Comment by yudlejoza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yudlejoza | Hacker News Reader

Pick a random essential nutrient. For instance, take zinc.

Human body needs it. It needs to be taken in. You need to ensure the right food items, or the right supplements, doesn't matter.

Where does that source come from? plants? animals? imported? produced? What goes into that? What's the prevalent intake level in developed countries? developing countries? what should be the right intake level? where (which parts of the world) do we have excess? where do we have deficiency?

How is zinc flushed? where does it go? rivers? recycled? ends up in ocean?

Keep going. And you realize there is a massive, highly complex, global zinc-supply-chain-cycle that has a crucial role in zinc ingestion in different parts of the world. And that's just one of the hundred or so nutrients.

Now multiply that with all the rest of the nutrients and nutrient groups. It's a behemoth of a multi-nutrient-supply-chain-cycle! Somewhere there's tremendous waste going on. Somewhere else there's tremendous deficiency going on, resulting in, possibly idiopathic, diseases among whole groups of people.

Now (the most important and the most interesting part) turn that "scientific" (observed) system into an "engineered" (planned) one!

Go figure!

Or just stop, or reduce as much as possible, the amount of crap we eat? There is no reason why meat has to be that low cost. Or that we cannot cook ourselves with fresh ingredients, ideally grown and sourced locally.

Nutrition, being a basic of human survival, has been sovled for millenias. We just lost it with pushing industrialized food production, of any kid, way to far over the point needed to get rid of starvation.

A simpleton tree-hugger mindset will automagically solve our biggest global challenges for 8 billion people in the 21st century. After all, it "feels" like it will work for millions, so it'll end up working for billions too. And it makes you feel all comfy and angelic inside.

Got it.

The problem is having 8 billion children to begin with. I don’t think that problem is solvable.

So you're saying big-tech and big-money hates scales and scalability?

Who do you think bought all those billions of android and apple phones and tablets?

Nutrition, being a basic of human survival, has been sovled for millenias.

Humans were mostly subsistence cultures for millennia (which means a period of a thousand years, so you are saying we solved this thousands of years ago). We routinely starved to death and only recently figured out something called "nutrients" exist in food. It isn't that long ago we discovered Vitamin C as the cure for scurvy and it's the reason we have nicknames like "limeys."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limey

That's from the 1850s. Not from two thousand years ago.

Another example of a nutritional disease is beriberi. It plagued the Japanese Navy in the 19th century:

>Beriberi was a serious problem in the Japanese navy: Sailors fell ill an average of four times a year in the period 1878 to 1881, and 35% were cases of beriberi.

It was caused by a vitamin B1 deficiency. Sailors were eating mainly white rice (polished) rather than brown rice (unpolished) while underway. A more varied diet eventually fixed the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency

We are currently researching the role of various nutrients in vulnerability to Covid. (Vitamin D and zinc seem to be the most salient nutrients for trying to reduce vulnerability, which is not the same thing as "curing" it.)

We have barely scratched the surface on the topic of nutrition and disease.

> Or that we cannot cook ourselves with fresh ingredients, ideally grown and sourced locally.

Anecdotally, over the last four years I went from eating pre-packaged ready meals every day to knowing my local butcher and cooking properly, and I feel a thousand times better than I used to.

People ask what future generations will cringe about from our lives today and prepackaged foods, ready meals, and fast-food will be my pick. Zapping a plastic container in a microwave for 3 minutes cannot be good for the food, the container or human eating it.

I agree with you, though, there is no reason we need to eat meat at all. The cost to the planet is way too high. Vegetarian diets are far healthier for us and our Earth.

> Or just stop, or reduce as much as possible, the amount of crap we eat?

Finding out what crap is, is really really hard if you want to be scientific. It may be possible for some bigger categories.

Reducing is also really, really hard.

Nutrition hasn't been solved for millenia, humans just ate what they could eat, if they had enough.

I'm currently in the process of reducing animal product intake. I'm going about it methodically to make it into an actual habit rather than a fad where I give up a month or two later.

What really got me to accept that maybe animal products might be detrimental is Dr. Gregor talking about the exogenous endotoxin theory. Dead bacteria in your food, no matter how or how long you cook it, will produce an inflammatory response. Animal fat may assist these endotoxins due to the structure of the gut wall.[0]

When it was put into these terms, it makes it way more apparent. The plan is to reduce consumption of animal products and when I do want to eat meat, get it from a high quality source with a lower endotoxin load.

[0]: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dead-meat-bacteria-endotoxe...

Lots of doctors also recommended an all meat diet. Try both and see how you feel.

Personally, I stick with what could be called evlution. Humans are omnivores, so I aim for a mixed and balanced diet, vegitables, meat, fish, animal products like eggs and diary, pasta... Preferred cooked at home and baught locally (e.g. local farms, even if it is through a super market).

I'd have to see a pretty strong argument disproving the exogenous endotoxin theory before I'd consider an all meat diet. It also sounds like it's a pretty low-fiber diet which isn't ideal.

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