Stress hormones in our diet may be a missing link between food and wellness

I never cease to wonder if articles like this are incredibly cleverly put together, or incredibly stupid.

I feel like it would take me so much effort to string together these unrelated things and try to present them in a faux-scientific manner, with such succinct certainty, in the way this article does.

Like how they smartly concede that they're waiting for answers, ... and then they quickly breeze through making a bunch of connections, with references that don't back up what they're saying, as if these are all just 'known' things. It's kinda clever, and I would expect a lot of people to be fooled.

If the pigs‘ bodies turned down their own cortisol production, I would assume that their endocrine system considered the level as too high, or it wouldn’t compensate. Cortisol has its place, but it‘s timed (usually with a spike at around 6AM, and after exercise) and excess can lead to bad sleep quality and worse. Low cortisol also does not at all mean that stress is low within cells. If you put a strain on e.g energy production within mitochondria, you will get a lot of cellular stress (accumulating nitric oxide) that is not directly related to cortisol. Cytokines would be another factor - stress leads to inflammation. There might be enough cortisol around in those pigs to suppress inflammation, but it doesn’t mean they are low on stress.

Wait... doesn't low blood levels of cortisol also indicates that the body doesn't react to stress like it should ? Like in the Selye model, when the body just gives up and doesn't react anymore (but still suffers the consequences: high blood pressure, muscular stress, etc.).

The consumption of hormones which cause a major adjustment in our endrocine functions in whatever direction is definitely harmful though. Just because it may cause lower cortisol baselines in some manner is 'not good' at very least, and there surely will be other side effects.

I'm sure being a wild animal means some level of stress. I'm also sure it is nothing compared to the deplorable conditions in which factory farm animals are raised.

Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"

I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to. There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild. (I'm not defending the "article" or its findings, just saying that we as a society do terrible things to animals we plan to eat).

I would not be this dismissive, considering the studies showing starkly different effects of acute vs chronic stress, for example [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788324/

Yes, actually. Animals in the wild don't experience _chronic_ stress. I recommend Robert Sapolsky's book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

Animals living in nature are typically well adjusted to the stresses they experience. Their stress levels return back to normal quickly after a dangerous situation.

No, animals in the wild are not under constant stress, because that would completely nullify the effect of stress in the first place. Stress is a bodies' response to an 'unusual' situation, in which you have to act in an 'unusual' way. But the baseline that defines 'usual' and 'unusual' is the environment in which the animal evolved over thousands of years. In this environment their stress response is natural, e.g. spikes in case of danger or exceptional threat, otherwise normal.

If you now bring those in a completely new environment (factory farming), their stress levels go wild.

Based on what I read in anthropology classes, yeah, there actually wasn’t that much stress or food insecurity in small scale societies. Cooking was time-consuming but there wasn’t much else to do but hang out with your friends and mash yams anyway.

I'm not sure I got your point. They were under severe stress for sure. So what? Even if that was very damaging somehow, our ancestors anyway died very young and in not very sophisticated ways.

Evolution is really only concerned with procreation and not much else beyond that. It definitely doesn't care if you feel stressed or suffer some inflammation after a meal.

This definitely fits the organic / free-range narrative (ie happy cows make better milk/meat). So regardless of veracity, it will likely be a popular idea.

That's my sort of assumption as well, but the article seems to indicate otherwise.

> A recent study of piglets published in the Journal of Animal Science by Purdue University scientist Elizabeth Petrosus found that when pigs are fed stress hormones such as cortisol or norepinephrine, their blood levels of these hormones spike, body temperatures rise and gut biomes shift.

I'm not saying I believe it, but that's the argument they are making. Now does that mean that eating stressed plants cause similar results for our stress levels? I doubt it.

The article make mention of flavour, and I don't think you need to try to scientifically rationalize what can be sufficiently explained by human cruelty. In fact, based upon these findings I'd expect eating tortured meat to be less enjoyable than that relaxed kind.

Please don't post like this to HN. You may not owe the Yun Foundation better, but you owe the community better if you're participating in it.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? Note these ones:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."