Are you sure,mate? Have you ever heard about the experiments with all potato diet?
"One landmark experiment carried out in 1925 on two healthy adults, a man 25 years old and a woman 28 years old, had them live on a diet primarily of white potatoes for 6 months (A few additional items of little nutritional value except for empty calories -- pure fats, ....
This one cracks me up. Pure fats are critical for good nutrition, not "empty calories." Do you believe that fats are "empty calories", Rawlion? I don't have a problem with people trying a diet heavy in cooked tubers. If that's what you want to do, go for it and report your experience. However, like others I am a bit concerned about how your diet seems to jump all over the place in wild extremes. Most troubling is the 6 day fast you mentioned recently.
From that study: "
THE potato is a very important constituent of the diet of many civilised nations, and it may be considered to furnish, with bread, the bulk of the food of the rural population of such countries as Poland and Russia. There is little doubt that the Polish or Russian peasant is nevertheless very healthy and able to do extremely hard work under trying conditions." Sorry, but diets rich in potatoes and bread don't work well for me. YMMV. Plus, I'll take the health of Kitavans, Zhu/whasi, Chukchi, Evenks and other HGs and pastoralists over that of Russian peasant farmers any day. Anyone who has read this forum for more than a few months should be aware that HGs tend to have lower rates of chronic disease than peasant farmers.
On the other hand, many hunter-gatherer peoples encountered in modern times were found to eat some form of cooked tuber and do well healthwise, such as the famous Kitavans I mentioned. Plus, digging sticks for yams have been found dating back to at least 40,000 B.C. (Timeline of dietary shifts in the human line of evolution,
www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1c.shtml, though that's also reportedly around the time that human stature and brain size began to decline, IIRC). The problem is when modern people start carrying this to extremes and make all sorts of false assumptions about the motivations and experiences of those who aren't currently eating a tuber-rich diet, and start lecturing anyone who eats differently than they do about what they should be doing, and even setting themselves up as experts (as Matt Stone seems to be doing).
BTW, re: the biochemistry, I'll reinforce that I wasn't disagreeing with Alphagruis' analysis. It sounds like it matches what KGH has explained in the past. It's just that in the real world, some people like me don't do well when they eat 100g or even 50g of carbs a day, for whatever reason (though I'm still experimenting). Textbook science can be useful, but real world experience is more applicable to real world results than textbook formulas. When real world results don't quite match textbook hypotheses, it's time to go back to the drawing board and try to come up with an explanation. KGH's hypothesis on this was that we who don't fare well on even small amounts of carbs are probably insulin resistant.
Alphagruis and Gary Taubes have also suggested something that I've been experimenting with--that the type of carbs may be the problem. Taubes and others have suggested that maybe fructose is the main problem when it comes to carbs. KGH has even called fruit "tree candy." Fruits are heavily promoted in this forum. I tried fresh, raw organic fruit again and my experience does appear to match the tree candy claim (for me--I'm not applying that to anyone else--others here thrive on them). So other than a tiny occasional fruit cheat, the focus of my recent carb experimentation has been animal and veg carbs (liver, eggs, cabbage, ginger, and other veg). Cooked tubers didn't work well for me in the past, but the tuber-eating HGs and Danny Roddy do have me curious about traditional low-and-slow cooked tubers. I'm even more curious about the predecessors of cooked tubers--starchy veg that is edible raw, though it's hard to eat enough of them to get much carbs.
For the cooked tuber proponents I have a question, why not first try starchy veg that is edible and palatable raw before trying cooked tubers? Is it because it's hard to get much carbs from them? I input seaweed, chicory root, garlic, cabbage, radishes, mixed salad greens, eggs, liver, and kelp into Fitday and it's difficult to get above 2 or 3% (25g/day) of calories as carbs. No wonder these foods don't bother me noticeably.
One of the issues I face is that cooked tubers are fine for people like Stone and Taubes who can handle plentiful butter and dairy. For whatever reason, I continue to have problems with dairy, though less than in the past. So for me that means either eating tubers without butter, which doesn't appeal to me, or frying them. I do occasionally eat french fries at restaurants (though most restaurant fries are too crappy tasting to eat many of) or when my mother makes them (home made are hard to pass up
). Is anyone arguing that I should eat french fries or potato chips if that's the only way that dairy-free tubers appeal to me? Before the domestication of animals, Africans obviously ate their tubers without butter. Has anyone tried a more traditional way of processing tubers that produced a product that tasted good? Apparently traditional techniques involved one or more of soaking, sund-drying, pulverizing, low-and-slow baking or boiling.
Another issue for me is I don't like the strange sweetness of American sweet potatoes or yams and don't know how people eat them other than maybe in stews to cut the sweetness (and that means going whole-hog with the cooking), or in pies to give them a more normal-tasting sweetness. It's not like the nice sweetness of fruits. So for me, tubers means either white potatoes or maybe African yams, if they are ever sold in my area (so far I haven't seen them at the tiny Asian markets in my area), or maybe some other tuber I haven't tried yet.
Still another issue for me is that when I eat too much foods beyond raw meat, fat and organs, the mildly euphoric feeling of well being I get from the latter goes away, and that feeling is not something I want to give up if I don't have to. Does anyone get it from any food other than raw meat, fat and organs? I've never noticed it from any other food.
Other things I'm curious about are, if cooked tubers are such an essential part of the human diet, then how did humans survive and thrive before their introduction and why do they taste like crap without cooking and then adding butter or frying or mixing into stews, whereas meat and fruit taste great raw on their own?
So far, as far as my experience and observations are concerned, there seem to be at least six strikes against cooked tubers:
1) humans and all primates survived and thrived for millions of years without them
2) they taste mediocre to me unless they have something added like butter, salt and black pepper or are cooked in unhealthy ways like high-heat frying (as with french fries and potato chips)
3) not all HGs and traditional peoples eat them even today
4) even HGs that eat them regard them as inferior to honey, meat and fruit
5) they don't give me the mildly euphoric feeling I get from eating raw meat/fat/organs and they actually appear to cancel it out
6) they violate nature's principle of keeping things simple (natural, wild, and unprocessed)
The only thing going for cooked tubers from my perspective that I've seen so far is that some traditional peoples and some modern individuals appear to do well on them and they go back a fair amount of time in human history. However, even there the experiences of modern individuals who do well on them, like Matt Stone and Danny Roddy, are very different from mine. For example, Matt and Danny report being cold on a VLC diet, whereas I got much warmer when I started eating lots of animal fat, and I even get more visible warm steam coming out of my mouth in the winter when I eat more animal fat. Matt's experiences have been so frequently opposite of my own that I quickly lost interest in his blog, despite my early hope that he might have beneficial tips to offer me. I'm not saying that Matt is wrong about everything, just that his experience has been very different from my own, for whatever reason. Matt even eats grains, whereas I've found wheat to be the worst of all foods for me.
And as for the example of traditional peoples who eat tubers, from what I've seen, most moderners who cite their example don't process the tubers in traditional ways. How can they be sure they're getting the same benefits? It seems to me that they've complicated things by introducing new variables and haven't accounted for potential differences in long-term results. The same question that is often posed to carnivores could also be posed to folks who used modern methods to cook and proho knows what damage they might be doing to themselves in the longer run?
