Vitamin D may not be the reason for lower death rates from sunshine.

[ric]

im now over 60, in the last 50 odd years weve been told whats bad for us and whats good for us, the only constant is that virtually all the "informed advise" has been proved to be either based on poor science or just plain wrong.  a lot of it designed to sell something. one classic is the 5 a day veg thingy ...dreamt up in a taxi on the way to a conference based on no research  by someone who had nothing better to say.
we just try to eat a varied diet avoiding added chemicals where possible.

any dietry advice that doesnt take any account of how active you are, what work youre doing, where you live , time of year etc etc is just a waste of time.


the old stalwarts of fruit and veggies are good and too much cake makes the trousers tight seem to have stood the test of time....a selection of everything in moderation seems to be the way to go.

[jbeegoode]

In advance, sorry about the sloppy paragraph structure. I promise all of the pieces go together.

Science often disagrees with itself when we start listening to diet experts. Most topics of science are often in their research infancy.

What we do know is that microbes, minerals etc. in rich soil give healthier plants, which give healthier consumers of these plants. The biological makeup of all in the system has evolved together.

We know that more nutrition is best for a body by the same coin. The more fresh, alive living the food, the more nutritional gain. Things start to change after being picked, or killed. That is science.

We know that the nutritional value of food decreases molecular when it is cooked, especially over cooked. There are positives that humans have taken from eating other than fresh uncooked food. There are benefits to fermentation, some foods go easier through a tummy in various modes. All of this is science, but it is cooking, too. Overcooking, for example, can waste nutritional value. Cooking up some foods makes it go down easier. How you eat, how much you masticate, chew, grind and use saliva can make a difference. Cooking can be grinding. There are no blanket, one way fits all solutions when we start consuming all the stuff available to us. But, we know that fire kills nutrition, when food gets blasted over 115F degrees, it starts losing goodness. Softened, stretched, cooking out bad bacteria after food gets older, for preserving, are all good reasons for cooking, but all will be a tradeoff to natural nutritional balance and content.

Smoking foods, drying foods, collecting seeds, grinding up grit to paste, all have been used to bridge the gap from feast to feast. The body is also used to a cycle of feast and famine and is cleansed and balanced by some starvation, or so the science is overwhelmingly pointing to.

Up until the more stationary domestic period, sometimes we used to get fresh this or that, local seasonality was a norm, some of us had to store food, we haven’t been living like great apes in Eden.

Looking around, we are all different, for example lighter and darker skins are affected by sunlight. Also, there is plenty of individuality. Another example would be our local desert dwellers, who’s bodies explode with diabetes when they get all of the sugars, etc. from modern diet. Allergies are abundant examples.

So, we have speculation, some better than other’s speculation, of what lifestyles people in other times and places lived. Bodies adapt.

We know that often a body takes what it needs and passes the rest. Its natural balances get changed by introduction of too much and getting taken over, also. That depends on the intake. To trust a body to not crave substances that are dangerous for it and overdo those, well just look at sugar, there are other addictive things, but just take sugars for example.

The studies have been well proven that sugar and salt will get people to eat and eat more and things that are not good food. The fast food industry has all the research. They have the science to make substances that get people to make themselves unhealthy eating. Stuff that they can make cheap and make a belly feel full. Add weird fats and people will die eating crap that their bodies crave. They will get no nutrition, no roughage, no amino acids, nothing that comes real food provides.

Having weight isn’t always a healthy thing. To lose weight often is. I’ll have to read your book, Bob. I haven’t seen that one, yet, but I’ve been into other sources. 70% as I remember, off the top of my head, is what nutrition and goodys are generally cooked out of food before it gets into the mouth. 30 plus percent in the three days after picking most plants (it varies). With a fresh garden, the taste and wilting happens fast. Then, the new processed foods have been shown to contain zero nutritional value. Then, the body has an extremely complex ingestion system that can be ruthless.

I see kids being raised eating garbage, and doing seemingly okay. But they are developing poorly and developing conditions and body habits that are messing with them by the time they begin to mature, and most disease down the road comes from this new diet in America. I see kids malnourished and obviously, and the science backs it up, they don’t do as well.
So, Bob, the science is like what Safebare says. We have to trust ourselves and always question authority. I know that you are big on thinking for yourself, too.

I do watch my body’s reaction to food and at different times. I can notice a difference eating fresh food and different kinds of food in healthy weight, energy, clear headedness, etc. over time. After cleansing, I notice ill effects, often relatively immediately, of non-nutritious food things. I can notice that I eat less to be satisfied when I eat fresh live and uncooked. I notice that I eat more, faster, like a starving body when I eat cooked. I notice that live veggies and fruit are generally more tasty than cooked foods, no matter how fancy.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

Given what has been said here, it begs the question, how is it that people are living so long, then? My mother-in-law died just a few months ago at age 97. Her first cousin made it past 100. She gave up smoking at around 95. Both outlived their husbands by six or eight years. Neither seemed to worry about what they ate--they weren't 'health faddists,' as the expression goes.

I sometimes like to say that the same things happen to everyone, if there's enough time. Of course, there isn't. But what has happened is that people now live long enough to get dreadful ailments that typically come with old age. Kids don't get the range of childhood diseases that were common when I was in grade school. We don't worry about polio, which killed one of my wife's cousins. It also was common at one time for a mother to lose a child in birth, usually the last one. Industrial accidents, always the fault of the employee, were considered something to be expected, if not acceptable, and many jobs weren't particularly healthy, either. So, instead, we die of old-timer's disease.

It also used to be recognized that mothers were authorities on nutrition. So do what your mother said to do and eat your vegetables.  Lay off the cigarettes and take now and then a little wine for your digestion.

[ric]

people may be living longer,  but many are not living healthy meaningful lives.

ive got a neighbour thats 97,  shes basically spent the last 2 years in her armchair, must be 5 since she went out the front door. but shes still got her marbles , refuses to leave her home.

id honestly say i wish my father had died 5 years before he did, similar with my mother in law. dementia is a horrible thing to watch.  whats often forgotten is it has a profound effect on the close family as well as on the actual sufferer.

my mother did the opposite went at 58 from a heart attack,  a shock at the time but all in all a lot easier to deal with than watching a parent decline over several years.  time of  death of the physical body  is recorded as  when they stop breathing but in reallity the parent, grandparent  can be gone years before.

[BlueTrain]

Families differ. My mother didn't make it until age 50. Her mother lived to be about 83 or 84. I'm 72, which make it above average.

[nuduke]

Going back to the Vit D thing, I had very low Vit D measured last March / April.  The doc put me on a short course of high dose vit D which - at the end of the course left me with an average Vit D level.  One thing I am convinced I experienced with the Vit D was a rise in positive mood and propensity to activity (i.e. I felt good, mentally!).  This could of course be coincidental with any number of other factors contributing to feelings of well-being but it was noticeable and coincident with the vit D treatment.  During our very nice summer this year I got lots of naked time in the garden and lots of time in the sun even when not naked.  The doc recommended that I go on Vit D supplement starting from mid October ("Start when the clocks go back").  Again I have felt a lot less depressed about the short days, long nights and cold weather than I usually do and there is a very evanescent and hard to characterise similarity in my less seasonally affected winter mood with the lift of mood during the original course of hi dose vit D.   
So whilst rationally recognising that this could be a placebo effect or something else not related to the Vit D at all, I do seem to have had some benefit from it at this emotional level.  I have read reports of this effect in others - evidently several studies have suggested that the symptoms of SAD may be due to changing levels of vitamin D3, which may affect serotonin levels in the brain. 

Last week I asked the Doc to repeat the vit D test to see if my levels had survived the winter so far.  She refused on the basis that the test is very expensive.  This is the modern NHS - cash strapped and gradually crumbling.  She said it would be pointless anyway because if my levels were OK you couldn't tell if it was the supplements or my body that was keeping the Vit D favourable.  I immediately countered this with the hopefully obvious point that if it was low then neither factor was working and that might indicate something more fundamental.  No dice!  She is a very good practitioner, though.  She did recommend that it would do no harm to continue the supplementation throughout the summer.  My response was that I intended to expose as much of me as possible to the sun in the summer for natural Vit D production!  Little did she know!  
I guess if I'm being really rational I should stop the supplements for a while now in mid winter to see if my mood deteriorates.
John