Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Rules For the rest of the Site also accessible on the sidebar.
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Most people I know have been using real butter in everything they cook and animal fats whenever they can. We have managed to train a lot of our relatives into eating 90%+ real chocolate instead of the cocoa mass goo thats basically sugar.
As for sugar - we have all pretty much cut it out (at least as much as our human natures make it possible, lol) and replaced with either honey or raw sugar for cooking.
Sugar and Alcohol are literally two biggest poisons we have been trained to injest.
I don't see the point of using oils to cook mea, using tallow and lard to cook beef and pork when tallow and lard are animal fats is the way to go.
I never mentioned anything like this! In my book anything artificial is 10 times worse than the natural counterpart, in general.
Refined sugar is deadly. But sugar itself, if consumed beyond very sparing amounts, is pretty bad for you. This includes natural sugars like fructose in many fruits, even though the level of "badness" is very different between sources of sugar based on how easily it metabolises.
Contrast this to salts where we have Sodium based salts that put pressure from the inside of a cell whereas Potassium based salts that put pressure on the outside of a cell, making it easy to balance both by consuming something like pink salt that naturally contains a good mix of different mineral salts. There aren'y counteracting kinds of sugar. Just different speeds of metabolizing.
If you still think like I used to - that c'mon sugars cant be that bad for you - I suggest learning about the liver functions and what kind of pressures sugar puts on the Liver and other systems, and exactly why it is so problematic.
Sugar: THE BITTER TRUTH
Understand Your CHOLESTEROL PANEL & Metabolic Health Tests (this has a section about liver function, butit gives a much more overall picture tying cholesterol and sugars together)
Now time for my own personal anecdote (which is how I stumbled on all this). I suffered from very serious gout which would attack me once or twice a year ever since it started 10 years ago, and I did everything the doctors told me. Cut off meat completely. Cut off some of the veggies as well that they said is bad. I was literally surviving on crap but not only did it not make me better, even the medicine they gave me stopped working after the first few times and I was in constant pain.
Thats. when I stepped outside of what my doctors said and started looking elsewhere. Thats when I came across the connection between Sugars and gout. I cut off all sugars and alcohol (which I used to drink very sparingly anyway) and went back to eating meat rich food and BOOM - gout just disappeared.
The next time I tested my uric acid, the doctor was bewildered. He just could not understand how it suddenly went down so drastically after so long not responding. When I tried to tell him about cutting sugars, he waved me off saying it had no connection.
Thats when I did more research into sugars and found that it causes so many things. Once I cut off sugars and started eating more meat, (And I started IF as well) I noticed that not only did I not crave for sweets, I was turned off by overly sweet things which I used to love before. That was because my body was slowly weaned off of insulin resistance.
There is allulose if you are diabetic, you can make bread and brew beer with it, its nowhere as dangerous as other sugars. But I am not a doctor so please do your own research on this before using it.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/what-is-allulose
Also there is Xylitol, its cheaper than Allulose and is a great substitute. It won't be useful for making bread or beer as it doesn't react with yeast and can be very dangerous for dogs, deadly dangerous.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32638045/
I hope this helps.
A Case Against Sugar is a book worth reading. It shows the History of Political corruption with the Sugar Lobby.
Things like honey (esp if its good honey like Manuka) has a lot of beneficial effects, and consuming it in moderation (esp in cold) is actually good. Same with things like dates and other dry fruits. My wife makes a killer "snickers bar" with 95% chocolate, dates and pistachios. It looks horrible but tastes 100x better than snickers.
I use raw sugar for cooking as well, where necessary and have not felt anything bad from it. I dont have any white sugar at home at all, just like white salt and we do eat some cookies etc (mostly home made banana cake with no sugar) sparingly.
Its important to not let yourself crave too much, so having some treat once in a while is good, but need to be mindful thats all.
I have reached the point where my body is extremely sensitive to sugar, and if I start feeling pain in my foot or in my palms I know I have to step back. My parents find this crazy because I used to put away boxes of sweets in one sitting before all this. But they have started doing the same as well now.