Feeding the world

I've been reading yet another booklet from my nutritionist. This one is only 30 pages and doesn't go into the scientific details. Much of this is the same (though condensed) as in the previous two handouts. But there are a few things that I learned.

If your teeth show signs of crowding or your teeth are a bit crooked it is because your parents abandoned a healthy diet and adopted the Western diet of processed foods.

This booklet devotes three pages to the dangers of soy. Yes, it is used in Asian cooking, but mostly as a flavoring, not a source of nutrition. In addition, the traditional diets in Asia used fermented soy, which removes some of its harshness. It is a mistake to use it as a primary source of protein or a replacement for milk. A problem is that soy contains isoflavones, which are a form of estrogen. That speeds up maturity in girls, delays it in boys, and otherwise plays havoc with a person's endocrine system. All that is why the first thing my nutritionist told me is to eliminate soy.

In booklet's section of mythbusting it says vegetarians do not live longer than carnivores and do not have less heart disease. Another section stresses there are nutrients that are available in animal fat that aren't in plants. This got me thinking. Several books have said that unless all humans aim for a vegetarian (perhaps even vegan) diet we won't be able to feed the world's growing population. Now this booklet says we would be undernourished on a vegetarian diet. Which implies we cannot properly feed the world's population and that the world is now overpopulated. Are we aiming for a population crash?

There was a small piece that mentioned the nutritional benefits of soups made with bones. So I bought a turkey drumstick, put it in the crock-pot with water, added a bit of olive oil and herbs, and let it sit all day. This evening I took the drumstick out, dumped in frozen vegetables to cook, pulled the meat off the bones, and dumped the meat back in the pot. For a first try without following a recipe it came out pretty good. And compared with my struggle to debone a drumstick at Thanksgiving this worked quite well.