Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

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> In plants, the predominant stress hormone is ethylene.

Wikipedia: "During the life of the plant, ethylene production is induced during certain stages of growth such as germination, ripening of fruits, abscission of leaves, and senescence of flowers." Ethylene the main way to ripen fruits, on the vine or after-the-fact.

> ethylene, a plant stress hormone known to trigger stress responses in microbiomes, including in species such as proteobacteria that are present in human gut biomes

The italics section is linked[0] in the article, but the link has no mention of the word "ethylene". I don't see anywhere they say that the human gut microbiome is "stressed" by ethylene.

As for the animal meat stress:

> The same pig study found that, due to negative feedback loops, the pigs eventually exhibited abnormally low blood levels of cortisol and norepinephrine due to overcorrection by the body.

This sounds like eating stress hormones produces less stress in the body, not more. They then use this as further evidence of their position, somehow.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000989811...

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.

I'd say it's something more like fortune telling. Based on scant clues, string together a story which seems meaningful. There's a skill in taking advantage of human intuition to grab attention, with a spectrum of how aware you are if what you're actually doing.

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.).

Stress causes cortisol to increase, but long-term chronic stress can result in low cortisol, and this happens in PTSD, burnout, CFS and other conditions. Factors include time since onset, nature of the threat, emotions elicted by the stressor, controllability of the stressor, and the psychiatric characteristics of the person.

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/0/...

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.

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