> it doesn't take long before you just get sick of eating meat. The charm of it wears off.
Yes and no. Food stops becoming an enjoyable activity, and just becomes fuel. If you're hungry, in the true sense of the word, you'll have meat and fat and ask for seconds. Fat adaptation works because if you have fat around you, your hunger signals tends to fade as you're already carrying a significant amount of energy.
The fact that carbs and sugar are so sought after is great when you're a paleolithic man, but is the cause of the modern obesity epidemic - it's an energy source than can be easily stored and accumulated around the body, so our taste buds have evolved to encourage us to eat plenty, because it was VERY scarce until recently.
> If you're hungry, in the true sense of the word, you'll have meat and fat and ask for seconds.
If you're really hungry you're going to ask for seconds for everything.
Source: Fussy 11 year old me stuck in a summer camp with awful food. The first morning there I refused to eat and after breakfast they took us hiking up some mountains for 4 hours or so. For lunch I asked for seconds of their awful food and I enjoyed it :-)
Monday: cat gets some porridge. It looks at it and says: screw it! And walks away.
Tuesday: cat gets porridge again. It looks at it, sights and exclaims: porridge! And walks away.
Wednesday: cat gets porridge again.
It looks at it in a semi-curious way. Hmm, porridge.. And walks away.
Sunday: cat gets porridge again.
It looks at the porridge, its eyes fully focused on it. It smells it.. It walks around the plate trying to catch even more smell of it. And then it screams: porridge!!!!!!! And eats it all in just a few large bites.
I think this is the source of most young picky eaters. They just aren't hungry. I know my kids are picky unless there are no snacks in the house, then suddenly they like everything!
The trouble we run into is if you try to call their bluff and make them wait it out until they are actually hungry, suddenly it's bedtime and you have a kid who won't go to sleep because they didn't eat anything, and it stops being their problem and turns into a massive inconvenience for you.
But probably the better idea would just be for us to ration snacks more closely throughout the middle of the day.
This 100% the situation we have with our almost 4 year old daughter. My wife has a soft spot,so any cries would make her surrender in a second,so it's very easy for our daughter to just walk away from a really nice meal because it's not ' what she likes' and then keep coming back for all sorts of snacks or the food she really likes.
I think these habits are developed over more than a few days too. I bet the pickier you are, the longer it takes for your biology to tell you that it's time to eat. Also this is all dancing around wanting to call picky eaters spoiled brats lol.
that's a special case, or he's a pantry cat burglar. I've known both. One case, the boy is autistic so once he heard he would get a specific food, he wouldn't eat until he got it. The other case the kid had a stash of snacks in his room and would break into the pantry when mom wasn't looking.
I think ultimately a lot of the traditional drive to celebrate the changing of the seasons boils down to the change of diet (either improved, or worsened) and the rituals that come after or have to be done before that time.
Spring is here. Any day we can stop eating porridge!
I have heard this recycled notion about carbs being scarce many times, but in this context it makes little sense. If fat adaptation is so efficient at converting food to energy and there is more fat around than carbs, why would the craving for carbs evolve even? I have also done keto a couple times and my experience is the same — in a month I just can’t stand anymore meat and bacon and going back to a balanced diet feels very good. I also can‘t stuff myself with carbs and start seeking both protein rich foods and fatty. Would question the whole „carbs where scarce, so we evolved to overfeed on them“ dogma. Why would fruits be more scarce for a non predator (as where human ancestors), than meat? It feels like a whole lot is missing in the story.
Carbs and protein are water soluble while fats are lipid soluble, and your cells preferentially burn water soluble molecules before lipid soluble. There can be tons of energy in the form of fat available, but to access it you will first burn up your available protein. This protein is necessary for things like cellular repair, muscle growth, etc. You need to sacrifice this to access your energy stored in fat - an acceptable tradeoff when you're freezing in the middle of winter, but certainly suboptimal. Carbs on the other hand will burn preferentially before proteins, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Carbs can't be stored for very long, but they can be readily converted to fats for storage.
In the past, it wasn't so much that carbs were rare as calories in general were rare, and carbs were merely the most desirable. If you're an athletic hunter gatherer, you want as many carbs as possible for fuel so you don't have to switch over to your small reserve of fat and give up your proteins along the way. On the other hand in the modern day it's easy to get more carbs than we can burn in a short period of time so we have a lot of excess calories that get added to our emergency supply. Since we actually have to go through a good bit of effort to starve in the modern world, we never switch over to our emergency supply and thus it never depletes (ie we get and stay fat).
Of course you crave carbs after eating mostly proteins and fat - as far as your caveman brain is concerned, you are starving and need real food. It's just an unfortunate reality of our modern civilization that most of us don't have the metabolism to support a caveman's diet.
> in a month I just can’t stand anymore meat and bacon and going back to a balanced diet feels very good.
90% of curries are keto friendly, Thai food that doesn't involve noodles or rice, a-ok, tons of Chinese dishes are also 100% keto!
Going on any sort of restricted diet is going to involve learning how to improve your cooking game, but after years of Keto I can put together meals for large groups of people that are 100% keto and people won't even notice, and that is including the hazelnut cookies with chocolate ganache for dessert!
> Would question the whole „carbs where scarce, so we evolved to overfeed on them“ dogma
I agree historical evidence may be lacking, but a large percent of the population[1] do overfeed on carbs and a mix of carbs+fat, in a way that is has dramatic health consequences.
The way I always like to put it is, between a stuffed baked potato, and a steak, what will people at more calories of when given a chance? I know for me it is the potatoes, I can easily go through 2 entire potatoes, stuffed with sour cream, chive, shrimp, and cheese. (and I know the shrimp sounds super weird in there, but trust me, try it, it is amazing!)
That is 800 calories, and after that I'm going to wait 15 minutes and resume the rest of my dinner for yet more calories!
But if I start with 8oz of steak and some well prepared kale, well, I'm done for the night. ~700 calories total for the entire meal, rather than starting with 800 and working my way up from there!
The thing that changed my mind was realizing that skipping the bread at dinner didn't make me any less full.
[1] Such unhealthy habits are spreading world wide!
Thai food and often involve palm sugar in what you’d consider savory dishes. And depending on the brand of coconut milk that’s used you could be nabbing extra carbs there too. So even without noodles and rice you may be sneakily pushing up against your daily carb limit and not realize it.
Calorie counting is illuminating. I've been able to eat 4000 kcal of mostly carbs in one sitting and perhaps up to 7000 kcal in one day, and I need some effort to eat 2000 kcal of meat/fat in one sitting (about 1kg of steak).
In general I tend to overeat carbs and go above my daily calorie intake if I were to eat until satiety, whereas I tend to eat at or under my TDEE of meat/fat and have to sometimes force myself to reach my daily requirements.
How much of the carb overfeeding is marketing and conditioning though (and mostly a US-centric phenomenon)? Any caloric excess is bad, nothing special about carbs. Demonizing one particular nutrient seems like a silver bullet and I could also enjoy 50 different ways to make eggs and ham and 50 varieties of brie and keto bread, but something felt amiss. That said, still want to try going 100% vegan someday.
> Why would fruits be more scarce for a non predator (as where human ancestors), than meat?
Seasons change?
Meat is available year-round but can be dangerous to acquire and prepare safely.
Fruits/veggies are easy but seasonal food sources that store poorly, and with vast competition.
Grains and tubers are difficult to transport, spoil, and are of limited supply determined by the growing season (especially without agriculture).
Our hunt & gather ancestors followed the seasons far closer than farmers. At least on gut check, it seems fat adaptation would be strongly selected for as well as a strong taste for carbs as available
Also not to forget that modern fruits and vegetables are nothing like the ones we've spent much of our evolution with. I would guess honey would have been the most sugary thing available, and still guarded by a swarm of angry bees.
Was/is there that much of seasonal variety in the African regions, where humans evolved mostly? And why should we stop at humans and not go back even further?
Maybe, in essence, the bacteria that we host to help break down carbs start producing something that makes us crave/prefer carbs?
It seems like the bacteria would, in essence, be self interested and might have developed their own evolutionary mechanism to promote the supply of their food source?
In other words, if we, essentially, keep internal bacteria colonies to help break down specific types of food, those colonies may encourage consumption of their specialized food source?
We may also, symbiotically, encourage the preservation/maintenance of internal processing capability?
On the contrary, there are orders of magnitude less megafauna than plankton. And there’s a diminishing range in between. It’s easier to get berries for dinner, than boar. Of course, things could be the opposite during Ice Ages, but that’s just a glimpse in geological time, not convinced that metabolism would change entirely during that period.
A trip to the woods would with a high likelihood show that there are more berries around than berry eating boars. But my point is not that there is no competition for resources, and not that there always was an abundance of everything, but that the carb scarceness theory is not a complete explanation. Because food in general was scarce, and we either should have the same cravings for other nutrients or the „carb-stuffing“ notion is a bit overused.
Might be that fat was as scarce as carbs prehistorically. Have you ever eaten wild game? They are drastically leaner than farm animals. I imagine they were even leaner back when there were more wild creatures competing for the same food supply.
It's not an accident that our palate has evolved to reward us for finding salts, fats, and sugars.
Nor fat, nor carbs are an essential nutritional component. The body can not synthesize certain amino acids, but it can convert protein to both fat and carbohydrates by means of gluconeogenesis. If anything, we should have cravings for sources of protein, not sugars. One could argue that sugars provide the burst of energy for the metabolic pathway that could be make it or break it in cases where that burst gives an advantage. This, and not the scarceness argument, which seems just thin to me, although mainstream opinion.
The very rough gist is that there is historical evidence of pre agrarian humans starving to death with stomachs full of lean meat. In a nomadic lifestyle where they chase down prey protein costs too much energy to digest and convert into usable energy.
Fat is an essential nutritional component. As an example, cholesterol is necessary to produce hormones such as testosterone, estrogen and cortisol. Thankfully, it's pretty much impossible to avoid if you eat meat.
Carbs are not essential. You can live on zero total grams of carbs.
Also gluconeogenesis only converts proteins to glucose, not fat, at least not directly.
Yes and no. Food stops becoming an enjoyable activity, and just becomes fuel. If you're hungry, in the true sense of the word, you'll have meat and fat and ask for seconds. Fat adaptation works because if you have fat around you, your hunger signals tends to fade as you're already carrying a significant amount of energy.
The fact that carbs and sugar are so sought after is great when you're a paleolithic man, but is the cause of the modern obesity epidemic - it's an energy source than can be easily stored and accumulated around the body, so our taste buds have evolved to encourage us to eat plenty, because it was VERY scarce until recently.