OT: "unsalted" butter

That too, but there is more to it than that. If they had beans always with the rice, it would have taken far longer for the priest to collapse.

Joe Gwinn

B12 deficiency would have caused CNS and brain neuropathy, but only after several years. The liver stores a lot of B12.

The workaround in vegans in third world countries is to unwittingly eat s*it, e.g. living with animals and using dung as a fuel.

ISTR we produce B12 in our lower intestine, but can only absorb it in the upper intestine. Many animals are copraphagous; I wonder if that mechanism is a reason.

Glad somebody else has heard of this brown rice diet nonsense. There isn't really anything about it on the internet last time I looked.

Any idea what started this fad?

Cydrome Leader snipped-for-privacy@MUNGEpanix.com wrote in news:si6cff$oik$ snipped-for-privacy@reader1.panix.com:

Could be. I assume that the B12 is made by bacteria in the bowel.

Joe Gwinn

There's some irony in that story. You tell it as if the commune got malnutrition from eating a single 50 lb bag of rice. I don't know how many people you are talking about, but it would be hard for even a single person to suffer any ill effects from eating 50 lbs of rice unless that was literally the only food eaten. For certain all the protein required is in rice. This is the usual rant about eating vegetarian, you *must* eat meat for protein which is pure BS.

There are a few nutrients that are hard to get from vegetable sources, B12 being the main one. If B12 supplements are taken the rest is pretty much duck soup. As we any food source, a bit of variety goes a long way. Eating nothing but steak and potatoes is not a very good way to live either. I know someone who does that. I'm amazed he is still alive.

I believe so, but have never bothered to chase down solid references to human physiology in this respect.

afaict you need to eat about 2kg rice per day to get your daily protein ...

It is, apparently, a bit light on lysine. As with any analysis, a useful question is "how much would I have to eat to get the RDA.

Calcium is the other one, but supplements are easy and vegan. Unfortunately many vegans have a doctrinaire belief that chemical supplements are evil.

Yes, but look at the eskimo diet!

That is a lot of rice to eat in one day.

There were about ten of them, and yes they were all working on that one large bag of rice, which was their main source of nutrition.

While one can manage to eat only vegetables, it is very hard to do, as Martin points out.

The Mexican peasant diet is instructive. It is based on rice and beans, with lots of vegetable, plus a few ounces of meat per day. That meat is essential. And peasants cannot afford the vegan alternatives.

If they had also been eating duck soup, there would have been no problem, at least not soon. I bet duck liver would solve the B12 problem, and maybe the C problem.

Yes. But as Martin says, consider the traditional Eskimo diet, upon which the Eskimo have lived for many tens of millennia.

The story that got me was the observation (from The Book of the Eskimo, if memory serves) that after six or twelve months in the Arctic, a dessert of blueberries with seal fat starts looking pretty good.

Joe Gwinn

And in those 2 kg you will get the correct amount of calories, ~2000. How may kg of food do you eat per day?

I was presented with a contradiction between what I had read in a book many years ago, "Diet for a Small Planet" and more recent discussions. In researching the facts I found that aside from a very few vegetables (the sweet potato being the most common) there are no vegetables that do not provide a sufficient amount of protein and even each essential amino acid when the entire calorie requirement is provided by that vegetable. That is, get all your calories from rice and you will get all the essential amino acids and total protein you need. You may die of boredom or scurvy, but you won't have a protein insufficiency.

This is not easy to research. There are many, many BS articles about this that have no references and make ridiculous claims or refer to "low quality" foods. Either you get enough or you don't. It doesn't matter if you get ten times the cysteine you need as long as you get enough of the others.

That's their problem, not the concept of a healthy diet without meat. I paid some attention to those promoting vitamins C, D, K and other nutrients for Covid. While there seems to be no evidence supporting the utility of massive doses of any of these nutrients, I realized I may well be short on vitamin D. So now I take supplements.

You mean Eskimo Pies? Yum!

BTW, Eskimos have lived in their environment long enough they have evolved different nutritional requirements. The person I know has only been this way for 50-60 years. So far, so good.

I don't know what post you are referring to. The only post I see from Martin is making a joke about ham in hamburgers.

It is not at all hard to get sufficient protein from vegetables. Anyone who makes that claim has done ZERO research.

What does the meat provide that isn't in vegetables? The only nutrient I can think of is B12. But protein is not the issue.

By "Martin" do you mean Tom Gardner? As I've said, the Inuit have lived in their environment long enough to have developed different nutritional requirements from the rest of us. They also are virtually all overweight by our standards and do not have high heart disease.

Ice cream is very expensive in Puerto Rico, twice what it is back in the mainland. I have an ice cream addition and would limit myself to buying ice cream only when it was on a really good priced sale. That number will never be met here! lol Still, the local diet is high in meat and starches and very low in other (green) vegetables. So I think I'm gaining weight. If I stick to my own cooking I might do ok, but that's boring.

Probably a false accusation then.

Just watching the commune crash and burn was enough for me. Fortunately, nobody was crippled or killed. Because they were young and healthy when they started, and so had reserves.

I do have one story that partly supports your position, but not enough to take to the bank:

In the 1970s in Washington, DC, I was standing in line at a an Indian-food takeout place near Dupont Circle, and struck up a conversation with an Indian woman also in line. She commented that her consumption of meat varied with the climate. Back home in India, where it was very hot, she would soon mostly stop eating meat. In cold places, like DC, she would resume eating meat.

I can only imagine what she would have done in the Arctic.

High-density complete protein. Rice has too little complete protein per kilo to be practical. Beans are better, and somewhat complementary to rice, so together they are more complete, but still....

Probably.

In the Arctic, it's very dangerous to be too thin.

The main expensive ingredient in ice cream is cream. Is that also twice as expensive?

Joe Gwinn

vegetables. So I think I'm gaining weight. If I stick to my own cooking I might do ok, but that's boring.

Lots of ice cream as many call it is actually labled ice milk. Much less expensive.

That depends on what flavor you are making.

E.g., for a (nominal) 3 pt batch I may have 3C of heavy cream which can run ~$3 (~$4.50/qt). But, the "flavoring" can easily beat that (e.g., $5+ for 18 oz of blueberries/blackberries/raspberries).

If you opt for a milk-based gelato, then the cost of the "dairy" falls.

And, for a granita (considerably harder to "get right" than ice cream or gelato), even moreso!

Or "frozen yogurt".

There's lots of wacky stuff in commercial ice cream -- the most important of which is *air* -- which is hard to get into homemade products to the same degree as it is, commercially! OTOH, you can put lots more varied "stuff" in than you'd ever find in a store!

Worse: ice "non-dairy fat whitener".

Amazingly, some vegan ice cream is tolerable - when made by my daughter :)