And Now For Some Science!
Aug. 1st, 2007 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillToday I spent an hour and a half talking to people about what needs to be done on everybody's end, and then did my actual work in twenty minutes. This is called "Corporate America."
I spent the rest of the day finishing up my eight-page essay on fats. You'll get a bit each day for seven days. It's time for biochemistry, but don't let the big words scare you. If you can count to eight, you can do this. I wrote this mostly because I’m annoyed at constantly seeing diets that break the two laws of fat:
1. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, calories are all the same. This is because a calorie is not a physical thing. It’s a unit of energy, equal to the amount of energy it takes to raise one liter of water one degree Centigrade. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.
2. Calories consumed in a day minus calories used in a day equals net calorie gain or loss. The only way to get rid of a calorie, once you’ve eaten it, is to use it. That’s it. Unless you go in for liposuction, but that’s really not healthy because it doesn’t just remove the fat, it removes a huge whomping lump of cells.
Once you understand these two laws, inside and out, you can, maybe, begin to bend them. But Do Not Play Silly Buggers with The Laws of Physics. It doesn’t work. Often, it doesn’t work so badly that you end up a) looking silly, b) dead, or c) both.
There are broadly two kinds of food, and I’m sure many of you will applaud the categories: meat and not-meat. Meat is good for you, but as a general rule, the leaner the meat, the better. (When I talk about meat, I’m always talking about lean meat. We’ll get to fats later.) This is because the two categories of food can also be divided like this: food that you eat for nutrients, and food that you eat for energy.
Meat is food that you eat for nutrients. Plants don’t need nearly the same number of nutrients that animals do, or rather, they don’t need the same nutrients. Often, they don’t even make the right ones. So while it is possible to get some of the nutrients you need from plants, you’d have to eat vast amounts of them, and you’d still be unhealthy. It is much easier to let other animals, like cows, eat vast amounts of grass and make essential proteins for you. Then you eat the cows. A good example of this is iron. Plants don’t need a lot of it, but people need it for things like blood. Good red meat is red because of the iron content. Thus, meat, poultry, and fish are generally very good, in the right quantity. We’ll mostly be ignoring the meat.
Plants are food that you eat for energy. I’m sure you’ve all seen those charts where the grasses have this huge block at the bottom and the solitary eagle has a singe slot at the top. It’s called trophic levels, and the basic rule is the closer you are to the original plant, the more energy-dense food is. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but we’re just dealing with concepts right now. Roughly, you’d have to eat ten times the amount of meat to get the same energy you’d get from a little bit of vegetable matter. Once again, I’m not saying that it can’t be done. I’m saying that humans aren’t really equipped to cope with it. You eat plants for energy and meat for nutrients.
There is a third category, rich in nutrients and proteins and energy. It’s called milk. If you skim off the fat, you get heavy cream (mostly energy) and the nutrient-and-protein rich portion, which can be treated almost exactly like meat. Unless you need an ass-ton of energy, say for heating up your body in the Arctic, don’t drink the cream. It’s full of energy. Which brings me to the next topic . . .
Next bit tomorrow. Feel free to ask me any questions :)
I spent the rest of the day finishing up my eight-page essay on fats. You'll get a bit each day for seven days. It's time for biochemistry, but don't let the big words scare you. If you can count to eight, you can do this. I wrote this mostly because I’m annoyed at constantly seeing diets that break the two laws of fat:
1. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, calories are all the same. This is because a calorie is not a physical thing. It’s a unit of energy, equal to the amount of energy it takes to raise one liter of water one degree Centigrade. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.
2. Calories consumed in a day minus calories used in a day equals net calorie gain or loss. The only way to get rid of a calorie, once you’ve eaten it, is to use it. That’s it. Unless you go in for liposuction, but that’s really not healthy because it doesn’t just remove the fat, it removes a huge whomping lump of cells.
Once you understand these two laws, inside and out, you can, maybe, begin to bend them. But Do Not Play Silly Buggers with The Laws of Physics. It doesn’t work. Often, it doesn’t work so badly that you end up a) looking silly, b) dead, or c) both.
There are broadly two kinds of food, and I’m sure many of you will applaud the categories: meat and not-meat. Meat is good for you, but as a general rule, the leaner the meat, the better. (When I talk about meat, I’m always talking about lean meat. We’ll get to fats later.) This is because the two categories of food can also be divided like this: food that you eat for nutrients, and food that you eat for energy.
Meat is food that you eat for nutrients. Plants don’t need nearly the same number of nutrients that animals do, or rather, they don’t need the same nutrients. Often, they don’t even make the right ones. So while it is possible to get some of the nutrients you need from plants, you’d have to eat vast amounts of them, and you’d still be unhealthy. It is much easier to let other animals, like cows, eat vast amounts of grass and make essential proteins for you. Then you eat the cows. A good example of this is iron. Plants don’t need a lot of it, but people need it for things like blood. Good red meat is red because of the iron content. Thus, meat, poultry, and fish are generally very good, in the right quantity. We’ll mostly be ignoring the meat.
Plants are food that you eat for energy. I’m sure you’ve all seen those charts where the grasses have this huge block at the bottom and the solitary eagle has a singe slot at the top. It’s called trophic levels, and the basic rule is the closer you are to the original plant, the more energy-dense food is. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but we’re just dealing with concepts right now. Roughly, you’d have to eat ten times the amount of meat to get the same energy you’d get from a little bit of vegetable matter. Once again, I’m not saying that it can’t be done. I’m saying that humans aren’t really equipped to cope with it. You eat plants for energy and meat for nutrients.
There is a third category, rich in nutrients and proteins and energy. It’s called milk. If you skim off the fat, you get heavy cream (mostly energy) and the nutrient-and-protein rich portion, which can be treated almost exactly like meat. Unless you need an ass-ton of energy, say for heating up your body in the Arctic, don’t drink the cream. It’s full of energy. Which brings me to the next topic . . .
Next bit tomorrow. Feel free to ask me any questions :)
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 11:06 am (UTC)It also means that once you figure out how to farm, you're pretty much set for . . . your ilfe, and yor children's life, and thier children's life, and so on for the next seven thousand years (to date).