Eating food from plants that have struggled to survive toughens us up as well
nautil.us
nautil.us
Incidentally, we are the only species on the planet that will sit there with our mouth burning from a jalapeño and wonder, “how can we make this hotter?”
Great book.
There's also a thing about jackfruit and elephants? Aside from tool users they're the primary consumer, and they'll grab one while they're on the march and eat it when it's break time.
Regarding another thread, if plants could chose their characteristics I would imagine we'd see anti-veg memes much like we see anti-meat memes. While there are carnivores out there as a lifestyle, it's nothing compared to what over a century of SDA has brought to veganism.
We have only been doing industrial scale agriculture for about two hundred years though, and we’ve been farming for at least eleven thousand years.
It is coincidental. Evolution doesn't plan.
This is why it is necessary to stretch bird nets over research-breeding beds for strawberries, to get varieties more attractive to paying human customers. Otherwise, the evolutionary pressure to be attractive to birds still heavily affects the results.
It's more of an optimization algorithm. But that's not the same as coincidence.
Co-evolution uses happy accidents all the time, but then some of those accidents get baked in, and what's left over is the result of that accident.
Peppers became more likely to be spread by birds because they became unsavory to mammals. Then what happened? And then what happened? And now we had pre-agricultural peppers, and now we have ... something else.
When too little evil is evil, it makes ethics complicated.
I have considered the same thought, but I always dismiss it as possible true, but too unlikely to occur to be worth including in ethical calculus.
Do you think it actually happens in real life? Such profoundly little evil happening that things start to suck?
I am awaiting blood work lab results to make sure I do not have anything out of whack, and if I get a green light, I'll continue.
Insulin response is quite a weighty subject to study, and the Standard American Diet (I bet some love the initials of that) appears to aggravate that system within us.
YMMV, consult with your health partner expert.
evidence?
Well 2% is a HUGE difference. That means if two people eat exactly the same diet and same level of activity, assuming a 2000 calorie daily intake, the person with a 2% slower metabolism is going to be 40 lbs heavier over a 10 year period.
As well as when and what foods you eat may change your metabolism.
What we really care about is why people are eating more than they expend, and how we can get people to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight unconsciously.
For example, diet soda has no calories, but has biochemical interactions that mimic those of regular soda, resulting in the trigger of hormones like insulin that trigger the body to store fat. Even worse, other biochemical reactions can kill the good gut flora lower down in your digestive system. Based on some studies, you're arguably better off just drinking regular soda despite the calories.
There is nothing even slightly controversial in that statement.
But...
Some forget that calories_in is the output of a function with multiple input variables, and calories_burned is also the output of a function with multiple input variables, plus whatever your wrist-worn fitness monitor says you burned directly through exercise.
If you stand in the freezing cold for 15 minutes, and then go back inside, and you still have some brown fat left after infancy, it will add to calories_burned for a little while. If you are insulin resistant, and you cut carbs out of your diet for a while, that will tend to deduct from calories_in, because the foods you are now eating impact your competing appetite and satiety functions differently, such that satiety is winning more often now. If you exercise vigorously, your calories_burned rises by when you burned directly, but you will also increase metabolism for a few hours afterward, and the fitness monitor won't tell you that, but it will also boost your appetite function, and your food scale might catch that.
If you eat a lot of veggies, wheat, or whole grains, you get a lot of fiber.
In other words, "calories in" and "calories burned".
umm what...
That is the only way to lose lean body mass. You should be thinking "its not clear that removing carbs is reason you're losing weight." Your bayesian priors are completely backwards.
The reality is that protein and fat are more satiating so people eat less and lose weight when they cut out carbs.
In reality it’s more nuanced:
“It is true that fat has more calories than carbohydrates, including sugar. But by that logic, a sugary beverage is better for you than a handful of nuts. That’s just not what the unbiased studies have shown. Looking only at calories ignores the metabolic effects of each calorie; the source of the calorie changes how you digest it and how you retrieve energy from it.”
From https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/theres-no-sugar-coating-...
But I disagree that the quote you presented somehow claims that a person can lose weight while not being in a deficit. It's physically impossible. That doesn't mean other processes aren't going on, or that you shouldn't consider other things like macronutrients and micronutrients when trying to construct a "healthy" diet.
For example, insufficient protein (or protein precursors like amino acids) can cause the breakdown of muscle, which is denser and weighs more than fat. You'd have to have a sizable excess of calories to have the fat storage to cancel out the loss of muscle mass.
Feel free to post some pubmed studies if you like.
Not true. It's possible to lose different types of weight (i.e., muscle or bone) due to the body's inability to repair such tissue in the absence of proper diet sources. For example, if you drink 2000 calories/day as your only food source, you will lose bone mass and muscle mass over time, and the fat stored by your body (if any) will weigh less than the bone or muscle mass lost.
There's no magic from eating fat/protein/carbs.
Fat, carbs, and protein all have different roles in the body. Luckily, our diets generally get enough of all 3 that it's not that much of an issue...but lots of research shows that having the optimal balance of FPC for your current body condition and activity results can drastically affect performance, sleep, behavior, etc.
And as stated in comments below, the hormonal differences are also claimed to have a bigger influence than just calorie counting. How those calories are processed (glucose versus fructose versus sucrose - all with potentially different mechanisms, from what I have learned) are treated differently by my body than how saturated fats are treated.
For example, there seems to be proof that saturated fat processing by the body sets the satiety signal more thoroughly than carbohydrate processing, and for longer duration. I feel less hungry, sated, so I eat less. And now when I eat, I focus more on the inclusiveness/variety of the source foods to make sure I am getting a more rounded spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and other vital components our bodies seem to require for good health.
It has so far been a fun experiment, unlike other attempts I have made in the past.
Literally every diet has been shown to cause weight loss if paired with a caloric deficit...
Low carb. Low fat. Low protein. No fruits. Only fruits. Etc.
If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
The types of fat and carbs in your diet matter. You can eat healthy carbs all day (i.e., vegetables) and not gain weight over a year, or eat unhealthy fats (i.e., trans fats) and gain 10 pounds in a week.
> If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
There are two ways of looking at whether a diet "works." First, what happens when a person actually follows the diet. This is what most people are curious about. Second, what happens when you tell a person to follow the diet. This is what all the scientific papers are written about because it's what doctors, public health experts, and other researchers care about. Don't get the two mixed up. From the first point of view, there's a wide variety of very different diets that "work." From the second point of view, basically nothing works, and there is a never-ending (re)search in which occasionally somebody announces weak evidence that the diet du jour is better than yesterday's favored diet, but there's no reason to believe the current conventional wisdom will last any longer than previous expert consensuses such as the need to eat low-fat.
Sticking to diets is really really hard.
A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. To lose 10 lbs of fat in 2 weeks, you would need a deficit of 2500 calories per day in order for that loss to be purely fat. Unless you are training for the Olympics, that doesn't seem likely.
Where did you get that number from? Pure fat is approximately 9 calories per gram, which is 9000 calories per kilogram or ~4090 calories per pound. Body fat is around 87% pure fat, meaning a pound of body fat is roughly 3600 calories. Thus, the necessary deficit for 10 pounds in two weeks is about 2571. Still pretty high, but well under Olympic training levels.
So I am assuming, based on those measurements, that some of the weight loss is due to fat consumption, even if the lion's share is water weight.
I will soon have to punch another hole in my leather belts, at this rate (already loose fitting)...
Also, water takes up space too, not just fat.
Also, losing weight is exciting and can cause mild mania.
Also body dysmorphia is a real condition.
It is working for me, and I no longer seem to be quite so affected by overcast/gloomy days. I would refer to it as mild Seasonal Affectation Disorder, but I am reading that this is now being challenged as maybe not a real reason for the blahs in winter/extended rainy season (paraphrased, maybe poorly, based on my own experience).
Regardless, I have found my own success for now, time will tell if I remain convinced.
YMMV.
Where is that coming from? And why?
> Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout.
I find it hard to believe that they didn't benefit at all from a workout because they took vitamin C or E. I'd like to see the methodology of this study if that's really the conclusion they came to.
It's actually not that surprising. Vitamin C and E have anti-oxidant properties. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated during metabolism. Generally we think of them as being bad since they can damage molecules in the body, but it appears that ROS are actually a signal to the body that causes it to improve cardiovascular fitness. Take too much vitamin C and E and you're blocking that signal.
Derek Lowe has a nice blog post on it.[2]
It's a good lesson in Chesterson's Fence. Before you tear down the fence (ROS), you may want to double check why it's there in the first place.
[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903485106.sho... [2]https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2009/05/13/ex...
Oxidation both being damaging in too much and having a purpose? Perfectly consistent with prior health experience and toxicology that adding something everywhere like a toddler doesn't generally help. Communication with herbivores? That is assuming too many mechanisms and ascribing agency which doesn't exist.
Self-propagation can look remarkably like agency but it isn't it. If a plant puts energy into making its fruits delicious to an animal and gets its seeds distribuited far and wide that plant will spread more than the one whose fruit is horrifyingly toxic. Never did a plant decide "lets be tasty".
Also 'a plant putting energy' into anything specific other than existing implies agency, doesn't it?
Evolution is hard to understand and I distrust anyone who claims to have figured it out fully.
Being tasty and toxic doesn't exclude itself simply because we like to think that.
I think the whole point of the article is that we don't understand things nearly as much as we think we do.
Especially the part about caffeine is fascinating.
It'll probably require a paradigm shift to make sense of it all. I have a hunch but I can't articulate it right now.
Interestingly, it's commonly mixed with potatoes across cultures in the culinary examples you can find on wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale#/media/File:Kogt_skinke_b...
Pretty much every time I've had kale in the USA, it's been cooked or baked like other plants in the brassica oleracea family. Okay, some people eat it raw like in smoothies or salads and have decided that the taste doesn't bother them. Why assume they couldn't make that decision for themselves or that they're missing out on some sort of ancient wisdom?
The growing body of evidence is that humans are not evolutionary cut out to eat plants to the level we do today. This article somewhat reinforces that point. The reason we stand out from other apes is likely the fact that we diverged to become a carnivorous ape roughly 3 million years ago, leading to our massive brain size as well as other abilities.
Evidence:
-Bone analysis of our ancestors indicates they were primarily carnivorous over the last 3 million years before the advent of agriculture. Probably only 10-15% of our food was plant based. That puts us in the same place as wolves and bears in the food chain.
-Humans require vitamin B12 to thrive, which can only come from animal sources or certain bacteria (vegans must supplement their diet).
-Your gut structure closely matches that of a carnivore, not a herbivore. Just because you can tolerate plants doesn't mean you should.
-Humans are the only living primate adapted for endurance running. This was likely to out last running prey.
-The healthiest populations on the planet are those that still maintain hunter gatherer lifestyles with no spill over of modern food. Plenty of anthropological field research pointing this out.
-Humans are among the few mammals that don't produce vitamin C naturally. A sign we primarily got this from eating animal organs since access to citrus fruit is seasonal.
-The prevailing theory is that our large brain capacity came along with the fact that we high and easy to access sources of Omega-3 fats. Fish or large game primarily. There is also a related theory that we were primarily aquatic apes, since we also have a lot of adaptations for water.
-Tapeworms: Without infecting a human host, at least four species of tapeworm would be unable to reproduce. Humans are a definitive host for them. The only other mammals to be definitive hosts for tapeworms are carnivores like lions and hyenas.
-Smaller canine teeth compared to great apes indicates they were less used for male to male conflict like we see in great apes, and more so used for meat eating. This falls in line with the time frame we see a switch to carnivore.
-Interestingly, we have very powerful livers for detoxification and a very strong ability to smell rot, decay and decomposition relative to other animals. This suggests we may have evolved first as scavengers then grew into hunting more.
-Egyptian mummies are the first times we see heart disease and tooth decay, as well as less robust skeletal features. In fact anthropologist recognize pre and post agricultural specimens pretty easily.
As I read this article I can only see another drop in the bucket that reinforces the point: Humans are not meant eat this many plant. We keep fooling ourselves with this notion that hormetic responses are "good for you" and "toughen you up". Its like telling a wolf that eating a salad is "good for you". Sure you can't feed the planet without agriculture nor can we feasibly go back to being hunter gatherers, and the vegans do hold the ethical high ground. However if the question is simply: "What are humans evolved to eat." The answer is right in our face and our modern culture hates to accept it: meat. Primarily nose to tail. Vegan diets tend to be healthy in the short term especially when you switch from the Standard American Diet, and deleterious in the long term without serious hacks to make up for nutrient deficiencies and the accumulation of plant toxins. Look at the high rates of infertility in vegan communities, the likely culprit is plant toxin accumulation and malnutrition. Especially when you look at the research involving the long term accumulation of plant oxylates.
Agreed, and I would add he's extremely combative with those of opposing view points. So much so, that he spends large portions of his books (and social media posts) not expounding upon his theories and why they are right, but why his opposition is so stupid and wrong.
In any event, I do think many/most of the things Talib expounds upon are correct/have merit. The best way to read his is probably through via second hand accounts of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile#Via_negativa
Lots of descriptions on the web:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=taleb%20via%20negativa (google seems to have mutilated its URL, so using bing)
In other words, positive knowledge and negative knowledge aren't symmetrical. It helps to say why people are wrong (although if you want to say he's rude and offputting about it, I won't disagree, although I've gotten past it)
There are also a lot more ways to be wrong than to be right. So describing why people are wrong could take a lot of space in the book, and still be valuable.
Antifragility is a very useful concept and is clearly real, regardless of the author's traits.