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from the these-boots-are-made-for-walkin dept.
NewsChina http://new.newschinamag.com/newschina/articleDetail.do?article_id=2414 is running an article titled, "The Walking Dead - The lack of public sport facilities and sites have seen a growing number of urban residents take to public roads for exercise"
Xu Guilin has been restless and anxious of late. As the head of the Outdoor Sport Association of Lanshan District in the city of Linyi, Shandong Province, he's used to organizing hikes and walks in an urban landscape increasingly hostile to pedestrians. But now he's facing a media blitz after tragedy struck his group – while also handling members who are keen to take to the roads again.
In the early morning of July 8, 2017, a taxi rammed into a crowd of walkers on the highway in the city, killing one and injuring two. After the accident, more than 20 teams of walkers were told to halt their activities.
"I am under mounting pressure," Xu told NewsChina. He doesn't know how to cope with his thousands of members. "They want to exercise and walk, where could they go?" He's very worried that some walkers will strike off on their own, risking another accident, and he's facing massive criticism online where netizens flocked to condemn walkers for their alleged intrusion onto public roads.
It seems that with all the new urban construction in China, they haven't built sidewalks, parks or sports fields. Meanwhile, people that want to walk for exercise have banded together in groups and take to the streets for lack of anywhere else to walk. These are not small groups -- one founder started in 2010 with a few friends and by 2015 his group had grown and split many times...10,000 people were engaged in group walking in Linyi city.
We may think that groups of road cyclists are blocking the roads in a few places, but walking in China appears to be in a whole different league. Some groups taking a lane have been run over by cars (there is a picture in the article that purports to show this) and other groups banned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Monday October 09 2017, @07:04PM (9 children)
How's slow-cooked rice and beans any healthier than what most Americans eat? Last I checked the problem was too many carbs and not enough proteins and fats. And slow-cooked foods are typically high carbs dishes.
I guess that makes anyone eating corn, potatoes or chili, or even taking a sip of coffee or tea on occasions a tolerant individual by definition. Seriously, Americans are probably the most unprejudiced eaters on the globe. If it tastes more or less palatable they'll eat it with little care to what it is or where it's coming from. Especially compared to Asians and Europeans who have a whole national pride thing going on with their cuisines.
Regardless, since I'm not going to leave a food discussion without prompting a recipe, one of my favorite dishes is Gordon Ramsay's Thai-style beef stir fry recipe [wordpress.com] and should fit the premise of easy-to-make Asian and healthy food.
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(Score: 2, Offtopic) by frojack on Monday October 09 2017, @07:09PM
It wasn't a food discussion until another food bigot decided to make it into one. You're not helping here.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday October 09 2017, @07:24PM (2 children)
> Last I checked the problem was too many carbs and not enough proteins and fats
Last I checked, the food problem was too much energy coming in (too often, indeed, in ratios of molecule types not balanced to match biological needs), and not enough going out.
What constitutes the perfect balance is always a topic of discussions, fashions, and highly dependent on individuals. But the immutable part is how, unless you have a very specific extremely rare disease, people being overweight is the simple result of failing to address an intake that doesn't match a lifestyle.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:43PM
Wrong. Insulin spikes modulate food metabolism and drives the efficiency of digestion. Combined with how calorie dense high-carb food is compared to high-fat and high-protein (aka, meat) foods, and you end up getting fat on a high-carb diets that total the same calories as high-protein diets you'd lose weight on while only satisfying your appetite on the high-protein\fat diets. The actual number has been suggested to be as much as a 30% difference in calorie intake depending on meal frequency and life style but considering most people are getting fat from as little as 5-10% surplus and you can see what a huge difference it makes.
And it's not just the insulin. Protein digestion is relatively inefficient and has high limits whereby the body expels excesses early before making it to the blood stream. However, extra glucose readily turns into fat.
The insinuation behind your statement is that it's possible to build a healthy high-carbs diet even for people with sedentary lifestyles simply by reducing the amount of carbs. That's just wrong. Practically speaking not only people will never be able to satisfy their appetites on such a diet leading to it failing, their energy levels throughout the day will fluctuate as their blood glucose spikes leaving them dysfunctional in their lives and jobs. And that disregarding the health of their kidneys.
Honestly I don't know why people insist on repeating these sugar industry propaganda points. Food is addictive. The biological reason we have addiction in the first place is food. The idea a normal person should be expected to demonstrate self-control and regulate their own dosages when served the equivalent of pure heroin 3 times a day is against everything we observe in the real world. Millions of years of biological evolution were done around regularly consuming scraps of meat with the odd fruit you picked off a tree with a non trivial amount of effort. We're not built for growing and eating wheat, rice and corn. It's a recent change and our biology just hasn't caught up. You're not supposed to be satisfied with such an energy dense diet since it wouldn't have naturally happened enough for humanity to evolve to. Adopting self-flagellation in the form of exercise might satisfy emotional needs for some to the point of sedating their appetites, but it doesn't help most people and makes a really bad argument when considering other countries who don't suffer from obesity and have just as many sedentary people don't have huge populations of gym rats to offset the figures to their favor.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Monday October 09 2017, @11:24PM
And what, pray tell, a "very specific extremely rare disease" would make you gain weight while not eating enough? Breatharianism? A perpetuum mobile creating energy then converting it to mass?
Stuffing yourself is an absolute requirement. No matter what "healthy at any size" crowd will tell you, being fat is purely your fault. No "hormones" can make you produce body mass out of nothing.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 09 2017, @08:22PM (4 children)
Glad you asked! I should specify I use brown rice rather than white, so as not to spike blood glucose too hard and too fast. The beans add fiber (and, unfortunately, lectins, which is why you soak 'em beforehand...), minerals, and vitamins, as well as all-important protein. Sauces for this are easier than you might thing, as you can just dump a couple cans of diced tomatoes and some tomato paste in--or whizz some cut fresh tomatoes in the blender and pour that in! I've got enough spice in the cabinet to turn your eyes solid blue, and you get an intuitive feel for how much of what to use depending on the flavor you want.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Monday October 09 2017, @10:22PM (3 children)
What drives me nuts is the way the stores decide to charge a lot more for brown rice and brown flour than their white equivalents! Surely, it needs less refining, therefore should be much cheaper. I can see how maybe white being more popular could create some kinda economy of scale but it doesn't stop it being frustrating.
There's also this drive to hype up cheap, healthy basics into fucking "superfoods" or similar and charge the Earth for them. Lentils and chickpeas used to be much cheaper. Frugal people have to eat too y'know!
Once big business figured out anything can be made very expensive if only you market it right to the right idiots, we were all fucked. Nothing will ever be cost effective again.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday October 09 2017, @10:24PM (2 children)
Oh and same thing with brown vs white sugar. There are probably more examples of the less refined product costing more. Maybe it still needs to be selectively refined and that selective process is more difficult than the one used for white sugar.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday October 09 2017, @11:02PM (1 child)
Most brown sugar is white sugar with added color and flavor. In no way is it cheaper to produce. I stress "most*, not all. For brown sugar that is truly less refined than white sugar, see point 2 below.
There are two fundamental reasons brown rice, flour and sugar costs more:
1. Buyers are likely to be wealthier and can afford more.
2. These products sell lower volumes so the overhead costs of producing and stocking it are higher.
They are just like any niche product.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:04AM
Most is an understatement. The only exceptions I know of is a Japanese company that ships to restaurants directly. Even the rum industry in the Caribbeans use refined cane molasses. Everyone else will, at best, mix white with molasses [joythebaker.com] or just reintroduce resin from some other source.
And mind you, this is done with good reason. Not only the shipping costs for the extra water content is prohibitive, the whitening process is essentially a form of pasteurization to kill off the germs and remove the insects, insecticides, fungi, heavy metals and the really rare stuff like polio that live in the canes and beets or the surrounding ground and that people won't wash down with soup since it's sugar we're talking about.
Regardless, if people are really interested in raw sugar they can just buy sugar canes.
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