Gelatin: A Secret History of Medicine and Experimentation?

reply to post by halfoldman


my grandmother, during the war , lived in france,,,, all they ate was potatoes and maybe goatmilk if her father could get a little money togther

reply to post by shortywarn


I suppose the diet would have to be sustained for quite some time until you got horribly sick. There are proteins in potatoes as well of course, just not as much as might find in meat. Certainly though, you would get all sorts of health problems, including various vitamin deficiencies and fatty acid related problems. If it was kept it up, it certainly wouldn't end well. The goat's milk you say your grandparents drank when they could would have been enriched in fats and contained some of the vitamins they couldn't get from potatoes. It certainly would have helped them get through it.

reply to post by hypervalentiodine

The nutritional information on potatoes does make them rather complete, and they contain vitamins and protein (as you say). nutrition.about.com...
I doubt one would get sick on a potato diet for a very long time, and potato crop failures led to famines.
In hindsight I doubt that as prisoners of war, my grandfather only ate potatoes for 5 years.
He probably meant for very long periods.
When he came home he was famished, and for weeks he didn't know when to stop eating.

reply to post by halfoldman


Actually, potatoes don't have all the vitamins or fats you need at all.

reply to post by hypervalentiodine

With the addition of dairy potatoes do seem to have sustained populations:

n Ireland, the expansion of potato cultivation was due entirely to the landless laborers, renting tiny plots from landowners, who were interested only in raising cattle or in producing grain for market. A single acre of potatoes and the milk of a single cow was enough to feed a whole Irish family a monotonous but nutritionally adequate diet for a healthy, vigorous (and desperately poor) rural population. Often even poor families grew enough extra potatoes to feed a pig that they could sell for cash.[35]

en.wikipedia.org...
Fortunately we are not in a position where we are reliant on a single plant staple.
In Ireland the failure of the potato crops led to massive starvation between 1845-1849.
There obviously wasn't much else around.
Unfortunately the generations who lived through these periods have now mostly passed, so they can't speak from their experiences, or provide more detail. It's amazing that people could survive the Russian sieges and post WWII conditions, and I even read rumors of cannibalism.
Of course nobody is suggesting a potato-only diet today. We were comparing extremes, and I suppose some people are genetically better designed to withstand starvation than others.
Looking at some SA cultures that have a high meat intake (and an aversion to vegetables) they seem to have a lot of diseases fairly early in life, but that's just my observation.
Unfortunately fried (and thus mostly ruined) potato crisps are the only vegetables a lot of kids eat on a daily basis.

Stanley P. Lovell received a summons from the OSS in 1942 to invent a number of creative devices to use against the Germans and Japanese. These included explosive candles, exploding cookie dough and camel feces, as well as:

On a number of occassions Lovell concocted chemicals specifically for Hitler's ingestion including, famously, a cocktail of female hormones designed to make his moustache fall out and to cause him to grow breasts.

Another device designed for Japanese officers consisted of "a gelatin ball the size of a pinhead containing the deadly botulins toxin". It was sent to Asia to be distributed by prostitutes. However, en route ship's officers tested the device on a donkey, and abandoned the plans when nothing happened to the animal after it was fed several of the gelatin balls: "Lovell was livid: donkeys are the only mammals on earth immune to botulins toxin".
(Dominic Streatfield: Brainwash: The Secret history of mind control, 2006: p.42.)

Originally posted by Cocasinpry
Gelatine comes from the dead and rotting, it makes Jello not as appetizing knowing that fact.

It's not bad if it's isinglass, if you have a pisci-ovolactovegetarian diet like mine, since that gelatin is prepared from the swimming bladder of fish like sturgeon and cod. (That diet means I don't eat or use anything that has come out of a slaughterhouse, or any vertebrates other than fish: no amphibians --frog legs sound like a revolting kind of food-- reptiles, birds or mammals. Insects are all right, though, and they can be wonderfully tasty.)

The lady from the Sugar Hollow Farm in the video says diarrhea can be caused by viruses and parasites but she doesn't mention the systemic or metabolic kind that has afflicted me with chronic indigestion for years. I don't know the exact cause but I finally found a solution, which is the antidiarrheal pills that inhibit peristalsis (the rhythmic movement of the intestines that pushes food forward), like loperamide hydrochloride, which means that the problem has something to do with an inadequate peristalsis that makes food move too fast and doesn't give time for it to be absorbed. I hope someone with a similar problem finds this helpful. Warning: they're not supposed to be a solution but instead they're used for acute episodes, to stop the flow, avoid dehydration, which can be fatal, and give the patient time to get a diagnosis. They won't solve an infectious diarrhea, in which cases you have to get rid of the infectious agent (a bacteria or whatever).

What really surprised me about this thread was coming upon a passage about John C. Lilly's sensory deprivation experiments, nearly forty years after reading about this for the first time, in my youth, back in 1974.

It was in an article about Lilly's research with porpoises (now they say "dolphins" but I think they always said "porpoises" in those days) in the "Psychology Today" magazine. I still remember just two things about this.

First, dolphins are so smart that they "break the rules creatively" (the exact words of the interviewer). For example, if they're told to bring all the yellow objects that are floating in a pool they're liable to bring all except the yellow ones, just to show how smart they are. It's like they had a sense of humor.

Second, his subjects started to bang their heads against the walls of the pool, in suicide attempts, because they could no longer tolerate being there, so he let them go. I think the pool was connected to the sea.

Apart from the article there was an interview with Lilly, who I seem to remember was a neurosurgeon, that changed my life instantly. He described what happened during a long immersion in a sensory-deprivation tank. He saw a man approaching, then this man told him: "Now that you know how to get here you must teach others how to do it." Then he walked away and disappeared.

Lilly told the interviewer that he didn't know how to explain that episode, that he wasn't sure whether or not it was a real individual or a hallucination. It seemed like the mind created its own stimuli when utterly deprived of external ones, as though it didn't tolerate the absence of stimuli. When you're floating in one of those tanks, in lukewarm water, hearing, seeing and smelling nothing, you can find it unbearable and can go into a panic attack. Some people say they sense an evil presence.

Well, in spite of Lilly's explanation, I was shocked. I'd been brought up as an atheist, but then all of a sudden I said to myself that what all religions said, about there being immaterial worlds, was true, and I began a new stage in my life and started reading everything I could about occultism. It was only about eight years later that I ran into definitive proof during a spontaneous OOBE. I've met two other persons who spontaneously have these experiences, which they fear and do not encourage. I never had a second one myself.

I think it was the Dec. 1973 issue. On the cover there was the photo of three women that stood for three consecutive generations: a girl and the mother standing behind the grandmother, who was sitting in a chair. At their website they don't have archives going that far back. I'd feel very thankful if someone could scan the article and send it by e-mail. Some public library could have a collection that spans several decades. In those days that magazine was like part of the counterculture, and it was full of reports on the "paranormal". They were exhilarating, explosive times: the New Age, Timothy Leary and '___', mushrooms, mescaline, the Beatles, the hippies, the gurus, T.M., regressive hypnosis, humanistic psychology. Another article in some other issue suggested that the U.S. was going to break apart, the way the USSR did 15 years later, because of the Vietnam War. It seemed like something big was about to happen. Maybe we were now ready for an ET visit and all our problems would be solved.

Originally posted by hypervalentiodine
reply to post by halfoldman

 

Actually, potatoes don't have all the vitamins or fats you need at all.

Had lunch with my mom and asked her about my Grandfather's testimony.
She said they had mainly potatoes, but he did mention cabbage and soured milk.
Soured milk is also what the black tribes drink traditionally in SA.
She told me that he saved people with stomach bugs with that milk.

If I hear people from Zimbabwean narratives sometimes - they survived on leaves and roots that were not even a potato, often for a year or two.

It's strange though, it's not the first time that testimony clashes with "nutritional science".
I recall the old-timers in the early 1990s, and they regarded the "Ami-nutritional scientists" with a mixture of scorn and amusement.

To claim potatoes don't have what we need at all is a bit much.
However, my mom keeps arguing that although potatoes were smaller then, the soil was very rich, so we cannot compare potatoes then to now.

reply to post by escapevelocity

Thank you for an excellent on-topic post.
Much to ponder on indeed.
Sad about the dolphins.
Just sometimes think, if they performed such weird stuff back then, what are they doing now?

Let me rephrase for the scientists: does GELATIN have any nutritional value?
Can it restore connective tissue?

Thinking, I had this energy capsule with Guarana, Synehrine and Green tea.
Now, the package says "slow release".
The slow release is apparently only because of the gelatin capsule (which makes a gel with the herbs in the stomach).
I've seen people spitting out the capsule (that's "bad karma") and they have a very different reaction.
Makes me wonder: can vegetarians or vegans take medication and spit out the capsule?
Is it safe?

Chewing gum would be another habit that contained gelatin.
It was often regarded a filthy habit, and the symbol of spreading American culture.
Not sure from various sites whether it is still ubiquitous in gums today.

Just wonder whether gelatin led to animal slaughter itself, or whether it was a by-product of the meat industry?

Originally posted by halfoldman

Originally posted by hypervalentiodine
reply to post by halfoldman

 

Actually, potatoes don't have all the vitamins or fats you need at all.

Had lunch with my mom and asked her about my Grandfather's testimony.
She said they had mainly potatoes, but he did mention cabbage and soured milk.
Soured milk is also what the black tribes drink traditionally in SA.
She told me that he saved people with stomach bugs with that milk.

If I hear people from Zimbabwean narratives sometimes - they survived on leaves and roots that were not even a potato, often for a year or two.

It's strange though, it's not the first time that testimony clashes with "nutritional science".
I recall the old-timers in the early 1990s, and they regarded the "Ami-nutritional scientists" with a mixture of scorn and amusement.

To claim potatoes don't have what we need at all is a bit much.
However, my mom keeps arguing that although potatoes were smaller then, the soil was very rich, so we cannot compare potatoes then to now.

edit on 11-1-2011 by halfoldman because: (no reason given)

The fact that they had milk and other things in conjunction would have contributed to their survival massively. Potatoes have certain things you need, as I have already mentioned, but not all things. That's my point.

reply to post by hypervalentiodine

Point taken - I've always argued against it with my family: this existence of a hallowed "super-food".
In the 1980s they had this Beverly Hills Diet, and people would just eat grapes and pineapples for weeks.
It completely ruined the teeth and gums of a family member (from acidity).
However, if I had to choose any vegetable food in a survival situation, I'd still choose the potato.

Personally, in a survival situation I would stick with Honey. Miraculous food composed of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Also has water so you wouldn't dehydrate. The sugar in honey is instantly made available to any part of the body i.e. brain, heart, lungs all can use its sugars for efficient energy, not like table sugar. It is a natural antibiotic which can kill off MRSA better than antibiotics. Hungry, eat honey. Got a cut, put some honey on it. Cleans up acne, promotes tissue repair and lessens scarring. Truly amazing

reply to post by realeyes

Oh, yum, yum -YES!
Honey has no significant fiber (like gelatin).
But if you have access to honey - great.

Here we noticed a lot of bees, and they had nested in the neighbor's bathroom.
Some company came to remove them.
A few weeks later they nested in a hole.
Two black men walked by, and they asked everyone if they could take it.
They just picked up a branch with the bees swarming and walked away.

These bees do kill however - two weeks later the newspapers reported a couple dead from bee stings.
In Africa, I suppose it's a chance you take.

Originally posted by realeyes
Personally, in a survival situation I would stick with Honey. Miraculous food composed of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Also has water so you wouldn't dehydrate. The sugar in honey is instantly made available to any part of the body i.e. brain, heart, lungs all can use its sugars for efficient energy, not like table sugar. It is a natural antibiotic which can kill off MRSA better than antibiotics. Hungry, eat honey. Got a cut, put some honey on it. Cleans up acne, promotes tissue repair and lessens scarring. Truly amazing

Honey is consists mostly of sugars. It has no fats, almost no proteins, and in a 100gm sample contains less that 1-2% of the recommended daily intake of B and C vitamins and other trace elements. You would actually be better off eating potatoes.

reply to post by hypervalentiodine

Oh for heaven's sake - could SOMEBODY please say something about GELATIN!
LOL.
Honey was never a staple food - it is not comparable to potatoes.

Originally posted by halfoldman
reply to post by hypervalentiodine

 

Oh for heaven's sake - could SOMEBODY please say something about GELATIN!

It gives you nicer nails.

I actually used to love the taste of that orange knox # and still love jello. I don't like how it's made though. I only eat fish.

reply to post by ChaosMagician

Well, the first time I got really drunk was on "Toxic Sludge", which was jelly mixed with vodka.
They sold it in slices.
They should bring it back!

There is gelatine in Film, I've never been hardcore vegan to the point to stop taking pictures back then and I wouldn't do it now either... and I just had a ham sandwich!

Vegetarian[ism]... see that's the problem right there. It's not a religious cult or a cultural movement, it's a personal choice. Health benefits, sure.. would depend on what it would be but I've yet to actually see any REAL and TANGIBLE IRREFUTABLE evidence that proves otherwise. A lot of rhetoric, propaganda and conflicting evidence about ethical issues and health benefits but nothing else.

So what works best for me?
Meat makes me bloated, tired and makes me gain weight. Tofu makes me feel good, regulates my system, makes me feel energetic and helps me maintain a healthy weight.

Meat makes my cholesterol goes up, pressure goes up and Protein goes Down and so does most of my nutriments as where a vegetarian diet for a year makes everything in my blood test PERFECT (except for the high bilirubine levels last time which was only due to the fact that I hadn't had anything to eat for a while).

So as a personal choice, based on my own personal results, I know for a fact that a vegetarian diet is better for me. I've been off in the past two months and i've gained nearly ten pounds, I'm due for some blood test in a month so I'll be able to compare to those of last years but I already know what to expect, it's pretty obvious.