Frank Davidson

FD

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  • It makes good soil and the fabric is a good anchor for weeds.

  • Hahaha

  • I'd have enough if I take in neighbours kitchen and garden waste as we did when I was little.
    BUT
    People use teabags these days instead of loose tea and the bags have a polypropylene matrix. One firm has said they will make their bags from paper following a harassment campaign from a petition site which targeted only that company. I doubt that will last as...

  • Don't be coerced into it.

  • Nice. I'd love to have more space for livestock -. beef, goat, veal, venison, lamb but I'm being taxed to death for a cradle-to-grave welfare system aimed at producing more humans without any sanction, keeping them alive longer and filling up any available space with them.
    Hella red tape and bureaucracy from the EU and government as well.

  • I don't care. What people eat in no way offsets the most damaging thing people do - having children. If folk stopped having so many children we could eat what we want, when we want, from where we want without being guilt-tripped by people whose faddy diet is their religion. Organic is just wasteful of capital and land.

  • Damn straight they were sanctioned. Food shortages are widespread in Cuba because of their socialism promoting irresponsible breeding.

  • I once bought chipped bark for my dad, poured it on his front garden beds and raked it in a bit. The plants took years to recover.

  • is that an oxisol?
    I chop and drop a lot, saves on handling to / from the compost

  • What went wrong?

  • Edit: size 200sqm usable south=facing including greenhouse. I'm looking for quite a few hectares and would like livestock.
    Whatever isn't cheap in the stores, is not available or I can't be bothered carrying home I grow I wouldn't grow onions when Farmfoods has better specimens a couple of quid for a few kg, so I grow shallots which are dear and take up less...

  • There are hobby farms near me, They suffer dreadfully inefficient farming practices compared to proper agriculture and poor distribution c.f normal agribusiness and retail. Above all the produce isn't that good and it's vastly overpriced.

    I wonder what drives them when there's no compelling evidence of organic being any better. I get the impression they do...

  • In what way is it "healthy"? Are they marketing produce as more healthy than science-based farming?

  • I clicked land sparing but it says "You selected Land sharing. See how your answer compares below".

  • University, botanic gardens, parking myself in the university library, university and Hutton talks, soil and plant scientists, plant pathologists,.I read sites such as the USDA UCDavisNCBI.. I was on a couple of forums but one attached to magazines gardening programme had a culture of bullying towards , academics, particularly towards on elderly fellow whom...

  • the bean, conn cucurb tripodis common in Bolivia and Mexico but isn't much cope in cold wet windy climates like Aberdeen. I intermix tomato and basil, apples and hosta. Not a planned interseed but I pop excess plugs I've reared where there is any bare space and there's no negative allelooathy. Some apiaceae and lamiaceae can be a bit funny.

  • These seed mixes, which need to fit with the soil and other ecology are horrendously expensive per unit mass.

  • Cover crops can introduce other problems. Ungerminated rye seeds = rodents, field lupins = gastropods, Rotations have to be meticulously planned and executed to get a good maincrop growing season, or intercrop the cover crop before harvest which reduces nutrition for the main crop. Buying in these seeds takes resources - money, transport, a seed production...

  • I've done Secale cereale and Vicia sativa (rye and vetch), Trifolium pratense (red clover) Phacelia tanacetofolia. Onobrychis Viciifolia (Sainfoin), Medicago sativa (Lucerne)Sinapis alba (White Mustard), Bocking 14 (lifter),
    herbal leys and others, Because of the appaling climate up north (aberdeen United Kingdom) timing is difficult. Soil temperatures...

  • The landmass of gardens c.f. farms is tiny.

  • Fewer humans.

  • The result of state interference (local authority zoning) . They're not too keen on industry either. Now city centres have been strangled by bureaucrats I imagine it's student blocks which are in favour with the LA.

  • @JulietWebber It's parents' responsibility to feed their children, not the state i.e. already overburdened taxpayer. Parents need to work or if they do find a better job or take a second or third job and make better choice, though ultimately the better choice would have not to have had children they can't afford in the first place..

  • The real issue underlying all the above is overpopulation.Welfare states which reward irresponsible breeding and keeping failed states [with excessive birth rates] afloat with food aid compounds those problems. Throwing more socialism at the problem is the very opposite of what needs done.

  • My major concern is making most profit long term.

  • Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Veg grower. Outside of the USDA soil classification I'd characterise the soil as "precipitation > transpiration". Heavy loam, dubs in winter, dry in the few weeks of summer.

  • We don't have innate rights. Rights are something we allow our overlords to give us.

  • "While 1991-2010 down has been witnessing more of imperialism in all fronts where the global north and Arab world kept making intrusion into the affairs of the region in a manner devoid of any benefits to the people of sub-Sahara Africa."
    There's the major problem with the UN, large blocs with major influence. The muslim Arab League, the xian EU The former...

  • Is your word shown in the word cloud?
    Probably not.
    The word I used was proselytisers and I don't think we've yet looked at the detrimental impact of proselyting religions on the region with their "Y'all need <insert name of deity or prophet here>" mentality.
    Can you think of any reasons why some words are more commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africa...

  • UK or Britain, not Scotland.

  • It hasn't faded out. Well into the 70s the British government for instance were funding people on degree programmes at British Universities to install a political middle class into the ex-colonies. That's more of a divestment strategy than one of control.

  • Hmm, this ignores the destructive geopolitical aims of proselytising influences.

  • "agency in one’s life" is the key phrase I drew from that. One can't fail to notice the encroaching hand of state in our lives. I imagine it's much worse in SSA with the added corruption.

  • Capitalism and enterprise.

  • Capital
    Enterprise
    Nomocracy (rule-of-law),
    Technology,
    Education.

    Establishing nomocracies, governance by the rule of law preventing individual civil servants applying their own laws on a whim is critical to reducing corruption which is a barrier to other developments realising a common good.

  • Proselytisers.

  • Haha, that was a rhetorical statement, I'm not in need of recipes.. I don't have an accumulation of tinned foods.

  • You should consult more authoritative sources though once you get up to speed, That was just a 1200 character max simplification, ultimately from evidence-based research published in sports and clinical nutrition journals.

  • I wouldn;t agree 'especially' when accompanied by good pulse-raising exercises (you won't do it with diet alone). More like higher P only to support resistance (weight-bearing) exercise. Muscle development requires one to catabolise muscle first (by lifting) to build up the same tissue again in the anabolic phase.No new fibres are created It's the repair of...

  • I've never seen them but I tried flax seeds. They took way more than the 72 chews prescribed in Nuts in May, it was almost dinnertime by the time I finished my breakfast.

  • I don't remember that survey form.

  • I wasn't really looking at it from a personal dietary perspective, just the science.Still it's good to take a critical look at one's diet from time to time, which this has prompted. I've enough food in he house and outhouse to survive a nuclear winter (in income insecurity -> food insecurity thing) and it's about time I cleared out some of the freezers and the...

  • Just because it can be tested doesn't mean it should be, routinely.

  • Many thanks.

  • Taking vitamin pills without any evidence-based indication that one is required can have detrimental outcomes, particularly the fat-souluble ones A, D E and K which bio accumulate.

  • D2 is made from a fungal sterol. D3 is from an animal sterol such as found in e.g cod liver, perhaps bio-accumulated up the food chain from plankton. Like in the video with the mushroom fruiting body the sterol is UV irradiated producing the D or at east a precursor our bodies can turn into Vitamin d. I worked on a pharma plant, it's big industrial chemistry....

  • Yes, yes I am ... awful in fact. I fouled my dinner up again but to be fair on myself I may be an even worse gardener. The chicken was dried out; the mushroom soy sauce, which I added for some inexplicable reason burned on the bottom of the pan; the calabrese and purple broccoli flowers, which had bolted were stemmier and stringier than I thought they would...

  • Where appropriate in other questions I have quoted published research. Unfortunately, here, where they have specifically asked for evidence-based research I don't have anything on branded diets because I frankly haven't looked into any of them and I'm not interested enough in them to spend many hours doing a basic literature review. Though I didn't expect...

  • Apps, schmapps. All this personal anthropometry can be taken a bit far and I'd be the sort to do that. I have a b0rked neck and I tire easily after a composting incident a couple of years back so considerably lower activity than normal. I used to swim middle distance (5km, 10km) in my youth, open water and whenever an indoor pool would allow it. I don't drive...

  • That sounds fine. You need to schedule in rest. The weight training should be beneficial to bone density.

  • Many of those "exercise activities" shouldn't be classed thus, they are day-to-day life activities before exercise. They go in the NEAT non exercise related thermogenesis bit of the macro calculations. Not all exercise is equal. Resistance exercise is important to try and maintain even improve bone density, something CV exercise won't help much with. It's hard...

  • Government takes money from the very people they target with their condescending campaigns.

  • What's going on in the histology and biochemistry of fruiting bodies of fungi that they store Vitamin D? I watched something about fruiting bodies of fungi storing Vitamin D on television but as usual for an entertainment/pop sci show it was very thin on science and very heavy on "don't you worry your pretty little head about actual scientific details", so we...

  • I tried to get an endoscopy, a C13 urea breath test or an HP blood test for my dad a few years ago when he had pretty obvious upper GI symptoms .The GP wouldn't budge, though I wouldn't have asked if it wasn't indicated. He did indeed develop an undiagnosed gastric adenocarcinoma which he died from a few days before he was finally given an appointment for an...

  • I've heard of FTO, leptin receptor insufficiency and BMIQ genes but it's just an extra challenge in the face of food availability and psycho-social factors. Dunno I haven;t researched it, so that's just a reckon.

  • I forgot about porridge. It doesn't keep me full long despite the recent trend to prescribe low GI cereals ostensibly to provide energy until lunchtime. I'm rumbling long before elevenses. Might be fine for someone sedentary like the office workers the FM/catering company I was a manager for gave free porridge to (and lunch, deskside fruit) but it's not if one...

  • Ambrose and Nectar. Not just any old Ambrose and Nectar M&S Fuller, Longer Ambrose and Nectar. Nah, I'm not hungry yet but the remains of last night's kippers. some broccoli flowers (bolted) and the last of the batch of chick peas with cabbage await. It's usually leftovers from a non-breakfast meal the day before, so usually nitrogenous. If there are no...

  • A higher protein does not necessarily mean a meat-based diet Food with higher protein (and lower GI) keep one Fuller Longer. In the gut higher protein lower GI foods tend to produce more gut hormones (eg GLP-1) which signal satiety to the brain. 30% fats is about right unless there are other clinically-indicated reason to reduce fats intake. Why do you think...

  • Don't equate Intermittent Fasting (5:2 or otherwise) with binge/fasting. It's not difficult to study fasting, I could hypothetically find you millions of test subjects on the 22nd (Yom Kippur) or one of the other 5 fast days. The month of Ramadan provides opportunities for conducting tests in semi-fasted states. We couldn't repeat Minnesota studies or...

  • There was significant buffering last week or the week before. I downloaded them this week, though the default filename is a hex string.

  • I don't either. The evidence that such feeding strategies were followed in the paleolithic age are based on thin evidence and a strong confirmation bias. The author of the book didn't seem to look for evidence to try and disprove his theories, a definite no-no in the Scientific Method.

  • I agree with Dr Johnstone if she said "paleo diet is at the level of tabloids" It's preposterous to suggest that hominids went from eschewing the fruit of true grasses to cultivating and farming them. There is evidence from the Paleolithic era of not just eating cereals but processing them Mercader et al 2009, Revedin et al, 2010, Henry et al 2011. Paleo is a...

  • My diet is just the totality of what I eat, not a thing someone goes on or something prefixed with a noun. People do love to attach to brands though. I've never seen diets on the Internet in all my time using it (since 1985). I must be doing something right then. They seem popular in chick mags and latterly bloke mags going by the trashy literature in my...

  • The problem is one can't find some of these wholegrains in the regular stores. Wholefoods stores stock them but, from an ethical would you give good money to retailers who make a significant revenue as peddlers of woo (homeopathy, healing crystals)..

  • Why is that so interesting? It's rather an irrelevant question for men, as fat tends to distribute around our abdomens.

  • Increased body fat is caused by a sustained excess of energy intake over energy expenditure, not particular macronutrients.

  • It was too basic, yet raised more questions than answers?
    It was "very basic" yet requires explanation of 'epigenetics', 'methylation' & 'triacyglycerols'.
    Just say they had gone into some of the metabolic pathways, how many people would have the chemistry background to follow? Getting up to speed on that alone to study nutrition at undergrad level is a...

  • Mmm, Asparagus, oh yeah. I worked in Darmstadt the outside of which had numerous asparagus fields. It was on the menu in the esa staff restaurant every day in May and June (spargelzeit).
    I've tried to grow it in my garden but it has never came to anything.

  • Have you tried varieties other than plain red? There are some real snazzy ones,

    #Oo arr!
    I got mangel wurzels in me garden,
    I got mangel wurzels in me shed,
    I got mangel wurzels in me bathroom,
    and a mangel wurzel for a head!#
    Edit: [Tony Hancock as Joshua Merriweather in "The Bowmans", a parody of The Archers on the Home Service (BBCR4)]

  • Though I don't fancy dying of cardiovascular disease a death from Chisso-Minamata disease doesn't sound pleasant either. [edit; typo]

  • I was never a fan, but it adds something to soup stock.

  • Lex, beetroot is a good sources of nitrates (I suspect the leaves would be better than the root organ) , and will stimulate eNOS to produce NO which triggers dilation of the blood vessels. One of the industrial, a huge chemical engineering conglomerate manufacture Nitrate supplements (Betaine or suchlike) from Beetroot. I'm not sure why they chose the storage...

  • Dr Russell is a scientific researcher not an agronomic political analyst.

  • Keeping the body fat %age down particularly if the fat is largely abdominal fat is the first line preventative measure against T2DM It's also the first line intervention. Abdominal adiposity is a better predictor of diabetes risk than other regional adiposity It's really the mass of visceral adipose tissue (organ fat) that is the problem but not many of us...

  • They are just terms used by most gardeners when trying to be specific about plants and their relationships.
    By all means call it keenwa in Bolivia. It's officially Quin-oh-ah in the UK
    Quin as in Martha Quinn (Scooby Doo), Oh as in Oh Deary Deary me and ah as in, erm, uhm, 'ah'.
    Here it is, from the farmer's mouth...

  • That book was written based on a perception of a paleolithic diet. There is little evidence left, so much of it can only be guesswork The diets of the age would have varied regionally and seasonally depending on the plant, animal and fungal life prevalent in the respective regions, INCLUDING C3 and C4 true grasses It's implausible that neolithic settlers...

  • Yes, please do.

  • The R and S phrases in the MSDSes indicate those household chemical are not carcinogens. Satellites are boosted into a higher orbit when they have reached the end of their life. Unless they are lost before the planned end of life or they're Skylab.
    Are you sure you smelled chlorine? You seem quite down on that abundant element! Good luck with your digestion ...

  • Sources for those claims, Yvonne Luna?

  • As long as I'm gone before retirement age, I'll be happy. I just don't want to die of anything serious though.

  • There's tonnes of choice of nice bread in Germany.

  • I bought some popping corn for my birthday to watch a film on iplayer (last of the big spenders, eh]. I used a little rapa seed oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker and some oregano. I'm still finding bits under cupboards.

  • It's been years since I've read any physiology but iirc I've got [thankfully working] kidneys, lungs and buffers for acid-base homeostasis

  • Sort of. It's a disease of damage to dna and mutation. The older we get the more opportunity for DNA telomeric damage and the subsequent risk of neoplasia. He's saying we can reduce the risk of DNA damage with a healthy lifestyle.

  • Wut! No use going fishing if I hate fishing. It might be your bucolic fantasy, it's not mine. I'll choose my own activities.

  • Neoplasias occur due to dna damage (mutation) of a cell or cells in response to prolonged exposure to an irritating agent (eg chemical ,biological pathogens, radiation, mineral ...). Carcinomas (cancers of epithelial (lining)tissue) are the most common cancers. Normal cells receive a biochemical signal telling them they've done their bit and it's time to die...

  • John, they only tested the varieties I listed on the programme. It was "Britain's Favourite Foods - Are they good for you"? It's not available on bbc iplayer but it might be on a popular video repository site. I looked up "apple polyphenols varieties/cultivars" at the time but iirc I couldn't find any uk tables.

  • Ah, turmus. I had them in Israel. I had no idea they were in the lupinus genus. Well I never I'll look into them furrher
    It would be nice to have something that as well as fixing nitrogen to the soil and is edible looks good too.

  • " alkalising foods."? What new nutritional science and physiology is this?

  • Seen the price of kosher meat and its absence in the shops? If I could find it and afford it l might eat more. Well I guess that's what I get for moving to a heavy industrial town on the outskirts of the back of beyond.Even then a 6 hour prohibition on dairy after a meat meal 1 hour meat after dairy tends to make the consumption of meat quite disruptive so...

  • My great uncle schechted chickens in his back garden. Probably wouldn't be allowed now that the sadly prevailing opinion is that it's better to pre-torture animals with a captive bolts before severing.. I'd eat more meat if it was legal to schect the livestock myself, that is if I had the land to raise the livestock..

  • I've noticed all the apples in the shops getting much sweeter than my reference apple tree ones in the back garden due to the retail varieties being selected and cultivated for sweetness. In a recent B B C (Horizon?) television programme (on which some of the Rowett researchers appeared), a selection of apple varieties were tested for polyphenols...

  • Woah, woah, Back right up there 00:32 Lupines are edible? but but but lupinine and sparteine. Hmm, I'll need to look into that, but I've never seen lupines that are described as anything but 'poisonous' or 'toxic'. . "What are your favourite vegetable?" A whole bunch of different ones, the more different colours the better. I'm hitting up the borecole and the...

  • That read like a recipe. As I said, not interested.

  • Regarding sustainability all one can do is check marine and riparian conservation schemes frequently, 'Stocks' change year to year, different species have different catch seasons and their criteria for determining what "sustainable" is changes frequently in response to other factors e.g.lobby groups..

  • Smaller species of fish lower down the marine / riparian food chain and younger specimens. (Krupps, Feldmann et al) That's going to have an effect on feedstocks/forage for bigger predatory species. A very mature tuna or halibut (both huge and predators of large fish)will have accumulated far more methylmercury (and other pollutants from its prey, its prey's...

  • This (only the first sentence). Since oily fish has been promoted to the sharp-elbowed middle class worried-wells the price has gone up.

  • Too much sitting about for me. I get my salmon and trout from my brother-in-law, let him do the sitting about.

  • What do you have against actual food? Fish oils eaten as fish are our best and most effective source ω-3 fatty acids.

  • Metric please.
    Exercise first! Frequent brisk exercise is the most atheroprotective thing one can do. This activates a chemical ERK5 to be released from the vascular endothelium (lining) which modulates other chemicals in the blood to reduce inflammation, the root cause of plaquing.. Oh great, popping corn is on the list. [edit: but still eat a healthy...