I’ve seen many headlines and articles about Oprah’s recent “weight special” which I didn’t see. I did catch her interview on Jimmy Kimmel, in which she reiterated her "ethical decision" to divest of all her interests and responsibilities with WW. Hah! I really like Oprah, but she can be so sweetly un-self-aware in her public pronouncements. She may be single-handedly responsible for sinking the Health Care insurance industry as millions of desperate people grab for GLP-1 injections.

I also watched a YouTube talk by Dr. Westman--he’s so low-key you have to work to stay awake. However, he’s smart and says wise things, as JEY will agree? One huge point he makes is that many if not most studies about weight loss and maintenance rarely talk about the food people actually eat.

Intermittent fasting, point counting, calorie reduction--none of that matters if the food consumed and counted is junk.

Ah well. We can feel smug if we’ve managed some measure of success over time, and learned a lot about our own bodies along the way. N = 1.
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We won't miss it. They are ruining actual healthcare with their business practices.

It's actually the LACK of food in what we eat, I tell people. But change is really difficult when you've been given bad advice and failed, over and over. This is how people are trained to obey instead of think.

At least they still need the lies. But if not stopped, they will ban meat and animal foods. The fanatics are being subsidized by the people who will make even more money as they drive real food from the marketplace as "unfair competition."

It doesn't matter what industry it is, now. We have corporations instead of utilities and everyone who said privatization was a bad idea was RIGHT.

If we're not careful, Soylent Green will be here before we know it.

Heck, Soylent Green is people. That was the scary part.

Not the nutrition involved🤣

I'm sure that it will be a vegan product.

There is actually product on the market called Soylent. It's soy based protein, in drink or powdered form.

There's a green one too - chocolate mint flavored.

Beyond Pete!

Drank only Soylent for 2 Years, got sent to the ER
https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/co...sent_to_the_er/

My sister has had kidney stones - she might have been in her 30's when it happened. She's in her 60's now, and I can't imagine she's ever even tried soylent. (I mean she would have been well into her 50's by the time it was first made)

She was on soy formula as an infant - too long ago to consider that might have caused her kidney stones 30 years later.

When she had the kidney stones, the Dr told her that "This is kidney stone country" - meaning that the area where she lives has so much lime in the water that it forms stones. The lime builds up in pipes around there, and she's drank well water her entire life.

The Dr told her that she ended up with kidney stones because she wasn't drinking enough water though - this was back before everyone had water bottles, so he told her that she was never to walk by a water fountain without taking a drink.

There was no mention of oxalate consumption as being the problem in her case.

She and her DH do grow a garden, and freeze a lot of vegetables from the garden, but it's mostly things like peas, green beans, corn, and squash, which means blanching them (boiling briefly to stop enzyme action in the vegetables which prevents deterioration while frozen), so based on what this bit from Pub Med says, that probably helps to reduce the oxalate content at least somewhat:



No idea if boiling vegetables would affect your oxalate problem, just thought I'd throw that info out there in case you hadn't seen it before.

Thanks, and it actually came up in the Taubes diabetes book I'm reading. The animal diet allowed a certain amount of leafy carb content if it was boiled to mush and drained. I instantly recognized it as the general Midwestern attitude towards all vegetables.

But yes, that technique does work for many familiar vegetables, though in this case it was attributed to "dissolving the carb content" and after three such cycles, it probably did. And why creamed spinach was not only more palatable, the calcium in dairy buffers oxalate, too. Or, at least, that was the theory.

Oxalate avoidance could explain my childhood food practices. Though I think the food was often left to fend for itself for a while, since overcooked things dominated in some branches of the family Still, I have learned how much more oxalate we are eating in 2023, when it's picked green and stored in warehouses. My family feared green, which is dangerous in potatoes, so I still practice the skill of nudging certain things along inside a brown paper bag. If it ripens, it's safer to eat.

Turns out that was also good health advice. Call the Weston Price Foundation! At home, kidney beans were super soaked with rinses, first. Now, commercial canners don't soak them. While the heat deactivates the fast deadly toxin, it does nothing to the slow and debilitating oxalate content.

But my plant content has dwindled in type and portion size to where I only eat low oxalate greens, fruit, and squashes, none of which need special prep. I do eat shredded raw cabbage in salads, it's a low oxalate veg, and even better, sauerkraut is fermented.

I look back now and realize I got in trouble when I started doing keto with more plant food than my body could deal with. I guess I was still in a "add foods and check reaction" mode. The reaction was an autoimmune flare, which made me feel really awful.

I don't eat raspberries any more, but I've been juicing them into my coffee in the French press. Coffee has no oxalate, and many juices have none. It was a test... and yes, I can have real raspberry flavor in my coffee. It's been a month, and I think this is low oxalate way of enjoying it. Blueberries and cherries are now fun fruits, which can handle the concentration of jams.

I do smear a teaspoon of jam as far as it will go on my cream cheese, which is what I lived on this winter.



Another fermented fat is cream cheese. I craved it all winter. Apparently, fermenting improves all foods The Inuit and Sami of the far northern regions let meat and fat lie around, especially for pregnant women. Because fermenting increases digestion and beneficial nutrients, turns out. So I tried it.

And I feel good as spring approaches. All winter, I was not daunted, even if it was zero outside.

It's supposed to keep me warmer. And I really think it did!

That's also the southern method of cooking vegetables.

For all I know, it might have been that way in the north 150 years ago too. It's definitely held on as the traditoinal way to cook veggies in the south though.

I think to a certain extent a lot of veggies had to be cooked that way if you wanted them to be edible - which has to do with the whole waste not/want not way of life. You picked the oldest green beans first, and if the pods had gotten old and tough and the bean had gotten big and really starchy, then you had to cook those things until they were soft enough to eat with whatever teeth you still had left in your head. And don't forget to cook them with a ham hock or some salt pork so they'd actually have some flavor after all that boiling.

My mother never cooked like that (she hated anything that she considered to be "greasy") - she cooked all vegetables in a pressure cooker, so the veggies were steamed under pressure. But they also weren't cooked completely to death, only about half-dead. And Dad always picked the beans when they were very young and tender, with very small, very green beans in the pod, so there was no need to cook them completely to mush.

Quoting from your quote:


When Dad had cattle (we didn't move away from that farm until I was 12), mom also made all our butter. True that at least some of the cream was several days old by the time she had enough to make butter, but I don't recall it having any kind of fermented taste to it at all - but then she pasteurized the milk and immediately chilled it, and as soon as she'd skimmed the cream off, she put the milk and cream back in the fridge to keep it cold, so if there was any fermentation at all, it was only very slight due to it being kept cold.

Still, the homemade butter did taste more buttery than the regular butter from the grocery stores, so maybe it was simply due to the "aging" of the cream (in the fridge) over the course of several days before mom made butter again. Or perhaps the flavor was more influenced by the fact that the cattle were pastured most of the time. (of course during the winter even when there was no snow on the ground, pasture growth halted, so they had to supplement with hay, alfalfa, and grains. In the milking stalls, they were fed silage to relax them so they'd let down their milk more readily)

Living in Amish country, I had occasion several decades ago to try some Amish butter (I'm trying to recall what they called it at that little Amish health food store - I don't think it was labeled as cultured, but the name implied that it was cultured or fermented), thinking that the Amish butter would taste closer to Mom's homemade butter than the store-bought butter did... NOPE! I actually couldn't bring myself to eat that butter - just tasted so completely WRONG to me, compared to what I had as a child. However, I'm also pretty sure that the Amish weren't adding any kind of specific fermenting culture to their cream - I'm pretty sure they were just letting it sour before making it into butter. (Maybe one day I'll go back to that store and see what they have in the way of butter, to find out what they're calling it)