On the topic of Spam and Spam

This winter we got 30 inches of snow where I was, which was quite an impressive amount, at least where I live. This summer hasn't been very nice though. You see, for the past four years, we've been having a drought (not of dust bowl proportions, but there has been very little rain) and this year, it won't stop. Kinda ironic.

 

Up where I live it's not only really hot, it's humid like no tomorrow. (I've never really understood the phrase "like no tomorrow" but now I've used it and I think it was right). To top it all off, we get crazy winters all the time. Getting 3 feet of snow almost always happens at least once per winter. Not to mention the freezing cold temperatures that are everpresent regardless of whether there's snow or not.
[/rant]

[back on topic]
I've tried spam and liked it, but my parents decided a long time ago that I should never eat it again. Thus, I have been denied the flavor of spam for quite some time.

 

Well, since this is turning into a pissing contest for extremes of temperatures...

When you guys move to the Middle East in the middle of summer, and when you've experienced 40-50 degree Celsius heat on a regular basis (as in all year round), then you can talk to me about being hot. And when you've spent a summer in Brisbane, then you can talk about it being humid.

On the other hand, I would never presume to tell you stories about being cold, because I don't think I've ever really been in sub-zero conditions. Wait, there was that week I went skiing, but most of the snow melted while I was there (they didn't have to close any runs though), so it couldn't have been too cold.

 

Well, where I live it is 90 somethin most of the summer and extremely humid which makes it feel a good deal hotter. Then in the winter it gets really cold, don't know exactly how cold, but it doesn't snow. Its cold enough to snow by far, but it doesn't.

Uh huh....

 

How dare you complain! :-x

I get no winter here and that's terrible. You might be bored of snow and freezing cold, but I think its wonderful.

About being hot and humid, its hot and humid everyday of the year here. In fact, the only places which are worse than here are deserts and India.

And I've never eaten spam because its not sold here. But I've eaten the equavalent and I think pork is the best type of meat, especially pork fat. If you think pork is unhealthy, realise that eating beef can give you an uncurable cjd, chicken and other fowl are thoroughly filled with cancerous chemicles and goat fat and oil is very dangerous to the heart. Not to mention the poison thats in the sea and your fish these days and the pesticides and inorganic pollutants in your vegetables. Last but not least, water containing mercury and other dangerous and hard-to-remove minerals is one of the best ways to get a tumour. :???:

 

Well this thread certainly has gotten off-topic, but I guess that's what you get when you make a thread about spam. You get people who starting bitching about the weather and how polluted the earth is. *sigh* I guess I'll go back to trying to come up with something meaningful to say.

 

Pork meat is EXTREMELY fatty. Not to mention trichynosis. Pretty much all mammalian meat is unhealthy taken in the quantities that many people do these days. All meat is pain and fear. Organic vegetarian is the WAY!

 

NO we do use the celsius in norway. I just wondered how cold 60- fahrenheit is. Anyway you are still weak.

 

Fairbanks, AK, is the third coldest place in the world by my reckoning, beaten out by Antarctica and Siberia.

 

Actually, we've been eating meat since the dawn of mankind. It's mainly the way things are processed now that is bad for us, but the quantity doesn't help either. We are biologically designed to eat meat and not vegetables.

We can't actually digest over 90% of the vegetable matter we eat. Vegetables are useful for their roughage (BECAUSE we can't digest them) as well as trace minerals and vitamins but they hold no real nutritional value. This is why vegetarians have to eat so much and such a balanced diet or they suffer from major nutritional problems. You'll also notice that most vegetarians vent alot of gas. :lol:

Being a Vegan is suicide unless you now EXACTLY what and how to eat the stuff. Our alimentary canal is neither long enough or functional enough to digest plant matter and it lacks certain structures necessary to either breakdown or absorb vegetable-based nutrients.

The Caecum and Appendix are the two main organs in the body that deal with plant matter. The appendix in humans becomes inflamed completely non-functional even before birth. I believe it's something like just an hour or two after becoming fully formed that it no longer works.

In addition Chalupa, if you live somewhere so cold then you NEED that fat. It's an essential part of the diet that insulates you. Vegetarians also suffer from exposure a lot because their bodies start to lose the ability to maintain thermoregulation.

 

The vegetarians and vegans I know seem like VERY healthy people to me in contrast to the carnivores I know. You say that 90% of vegetable intake isn't properly digested but that's mainly because the human digestive tract is about 90% ineffective. It has many of the same difficulties with meat. Vitamins and minerals are in reasonable abundance in a vegan diet and protein is easily acquired from legumes. Meat is a complete protein overload and the majority of it is simply wasted.

The land required for livestock would be better spent in the raising of organic crops as animals are not as good at processing the environment as plants are. This goes back to the inefficiency of the digestive tract. Still, animals DO serve a purpose in the maintenance of crops.

Believe me, it's wholly possible to become fat from a vegetarian or even vegan diet. It's just a healthier fat that is more easily converted into energy and that is why many vegans and vegetarians are not obese. Thermoregulation rarely becomes a problem when you are too much of a fatass to get up and exert yourself. Slimmer people have more efficient body systems and their gas isn't usually so bad as an egg fart or your run-of-the-mill Happy Meal (tm) fart.

Eating well is no excuse for forcing the pain and fear of a premature death on unwilling creatures. When you eat meat you partake in the pain and fear of a premature death, both your own and someone else's.

 

If you've got friends who are healthy and well nourished (without being fat) friends then congratulations to them. It IS possible, it's just that it takes a hell of a lot more planning and controlling of your diet in order to make sure you get the full balance of nutrients your body needs. It doesn't change the fact that your body can't digest or absorb almost all of the material that makes up plant matter, which means that you also have to eat a lot more of the stuff.

I know it's possible to become fat. If you eat too much of anything you'll get fat. Also, it makes no difference what you eat, the type of fat that your body stores is the same. There are only two exclusions from this: Cholesterol and cell wall Phospholipids. These two fats can be altered by partially hydrogenating any oil, be it vegetable or animal in origin. Any natural fat bears no problem, but partial hydrogenation 'kinks' the chains of fatty acids, making the Cholesterol that is formed from them 'sticky' and the cell walls tougher. The cell walls work harden as a result and organs like your heart which are constantly flexing eventually just shatter. Even a small amount of partially or fully hydrogenated oil in your diet will increase the risk of heart disease by 50 to 80% and unfortunately, they're found in virtually everything nowadays from sweets to fast food.

The conversion to energy thing only applies to that which is used upon digestion and absorption into the lymphatic system. All fat that is stored by the body is converted into specific body-type fat and so makes no difference as to it's origin. As such, it doesn't matter if you eat vegatable fat or animal fat as long as it is in it's natural form.

Of course, if you eat a lot of the stuff, no matter what it's from, it's going to be bad for you because you're just going to lay it down as blubber.

It's a natural process undertaken by ALL carnivorous animals (and some plants too I might add). Each animals needs to feed and nature has found a balance in the predator/prey relationship. As such, we have every right to undertake this process ourselves (and to have it done on us, although not many people like that thought, me included) in order to gain nourishment. It's a perfectly natural thing to do and nature allows for it.

However, I don't agree with some of the processes that some animals undergo in order for this to come about. As such, I try to eat free range where possible and avoid certain meats that I know cause untoward suffering. It's the barbaric farming of some animals that I don't like and that is NOT part of the natural process of things but it's not a reason for me to give up meat though. I just avoid those brands and types I know to mistreat animals.

If you and your friends are happy as vegetarians then fair enough and I say good luck to you, but I'm going to continue to eat my squealing, writhing meatables thank you.

 

You know, I'm all against cruelty to animals, but that doesn't stop me eating them.

Where the fuck do you come up with this shit? The Big Book of Convenient "Facts"?

Sure, that's why you can also identify the corn AND steak when you take a dump...no, wait, I've never actually seen a chunk of meat come out before. Could that be because it's actually been digested?

Yes, we all know how large tracts of land in South America are over cropped. I wouldn't call it inefficient use of the land though, as even animals have to eat.

Hey, are your teeth flat or pointy? If you're human like the rest of us here, then they're pointy SO YOU CAN EAT MEAT, DIPSHIT! Don't give me that crap about meat causing premature death. I'd rant further, but I have to go now. To be continued...

Okay, continuing on, I respect anyone's decision to be a vegetarian, but I still think that some of them do it for stupid reasons. I mainly find those people to be bleeding heart Lefties, who'd rather inconvenience themselves rather than eat a chicken. Humans have been eating animals since the dawn of time, we wouldn't have survived if we hadn't done so. What's wrong with still killing animals to eat them? Excessive killing is wrong, but if we only meet demand, then what's your problem? Your philosophical viewpoint that killing animals is always wrong?

I'm constantly fascinated by how blindly zealous people can be, especially when it comes to the extremes of life styles. So please, CC and any other vegetarians out there, why is it wrong to eat other animals? After all, they eat each other, are you suggesting that they should turn vegetarian as well?

 

Hmm... yes. Actually, regarding meat, more than 99% of it is digested, whereas just less than 5% of most vegetable matter is digested. The human digestive tract evolved to be highly efficient at extracting material and nutrients from animal products, whereas it hasn't got the first clue how to handle vegetables. Infact, many vegatables aren't even affected by the human digestive tract. Most seeds and nuts pass through without even being touched and most brassicas and vegetables like lettuce and cucumber hold no nutritional value whatsoever and are used purely as roughage because they can't be touched. The only nutrients we get from lettuce and cucumber is the water we release by chewing.

In short, you can only measure the efficiency of something it is designed for. Our digestive tract is 99% efficient at doing it's job. It is not at all efficient at doing other jobs like digesting vegetables and wallpapering the dining room. It's like saying that a lawn mower is hopelessly efficient at mowing the lawns because it can't milk a cow.

And before you argue that we pass so much matter as faeces, I'd just like to point out that we do so because meat is so packed full of nutrition that we don't NEED to digest all of it. Even so, the majority of faeces is matter that cannot be digested in the first place (the roughage, like plant material). If you do a nutritional value extraction study, you will see that the amount of nutrients taken up compared the the amount of nutrients available is almost beyond comparison between meat and vegetables, with almost ALL of the possible nutrients in vegetable matter passing straight through and almost ALL of the possible nutrients in animal matter being absorbed.

 

Ahh meat is good.

Anyone here ever tasted imam? The only really good vegeterian meal i have found that does not require meat to be really good.

 

I love pork, and steak and chicken. YUM! However, I gave up fish/sea food this year, because of personal reasons. (Well, I'll elaborate, just because I'm bored.) The oceans are way over fished, the tactics of fishing are horrible, and the health of the oceans, and their delicate balances, are completely screwed up. So, I've given up fish. I think it's the right thing to do, and I could care less if you tell me "if you stop eating fish, it's not going to make a difference, because they still kill them", then I shall laugh at you. Why? Because they kill fish because people eat them, so if you don't eat them, then they won't kill them. Obviously it's going to take a lot to get oceans back to being healthy, because we've fucked them up so much, but I feel that I should start somewhere, and while it may not be making a big difference, it's making a difference to me.

(PS: I'm feeling a little woozy because I of some medicine I took, so if this post is full of run on sentences and doesn't make much sense, I apologise.)

 

Unfortunately that SHOULD be the case, but it's not. In most countries that is true, but in the countries that are causing the most problems (Spain, America and another mainland European country I'm not too sure about) they still catch more fish than they could ever hope to eat. THe reason being is that they get paid up to a certain quota whether it's eaten or just thrown away. Spain is by far the worst case and not only do they massively overfish just for the quota, but they are massively overfishing in other people's waters and are ignoring all UN and EC sanctions placed upon them.

I applaud your effort though and I myself have stopped eating certain types of fish, like cod, because they are now on the verge of being placed on the endangered species list. Instead I favour fish that are just as tasty and as yet massively 'underfished' in terms of their reproductive capabilities.

You'll be pleased to hear though that many fish stocks are now starting to stabilise, although it will take decades before their stocks reach sustainable capacity again.

 

I support your reasons completely and they're the same reasons why I don't eat seafood either. Oh wait, it's cause I don't like the stuff. Still, if I did like it, I would stop eating it for those reasons.

I have no idea if this makes sense or not, I only got about an hour of sleep last night. I hate not being able to sleep.

 

Well if i wanted fish I would just ask my mom to get me some. She works as a vet and she specialises on fish in fishing farms, so i can get any fish i want. Salomon and the fish that lives around the farms.

 

I basically agree with Snowmane, but I still eat fish, just not very regularly. I couldn't imagine being a vegetarian, though. No steak? No hamburgers? No bacon? Heh, sorry, think I'll stick with my meats.