@consolation:
Thanks, I thought that lactose would be a problem if someone was diabetic…guess not:)
I like the idea of subsituting for cheese, avocados have a unique texture, hummus could replace some of the places you use cheese (it is great on sandwiches or as a spread with vegetables).
As far as the cuisines where they eat grains, like the french and the Italians, keep in mind a couple of things. For one thing, the amount they eat in general is traditionally less than here, and they tend to eat things in a balance we don’t. Yes, the french eat bread, but they have a couple of small slices of it, they don’t eat a whole loaf. Likewise, while pasta is a staple in italy, along with bread, they don’t eat a 5 pound bowl of pasta. Risotto again was not eaten the way we did, and Polenta, a staple of the north (which was served as a mush, fried, and so forth) would be balanced out by other things, and they would eat a fraction of what a restaurant portion of that is.
The other thing you have to keep in mind is that those diets were eaten by people who were active, these were basically peasant diets, the people eating these diets were people who worked hard each day to keep going. My father was from southern Italy, and the things they ate were simple, they would eat things like bread dipped in olive oil that had had onions cooked in it, or they would eat past with a simple tomato sauce, they would have bread, of course, but again it wasn’t with butter…and they were physically active, walked all over. And the bread itself was simple, likely would be more whole grain, and it certainly wouldn’t contain the crap a lot of bread here contains, especially sugar.
The problem here is that the portion sizes are huge, and often what is being consumed as carbs is processed crap, with sugar in it, and it is out of balance with everything else. Though I am not going to disagree that our diets were thrown out of whack with the whole food pyramid based on grains and the like, and that carbs, especially sugar, creeped into so much of our diet, with no thanks to the medical profession (anyone remember doctors recommending the no fat food products out there, that were loaded with sugar…). It is one of the big problems with taking diets out of context without looking at the other factors. Put it this way, if you looked at the diets in eastern Europe where my wife came from, where the diet was laden with pork and root vegetables and they cooked with bacon grease and duck fat and the like, it would look like no one would live past 25…but that diet was from a time when people were doing heavy labor every day, and that makes a difference, eating the same kind of diet as a sedentary office worker is different than someone working on a farm.