Kale!

[Raineyrocks]

I love it when smart people argue / debate... I learn so much . Like I was unaware that cats preferred beef over fish .

Or do cats prefer fish over beef?    With a cup of milk on top?

[Alex Libman]

This is a kale thread.  No cats please.  Although a freshly picked ripe bunch of kale is quite fluffy, like a green crunchy kitten almost.  And it doesn't get hairballs.  And it never bugs you for attention just when you're trying to work, and when you have time to play it never hides under the bed...

I have no idea how you found a youtube video like that Pat, but it's hilarious! 

Every YouTube video you watch that involves photoshopped singing cats lowers your IQ by 0.25% percent.  Good thing I'm running OpenBSD, so I'm protected (no Adobe Flash).  The antioxidants from leafy greens also help.

the problem Alex is that you're looking at the issue in terms of the MAXIMUM POSSIBLE output PER piece of land. Sure, in THAT SPECIFIC sense plants are more "efficient", but in real life those aren't the sole parameters of "efficiency". Problem is improving the land to that level to raise grains & fruits & veggies can be very costly in lots of places, and then involves running costs of irrigation, fertilization, etc. Whereas raising ruminants involves just following/directing said ruminants around and letting them eat what's already there. Again, Peta-tards love to expound on how much we feed to cows, but I've also heard numbers that like 80% of beef is grazing-grown - and "feedlots" are often confused with places where they "finish" the beef (plump them up on grain). They can show pictures of cows in rows munching on grain-based feed, but apparently what they're missing is that most of those cows' lives was walking around munching on barely-taken-care-of-grass (little to no irrigation or fertilization)

I agree 100%, but being forward-looking means anticipating extraordinary scenarios, and elevating yourself to the challenge.  It's like asking an Olympic champion, "why do you want to run so fast, can't you just take a cab?"

The question of agricultural efficiency ties directly to food security, and is thus a crucial libertarian issue.  The first enclaves of freedom are likely to be small, densely populated, and blockaded or otherwise isolated by the hostile governments that surround them...

And sure, when we're in space we'll probably be using plants for food. But we're not in space yet, are we?

The first rule of Libman's Gulch is you don't talk about Libman's Gulch.

The second rule of Libman's Gulch is that you don't make references to anarcho-punko-transgresso-BradPitto Hollywood crap without calling it crap.

Third rule - self-fulfilling prophecies.  The hardest thing in leaving this planet is overcoming the psychological and cultural attachments.  That is a difficult transition to make in one non-cyborg lifetime.  One must prepare oneself decades in advance, or perhaps even prepare generations in advance by establishing a rational future-oriented culture and passing it on to your children.

Fourth rule - don't write highly sophisticated symbolic poetry, no one will appreciate it anyway.

Except that slaughtering them involves subsequently crying, rocking back and forth all night in the fetal position because you killed an innocent little bunny.

Hmm, maybe I should get a job as a wabbit whacker.  My qualifications:

(1)  Some animals (and very sensitive humans) can smell byproducts of meat and dairy ooze out of a carnivore's pores, so the rabbits might feel more comfortable in my presence.

(2)  Strong forearms and skill to break the neck in proper fashion, causing clean instant death.

(3)  Complete disregard for anyone or anything except myself.

[MaineShark]

Rabbits are darn near perfect meat animals

Except that slaughtering them involves subsequently crying, rocking back and forth all night in the fetal position because you killed an innocent little bunny.

Not really, no.  Rabbits are property - things - not people.  They don't have rights, and there's zero reason that a rational person would be offended by killing them.  I realize that you Statists have this whole psychological defense mechanism where you pretend that having thugs murder people doesn't make you guilty, but rational people don't have that.  If I'm okay with having someone else kill animals so I can eat them (and I am), then I'm okay with doing it myself, because hiring someone else to do it doesn't change my responsibility in the matter.

Hmm, maybe I should get a job as a wabbit whacker.  My qualifications:

(1)  Some animals (and very sensitive humans) can smell byproducts of meat and dairy ooze out of a carnivore's pores, so the rabbits might feel more comfortable in my presence.

Rabbits don't even care when you kill other rabbits in front of them.

(2)  Strong forearms and skill to break the neck in proper fashion, causing clean instant death.

Actually, it's largely in the shoulder and the wrist.  Speed is everything, since rabbits are ridiculously fragile, and it takes nearly no actual force to kill them.  Quick whack on the top of the head to render them unconscious, then pick them up by the hind legs and carefully do a whack to the base of the skull to separate the brainstem, causing instant death (not that the rabbit notices - no animal is conscious seconds after having it's
skull crushed).  Then get it to the chopping block and take of the head so you can hang it and let the blood drain, before it bruises the meat in the shoulders.  Even that doesn't take any real force, if you have a sharp instrument (I like my bowie knife).

Then clean and skin it, and you're set.  Less total man-hours per unit nutrition expended from birth to table than tending a garden.

Plus, we sell some as breeding stock or pets (rabbits are essentially tribbles, after all), if folks happen by and ask.  Can't do that with vegetables - seeds sell for almost nothing, and no one keeps a pet lettuce, unless he's a candidate for psychological intervention.

Joe

[Alex Libman]

Libmanologists who read me on other forums will already know the big news - after 1.5 years on the vegan "Tax Resister Diet", I've done a complete 180-degree turn and switched to a low-carb "Seasteader Diet" instead!

None of the anti-vegan points made on this thread or elsewhere had anything to do with it (and I might have some more responses to that later) - I'm simply conducting an experiment to see how that diet would affect me and what the differences are.  I definitely still believe that the vegan diet is more efficient, and thus more beneficial for an agorist community / micro-nation secession movement (except when seasteading), and a vegan diet would have greater longevity benefits for someone with a family history of heart disease and cancer.  (See the first post in the "Seasteader Diet" thread for a list of other vegan health advantages / low carb disadvantages that I'm aware of.)  There are, however, other things I must consider...

My primary interest is in how this diet change will affect my depression, which has been getting rather bad lately...

I'm also curious to see which diet will make it easier to consume less calories, increase metabolism, get more exercise, and thus lose more weight.  (I've already lost 70lb since I became a tax resister, but there's plenty more to lose.)

So, as of 1-2 weeks ago, I'm now eating plenty of lean (or not so lean) meats and most especially fish - and little else.  I try to limit my portions so that I'm not getting more than ~45 grams of protein at a time, which is all that my body can absorb in a single meal, and if I go more than 3 hours between meals I snack on some egg-whites (raw or cooked) to maximize the protein.  I avoid shellfish and egg-yolks because I'm getting more than enough cholesterol already.  I'm still excluding dairy, because I went from being very lactose tolerant to becoming very lactose intolerant in the last few years (even before the vegan diet), but I can now have a little bit of cheese because it has no carbs.  In theory I can still have tofu, which contains no carbs, but I'm cutting it out as well to better see how the diet change will affect my mood.

I try to limit carbohydrates to 30-50g a day, and only from leafy sources.  My vegan dietary staples -- beans, peas, legumes, whole grains, etc -- are definitely 100% forbidden.  (Even while vegan I was always avoiding "junk carbs" like potatoes, rice, white bread, processed corn, fruits, anything sweet, and especially alcohol.)  I also avoid processed meat products that can contain carbs - corn sugar is very cheap, and the customers mindlessly enjoy the taste and want more, so the manufacturers try to inject it into everything.  In theory I can have as much artificially sweetened beverages as I want - I learned to live without them on the Tax Resister Diet, but fatty meals make me crave a Diet Pepsi more than ever.

The craving for more carbs was very strong at first, but it went away for the most part after the first week, especially if I eat more fat.  This makes the low-carb diet much easier than the vegan diet, with which I've had to suffer with meat cravings for the first few months.  I think I've lost ~6lb in ~10 days, but that isn't significant because I've been losing and regaining the same 5-10lb for quite a while now...  Even if my weight remained the same, that is good news, because I've been eating a lot of meat and other things I've been craving for 1.5 years - I decided I can be less strict about counting calories at first.  I'll proceed with this experiment for at least 1-2 months and see what the differences are.

Getting back to the subject of this thread, the one major food source that hasn't changed between these radically different diets is leafy greens.  If you limit your carbs, you want to use your daily allowance on the best low-starch high-micronutrient plant foods you can get.  When you get 20g of carbs from kale (200g plant weight, as all plants are mostly water), you're also getting 6x the daily requirement of vitamin A, 4x of C, a third of calcium, and 16% of fiber (which is much needed on a diet like this).  Kale's per-carb micronutrient value beats brocolli (350g plant weight per 20g carbs), Brussels sprouts (200g), celery (666g), cabbage (370g), artichokes (200g), lettuce (730g), gralic (60g - just going by nutritional value and not other health claims), carrots (230g), and pretty much any other vegetable that's not a leafy-green.

Unfortunately, when per-carb-gram efficiency is considered, kale it is no longer the #1 champ.  You can instead get those 20 carb-grams from 540g of spinach, which is a lot more plant chewing, and it will get you half the daily requirement of calcium / fiber / vitamin E, 81% of iron, and more B vitamins as well.  Other low-carb micronutrient champs include Swiss chard (also 540g plant weight for 20g carbs), bok choy (950g), mustard greens (400g for 20g carbs), collard greens (330g), dill (280g), parsley (320g), and possibly avocado (240g - specifically for its fatty acids and fiber).  Of course if you don't particularly like any of those greens, aren't so fanatical about carbs, and want to measure by weight (i.e. more nutrition for less chewing time), then Kale is still the man!  It is also significantly cheaper than most of the per-carb champs listed in this paragraph (except collards).

[CurtHowland]

My primary interest is in how this diet change will affect my depression, which has been getting rather bad lately...

Use Linux.

Good luck on the diet change. No worries about fatty acids and other needed things like on a vegan diet, but do keep some brown rice around in case you start feeling dizzy from a lack of carbohydrates. It happens.

http://www.westonaprice.org/

These folks had a great talk at the National Press Club some time in the last month that I pulled down, great viewing from actual experts, about just how bad the Federal Food Pyramid is.

[Alex Libman]

My primary interest is in how this diet change will affect my depression, which has been getting rather bad lately...

Use Linux.

Good luck on the diet change. No worries about fatty acids and other needed things like on a vegan diet, but do keep some brown rice around in case you start feeling dizzy from a lack of carbohydrates. It happens.

http://www.westonaprice.org/

These folks had a great talk at the National Press Club some time in the last month that I pulled down, great viewing from actual experts, about just how bad the Federal Food Pyramid is.

I've been using Linux for ~10 years.  Using a faster and more popular but commie-entangled UNIX will not cure my depression, only living up to my values can.  (But that's for another thread.)

No problems from limited carbs so far.  Brown rice is not the best thing to keep around in case you get dizzy, because it's perishable and not very portable, while you're most likely to get dizzy when you're on the go.  It would also be better to have a mix of simple carbs for immediate absorption as well as complex carbs to get you home.  I still keep some "trail mix" (cereal and dried berries) in my backpack when I'm hiking.  But I don't think that's gonna happen, because I get ~50g of carbs and plenty of fats.  Most people who get dizzy on a low-carb diet are ones who really eat nothing but lean chicken breast and tuna for a while.

There are very good arguments criticizing the food pyramid from both directions - vegan as well as low-carb.  I still think the vegan argument has more medical merit, but I stopped losing weight on that diet so I decided to experiment.  Suddenly I remembered how I was on a high-protein diet when I was lifting weights in high school, and I seemed pretty happy back then - don't know, maybe that's just nostalgia...

[CurtHowland]

Using a faster and more popular but commie-entangled UNIX will not cure my depression

Jodan shimashita. That was a joke.

And it was funny. Laugh.

[Alex Libman]

You wanna make me laugh - get my karma up to POSITIVE 33...   

[CurtHowland]

You wanna make me laugh - get my karma up to POSITIVE 33...   

I've wondered for a long time now, just what that "karma" is and how it changes. I'm clueless in that respect.

[Russell Kanning]

Kale is my second favorite green in our green smoothies .... as in I only taste the berries and bananas
I like Kale in salad.
Rainey ...... Kat pulls all the green leaf off of the stem. it is then easy to eat. We buy it at walmart for 88cents a bundle like other greens
Kale survives the nh winter and starts up again when it gets some sun again .... go baby go. Our Russian Kale had a nice purple color to it.
I also like Kale with a steak or fajita fixins.

see all Kale komments

[MaineShark]

You wanna make me laugh - get my karma up to POSITIVE 33...   

I've wondered for a long time now, just what that "karma" is and how it changes. I'm clueless in that respect.

I don't think you've posted enough - IIRC, you need to post 25 times, to have access.

Once you hit that point, you will see an "applaud" and a "smite" link under each user's name, to the left of the post.  You can add or subtract a karma point from any user, once per hour.

It gets gamed a lot, of course.  The system used to show the total, as well as a positive and negative number.  If someone had a lot of positive or negative karma, you could see that most folks were reacting only one way to that individual's posts.  If someone had both high-positive and high-negative numbers, you'd know that there was gaming going on, or the individual was very controversial, getting applauds and smites, each from approximately half of those bothering to act.

Joe

[Alex Libman]

An update on my experiment:

OK, after ~30 days of experimenting with this meat-centric super-low-carb diet, I am calling it quits and going back to veganism.  Observations:

• My weight stayed exactly the same.

• The change in diet had no effect on my ailments: exhausted eyes and clinical depression.

• I did not crave carbs as much as I thought, and I could go with almost zero carbs without feeling any major side-effects.  Although maybe it's just the first month.

• I never felt hungry, because I ate lots of animal fat.  In fact I found myself eating only two large meals a day on most days.  I also snacked less, because my desire to munch on leafy greens went down for some reason, and snacking on the go is a lot less convenient on this diet (unless it's beef jerky).

• I think on some days I actually got less protein into my cells than on a bean-centric vegan diet, because of large infrequent meals and there being a limit to how much protein the body can absorb per meal.

• Although I did not feel any difference, it makes sense that this meat and sodium-heavy diet would cause more stress on the internal organs.

• Animal products are definitely a lot more expensive than beans, grains, and vegetables, especially ones of highest quality, in spite of all the government subsidies and stuff.  Processed meats and canned fish are cheaper, but you get what you pay for.  They're also more perishable and just pretty darn inconvenient for frugal and on-the-go lifestyles.

I think I'll try this experiment again in a couple of years, when I'll be better able to accurately benchmark how diet affects my physical performance, and also when I can afford to eat lots of highest quality beef, sashimi, etc. 

[Alex Libman]

I recently came across a pro-juicing / juice-fasting documentary called Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead [BT] IMDb.

I never tried juicing myself, and it seems more wasteful and counter-productive to the benefit of fulfilling idle munching instincts with leafy greens, but I guess it would be beneficial after a point where any more fiber in your diet would do more harm than good.  In addition to some easily-quantifiable nutrient losses, the juicing process also diminishes digestion, for which proper chewing is imperative, reduces enzyme quality, etc.  Plus there's a certain rugged toughness factor involved - you just know that a man who chews his greens will blast your head off with a shotgun without flinching.  So I guess a reasonable balance is to eat your day's first 3 lb of raw greens whole, and juice anything above that. 

The movie itself was one of the more inspiring food documentaries I've seen, with frank exploration of America's fast-food culture.  What's specifically related to this thread is a foods table the movie zooms in on at ~8.5 minutes, called "Dr. Fuhrman's Neutrient Density Scores":



That's right, folks, kale is #1 yet again!

(Note that the above image I found on the Web is a bit different from the one in the film - the latter has kale as a more dominant champ, with Collards a distant second at 876.)

It's so sad that people waste their time on calorie-dense fruits and loser-veggies (ex. tomatoes, lettice, cucumbers), while not paying enough attention to spinach, collards, and of course kale.  The main reason why people associate potassium with bananas, calcium with milk, vitamin C with oranges, vitamin A with carrots, antioxidants with green tea, etc, is because those foods are more expensive and their producers / importers have better lobbyists...

[MaineShark]

I never tried juicing myself...

That's way more than we needed to know about your personal life...

Joe

[Alex Libman]

I knew the pro-wrestling term, but apparently there are others.  Get your mind out of the gutter!  A tall wholesome glass of bubbling-fresh kale juice could help.   It's like washing out your braincells with some vitamin K and antioxidant soap!