Originally posted by krizon@Mar 4 2005, 03:09 AM
RIVAL: sorry, you've rather forgotten the hundreds of thousands of square miles of land, all over the world, cultivating nothing but endless lines of barley, corn, rice, oats, and wheat! Not a tree in sight, not a bird nesting, and all sprayed with various fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides to make them, er, safe to eat!
I'd also like to direct your attention to the FACT that eating these products in, in terms of human digestion, an evolutionarily recent event. This is why so many people today suffer from bowel disorders, as their systems are in carbohydrate overload. The Asiatic countries may well traditionally eat rice, but it's in small quantities, well mixed with native vegetables, and some fish or fowl, but little meat. Africans enjoy 'sadza' or mealie-meal (maize meal to the health shops), mixed with a little oil, but also a diet of native animals, including rodents. No native peoples eat only a vegetarian diet - the least-known tribes in Africa hunt with bow and arrow or set traps for monkeys, small deer, bush pigs, small mammals, and so on.
Total vegetarianism is a very new construct, digestively speaking, and while I've nothing against it, it is the result of intellectual processing, and nothing to do with what the human digestive system is best fit to do. What it is best fit to do is to process all kinds of foods, with protein taking up a smaller amount in ratio to vegetation and fruits, while legumes, seeds and grains department are slow in gut transit, and are the reason for so many foul emissions (caused by volatile sulphurs). They should not be mixed with proteins, for optimum gut health, since they tend to 'capture' faster-processing foods while they take longer to transit the gut, thus fermenting the other foods unpleasantly (and often unhealthily) until ready for expulsion.
The best form of dietary intake would be to limit meat (because of the fats/cholesterol involved), eat fish (high in Omega-3 oils), a little sea food, fowl of any sort, plenty of raw vegetables and fruits, carbohydrates in the form of cooked and raw root and tuber vegetables, and ELIMINATE wheat from the diet. It is, vegetarians should be aware, entirely unnecessary to human wellbeing and causes or contributes to many allergies and digestive problems.