High carb, high plant diversity diet?
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I can't say I eat starches instead of sugars, but I do have a lot of both. If I have just sugars, I never feel full and I eventually become ravenously hungry for starch. If I have only starch, I feel very slow and bloated, and it becomes hard for me to think. Having them both together is beneficial in my opinion.
Usually I will eat more simple sugar in the mornings and a lot more starchy vegetables later in the day. My theory is that if you have more muscle, you will tend to crave more starches because the insulin response from it is anabolic and helps to build and maintain muscle tissue. Fructose does not have such a high insulin response so it doesnt build muscle very well.
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@Orindere if I eat much sugar, I get very hungry and eventually gain fat. If I eat mostly starch, I lose fat and keep good muscle tone.
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@Ecstatic_Hamster
What kinds of starches do you like best? -
the only trouble is finding a large variety of plants/vegetables that are agreeable with digestion and that you actually look forward to eating. in practice this scheme works best if you find the 1-2 starches you handle the best and the 1-2 greens you handle the best and have an appetite for/don't have to force down, but that defeats the purpose you are after here which is as much diversity as possible.
you make a point about using things such as steak, eggs, etc as vitamins on an as needed basis. i have a fundamentally simple diet where i rely on jasmine rice for glucose and whatever lean cut of meat for protein structures that im craving and i will use the traditional peaty foods like liver, gelatinous cuts, oj, coconut oil almost as "vitamins".
i have in the past optimized a diet based around traditional "peaty" foods and used cronometer for instance to make sure all nutrients are met in ratios/amounts that would be considered ideal (low pufa, good zinc:copper ratio, good ca:p ratio, low iron, high glycine to methionine ratio, high vit e, etc) but i found this to be too reductionist of an approach. part of this could be nutritional data on foods is contentious at best but that is a separate issue.
as for maximizing diversity, in my experience i feel much better sticking to the same things everyday that i know i digest and look forward to eating and using those traditional peaty items on an as needed basis. if i haven't had liver in a while, i will have some. if im particularly stressed, its oj with masa cooked in coconut oil, once a week i will dine out usually turkish food and try to get something high in glycine like some lamb, ice cream if im out of the house and there is a shop selling häagen-dazs ice cream bars etc.
if you look at the diet and lifestyles of a lot of centenarians, you can observe they are mostly doing the same habits and routine day in day out for decades and often eating the same things. on the other board someone made a funny remark about how they are some of the most boring goddamn people on earth, or appear to be quite dull. i believe the example used is something like "these are the type of people who if they get to listen to their radio for 5 minutes before bed they will be completely satisfied with what they did that day". i think that is one way to look at it. when i have a routine (diet wise) that i look forward to doing everyday, this is a highly dopaminergic thing and i think there is more value in this than anything else. of course, you don't want to be lacking in important nutrients and precursors, hence using the traditional peaty foods whenever you crave them or as needed. i actually think the peaty foods work best as tools rather than eating them every single day but others get great benefits from daily use.
@GreekDemiGod i remember that thread about applying peat ideas to veganism, iirc it devolved very quickly into people giving OP shit about his b12 status despite him claiming he was doing alright. interesting nonetheless.
slightly tangential but i remember from the old board someone pointed out that pea protein isolate had a relatively "peaty" ratio of amino acids, about half the amount of methionine, cysteine, and tryptophan compared to whey per serving. shame it digests like shit.
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Mr Greek. Would it be fair to say that what you're still wishing for in asking these kinds of questions is "more energy" (that was your thread right, I think)? And if yes, how does that actually feel to you? Is it a kind of debilitating somnolence or more subtle than that?
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@oldchem would it not be more plausible that centenarians live longer because they eat traditionally rather than due to a lack of variety? If you eat a varied traditional diet, you should hope that the benefits of more minerals and vitamins should outweight the extra stress.
Eating varied is much more enjoyable, so it seems almost impossible to return to a simpler diet. There was a discussion on RPF about the benefits of living like the Amish. These kinds of return to primitivism will simply not fly for most of us. -
@Norwegian-Mugabe you are correct, the takeaway I got from the centenarians and their habits is they all seemed to have a dietary routine that they looked forward to each day, i suspect the benefits have nothing to do with a lack of variety but simply looking forward to indulging on their daily staples. in my own experience having a routine where i look forward to each aspect of the day, especially food choices, is positively dopaminergic, this is where i think the benefits lie.
i perhaps didn't illustrate the point properly in my previous post but the centenarians i saw videos of or read about seemed to genuinely look forward to every meal, even if it was modest like a bit of chocolate before bed or coffee and cookies. i'm speculating that the dopaminergic benefits of such a routine where you look forward to waking up everyday does quite a bit for longevity, indirectly of course. food choices can help create such a routine.
suffice to say if you can accomplish this while having variety you will, as you said, reap the benefits of a more robust nutrient profile. in my case at any given time, there are really only a small variety of things i truly crave on a given day. the logistics of having a varied diet on a daily basis isn't even that challenging depending on food choices. if you are looking forward to each meal you eat, you are getting the same benefits those centenarians got with their routines i reckon.
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@oldchem Thanks for taking the time to answer. You are right that cravings are usually the same. We want high calories, salt, sweets, fats, and sufficent proteins. Yet, I might want pork taco one day and lamb stew another. There is something to be said for a variety of tastes even though different dishes satisfy the same needs. The kitchen is also a wonderful place to be creative. I love the smell of different herbs and fruits.
I think the main benefits of routines lies not in lower stress from food variety, but rather that living a life of routine will lead to less stress. I have also observed that people who always needs variety and new forms of stimulation are extremely stressed and in poor health. The kind of type that always needs an event each and every week, probably needs this because they are not able to achieve tranquility within themselves.
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@Norwegian-Mugabe said in High carb, high plant diversity diet?:
I have also observed that people who always needs variety and new forms of stimulation are extremely stressed and in poor health. The kind of type that always needs an event each and every week, probably needs this because they are not able to achieve tranquility within themselves.
i absolutely agree with this assessment and have observed this many times as well. in some high-strung types, i suspect that routine can help placate their neuroticism, often not really solving the underlying problem but it can help facilitate a transition to a better state of health with time. you see this quite a bit in this sphere, certainly on the old board, people making radical changes impulsively diet-wise in a never ending cycle. it is a sign of poor health indeed.
in any scenario i would expect someone who is truly metabolically healthy to have a wide palate for delicious food. i believe there is a time and place for adhering to routine (in the case of a high-strung type mentioned earlier for example), but the goal long-term should be to find a way to implement one of life's greatest joys (food) without such stiffness. this is one of my main interests in bioenergetics, a dynamic and instinctual palate has been elusive thus far, but it is a sign of a metabolically healthy person.
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I have talked with someone who had success in rebuilding her microbiome. She saw improvements within 3 months, but she said that generally repopulating the microbiome is a long term process and can take years.
Makes you wonder why people quit too soon, they expect results too early.
I too didn't have the patience.
Her approach was probiotics, and slow reintroduction of plants, fibers, veggies. She saw big improvements in depression, candida, bloating after a couple months.
