Lifestyle Design With a Difference

Minimalist Eating and Nutrition

Earlier today, I read an entry named “Minimalist Eating” on the minimalist blog. It’s a great blog that I enjoy reading, but today I didn’t feel entirely comfortable reading dietary advice that – at least depending on your interpretation – flew in the face of established nutrition theory. That’s why I decided to write my own post on what I consider to be minimalist eating.

One of the first statements in the mnmlst blog post on Minimalist eating was that “A minimalist would more likely eat less, prepare food simply with few ingredients, eat mindfully, and eat sustainably“. While this is probably essentially true, eating food with few ingredients is seldom a good idea. A problem in the modern (western) diet is already that we’re eating too few species (of animal and plant), so a suggestion to reduce it even further cannot be condoned. Instead, we should try to eat more species than we’re eating today. The New York Times article named “Unhappy Meals” claims that:

Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

However, if we open the floor to interpretation, the recommendation to eat “few ingredients” still holds true in a different way. A quick look at the list of ingredients on a Twinkie, for example, contains the following (according to its Wikipedia entry):

  • Enriched Wheat Flour – enriched with ferrous sulphate (iron), B vitamins (niacin, thiamine mononitrate [B1], ribofavin [B12] and folic acid).
  • Sugar
  • Corn syrup
  • Water
  • High fructose corn syrup
  • Vegetable and/or animal shortening – containing one or more of partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed or canola oil, and beef fat
  • Dextrose
  • Whole eggs
  • Color added (yellow 5, red 40)
  • Sorbic acid (to retain freshness)
  • Caramel color

Twinkies also contain 2% or less of:

  • Modified corn starch
  • Cellulose gum
  • Whey
  • Leavenings (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate)
  • Salt
  • Cornstarch
  • Corn flour
  • Corn syrup solids
  • Mono and diglycerides
  • Soy lecithin
  • Polysorbate 60
  • Dextrin
  • Calcium caseinate
  • Sodium stearol lactylate
  • Wheat gluten
  • Calcium sulphate
  • Natural and artificial flavors

It doesn’t take long to realize that most of what we see on this list isn’t food, it’s ingredients. The recommendation to reduce the amount of ingredients, if interpreted as not reducing the amount of things identifiable as food, now becomes a rather good piece of advice. I hope this is how they meant it. You can still eat pasta, vegetables, cow, fish, fruit, nuts, ham, and all of the normal foods, but once you start looking at foodstuff that has a long list of ingredients, you’re probably no longer eating food.

Recent studies have shown that while vegetarians are the healthiest people among us, flexitarians are no less healthy. This seems to indicate that eating meat is not a bad thing per se, but that an imbalance in the diet where one eats mainly meat can be quite harmful. As long as meat is treated as one of many pieces of food on your plate, and as long as it doesn’t have to be there, you’re probably eating healthy. Imagine a plate with salad, cucumber slices, an apple, five slices of ham, half a baguette, some carrots, a leg of chicken and two potatoes. None of these foods is the main part of the dish, but all play together to create a whole meal. Now compare this to a BBQ steak dripping with sauce along with some french fries. While you’re getting proteins, fats and carbohydrates, the lack of biological diversity in your meal is staggering.

Lastly, one of the tips from the Minimalist Eating article that I can completely get behind is their suggestion to eat less; to reduce your overall calorie intake – unless, of course, you are underweight. Instead of eating a meal until you feel ready to explode, it is suggested to eat until you are approaching a feeling of being full. Say 75-80% full. This eases the digestive process and is far friendlier on the digestive system, but also reduces the chance for heart attacks, cholesterol buildup and other related problems.

All of this can be summarized in the three sentences that contain everything you need to know about healthy eating.

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

The Note-Taking Conundrum

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’ve written more than one entry about note-taking techniques, software and hardware for taking notes and other ways that notes and note-taking can be integrated into daily routines in simple and efficient ways. Today, I revisit the old and begin to sketch out a new and more efficient way to handle things.

My notes are all over the place. For those of you who remember my previous entry on the subject (and I urge all my new readers to read it first), you’ll remember that I mentioned three major note-taking locations. They were:

  • My Moleskine Notebook, where I add new thoughts, ideas, notes, plans, suggestions and other that I need to remember in the future. A short thing will do, such as “Buy Birthday present for mom!” or “Research weaving in mythology” or “Maybe Book Character X should be a veterinarian?”. These ideas will later be made into either notes or tasks by being transferred into one of the following two pieces of software.
  • Things is a wonderful piece of software from Cultured Code that I use to handle my tasks. It reminds me 10 days before any of my contacts has a birthday (and again on the birthday, just in case), it keeps track of my work-related tasks, my personal tasks and my more long-term projects. It’s a fantastic piece of software and I would recommend it to everybody.
  • VoodooPad is another fantastic piece of software, brought to us by Flying Meat. Basically, it’s a local wiki-type installation where you can create notebook pages that interact with each other. My first page has a number of different topics that then have sub-topics that link back and forth to each other. My book-writing project has a VoodooPad-project of its own where I have notes on all characters, places, religious festivals, seasons and historical events that are relevant to the planning and writing of the book. Again; it’s a fantastic piece of software and I’m only sorry that I didn’t discover it sooner.

In most day-to-day cases, this is enough. However, sometimes situations pop up where I need other software. Sometimes I need to save information that isn’t as simple as taking notes. Enter four more applications:

  • I use OmniGraffle to help me visualize the family trees of the characters in my epic fantasy series that I’m writing. It makes it easy to add and edit things as I move along instead of having to update multiple pages in VoodooPad every time I make one little change.
  • I use OpenOffice when I’m working on my book. It’s a great combination of minimalism (when you turn off enough visible features) and functionality. Unlike Microsoft’s Office package, OpenOffice still hasn’t come to the point where there is feature bloat with features that actually come in the way of your writing and editing.
  • I use Evernote when I see quotes or pictures that make me feel “I’m sure I’ll need that in the future”. Over time, as my Evernote Inbox swells, I begin sorting things into distinct categories that may (or may not) crystallize into a blog post, a short story or a new project. Other things are just discarded as their relevance or my interest in them dissipates.
  • Lastly, I use Instapaper for all of my “Read Later”-things. I very often happen upon interesting things on the Internet while I’m at the office or just about to go to bed. Using Instapaper, I can queue these things (and get rid of sidebars, advertisements and other pointless trivia) for reading later, usually on my commute to or from work on my iPhone. I’m really looking forward to seeing an iPad version of Instapaper as this would make things so much easier to manage.

What’s beginning to become more and more apparent to me is that all these four main applications have overlaps in functionality and purpose. I open Things for my planning and give myself a schedule of 2 weeks to finish creating the family tree of a certain person in my fantasy series. Then I’d use OmniGraffle and VoodooPad to plan and plot everything. Finally, once the information is available, I’d have it as reference material once I started writing about the relevant people in OpenOffice. There must be better ways of doing this?

That’s why I’m going out to you guys, my readers. Do you have any suggestions for ways that I can improve upon this process? I’m open to the suggestion of trying new software or new ways of using the current software that I’m using. Pitch me ideas and suggestions; I’d love to hear from you!

The Science Fiction of the Past

The past few weeks, I’ve read a lot of science fiction from the 60s and the 70s. While filled with amazing vision and ambition, it seems almost quaint to read it in the year 2010. If there’s one thing we can say for certain about our visions of the future it is this: We can never know what to expect if we try to base it on today’s paradigms.

The books that I’ve been reading have mainly been random books by Philip K. Dick. The latest one I finished was Our Friends From Frolix 8, a story about a man living in a totalitarian surveillance-heavy society containing – in addition to ‘normal’ people – two transhuman groups; the Unusuals and the New Men. The Unusuals have psychic powers in one form or another; they may be able to read minds, move objects with their minds, start fires or something similar. The New Men are like Humanity++, they have the same skills as us, but super-charged. They can do trigonometry before their tenth birthday, look better than the rest of us, are healthier, and so on.

The predictable adventures occur – okay; semi-predictable, actually, since this is, after all, a Philip K. Dick book – and the protagonist eventually gets the girl (no, wait, she dies) and the ruling order of Unusuals and New Men is toppled.

Since Philip K. Dick wrote this in 1970, a number of things we take for granted today weren’t even thought of at the time. The characters in the book actually walk to phone booths to talk to each other; but these booths have video functionality. The thought of picking up a phone that fits in your pocket was so foreign at the time that it didn’t even fit into the mind of this, one of the most visionary of Science Fiction authors of the past 100 years. The Internet didn’t exist at the time, so nowhere do we have any mentions of widely accessible databases of information that are stored and accessible from across the world. Instead, we have filing stations with microfilm that are accessible from anywhere within the building where one is sitting. People travel from one part of the world on flying ships to meet each other instead of engaging in telepresence. Cars don’t just drive on the streets, they can fly now … and they’re called squibs.

While the book was fun and had some very interesting plot twists, it – and the others that I read – have gotten me thinking. A lot of people have wild dreams about the future. They might be technology-optimistic immortality-yearning Extropists. They might be expecting aliens to come destroy the world. They might think feminism, Greenpeace and whale-saving will make the world a fantastic place. They might think overpopulation will ruin all hope for the future. They might be espousing a specific economic or political theory that will change everything, but they all tend to do one thing wrong.

They do it expecting their own paradigm to be the one to dominate in the future.

Imagine, 300 years ago, when a person was asked how the world would look if it would grow to contain nearly seven billion people who all need to travel long distances to get to where they need to be on a daily basis. This person, stuck in their own paradigm, would imagine carriages drawn by horses littering the streets, the masses of farms needed to sustain such a huge population, the complete and utter chaos as the aristocracies of the world try to maintain order. Fast forward 300 years to today and notice that none of this is a problem; science and social progress has created a complete paradigm shift.

We don’t even need to look at centuries as a time scale to see things like this, Moore’s Law can be applied to society as a whole as we see accelerating change all over the world. Only twenty years ago, it was rare for a person to even know what the Internet was. Ten years ago, people had dial-up and ISDN connections to the Internet and were able to do basic tasks over it. Today, most people in the western world carry an Internet connection in their pocket on a daily basis and access Twitter, Facebook and their e-mail from wherever they want to be.

I was recollecting my dreams and hopes with a friend of mine yesterday. We both work within the telecom and datacom industries and remembered how we, ten years ago, dreamed about how Wireless LAN would be rolled out and be accessible to everybody everywhere, with maybe ten or twenty Megabit connections available to all! We can try to imagine what the ruling paradigm will be in ten years, but it’s almost impossible to do so today. We just have to wait and see or try to take part in changing the future.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is this. If you try to predict the future, try to step outside of your current paradigm.

Don’t expect the future to resemble the present in any way.

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