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idamtnboy wrote: The owner of the local Burger King said he was in France a couple of years ago, and had some french fries at some French restaurant. Hardly preprocessed, cooked in lard, unhealthy as hell, and damn good!

Forty years ago there was a lady who had a sub shop in a former gasoline station near my office. A bunch of us guys would go there at least once per week for lunch. All of her ingredients were fresh. Her sub rolls came from a local bakery. She made an excellent fresh slaw.

She bought large (probably Idaho) potatoes and cut them in large slabs and fried them in lard in a special fryer she had bought from a bankruptcy sale. If you wanted salt you added it yourself at the table. I remember that slaw and french fries as well as I remember the subs.

When we came back to the office from the shop one day a couple of the young girls in the office told us they did not go there because they did not like the french fries. I thought to myself, "Yeah, you don't like them because they taste too damn much like potatoes!"

Hated it when the lady found another building out in the suburbs.

I practically grew up on lard.
Fried chicken, killed an hour ago and cooked in at least a half inch of hog fat.
Wild asparagus and corn from the garden, red potatoes, mashed with butter and top cream.
Mom's biscuits (what's a cat-head anyhow?)

McDonalds and other fast food chains offer reverse or negative nutrition. Foods are laced with additives that make them tastier than they should be. Over-processing cooks much of the nutrition out of fast food products. Concurrently, over-processing removes many of the enzymatic/chemical cues that our bodies need to let us know when we're full. We end up obese and diabetic literally because we cannot gauge when we're overeating this reverse nutrition. It happens within months of eating a MacDonalds-only diet.

If you haven't already, watch 'SuperSize Me' with Morgan Spurlock.

They stopped using lard at McDonalds when veggie oil got cheaper. I'm not so sure using Lard for french fries was a bad thing.

When my sister came back from her stint in the Peace Corps, she said it took her months to get used to the over-processed foods we take for granted in the US. She said it made her feel sick and that she wished she could go back to eating the rough, simple fresh diet that fed those with home she lived. (Though she didn't like fufu. Manioc makes you stink if you eat enough of it.)

( Perrybucsdad said 'power dump' -- heh heh... )

DreamDiver wrote:McDonalds and other fast food chains offer reverse or negative nutrition. Foods are laced with additives that make them tastier than they should be. Over-processing cooks much of the nutrition out of fast food products.

Interesting terms: "reverse nutrition" and "negative nutrition." Like a twisted way of being "malnourished."

DreamDiver wrote:Concurrently, over-processing removes many of the enzymatic/chemical cues that our bodies need to let us know when we're full. We end up obese and diabetic literally because we cannot gauge when we're overeating this reverse nutrition. It happens within months of eating a MacDonalds-only diet.

Another puzzling aspect to my experience the other day was that I actually still felt hungry after eating the 2 McD's hamburgers and small fries, even though the meal amounted to 730 calories! When I eat two of my own hamburgers and a half-potato's worth of home-made hash browns in a small amount of olive oil, I feel satisfied. And without that McDonald's hangover.

They stopped using lard at McDonalds when veggie oil got cheaper. I'm not so sure using Lard for french fries was a bad thing.[/quote]
My friends were baking Christmas cookies the other day and criticizing how, in their grandmother's day, lard was used for the recipes. They believe that Crisco shortening is an improvement over lard. This strikes me intuitively as incorrect. What say you all? In terms of calories, lard is only 10 calories more than the Crisco per Tablespoon. Lard has some cholesterol and Crisco has none, but it's not a great difference, and the whole cholesterol thing is bogus, anyway. It just means that lard comes from something that has feet and Crisco comes from a plant.

If you were feeling sluggish after that meal, I'd suggest testing your blood glucose if that hasn't be suggested.

Cheers,
xena

napstress wrote:Interesting terms: "reverse nutrition" and "negative nutrition." Like a twisted way of being "malnourished."
...
Another puzzling aspect to my experience the other day was that I actually still felt hungry after eating the 2 McD's hamburgers and small fries, even though the meal amounted to 730 calories! When I eat two of my own hamburgers and a half-potato's worth of home-made hash browns in a small amount of olive oil, I feel satisfied. And without that McDonald's hangover.
...
My friends were baking Christmas cookies the other day and criticizing how, in their grandmother's day, lard was used for the recipes. They believe that Crisco shortening is an improvement over lard. This strikes me intuitively as incorrect. What say you all? In terms of calories, lard is only 10 calories more than the Crisco per Tablespoon. Lard has some cholesterol and Crisco has none, but it's not a great difference, and the whole cholesterol thing is bogus, anyway. It just means that lard comes from something that has feet and Crisco comes from a plant.

To me, malnutrition implies something like rickets or scurvy -- usually the absense of a single nutrient in famine situations or in small populations that temporarily don't have access to a regular food stuff for that culture. Sailors got scurvy because they didn't have access to fresh foods that had vitamin C. The term 'Limey' comes from the early British naval practice of making sailors eat limes on a regular basis to keep scurvy from manifesting.

In this case, the entire food product has been so over processed, all real nutrition and enzymatic cues have been purposefully removed. The only thing that's left is starch and sugars. The tiny amount of lettuce and tomato are insignificant in their actual nutritional value. A slice of tomato and a lettuce leaf do not a salad make. Fructose is the sweetener used in all the non-diet beverages at McDonald's. As sweet as it is, fructose is a toxin that can only be remediated by the liver. Your liver deals with fructose the same way it deals with alcohol. While there are no noticeable immediate effects of fructose on the body, chronic use has the same effect as alcohol - diabetes, liver failure, death, etc.

We feed this stuff to our kids thinking it's okay because we don't feel any different now, but our bodies are working just as hard to get rid of fructose as they do to get rid of alcohol. If you tax the liver too much, too long, it's going to fail. McDonald's and most similar fast food places are culpable for creating foods that fill us, but leave us still feeling hungry. We crave more, so we eat more. We get fat, We get diabetes. We die. Since these consumable products actually make us sick rather than fortify our bodies, they are in fact reverse nutrition rather than mere malnutrition. We shouldn't call these consumables 'food'. Most of the 'snack-things' available in hermetically sealed pouches on the store shelves are similarly reverse nutrition and not food. My choice? I wouldn't let a kid eat at McDonald's, BK or any of these other places because they are nutritional graveyards.

There is nothing wrong with lard when consumed in its normal culturally-traditional food palette. I'm sorry to report -- cake with lard frosting is not part of any culturally traditional food palette. Cold-pressed vegetable oils are okay -- olive, coconut, walnut, peanut, sunflower, safflower, etc. These oils have been in traditional foods for ages.

But think about corn or rape-seed (canola) oil: they have to be heavily processed - basically heated and killed -- before they provide the oil, wrested very forcefully from huge amounts of the original plant material at great cost and little benefit to provide meager amounts of actual oil. These are negatively nutritious oils. Like fructose, these oils are on the GRAS list (Generally Recognized As Safe) only because they were on the market before the late 1950's. Market forces lobbied for them not to be scientifically tested and won. So we have no proof for or against the actual nutritive value of these substances because market economists don't want to be forced to remove any very lucrative crop or its over-processed products from the market if the products are found to be 'bad'. How many aisles in our grocery stores are filled with this stuff?

Further, I am convinced that there may be an addictive element to the modern junk food diet that is being shoved 'under the carpet' in the same way that market-unfavorable tobacco smoking research was scuttled for decades.

My wife suggests that you could have removed the buns and just eaten the patties for the protein. Considering the source (vast feed lots of corn-fed cattle), it's still debatable how much actual nutrition can be gotten from them.

In short - you better believe this stuff can affect your sleep. I don't know how it ties together, but our bodies are each an integrated ecosystem. When one organ begins to fail, the others try to rebalance and pick up the slack. With continued reverse nutrition, the other organs start failing too. Sleep will be somewhere in the cascade of cause and effect. I'm just not sure which side of the spectrum lack of sleep is closet too.

In the last decade or so, we are beginning to realize the tie between criminal behavior and our junk food habit.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/cri ... 39865.html

napstress wrote: Another puzzling aspect to my experience the other day was that I actually still felt hungry after eating the 2 McD's hamburgers and small fries, even though the meal amounted to 730 calories! When I eat two of my own hamburgers and a half-potato's worth of home-made hash browns in a small amount of olive oil, I feel satisfied. And without that McDonald's hangover.

I feel full after I eat my fresh hamburgers fried in bacon fat too...

In all seriousness though, my grandparents all used lard and most of them lived into their late 80's. My wife and I try and use real butter (no margarine) and real fat (r.g. Lard) whenever we can. We try not to overdo it and I think that is the key.

And on a rare occasion, yes, I will fry myself a hamburger in bacon fat. Just can't beat the taste.

John

We use a lot of extra virgin olive oil.
Bacon fat is for flavoring, and a little goes a long ways.

chunkyfrog wrote:We use a lot of extra virgin olive oil.
Bacon fat is for flavoring, and a little goes a long ways.

I agree, but the way I make them (turn away if you are faint of heart) is fry up a pound of bacon on a special pan (I do this on the grill). When the bacon is all done, I then use all the bacon grease and fry the burgers in it. Yes, I know it is more than likely is unhealthy, but we only do this maybe once a year as it is really messy and a PITA to clean up. But the taste is wonderful.

I'll bet a dollar to ten that my one outing of bacon grease fried burgers is healthier than a years worth of McD's burgers.

John

When I eat certain foods (or too much), my AHI goes up. I don't think it's reflux but it could be. Haven't narrowed it down.

Perrybucsdad wrote: I agree, but the way I make them (turn away if you are faint of heart) is fry up a pound of bacon on a special pan (I do this on the grill). When the bacon is all done, I then use all the bacon grease and fry the burgers in it. Yes, I know it is more than likely is unhealthy, but we only do this maybe once a year as it is really messy and a PITA to clean up. But the taste is wonderful.
John

Think I felt an artery clog up just reading this!
It does sound frightenly good though.

I like to get 80/20 ground beef and grill it up with American Cheese on a grilled sour dough bun, very tasty. Although I never checked if it causes higher AHI's, but sounds like a good experiment.

napstress wrote:They stopped using lard at McDonalds when veggie oil got cheaper. I'm not so sure using Lard for french fries was a bad thing.
My friends were baking Christmas cookies the other day and criticizing how, in their grandmother's day, lard was used for the recipes. They believe that Crisco shortening is an improvement over lard. This strikes me intuitively as incorrect. What say you all?

Saturated animal fats! Absolute killer! Artery clogger!Surely you know that! Where have you been all these years? That's why the term "poly unsaturated fat" is the largest type on a can of Crisco!

Yeah, right! Another one of those medical "discoveries" of years ago that may pan out to not be as real as commonly believed. My general rule for food--the better it tastes the less healthy it is. Really healthy food is supposed to taste blah. That way you get two benefits. You don't eat so much, thus cutting down on your calorie intake, and it's better for you bod! Live long and boring! or, Live short and fun!

idamtnboy wrote:My general rule for food--the better it tastes the less healthy it is. Really healthy food is supposed to taste blah. (....) You don't eat so much, thus cutting down on your calorie intake

This explains a lot.

DreamDiver wrote:Fructose is the sweetener used in all the non-diet beverages at McDonald's.

Hmmmm... I thought fructose was the sugar that comes from fruit. Not that it's necessarily good for you; it's just that at least we get some vitamins and fiber from the fruit. Did you mean high-fructose corn syrup? That's stuff's probably the worst possible thing we can eat—and it's in everything, including things that don't need to be sweet, like the hamburger buns. It's even in pasta sauce!!! Now, how is that necessary? My Italian grandmother didn't even put sugar in it.

robert lustig, sugar the bitter truth
It's long, but he explains why fructose as it is consumed in modern society, is as bad for your body as alcohol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

DreamDiver wrote:Fructose is the sweetener used in all the non-diet beverages at McDonald's.

napstress wrote:Hmmmm... I thought fructose was the sugar that comes from fruit. Not that it's necessarily good for you; it's just that at least we get some vitamins and fiber from the fruit. Did you mean high-fructose corn syrup? That's stuff's probably the worst possible thing we can eat—and it's in everything, including things that don't need to be sweet, like the hamburger buns. It's even in pasta sauce!!! Now, how is that necessary? My Italian grandmother didn't even put sugar in it.

HFCS is the killer. It is - again - over processed -- distilled so purely that all the satisfaction cue mechanisms are removed from it. When we eat whole fruits, we get fructose too, but it is mixed with fiber and various other things that quickly tell us we've had enough. Yes, HFCS is currently in just about every prepared food we can buy today, whether we like it or not. It's low price is supported only because our government has created legislation that support the cheap production of HFCS. All these price supports of reverse nutrition should stop. Yes food would become more expensive, but we'd eat real food instead, and we'd eat less of it. And we'd likely feel fuller too. Everything is sweetened to make us crave more.

Lizistired wrote:robert lustig, sugar the bitter truth...

That's the only credentialed scientist I know of today who will actually stick his neck out and say how bad it really is.