Comments Binx Bolling of Palookaville on the shamefully bad NYT article "Is Matcha Good for You?/The brightly colored powdered green tea has become popular among health-conscious consumers. Does it have any nutritional benefits?"
I know, I'm only encouraging them by linking, but I liked "Binx Bolling of Palookaville" and the comment was spot on.
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34 comments:
Binx Bolling is the name of Walker Percy’s alienated Everyman from his 1962 national book award winner The Moviegoer. Dude wins the pseudonyms forever, in my book. Obviously a bourbon connoisseur and deep thinker.
Best taken with Picchu for full effectiveness...
Dietary supplements in general are quite superfluous for most Americans who have a reasonably well-rounded diet - which group includes those peculiar middle and up class folks who frequent health food stores and swarm to the latest "healthy" dietary fad.
There is an adage in my trade that says that vitamin supplements are a great way to make expensive, colorful urine, but not much else.
Looks like kratom, an opiate. So I can just say it's matcha? LOL
*Goes to rooftop, lights the Crack MC beacon*
Nutrition science is at least as Dismal as economics.
Comments like IceNine's chap my ass.
Do you know how the FDA sets an RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for a nutrient? A deficiency is created (e.g. pellagra (B3), rickets (D), scurvy (C)) and then the *minimum amount* of the nutrient necessary to solve the deficiency is recorded. That value becomes the RDA.
There's no focus on finding the *optimal* daily allowance. Imagine someone suffocating you and as you gasp for air they let a little seep in. As long as you're alive, that amount of air is your RDA. Expensive urine... heh.
The FDA *mandates* that iron be added to all flour products. This was done a century ago to address a problem where some portion of the population was anemic. Guess what? That same proportion of the population remains anemic. The iron fortification didn't solve the problem. Did that "fortification" have anything to do with increased heart disease, obesity, or other problems? We'll likely never know. It's one of the first society-wide experiments performed where none of us had a choice. As COVID has shown us, it won't be the last.
Yep. My favorite commercial to skip over lately is the "nutritionist" who laments that he "forgets to eat" -- not "forgets to eat RIGHT," just plain forgets to eat -- and so recommends we take the supplement he does to get all those needed fruits and vegetables.. in a tiny pill. Uh huh. I saw that on the Jetson's. It's still faker than that cartoon was.
On a related rant, the little woman and I have noticed a distinct uptick in TV ads for supplements, gambling, pharmaceuticals (including those misleading COVID "get-the-jab" commercials) and booze. Drink, drugs and risky get-rich-quick scams. Never before has Newton Minnow's words from 1960 or so been as correct as they are today.
You're not drinking X because it provides health benefits.
You're justifying your drinking X by saying it may provide health benefits.
And if X is $4+ dollars per drink, that helps sales a lot.
>cremes said...
Comments like IceNine's chap my ass.
Do you know how the FDA sets an RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for a nutrient? <
Ah, a True Believer, I see. Well, had I said anything about the FDA or Recommended Daily Allowance, you might have had some reason for your chapped ass. As it happens, however, I didn't and you are arguing with yourself.
Dietary supplements exist in a regulatory netherworld where all the innovation and brainwork go into wording the health claims so they can score sales without going to jail.
I think that dietary supplements are also part of a long and distinguished American tradition of quackery and patent medicines, which exists because of a deep, maybe existential, anxiety. We like to worry, and we like to control our worry by buying stuff like this.
OTOH there are vitamins, and they're real.
Nutritionists have been telling use we need to get vitamins and minerals from fruits and vegetables for years.
It is just flat out wrong. You get everything you need but salt from red meat and eggs.
Everything.
The vitamins and minerals in fruits and vegetables are not bio available to humans in general because plants are just a completely different physiology to humans and they store those vitamins and minerals in different ways.
You absorb very small amounts of these nutrients and therefor have to eat huge quantities of vegetables to get daily requirements. This puts massive stress on your stomach and intestines and your health in general.
Ruminants like cows developed huge metabolically expensive gastrointestinal systems to digest and derive energy and nutrition from plants.
Humans did not. We put that metabolic capital towards brains.
Anyone telling you that you need vegetables and fruits is just wrong. A quarter pound of beef will give you more usable vitamins and minerals than any bowl of fruit or a salad that any normal person could eat in a meal.
Fruits are Tasty sure. Supplement vegetables sure. Necessary absolutely not.
XYZ supplement may have some benefits, but they are unproven.'
Which is true of ALL pharmaceuticals / nutrients / chemicals. Context matters: what is the state of the body when the pharmaceuticals / nutrients / chemicals is ingested. A severe deficiency can make a supplement almost miraculous, but otherwise not at that useful. Same with most medicines.
That we have gatekeepers (the FDA) that 'decide' what it means to be proven doesn't change that. In some cases, it makes it worse. We are 'fortunate' that sometimes we are allowed off label use if the compound is accepted for some other reason.
I'd really like the FDA to limit itself to GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) or Beneficial for a Specific Use, and otherwise stay the hell out of it.
That made me want to exclaim, "Save us, Binx Bolling! It's 2023, and we need you now, more than ever!"
Parenthetically, I skip any story that has a headline that says we need something "more than ever." I nominate that for the most annoying headline cliché of the modern age.
The comments are always the best part, that's why the FBI and CIA work so hard to shut them down.
Jar Jar Binks Bolling of Palookaville would have been even better.
Some friends have been touting bone broth, which does not sound appealing but it is supposed to be good for skin, so there's that. Plus, read again recently about water intake and a twenty- five year old study that recently came out about another benefit of staying hydrated and being more youthful and less susceptible to disease. Wish I liked water, but apparently you can still have same benefits even if you just take sips regularly from your water bottle, and not have to chug huge bottles of it.
> Ah, a True Believer, I see. Well, had I said anything about the FDA or Recommended Daily Allowance
Here, let me quote the relevant part for you. If you can't see how this relates to RDA (and how exceeding it just makes expensive urine) then you must have gone to medical school where they devote a whole 3 hours (out of years) to nutrition. MD's have the same ignorance of nutrition as the average Joe on the street; but they try to distract from that ignorance by appealing to their credential.
> There is an adage in my trade that says that vitamin supplements are a great way to make expensive, colorful urine, but not much else.
Pop over to pubmed and sift through the research showing the efficacy of vitamins and how they ameliorate any number of ills. If understanding the value here makes me a True Believer (tm) then guilty as charged.
"I skip all of these stories because the bottom line is always: 'XYZ supplement may have some benefits, but they are unproven.'... says the double vaxxed and boosted with an appointment for a 4th shot guy.
oh no i think i did it again. posted on the wrong thread.
"You get everything you need but salt from red meat and eggs."
Ulysses S Grant said that an army only needed beef and salt. One does wonder how the eskimos lived for thousands of years on a diet that almost entirely consisted of fat and meat. Still though, if you have ever read Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic War, he describes tribes across Europe as living on various diets, there was even one tribe that refused to grow wheat because they rightly believed that it was an open invitation to Roman conquest, since the Romans paid their soldiers in wheat. Instead they *chose* to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I am thinking that Achilles is descended of that tribe pretty directly. I think that I am descended from one of the wheat growing tribes.
It really depends on what you mean by "mattcha". I haven't been that impressed by anything bottled I've seen... but I do like to drink hot 抹茶 from powder occasionally as an early afternoon replacement for coffee.
It's caffeine, quite a bit less acidic than coffee, and feels/tastes "creamier" than tea with cream does.
I guess I don't understand why you would think it's significantly different from ordinary black tea in terms of health.
Re: Kevin:
And if X is $4+ dollars per drink, that helps sales a lot.
If your matcha powder is costing you $4 per drink you are probably putting too much matcha powder in your tea. Even for koicha that would be pricey. In a specialist shop that makes the tea for you, I guess that wouldn't be out of line, but you'd hope they're using the fancy bamboo whisk and all and maybe giving you a sweet to eat on the side for that price.
Is Matcha good for you? Depends on how mutcha you take.
And while the research on its health benefits is not definitive, experts say that matcha does contain high amounts of potentially beneficial compounds.
...
“If you develop a habit of regular matcha consumption, in the long run you may get some health benefit,” Dr. Hu said.
That's a strong "Maybe ... Maybe not."
Narr @ 3:04: clear threadwinner in the Bad Pun category. And here I was thinking that you excelled in SNarrK!
Interesting feature is the best sales tactic for the latest health supplements is a high price. That is how the old folks judge new remedies. The good ones are the expensive ones. WRONG!
Dr. Hu?
Don't you hate it when a guy holding a $4.00 cup of Matcha starts complaining about $4.00 a gallon gas?
Anyone here had experience with the new Kumis & Delta-8 Gummy diet?
Thanks, Owen, I'll take the W.
“If you develop a habit of regular matcha consumption, in the long run you may get some health benefit,” Dr. Hu said."
Doctor Who?
Cremes at 1104 is mostly correct. The addition of iron to flour wasn’t to cure all anemia, but just childhood anemia. And it worked.
And crème’s doesn’t say it directly but high blood levels of iron are directly associated with heart disease, along with various cancers, and diabetes, the scourge of my family. And I’ve seen many references over the years that hemochromatosis is most often diagnosed on the autopsy table. I convinced my doctor to give me an iron panel test circa 1995 after reading the symptoms in Time magazine. High numbers just short of the diagnosis numbers everywhere it was bad to be high, low numbers just above the diagnosis numbers where it was bad to be low. I had been giving whole blood every 56 days for over two years at that point… the treatment for hemochromatosis.
So iron fortified flour stopped one problem- childhood anemia. And IMHO, and crème’s speculation, created an increase in old age problems with it initially showing up 30-40 years later. As for obesity, I blame the carb heavy officially approved food pyramid. We’re omnivores, but as Achilles points out we can survive quite well on meat and eggs. And for people of Northern European descent, just about any kind of dairy product. We have to process grains to digest them. Raw wheat or rye aren’t going to do you any good. And corn which I love- you can tell later as it leaves the body that much of it is undigested. And anything leafy? Any nutrients in them stays bound up in them as they transit the digestive system for the sole purpose of adding bulk to your waste products.
And as mentioned by ma, the government has an MDR, minimum daily requirement, not a recommended optimal requirement. Which would actually be different for everyone. I maintain my Vitamin D at the optimal 50 ng/ml with 2000 iu daily over and above what’s in my multi and the half gallon of whole milk I drink weekly. D was added to milk to get rid of rickets. For those that can digest it- people of Northern European descent- it worked. 83% of children diagnosed in the USA between 1986 and 2003 were black.
You mean my tits won't get bigger?
In 2016 it was reported that the median cost for completing the FDA approval process was $19 million dollars.
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