Does feeding garden birds do more harm than good? | Hacker News Reader

Does feeding garden birds do more harm than good?

bbc.co.uk

62 pointscmsefton89 comments

If you use Permaculture Principles you will exponentially grown biomass and animals including birds which visit your plot daily.

I don't have a bird feeder and yet a huge variety of birds feed on my garden.

It's just a matter of selectively sparing some plants over others.

For example many small birds will eat kale and brasica seeds which are tiny and black like a poppy and each plant produces a huge abundance.

Another favorite I noticed among the small birds is wild Lambs Quarter seeds, same thing, thousands of small seed per plant.

And if you really can't help yourself, you could learn about animal husbandry and raise chickens for eggs, they love to have about 20% of their diet as scratch grains. I like to ferment and sprout the dried grains to make it easier for my hens digestion. Did you know chickens are omnivores and eat nearly all the same foods as humans? No wonder we keep them around, they literally eat all the left overs!

For more details check out this video:

https://youtu.be/xbPr7DHwSIw

"you could learn about animal husbandry and raise chickens for eggs"

My grandad, when he retired bought a smaller farm. He kept around 200 chickens in the old cow shippon. Now if you google "shippon", you'll be told it is a northern (English) term. My grandad was born in Paignton in 1901 and lived in Devon all his life. His working farm was near Dartmouth. I only searched to check the spelling for this comment, it turns out that the internets can spout ... approximations to truth sometimes (fancy!)

Anyway, the farm cat was called "Panda". His job was keeping an eye on the chickens. He was fed on top of the meal bin everyday next to the shippon, something/enough that kept him from deciding chicken was food.

Panda was quite a vigorous chap and once killed a fox that tried to do a DIY KFC. Any New Zealand readers familiar with Footrot Flats will see "Horse" here. Panda was Horse's British cousin. Murray Ball is a legend in my family. I have no idea why grandad called his farm cat Panda. Murray Ball called his cat Horse, probably for similar odd reasons.

The house cat was called Wee White - she was my mum and dad's that was left with her mum because they buggered off, sorry, got posted to West Germany, with me and my brother. Wee White had a white collar. Her sister Big Red had a red collar. She (Big Red) unfortunately was an example of why we ensure that cat's collars can slip off if caught in a tree.

In the US those farm cats are generally called "barn cats". They will live in the barn and their "job" is to kill vermin and protect the livestock that also live there. They seem to do this instinctively.

They need to be fed independently as it ties them to the barn. Otherwise they'll leave in search of food.

When farms are sold typically the barn cats will stay with the farm as it's the only home they've known and if taken they'll often try and return to the barn.

The complexity of all this behaviour is kinda crazy to see. It's likewise the case with dogs that have herding instincts. You'll see them blocking chicks or ducklings from getting out of their pen or just getting stressed when they think some of the animals are where they shouldn't be. Often any tendency to chase other animals is actually the dog trying to get the animal back where it belongs.

Quite. I think they are in the middle ground between domestic cats and wild cats. I don't think you have what I would call wild cats in the US (you have the bigger felines such as Lynx etc). In Scotland there are a few examples and they are being actively conserved. They look like large domestic cats but are completely wild.

The farm cat or barn cat is one that is clearly domesticated but encouraged to do whatever it likes with a few simple rules. It gets fed regularly and apart from a particular species (hens) it can destroy anything else at will.

We created these things and we should damn well look after them. Cats are not complex at all. If you "make" a farm/barn cat then it should be left as such.

Granny and granddad also had Wee White as a house cat. When the chicks were hatched they were stuffed into a tray and put into the house boiler cupboard to keep warm. This was the "airing cupboard". British housing off of the sixties and beyond often has a hot water boiler that was merged with the formal place that you air fabrics to dry them.

Their airing cupboard had a load of chicks in a tray and a cat on another shelf. You walk past a combination of purring and cheeping.

The mechanism described in the article is that human assistance benefits more dominant species over less dominant ones, which increases the dominant species population and further suppresses the less dominant species. How is your garden fundamentally different than using a bird feeder regarding this specific interaction?

The type and size of seed. Larger birds focus on larger (higher energy) seed sold at the stores.

The plants I select to go to seed have small seeds and feed small birds.

Just one of many observations I've had the pleasure of collecting anecdotal evidence on.

I have a 1 ft. x 1 ft. platform with 1 inch sides, which I hang from a huge Oak tree.

I put in peanuts, and wild bird seed.

The black birds, and the squirels only eat the peanuts.

The smaller bids eat the seeds.

I have only seen the Squirrels chase away the black birds, but there are days when it's the other way around.

The smaller birds wait until the peanuts are mostly gone, and they go in.

Since I put in my bird feeder, I have noticed more birds of all species some using my property. I have had a small bird (I think a finch) set up nest on my front porch 3 times. The nests are a few yards from the feeder, and bath.

I have noticed small birds eating spiders under my eaves.

Since man has built houses, and paved land; I can't see how a bird feeder does much of anything besides bring in a lot of species. Peanuts will bring in rats too. Squirels bury the peanuts, and rats will dig them up. Squirels seem to forget where they buried their stash?

I probally over feed with the peanuts. I've noticed the black birds will squawk for peanuts around 4 pm., and the Squirels practically tell me to feed them. There was one who used to rattle tge screen door.

I've noticed this year in particular, the watering platform is used by more birds, and insects. I could be me. I might be thinking they are thirsty because of the drought, but I just see a lot of action in that water. (If you supply water, try to change it daily. There's some bacteria going around.)

> Squirels seem to forget where they buried their stash?

This is well-documented. In the wild they do this with acorns. It's estimated they "remember" ~70% of their buried acorns.

What's crazy is the other 30% is where the trees come from.

> If you supply water, try to change it daily. There's some bacteria going around.

I know the answer is obvious, but I don’t know what it is. Why is promoting animal growth better than promoting bacteria growth?

Animals have an inherently higher worth in terms of energy, niche, process, consciousness.

Bacteria left unchecked, could wipe out a species due to it's crazy exponential growth factors. For example over running the immune system.

Lately we have had scientific observations of some or of illness killing many birds across many species.

In this case you clean the "watering hole" if you are going manage that artificial shared resource to prevent being part of the problem.

I don't know for sure, but off the top of my head I can come up with two reasons:

1. Bacteria can be dangerous (for the animals, for us)

2. Birds are beautiful and squirrels are adorable (esp. with their their fuzzy tails). A pool of sludge is repulsive. So, uhm, I like animal growth better for personal, subjective reasons :)

One isn’t inherently better than the other, but if you spend time making a platform for birds, you probably want to enjoy looking at them rather than let them die.

I don’t think the size of the bird is particularly relevant as birds of the same size compete for the same nesting sites. The article gives the example of blue tits dominating willow and marsh tits by hoarding the bird feeder and kicking them out of their nesting sites. Both the willow and marsh tit are slightly bigger than the blue tit. It seems to me that your garden would also have this issue.

A bird feeder is a very small location with an extremely high concentration of seeds. A garden, while small, is much larger than a feeder. I think less dominant birds would stand a much better chance of reaching the seeds in a spread out garden than they would at a feeder. Additionally, the plants in the garden offer cover for small birds to hide behind while they’re eating seeds on the ground. This should also help the less dominant birds survive.

Another factor is whether your practice also helps create additional nesting spots. Certain plants, leaving behind brush or downed trees, etc, can help create additional nesting sites, or leave ones that would otherwise be removed. For example, we maintain a few brush piles and downed trees rather than chipping everything. These make for busy way points where you’ll see less common visitors.

This is neat. Just doing nothing with a section of the garden seems to help. Let things grown and leave them alone and all sorts of stuff appears. We now have weta, which I like (at a distance), though others are less keen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wētā

How many chickens should I plan on for a household of two? We dispose of just a few handfuls of veggie scrapings & trim and a coffee puck each day, some fatty scraps of meat over the course of a week, and not much else. Currently composting but could well do a few chickens…

Chickens like to be in flocks, I would say 6 hens would be good for two people, yields 6 eggs per day, you'll never buy eggs again (assuming you continue the process). They can be picky so my recommendation is to also maintain a compost area they may access. The soil life breaks it down into other forms which the birds may use. Good luck!

One last video for you to get pumped up: https://youtu.be/fydmrz5EThw

Oeuf! That’s four more eggs than I’d need! Maybe my neighbour would like to share.

Is it practical to let them free-range in an urbanish neighbourhood? We have deer, raccoons, cats, the occasional coyote, osprey and eagles, etc—we are not far from open range and open wildlands. I assume they’d need some sort of enclosure at night, but during the day?

I’ve checked and we are allowed a coop…

("Oeuf!" made me do a snort-coffee-out-my-nose laugh. Genius.)

I am no genius, my dear Mrs. Peaker, for were you to call me a wit it would be too kind by half.

But I do like to think that I have my moments.

I concur, as a permaculturist myself, 100% completely.

We get an extraordinary variety of species in our garden every year, and its because of the plants we grow - not because of the birdseed we buy in bags.

We raise chickens and find them incredibly endearing and entertaining.

An alternative narrative: if feeders favor dominant/ bully birds, it might help the less dominant ones by freeing up just about every other spot in the area. If you knew the high school bullies were hanging out in the gym 90% of the time, the gym is actually helping you avoid the bullies (assuming you don’t have to go to the gym).

But what if the bullies reproduced yearly? Wouldn't you want to reduce the bully's food supply?

The bullies tend to be loud and annoying. So I'd personally prefer not to have them in my yard. Geese are the worst.

Our bullies here in London are ring-necked parakeets. They are the most bad-tempered birds on the feeder, preferring to peck at each other, and other birds, than to actually eat. I keep one feeder with a cage over it to give the smaller birds a chance. Luckily they only come mid morning and late afternoon, so again the other birds get to eat in peace.

Spring and early summer we have breeding starlings who also cause a commotion on the feeder, but that is more of a good natured scrum, they eat very fast and disappear in seconds.

Only in the short term. The additional food allows for additional bullies to survive, so now the bullies occupy their old stomping ground AND the bird feeder. And of course the new bullies need nesting sites that they’ll happily take from submissive birds.

Maybe, but I suspect many of the birds I see around are made of the very food my wife puts out. Would be curious to see more study.

The paper mentioned in the article, Killing with kindness: Does widespread generalised provisioning of wildlife help or hinder biodiversity conservation efforts?, can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

> can be found here

For the low price of only $35.95!

Not even sure it contains much. The abstract says (replacing some needlessly obscure words because not everyone's native language is english):

> Direct effects upon [fed animals] have garnered most research interest, and are generally positive in leading to increased survival, productivity and hence population growth. However, we argue that the wider implications for [their non-fed] competitors, prey and predators are underappreciated and have the potential to generate pervasive negative impacts for biodiversity.

"We argue"? Not like, "we show" or "our data shows"? A bit further into it:

> Using a case study of UK garden bird food and nestbox provisioning, we hypothesise how well-intentioned [feeding] could be contributing to widespread ecological community change and homogenisation.

I know the word hypothesise as basically meaning speculate or a theory yet to be investigated (and a dictionary agrees). I guess they do have some results from that case study, but with this tentative wording I'm not sure it's worth forking over thirty bucks to a publisher for no conclusions.

FWIW, virtually nobody pays the sticker price for a single article. Many researchers have some kind of institutional access (e.g., through a library).

If you don’t, shoot one of the authors an email and ask for a copy. Not only will they certainly send you one—-they don’t see a penny of that money—-but you’ll also make some harried grad student’s day.

Also assuming you went to university you probably have such access via its library as an alumnus/a, though not (at least in my case) remotely, would have to actually go in and access from the network.

(I've never done so; I don't expect many people do, but especially living in the same city still I quite like the idea that in theory I can!)

Does not make the price not absurd. And then you have researchers who have to ask friend of friend or otherwise hunt down articles.

These prices is how rich institutions gets even more advantage over those in less rich parts of world. And that is pretty much it.

The institution doesn't get that money: literally not a single dime of it goes to the authors, their departments, or their institutions. It goes to publishers.

You don't need to be friends-of-friends either. Search for the authors and if the PDF is not on their webpages, shoot one of them an email. All it has to say is "I'm interested in your paper [title], but don't have access to [journal]. Could you send me a reprint/preprint? Thanks."

It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote.

> It makes my day when people do this. Getting a paper published is a huge slog with overwhelmingly negative feedback, so it feels great to know that someone actually cares about what you wrote.

Wait, I don't get this. Probably this is very dumb, pardon my nonacademianess. My first thought is: then why don't you just host it on your own website? Then you can see exactly how many people download it. Heck, it could even be in an accessible HTML format (I'd love this instead of basically-image formats like PDF) and you can check if people leave the page after 5 seconds or if there are 30 minutes worth of mouse movement events. Not to say that you need to track this all identifiably, but the server could ingest "user still active on page" events and aggregate that per IP address or something until the session goes cold, then convert it to a mere "visitor #9001, stayed 27 minutes". I'm probably already overthinking this because I've never seen anyone host their own paper in the first place, nor any other format than PDF. Why doesn't anyone do that?

Sending an email to request the paper is much slower than just having access (be that through sci-hub, a friend that you can see is online and whose university still supports the publisher system, etc.), so I don't think that's a good solution even if I understand perfectly why you love to hear of your readers. Imagine you had to email the authors of every link here on HN every time you think a headline sounds interesting; it's just not a solution to paywalls with ridiculous costs per article.

This is a weird edge case.

- For most academic articles, the audience is almost entirely other academics with institutional access. If so, getting a paywalled article usually just requires signing into the VPN and reloading the page. If your university has a subscription--and it likely does to "core" journals, you're good to go. If not...

- Funders have been pushing for "open access" to research findings. Work funded by the US government needs to be freely available online within a year of publication. You should therefore either be able to access the article text somehow, either through the journal itself, a preprint server (arXiv or one of its offshoots), or a repository (PubMed Central, DTIC, etc).

- On top of that, most labs do have webpages that contain their publications. Google scholar is pretty good at finding them too.

This covers ~99.9% of cases, and they're all instant once you know how to use them. My point in the original comment was if that these fail, you should shoot the authors an email instead of paying. A few publishers do hold a fairly hard line against publicly posting an article, but even they typically allow you to provide a copy "on request".

Also, in case it's not clear, academic publishing is only partly about actually disseminating information. A huge part is getting the "imprimatur" of peer review generally, and from certain journals specifically. A brilliant self-hosted document might impress people within a very specific subfield that are motivated and able to evaluate the work. However, its value will be unclear to others who fund/hire/evaluate you. The Dean, for example, likely has neither has the background nor the time to decide if your technical blog merits tenure. He/she does know that Nature is very selective, publishing there means that your work is held in high regard by your field, and therefore you deserve tenure. This holds true for funders too. It's not a great system in many regards, but it is how things currently work.

Maybe you've heard of copyright and contractual obligations?

I usually only feed birds during unseasonable weather (either unseasonably cold, or a rare snow which I figure covers much of the ground where they'd usually find food). The rest of the time I presume they can find food on their own. Surprisingly, it takes only a couple of days before dozens of birds find the food.

I put out a birdbath when we had an unusual heat wave, but didn't see any birds using it, though we had some squirrels stop by in the daytime, and a raccoon family visited at night to get a drink.

I put in a new birdbath and it took two years for birds to "find" it. Now they're there daily. I don't know why, but if I had to guess it's a new generation of birds without no set habits that found it.

"A blue tit is a dominant species - it tends to win in interactions and fighting for food or quarrelling for nest sites," explains Dr Lees. "Whereas species like willow and marsh tits are subordinate. They tend to lose those in interactions."

This doesn't quite square with what I recall was presented on a recent "Spring/Autumn watch". That's a BBC nature program - well respected and properly science focussed. It can get quite unpleasantly natural: for example it does not shy away from the effects of predation in all its gory forms.

I recall that blue tits depend on a particular insect, which is or was currently scarce due to weather. Nests failed wholesale and second clutches didn't happen. So blue tits are currently having a bad year in the UK.

Now, willow tits (I thought) majored in willow ... OK let's at least do a quick search: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/b... So where I live (Somerset) isn't in it's resident area. There's quite a lot of willow here and in Dorset to the south. I don't associate the midlands and Wales with willow, so there you go. Also I would have mis-identified one as a coal or great tit.

So, given it was a shit year for blue tits - I've got off my arse again: https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/countryside/a36603... what do you do?

I suggest that in the first place, we feed the birds as best we can. To do that, the very best thing to do is provide the environment for insects and all the rest of the bottom of the food web to get cracking. We might also supplement that with caches of the sort of things that get a bird through tough times - dumps of seeds and fruits.

I'd like to see way more research on these things and way more direction to willing civilians. For example is a "bee motel" really helpful and why? What can we do for blue tits - please read the section "WHY ARE THERE LESS BLUE TIT NESTS THIS YEAR? THE SCIENCE EXPLAINS". It turns out the current years decline is complicated and the blue tit does not seem to be very generalised or able to adapt.

Worrying about blue tits being bullies seems a bit crass when the poor buggers are having a pretty shit time. Willow tits - no idea how they are doing this year. Perhaps they are seeing a resurgence now that blue tits are laid low.

Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment.

I think most birds are not having a great time these days, between losing habitat and losing insects/biomass.

We are still thinking of nature and animals as being self-sustaining, the way they have been in the past, but more and more it's becoming apparent that we have to not only reduce harm, but also step in and help, to become true caretakers of the biome.

I live in a house with a decent garden and opposite a park. Both of which are absolutely rammed with wildlife. Which is nice.

However I completely agree with you:

"We are still thinking of nature and animals as being self-sustaining, the way they have been in the past, but more and more it's becoming apparent that we have to not only reduce harm, but also step in and help, to become true caretakers of the biome."

We humans now dominate the biome. Completely. We can no longer rely on it to function on its own. I personally gave up on the notion of "natural", with regards a British environment a long time ago. For example I have a huge number of non native plant species growing here in my garden. What does non-native or native actually mean anyway? Are apples native? - not really (Roman introduced but work well - only about 2000 years local.) Oak? probably been here for quite a few years but check your subspecies out.

We used to have a whopper of a walnut tree here. It died two years back and we had it cut down. It was over 50' tall and when I found myself spending more time at home instead of at work recently, I noticed that wood peckers and pigeons and others used it. I saw a series of circuits. The ravens would start from next door and whizz off clockwise and the pigeons would randomly fly everywhere. The woodpeckers would simply appear and start whizzing around. It's quite hard to describe but I'd be happy to formally log stuff for a study.

Interesting research…. …but don’t feed the garden birds will harm my mother brain healt, she is convinced that without her food those “poor little birds” will death! :)

I like the short story “what men live by”

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

My conclusion from the story isn’t that we shouldn’t do our best but we shouldn’t worry. The universe existed before I was born and it will continue to exist after I am dead.

It develops bird-human relationships, and it makes up for all the lost biomass of insects.

Titmice used to be famous for picking the foil off the jugs the milkman delivered.

If these are migratory birds, then it is possible you are going to kill them by keeping them feeding while they should be migrating.

We have this problem here in Poland

Then you find birds dead because they are not adapted to surviving the winter.

Are you trying to say that the availability of food along the way can supplant a bird's entire migratory instinct?

That's an interesting point.

In the (UK) context of this study/article, blue tits and great tits (and indeed most garden birds) are generally non-migratory in the UK, so I think that's an orthogonal issue.

To be fair bird movements are quite complicated: e.g. a Robin in the UK between September to March might be a member of a migratory or a non-migratory population. And Blackcaps are an example of a mostly migratory species in the UK but where less migratory individuals come to feeding stations in winter months.

Hum, I don't think so. Even with a few birds dying, as long as they are replenished routinely bird feeders are definitely good for winter survivorship in birds.

Birds that evolved in Central Europe don't die by winter if they can find a constant supply of food. Can choose to do a shorter migration and overwinter in northern areas and this is good for the survival of young birds. Urban areas are warmer also. Migrating south is hazardous and exhausting and there are some places in the Mediterranean or Africa that are notoriously dangerous for birds when they are hunted massively.

There is a lot of migratory birds that just can't survive winter, let alone harsh one, even when fed.

Some have evolved in much warmer climate (a lot of migratory birds from Europe evolved in Africa) and never evolved to survive winter.

One aspect not addressed is that birds using feeders are at increased risk of being killed by pet cats. Could this be offsetting the greater food supply?

I don't think that is a generalisation which can easily be made. Many factors in play as well, e.g. imagine the situation where the birds normally have to be at about ground level to pick seeds, and one hangs a feeder on a washing line. The latter cannot be reached by cats, in the former situation the casts just have to wait for their possible meal to arrive. At the same time seeds drop from the feeder so birds going for that are an easier target for cats. But that's back to square one, so might not total to increased risk.

We've had birds at our feeders killed by American Kestrels.

One could view this as another layer of indirection in bird feeding.

The birds that come to our feeder only care for the seeds when it's called. They bare come around during the summer. I guess insects are much tastier

I often see people giving bread or other completely inappropriate food to birds in parcs or horses, chickens in small farms or ducks, swans, gallinules, fishes in estuaries

I think we can also raise the problem in people diet as well, it's quite related. Our ideal food is plant-based, vegetables, fruits, grains, seeds, leaves, bulbs (eating raw garlic is incredible), that's what we're designed for chewing and digesting since million years

edit: I can understand my comment is unpopular since I'm saying most people diet is inappropriate as well, but instead of rage downvoting, try to phrase why you disagree

>Our ideal food is...

This is probably why you're getting downvotes; it's the idealism and certainty with which you determine a human's ideal diet.

We cannot say with certainty what the ideal human diet is. And what's ideal for one group isn't ideal for another. For example: most Northern Europeans are adapted to digest fresh milk while East Asians are not.

I can't say with certainty what the best human diet is. But I can say it is highly probable that the ideal human diet includes some meat, and it's highly probable that humans cannot thrive on a plants-only diet. This is evidenced by no plants-only diet peoples in existence today, other than vegans, which are a young group, untested by time. And time is the greatest filter.

The longer something has been around, the higher the probability it is a good thing, and the higher the probability it will continue to stick around. And plant-only diet peoples haven't been around very long. Contrast that with peoples who eat meat, who have existed for millions of years.

Vegans must eat some foods enriched with b vitamins to survive so they are not really on a plants only diet either. An entirely raw food, plant only diet leads to a horrible death due to b12 deficiency.

> Our ideal food is plant-based

This is a myth. We eat lots of cereals of course, but the longest living people are definitely ommnivorous and eat a lot of seafood also. We can survive on bread and water, but this is not ideal.

Common people identify plant eaters with primitive, but is a mistake. Specialized plant eaters developped a lot of modern features. We don't have ever-growing teeth. We don't have a gut split in several specialized guts for housing fermenting bacteria. We don't have a sophisticated olfact sense to smell the plants and detect poisonous ones.

My favourite are the people who claim being a vegan is our natural state but eat fortified foods to get enough B12.

I think you're being downvoted because you're giving non-mainstream health advice and acting as if it's sensible and obvious.

Most people are used to hearing strange health advice from others and have developed strong "bullshit detector" instincts around this topic.

"Eat raw garlic" would be a textbook example of this form of health advice, as it has an extremely unpleasant taste in any significant quantity and also makes you smell bad to others.

It’s dangerous health advice as well, going completely vegan without some planning can result in all sorts of health issues.

Everyone should Google “vegan b12 deficiency”

Plant based diets can be healthy but you’re putting nutritional yeast in a lot of meals.

Yes switching too fast is dangerous for someone without a good vitality

Of course people should do it gradually, and about b12 deficiency, someone eating mostly raw food will have lower levels (compared to the "health norm") but it's mostly because we need less of it, we can produce it naturally, and do so only when necessary. It's in French but someone like Florian Gomet explains this fact well. Why would I be deficient in b12 if my energy, digestion, and everything is going perfectly (someone "deficient" would not be able to accomplish what Florian Gomet did or just my life style since 10 years)? I'm asking you

I haven't been able to find any reputable sources about your claim "we can produce it naturally", which sets off my bullshit detector for your entire claim.

You might be more successful if you support what you say with sources.

They are completely wrong. There is some b12 generated by our gut bacteria but it is too low in the digestive track to be effectively absorbed. There is a reason vegans eat foods enriched in b vitamins.

> It (B12) is synthesized by some bacteria in the gut flora in humans and other animals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12#:~:text=It%20is%20...

so yea not directly by us, but by our guts flora, you validate it?

The rest of the sentence provides some important information:

> It is synthesized by some bacteria in the gut flora in humans and other animals, but it has long been thought that humans cannot absorb this as it is made in the colon, downstream from the small intestine, where the absorption of most nutrients occurs.

ok, maybe not everything has been discovered about this, because how come my summer diet of only figs, tomatoes and some leafy greens doesn't cause any b12 deficiency symptoms? (as listed here https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamin-b12-or-folate-deficien...)

but I'm not at all a vegan, it's just that currently there is an abundance of figs around, and why not use those calories. I may consume a fish later in the year, but I'd be curious to understand why some people suffer from b12 deficiency, and some others apparently don't

https://www.b12-vitamin.com/body-store/

> Our bodies store a greater amount of vitamin B12 than that of any other vitamin

> serious effects of vitamin B12 deficiency can take several years to emerge.

interesting, thanks

> Garlic is the plant necessary in everyday life from the past until the present days. It contains active compounds that are responsible for its effect on almost every part of the human body. Garlic is an excellent tonic for the human organism. It has been used for medical treatment of everything, from ancient civilizations to date > From all of the above-mentioned data, it can be concluded that administration of garlic should not be avoided; on the contrary, its intake should be as much as possible since it underlies human health.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3249897/#sec1-3...

Please read your own quote back to yourself.

Does it make any hard, falsifiable claims (e.g. "eating one clove of garlic daily reduces the probability of catching a cold by 26%")? Does it make any prescriptive recommendations at all (at least to people that are not hyperlypemic)? Does it even sound remotely at all like hard science?

Regardless of the validity of the health claims, does this mean people should actually start eating something that is repulsive to both them and everybody else around them?

You had me at every until saying garlic is repulsive. Shots fired, I grown garlic but I most often consume it fried in olive oil to pull out compounds into the oils for flavor.

Another way one is fermented with hot peppers to make hot sauce. Just a little bit of garlic goes a long way.

One hint, always remove or discard the green "germ" or kernel of the garlic before using in food prep. The nasty garlic flavor comes from there.

Planting and growing garlic is easy and for northerners we plant in the Autumn. Video related:

https://youtu.be/GUYrN0o-cfk

Mate I'm a wog. I generally quadruple garlic amounts recommended in recipes. GP was suggesting eating it raw, though, in large quantity.

> that's what we're designed for chewing and digesting since million years

You’re being downvoted because this is just wrong. Humans aren’t “designed”, we evolved and we evolved as omnivores NOT for a plant based diet.

I’m not saying we can’t switch to a plant based diet now, it is probably better for us and the planet; but this “humans are naturally vegan” is just silly.

Sure we are omnivore like most primates, and fortunately because some human sometimes don't have anything else to eat. And meat is often better and safer cooked. I eat fish sometimes, but very rarely (2-3x/year), it's not about vegan, it's about unprocessed food (fruits, and most vegetable don't need to be cooked, and it's drastically reducing their benefits to do it). I think it's something people have to experience in the long term before arguing against it. Yes people can survive eating processed food, but I'm just saying it's not optimal

Your hypothesis seems to be that the invention of cooking made us unhealthier? That seems unlikely.

Are you referring to the situation 1-2 millions years ago when human brain size expanded? The sitatuion back then and now are not comparable. Just like inuits don't eat much plant-based food, like I said they had no choice, they needed fire to warm themselves, they needed food, any food in their different climate at that time. We can't transpose this situation now, we can grow more various vegetables, we can get all the nutrients from them, and actually more than meat

My teenage son is a picky eater, still thinks unbleached wheat bread sandwich crust tastes bad. I used to feel like it was a waste to toss, still felt bad to compost, now that I feed the crust to my hens and see how they light up, I no longer feel bad.

As for garlic in the raw, I'm glad you can eat that, I can as well but my wife absolutely cannot eat garlic even though she does enjoy the taste.

If you really love garlic check out this authentic Italian process and techniques in this video, I was pleasantly surprised:

https://youtu.be/NTSxnC7vCRc

I definitely prefer to eat garlic raw, you can let it in your mouth for a while, saliva will make it less strong. But cooking it is killing too much of its important macro-nutriments. I don't eat pastas or other starch because with experience I feel like they're "glueing" my digestive system and make digestion less efficient. My diet is mostly fruit currently (tons of free figs along my rides, persimmons, clementines, grapes), tomatoes from a local producer, all kind of edible plant leaves (e.g. common purslane, kale, onion leaves, leek leaves..), everything raw actually since many years. Even bell pepper, cucumbers, zucchinis I eat them "raw" (in quotes because technically fruits and this stuff are already somewhat cooked by the sun, and later by our digestive system), you can feel some taste that wouldn't exist anymore when they're cooked, it requires to chew more, and with time, the situation completely change, you don't like anymore cooked products

It's great that you have a garden, I hope you'll grow some stuff. I was picky like your son when young, but fortunately I changed my diet later

> I was picky like your son when young, but fortunately I changed my diet later

That's a weird statement to make after describing how you only eat very peculiar food - raw leaves, fruit and some veggies. ( Who the heck eats cucumbers nom-raw?)

right, I meant I'm not picky for the food I eat, I'll eat damaged fruit, some fresh ripe fruit from the tree with sometimes some little worms, I won't mind, or a bird bite, or one on the ground even if it looks fresh enough, that's what I meant by non-picky, not wasting stuff, eating cucumbers or zucchinis raw and with all the skin of course

> Who the heck eats cucumbers nom-raw?

pickles.

Yeah, these downvotes are silly. My guess would be not rage but simple disagreement, neither of which justify downvotes.

Raw garlic is very intense, I've never heard of eating that except minced in salsa.

I'd also say we're not evolved for purely vegetable eating, we've had access to cooked meat from fire for probably 1-2 million years. This is one reason our brains expanded, because we gained access to richer foods like cooked meat with fat, which in turn supported more brain cognition.

> I'd also say we're not evolved for purely vegetable eating

how come I can get all my necessary nutrients from it so?

> This is one reason our brains expanded, because we gained access to richer foods like cooked meat with fat, which in turn supported more brain cognition.

This also is interesting, it's definitely possible that at this time humans didn't have access to enough vegetable, it was pretty cold 1-2 million years ago, people like inuits obviously don't eat much plant-based food. Fire was an important step (for creating warmth at least), for cooking see this https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-for-thought-... which puts things more in relief

In brief, you're putting 2 confounding factors together: brain size expansion and cooked meat. It's very likely that our environment challenges forced us to adapt and get more intelligent, but the causal effect you're saying is not true, just like any logical implication can't be reversed

It's also fun because you are also implying "you'll be more clever by eating meat than vegetables" which is also wrong nowadays, just because we can't compare a situation that happened 1 million years ago in a different context.

My understanding of the theory is that animals which subsist on greens have a huge gut to allow for fermentation to get the calories from the fiber in the plants. Eating meat allowed our brains to grow larger and gut to shrink, since meat is more calorie dense, and the brain consumes a lot of energy.

I use to use a lot of raw garlic mixing with mayo or potatoes or whatever.

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