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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

There is a (bro science, so you will love it or hate it) theory I recently heard from Carnivore Aurelius that unlike fruits which evolved to be eaten, many vegetables have natural “pesticides” (believe he was using this term much more broadly than things you may have heard of like caffeine, nicotine etc) and pro-inflammatory compounds that cause our guts a lot of heartache when you eat them, because they don’t want to be eaten

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There is some truth in that theory.

Because the fruits have evolved to be eaten, most of them are tasty, but they have a very low content of nutritive substances, so the plants do not lose much by giving them away.

On the other hand, the parts of the plants that are the richest in nutritive substances are the seeds (this includes the edible parts of nuts).

A human could easily live by eating only some combinations of seeds, without eating any other plant-based or animal-based food. On the other hand, it would be quite difficult for a human to live by eating only other parts of the plants, because those have low levels of nutritive substances, like proteins and fat, so they have to be eaten in very large quantities to provide enough.

Because the seeds are the most valuable, most of them contain various harmful substances, attempting to discourage the animals that would eat them. Due to that, many kinds of seeds and nuts require special preparation methods in order to be used for human consumption, in order to remove or decompose the undesirable substances.

If that were true then how come plants improve human health outcomes every time we put them to the test especially when swapped from, say, red meat?

It’s a fun theory for people who don’t demand evidence.

I’d be concerned about this but pretty much all studies I’ve seen show health benefits the more vegetables are included in the diet. We’ve been evolving with plants a long time and can deal with the secondary metabolites in edible vegetables. It’s likely these exact compounds are responsible for many of the health benefits like cancer prevention, etc.

Taleb in “Antifragile” talks about this as well. However he derives a different conclusion; he speaks of a phenomenon called “hormesis” which refers to a biological response where a low dose of a harmful stressor can have positive benefits on an organism.

Biology is all about survival and multiplying the species. Seeds are plants babies, the biological response is to make your babies aren't eaten! I think there's a book about this, probably Grain Brain, but I 'm not sure.

That eating a plant's babies is bad is easily false if my 6th grade education serves me: plants bear delicious energy rich fruit so animals eat them and spread the seeds via digestive system. poop.

Seeds are the babies, not the flesh. Nobody consumes fruits for seeds. Grains don’t need this mechanism, they are fine spreading by wind.

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