply-side and on the demand-side which helps to determine availability, efficacy, and cost).

"you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care."

Sorry, but this is just absurd. What else can I say?

"but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?"

The free market model.

"if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism."

Redundant: "free market under the auspices of free market."

"disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine."

Only Krugman-style Keynesians would say that illness is more profitable than health (or war more profitable than peace, or that alien invasions and broken windows are good for the economy). They, like you, aren't taking into account the One Lesson in Economics: look at how it affects every group, not just one group; look at the long term effects, not just short term ones. You're just seeing that, in the short-run, health will be less profitable for medical practitioners (or some pharmaceuticals) that are currently working in the treatment of illness. But look at every group outside that small group and at the long run and you can see that health is more profitable than illness overall. The market that profits more from illness will have to adapt, in ways that only the market knows for sure.

Do you realize that the money you put into socialized medicine (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) is money you deplete from prevention entrepreneurship?

(As an aside, I wonder, why do so many people assume that the socialized central planners have some kind of special knowledge or wisdom that entrepreneurs do not? And why is there the belief that unlike entrepreneurs, socialist central planners are not selfishly motivated but always act in the interest of the "common good?" Could this be part of the propagandized and indoctrinated fear that's implicit in living in a socialized environment? Why do serfs (and I'm sure that, at some level, people know that's what they are) love the socialist central planners more than they love themselves? Complex questions about self-esteem and captive minds.)

If fewer people get sick, the market will then demand more practitioners to move from treating illness into other areas like prevention, being a prevention doctor or whatever. You're actually making the argument for free market here, not against it. Socialized bureaucratically dictated medicine will not adapt to the changing needs as efficiently or rapidly as a free market can and would. If more people are getting sick, then we'll need more doctors to treat them. If fewer people are getting sick because preventive medicine takes off, then we'll have more of that type of service. If a socialized healthcare is mandated, then we will invariably have a glut of allopathic doctors, with little need for their services (and we then have the kinds of problems we see amongst doctors who are coerced -- by the threat of losing their license -- to take medicaid and then lie on their reports in order to recoup their costs, e.g., see the article linked here.)

Meanwhile, there has been and will remain huge profits to be made in prevention, as the vitamin, supplements, alternative medicine, naturopathy, exercise and many other industries attest to. What are you talking about, that there's no profit in preventing illness? (In a manner of speaking, that's actually my bread and butter!) If you have a way to prevent illness, you will have more than enough people buying from you, people who don't want to get sick. (And other services for the people who do.) Open a gym. Become a naturopath. Teach stress management, meditation, yoga, zumba, whatever! And there are always those who need treatment, who are sick, and the free market will then have an accurate measure of how to allocate the right resources and number of such practitioners. This is something that the central planners (under socialized services) simply cannot possibly do (except, of course, for the omniscient ones that socialists insist exist).

You wrote "cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis."

But they won't as long as you have centrally planned (socialized) medicine. The free market forces practitioners to respond to the market's demands. Socialized medicine does not. Entrepreneurs will (as they already have) exploit openings for profit in prevention (without the advantage of regulations which distort the markets) and take the business away from treatment doctors. If anything, doctors prevent preventative medicine from getting more widespread by using government regulations to limit what the preventive practitioners do. In fact, preventive medicine is so profitable that it has many in the medical profession lobbying to curtail it. They are losing much business to alternative/preventive practitioners. They lobby to, for example, prevent herb providers from stating the medical/preventive benefits of their herbs. They even prevent strawberry farmers to tout the health benefits of strawberries! It is the state that is slowing down preventive medicine, not the free market! In Puerto Rico, for example, once the Medical Association lost a bit to prohibit naturopathy, they effectively outlawed acupuncture by successfully getting a law passed that requires all acupuncturists to be medical doctors. Insanity.

If you think there is no profit in preventative care or exercise, think GNC and Richard Simmons, and Pilates, and bodywork, and my own practice of psychotherapy. Many of the successful corporations (I'm thinking of Google and Pixar and SalesForce and Oracle, etc.) see the profit and value in preventative care, which is why they have these "stay healthy" programs for their employees. There's more money in health than illness. No doubt.

Or how about the health food/nutrition business? Or organic farming, or whole foods! The free market could maybe call for fewer oncologists and for more Whole Foods or even better natural food stores. Of course, we don't know the specifics, but that's actually the point. Only the free market knows (and the omniscient socialist central planners) what needs to happen and how.

Imagination! We need to get people to use it more.

You wrote: "but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet."

You're actually making my point here. In a free market, pharmaceutical companies cannot monopolize what "drugs" people can or cannot take, sell or not sell, and cannot prevent natural alternatives from being promoted. Only with state intervention (by way of IP regulations, and so forth) can they do so.

Free market is not corporatism. Free market is not crony capitalism. (More disinformation that needs to be lifted.)

So you're not countering my free market position, you're countering the crony capitalist position. This is a straw man argument, even if in this case you might not have understood my position in the first place. You, like so many others, equate "capitalism" with cronyism or corporatism. Many cannot conceive of a free market that is free from regulation. So folks then argue against their own interests, either for or against "fascist" vs. "socialist" medicine. The free market is, in fact, outside these two positions.

You wrote: "IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis. the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering."

I won't go into medicare right now (It is a disaster, and so is the current non-free-market insurance industry. See the article linked in my comment above.)

You wrote "this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades."

I don't want to be a naysayer but, socialism is nothing new. It has been tried (and failed) many times before. The USSR had socialized medicine. So does Cuba (but then you may believe the Michael Moore fairytale about medicine in Cuba). It's probably better to go see in person how Cubans live and how they have no access to the places that Moore visited.

You wrote: "i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other."

Really, then why try to force me (or anyone) into your idea of "good" medicine? The free market is a communal effort. In fact, it is nothing else (and nothing else is as communal as the free market). Central planning, socialized, top-down decision-making, is not. Never has been. Never will be.

Voluntary interactions is "taking care of each other." Coercion is not. Socialism is coercion. It cannot "work" any other way. A free market is voluntary cooperation.

Economic calculation is necessary to avoid chaos, whatever the purpose of a service. This is economic law. Unless the purpose is to create chaos, you need real prices and efficiency that only the free market can provide.

I hope this helps to clarify (and not confuse) what I wrote on @eric3579's profile.

The types of mass produced production shown in this movie are the only reason that we can sustain an opulent lifestyle where it is rare that people starve and exercise is needed to fight over-nutrition.

Producing food "organically" takes much more time and money to create the same amount of final product. It also creates more waste.

Monoculture crops and warehoused livestock are ways to more efficiently create the resources that people crave thereby optimizing profit for those who create and sell the final product. The downside of these production techniques is that they are very sensitive to disruption by disease or pests.

If we didn't have mass produced farming, food would be more expensive and more people would be starving.

Requesting nutrition drop, SIR.

This is partly because such studies are hard, and rare. The most commonly cited one (which is unusual, as you point out) is the Nurses Study.

An interesting one mentioned by the TV show "Supersizers go..." was studies into the effects of wartime rationing in WWII London (the first episode of the series actually).

Since they have put up all the episodes on yt, I can even link to it: http://youtu.be/cCddAKnf2LI?t=7m



As they point out, although certain details change, the basic advice has stayed the same for the past 50 years... eat less sugar and fat, eat less meat, eat more fruit and vegetables. No matter which trend is in at the moment, eating too much processed food is always discouraged and, with few exceptions, eating more fruit and vegetables is usually encouraged.

Re-watching the end of the episode though, reminds me that it wasn't actually the last few minutes where they mentioned the research, it was earlier. Rats. Somewhere in the episode they did make mention of it, I'm sure of it, but I only found the summary at the end.

In his short and readable book "In defence of food", Michael Pollan also mentions research by Canadian dentist (!) Weston Price, published in 1939 and titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Price studied the diets of various isolated populations that had not been exposed to modern food, and found that humans are quite adaptable and can thrive on a wide variety of diets... sadly, the Western diet does not appear to be one of them.

In the same volume he also points out that you should avoid foods which make health claims... if you look in the supermarket, the healthiest foods are likely to be lumped together in the fresh fruit and vegetable section making no claims at all. If you want a book which provides references and studies, that one is worth reading. I'm sure he is not 100% correct in every claim he makes, but like I said, the book is short and readable.

One of the things that really annoys me about debates on nutrition, is that there are almost never any actual studies cited. Tons of anecdotes, but anecdotes are not evidence.

Frankly, I've had to tune them all out in self-defense, or I'd be switching my lifestyle on a yearly basis to go along with the latest fad.

Of course, you are right that there are other components to health, however, I think the majority of our health is accomplished by what we do to our insides with a minority of the benefit coming through exercise.

I find it compelling that the heart patients too sick for bypass surgery are sent to Joel Fuhrman for fasting followed by a plant-based diet in order to get them safely back to health. In your own back yard, Joe Cross came out with "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead." and was healed to health through a plant-based diet. The evidence for health through proper nutrition is now overwhelming. From Dr. John McDougal's, "The McDougal Plan," through Dr. Neil Barnard's, "Reversing Diabetes," we are seeing that the western diet is the main reason for the burden on our healthcare system.

My own story is this: Several years ago my blood pressure was 210/120. I was on 4 medications and had edema in my legs and was, at 54 years old, feeling that I was on my way out. The doctors were so concerned that they continued to recommend additional drugs and tests to see what was going on. At that point I went to an old friend named Richard. He is a nutritionist and he and his 10 children have NEVER been to a doctor. (He claims it is because he didn't poison his family with sugar and white flour among other processed foods). Through natural foods and supplements, he healed me. Last year I completed two rounds of P90X. That was the benefit of the internal healing. I was able to do that.

All that being said, a plant-based diet doesn't necessarily mean no meat. But if people choose to do a no meat diet, I suggest strongly that they plan on figuring out their protein requirements and making sure that they can eat a broad enough range of fruits, vegetables and legumes in order that they don't run a protein deficit. That is different, in my way of thinking, from a protein deficiency. It is possible to get all of some of the amino acids needed and lack some of the others. Trust me, that results in some weird side effects.

I believe the huge problem with discussing this issue with people is that it seems everyone has something to protect. So I normally don't talk about it unless someone comes to me who wants to get well. Even then, I am just a resource and offer no medical advice personally. I do, however, have a story to share with regards to improper nutrition.

I will add this beautiful tidbit : Linus Pauling's protocol for reversing heart disease is, in my mind, a remarkable piece of work. One doctor, when asked what he thought about it, said that he wasn't too sure it would work, but then again he hadn't won two Nobel Prizes either.

Alcohol. Best nutritional supplement, ever!
Oh, and the 1% of drunks on the planet are all your musicians, writers, and entertainers who without that monkey would no-doubt drive themselves insane dealing with the majority of humanity!

>> ^jimnms:

Caffeine is not a diuretic.

“In the 10 studies reviewed, consumption of a caffeinated beverage resulted in 0 to 84 percent retention of the initial volume ingested, whereas consumption of water resulted in 0 to 81 percent retention.”
Another study, in the same journal in 2005, involved scientists following 59 active adults over 11 days while controlling their caffeine intake. They were given caffeine in capsule form on some days and on other days were given a placebo. Researchers found no significant differences in levels of excreted electrolytes or urine volume. [source]

>> ^jimnms:

Caffeine is not a diuretic.

“In the 10 studies reviewed, consumption of a caffeinated beverage resulted in 0 to 84 percent retention of the initial volume ingested, whereas consumption of water resulted in 0 to 81 percent retention.”
Another study, in the same journal in 2005, involved scientists following 59 active adults over 11 days while controlling their caffeine intake. They were given caffeine in capsule form on some days and on other days were given a placebo. Researchers found no significant differences in levels of excreted electrolytes or urine volume. [source]

Caffeine is not a diuretic.

“In the 10 studies reviewed, consumption of a caffeinated beverage resulted in 0 to 84 percent retention of the initial volume ingested, whereas consumption of water resulted in 0 to 81 percent retention.”

Another study, in the same journal in 2005, involved scientists following 59 active adults over 11 days while controlling their caffeine intake. They were given caffeine in capsule form on some days and on other days were given a placebo. Researchers found no significant differences in levels of excreted electrolytes or urine volume. [source]