Carbs are sugar as far as your body is concerned.
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How does the longterm unsustainability of our large scale farming have -anything- to do with the arguments I present in the post you replied to?
If our current grain production methods are unsustainable (which they are), then the production of meat - which requires dedicating grain to the feeding of livestock - is exponentially moreso (which it is).
Animals biologically do not make for efficient caloric batteries. Plants are extremely efficient, and store vast amounts of energy via photosynthesis. But when animals consume those plants, the stored energy of the plants gets largely wasted via basic life functions, as well as incomplete digestion.
This is why the US could feed 800,000,000 people - over two and a half times our current population - using only the grains we feed to our livestock. And we donât even EAT much of our livestock! Things like eggs, dairy, and leather account for huge swathes of our livestock population, and the animals producing these goods do not get eaten.
Now, yes, we do feed our livestock on various types of feed, and a substantial amount of our feed is in the form of plants we ourselves do not eat as humans - but weâre still paying an opportunity cost. In many cases, the same land which is used to produce a non-edible feedstock could also be used to produce human-edible grains instead. Even if the yield is lesser, the fact that it is intensely more efficient than meat makes up for any benefits the non-edible feedstock provides.
As for a plant-based low carb diet, I pointed out the problems with that elsewhere in this thread.
And even putting aside modern farming techniques, there are reasons why basic grains have been the foundation of the human diet since the dawn of civilization. There is a reason why meat has historically been a luxury of the wealthy, and why even they still ate plenty of bread and noodles and beer and the like.
Low carb diets are completely unsustainable on any significant scale when based on meat, and are probably unsustainable, but most certainly culturally resisted for to an astounding degree, when based on plants.
I know that. However, I specifically mentioned fructose. The quantity of fructose created by breakdown of complex carbohydrates is very small, as I understand it. Starches, for example, end up as glucose and maltose.
I was responding to this where you explicitly mentioned food production:
Carb laden foods like grains and cereals are staples because they are calorically efficient - both in terms of carbohydrates themselves compared to protein and lipids, and in terms of food production.
I contrasted current grain/cereal food production, which you see as some kind of savior though you admit is unsustainable, with a possible alternative use of the same lands which is sustainable.
Cereals are not efficient in terms of production.
Look at water alone, most land is not suited or only marginally suited for farming. Large swaths of US farmland depend on pumping/depleting eons old groundwater reseviors. Once that water is gone, those lands will no longer be suitable for farming at all. That same land could support herding animals from rain water and native grasses alone.
Back to your efficiency argument. Efficiency is the energy put out by a system divided by the energy put in. How many calories of diesel fuel + the calories from the sun are required to produce a calorie of cereal grain? Herding ruminant animals requires almost no additional energy inputs!
In terms of limited and diminishing resources (fossil fuels, fresh water, and not yet even mentioning top soil), will there ever be a sustainable industrial scale production of cereal grains? To feed 9 billion people?
The other point Iâd like to make about efficiency is that cereals are not efficient in providing nutrition in that they donât really provide much beyond calories. A grain centered diet is likely to be deficient in fat soluble vitamins A, E, D, K, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, B12, calcium, iron, zinc, and likely others. There is a reason why when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers they got sicker, shorter, and began acquiring chronic diseases.
But all of this misses the point entirely of the study, which is that in 2014, we still have to conduct research to prove that dietary fat is not bad for your âheart healthâ.
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If you think that promoting the complete eradication of the human race is âsociopathic,â maybe youâre the one who needs psychiatric help.
Step one is to restrict yourself to one bottle of your favorite beer a day. You can drink water to fill your belly and satisfy your habit of repeatedly lifting a glass; drink your one beer just for the taste and the health benefits.
If you have a really rough day, pick up a âbig bottleâ beer like Adriaen Brouwer dark gold (which is clearly cheating, but thatâs the point).
After about a week, youâll develop the habit of drinking your daily beer really really slowly, so that it takes as long as it used to take you to drink three or four. Youâll also start to see the appeal of porters and stouts and English beers that still taste good even after they get warm⌠that last swallow is likely to be room temperature.
After about three weeks, your capacity for alcohol will start to plummet. (And so will your weight and/or circumference, if youâve eliminated sugar, bread and potatoes from your diet.) Youâll start to feel pleasantly âloosened upâ with only a single beer.
After a couple months of one beer a day, you can get pretty tipsy on two beers. And schnockered on three, so donât even think about driving.
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