In the gut's 'second brain,' key agents of health emerge
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.
Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.
And I think for such an entity we may be closer to emerging than we like, especially if it can traverse whole internet including this comment and make summaries out of it out of reach to mere mortals.
Why are people talking about it as if it was a bad thing? If I listen to people everyone seems to be dissatisfied with their life as of now, due to work, politics, society and everything else. If AGI was to arrive it would potentially remove those frustrations, right.
We don’t really know what happens next. There are optimistic outcomes that AGI could enable, but this tech is ultimately being built and distributed by humans currently deeply beholden to the system that everyone seems dissatisfied with.
AGI is not some savior that bursts onto the scene and magically fixes problems. There’s a lot of very messy human work ahead of us if we ever hope to integrate it with society in a way that actually removes those frustrations. And this is not a guaranteed outcome.
Our current AI tech is built by and for giant corporations and governments (many of which are dystopian). AI will simply accelerate the vast divide between the haves and the have-nots.
AI is being used to increase profits of corporations, with no concern for the rest of us. AI will allow the elites to rule with fewer messy humans in the loop, who may disobey orders or have sympathy for their fellow humans. AI will blur the distinction between truth and lies, enabling dystopian regimes undreamt of by writers like Orwell. AI will provide a vast toolset for criminals as well.
If you look at the news, horrible trumps positive big time, any day. It may not reflect actual truth on the ground, but AGI scanning internet knows nothing about reality on the street and everything about trending topics and Fox news headlines.
I guarantee you you can't have an objective viewpoint on mankind from just watching internet go and the one you get will be more negative than reality.
With such conclusions, and capability to collapse our society in a millisecond (it doesn't have to be nukes, it can be subtle subversion of financial and societal system for example), you really want a completely unknown and un-understandable entity to judge all of us?
It still is though, you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain. The problem is that you probably won't reach an emotionally stable human since you'll be missing all the emotional/hormonal signaling that comes from the rest of the body, but we can emulate that without having to model the full complexity of the gut.
We just need to maintain our awareness of that difference.
The good news is, it makes replacing humans - trait for trait - far more more complicated.
I wouldn't take much comfort in that. You can probably reach something that resembles a human by just providing an alternative set of signals. We already do this with the reward mechanism during training and that is proving very effective.
To give a parallel, your high blood pressure may not be due to your heart, as it may be responding to a system of factors. Vasodilation and vasoconstriction of blood vessels have a direct impact. Your kidney health, an organ outside of your circulatory system can trigger high blood pressure. O2 and CO2 levels in the blood can trigger a response.
Looking at the brain in a vacuum will only get us so far.
I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.
Just one example (from what I understand) you can't really separate intelligence from emotions. There are researchers in emotions that explain our whole system of affect/feeling/emotion/mood/etc. as a very effective abstraction of all the inputs from our whole body (both direct inputs, cognitive processes and stored data). So without a working system of emotions I don't think you will have a working brain at all.
Those are two very different goals and I don't think one is necessary to achieve the other.
An older but still popular view of the human mind separate the brain and body as two parts. And we also like to separate emotions and intelligence. From my amateur understanding that does not correspond to modern neuroscience, it is all a very integrated system. We usually like clear and separate categories instead of fuzzy complicated integrated systems.
At least, there are people who have lost most of their gut due to disease or trauma, and their human intelligence is still working unharmed. You may say it is needed for development of the brain, but it does not seem to be needed for function once at least partially developed.
What is the basis of this claim?
Quoting from here[1]:
"Somatic markers" are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making. Within the brain, somatic markers are thought to be processed in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. [...]"
Although, experimental evidence is not as yet as robust as it needs to be. See the "Experimental evidence" and "Criticism" sections here[1].
In terms of complexity, since we haven't solved brain yet, it doesn't matter that much that there's also other parts of the body involved, as we don't even know the exact complexity of the brain, but the argument stays the same.
In theory we are input/output mechanism, possible to emulate if there's enough capacity.
But in addition AGI wouldn't require many traits that humans have since it doesn't need the same evolutionary survival mechanisms. It only needs part of it.
Maybe you are right and we’re all just selfish and driven by our own desire to survive, but why does it matter to you if you survive if you are just an input/output mechanism? My computer doesn’t care if it gets crushed to bits (I assume).
It matters to me because I have inherent bias to want to survive because that's what was successful through evolution. I'm aware that I have it, but it still exists.
Why does GPT keep generating tokens after a token, should it matter to it whether it would keep responding?
People used to think that the universe was a deterministic clock-work mechanism, possible to model in theory down to atomic interactions. Now we have things like black holes to nowhere and correlations without causation. So this theory seems at best, a tentative first approximation that doesn't warrant the kind of confidence you declare it with.
We are still in the very infancy of the study of the mind body and brain. We're finally uncovering some of the most basic tools that will serve us for millennia to come. Imagine trying to understand a 2022 Ford F-150 with only a 7/16ths wrench and a flat-head screwdriver: You can get pretty far, but you're not getting anywhere near the cylinders. It's going to take along time to even get the tools to understand the brain.
For example: We don't even have all the basic circuit components that the brain has. We have resistors, capacitors, and inductors. All things that the electrical systems of the brain have analogs to (very very roughly, I am simplifying a lot here). But we're missing the memristor. We know the brain has a memristor, it's the synapse, but we don't really have ones to play around with and use as tools. Yes, you can model these things in software. But then you miss out on most of the ugly reality that is hard/wetware; and that's where all the magic happens.
But that's just the electrical parts of the nervous system. Most of what is happening is in the electrically dark chemistry. Heck, we can't even agree on what percentage of the brain is glia. Is it 50%, is it 90%? Whose paper should you trust? We don't even have a good census of what is in the damn thing!
But of course you can't take the brain in isolation. The inputs and effects on it are still nearly completely unknown to us. And that's not hyperbole either. We really are mostly in the dark as to what effects the brain. Just look at temperature. We know that the rate of firing of neurons goes as T ^ 4. Yes, that's the hypercube of temperature. Even the slightest change in temperature has massive changes to firing rates. How in God's name do any of us function on a hot or cold day!? We haven't the foggiest idea.
So again, we're in the absolute infancy of our study of the brain. Fortunately, most of us HNers are going to live to see a lot of progress in this science. It's an exciting time to be alive.
> Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.
This is completely unwarranted judging from the rest of your post ("in the very infancy", "nearly completely unknown", "mostly in the dark", "haven't the foggiest idea"; although I appreciate the frankness).
If people made bold statements like "There is no such thing as X" in any other field at a similar stage of development, their claims would be rightly dismissed as pseudoscience. ("There is no such thing as a graviton. Full stop.")
Your claim is not a finding of your field of expertise, or any other branch of science. It's metaphysical belief. You're entitled to it. It's a widely shared belief. It might be a belief with a lot going for it. Metaphysical claims are fun! They can be discussed! But I wish people wouldn't confuse them with scientific knowledge.
1. mental phenomena are not physical
2. the mind and body are distinct and separable
Neither of these claims are supported by modern science in any meaningful way. It is perfectly reasonable to say that mind-body duality has been disproven by science, insofar as it is reasonable to say anything has been disproven by science. Just because neuroscience is still in its infancy doesn't mean there can be no established foundations of the discipline. These foundations may turn out to be wrong or incomplete, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about them.
Not that it matters all that much. Every single test ever performed looking for a mind absent a body has conclusively, and unquestioningly failed. There are even large bounties available for showing a single successful test which have yet to be claimed.
We’re in the infancy of understanding the human body, period. But why does that imply a mind/body duality? One thing that’s clear is that everything is interconnected, and I think that much is clear from the comment.
The whole idea of a mind/body duality is a historical artifact. If someone wants to argue that there is a duality, then I think the onus is on them to prove it exists, not the other way around.
I don't totally disagree with your notion that the body is the mind, but I'm struggling to determine what a MVH (Minimum viable human) is.
"Not only simpler lifeforms. Cases with humans that may indicate a memory transfer after organ transplants are also documented:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
>The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory
https://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-...
>There have been perplexing reports of organ transplant receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory, experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, and which are causing quirky changes in their personality."
This post was in response to one describing decapitated worms growing new heads with their old memories intact, as well as old studies where planarians were trained to navigate a simple maze, then fed to other planarians who were then also able to navigate the maze. Fascinating stuff!
made me chuckle
get metric guys!
Of course there is, if I lose a finger I don't lose part of my mind.
If I am doing math my skin is not being leveraged to help out.
Probiotic foods, plenty of water and movement have been key factors there.
I still have issues from time to time, but I'm now also off the fiber supplements entirely as well (some dietary changes probably helped there as well - I cut out almost all sugar).
To explain the change: I had weeks where I'd have to take 2-3 movicol satchets a day to try and alleviate the pain: after about 3 months.
Probiotics are fiber or long sugars which yeasts can't digest. The big issue nowadays is yeasts and leaky gut. The herbicide Roundup is suspected as a cause of leaky gut syndrome. Avoiding non organic wheat and non organic oats can help while you heal. Going to spelt bread or at least organic can help the gut heal. Using other grains like rice and others can help. Unless diagnosed as gluten intolerant or actually having Celiac disease skip the gluten free breads just avoid non organic wheat & non organic oats while you heal. Once your gut heals you can slowly relax those restrictions.
The night before I soak:
* chia seeds (1 tsp)
* psyllium husks (1 tsp)
* quick oats (1 tsp)
* almonds 17g
In the morning I add in:
* a frozen banana
* kefir / fermented yogurt drink (1/2 cup)
* frozen berries
* protein powder
* kale / spinach / broccoli
* cinnamon (a lot)
* creatine
* collagen
* water
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/probitoic...
40g/220lbs, 0.4g/kg. Prevention of traumatic headache, dizziness and fatigue with creatine administration. (1)
Similarly, a review of 6 studies found that doses of 5–20 gram of the compound may improve short-term memory and intelligence in healthy people. (2)
0. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03331024209310...
There's probably minimal risk of meaningful damage going overboard for a healthy person, but large doses can cause stomach issues for some people, and it seems unlikely to provide benefit beyond going beyond complete saturation. It looks like, of the studies you showed, the only one where they went for a large dosing for a long period of time was when experimenting with it on children with traumatic brain injuries. That's probably because the risk:reward skewed heavily towards reward there.
I think dividing the dosages throughout the day would help offset the stomach issues some and there have been 5 year long studies showing creatine doesn’t have any major risks with 5-7% people experiencing GI issues during loading phases.
https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/6-side-effects-of-creat...
For those that don't know, if you aren't used to creatine then taking more than a few grams has a good possibility of giving you the shits (or sometimes even strong abdominal discomfort). This will (mostly) go away fairly quickly and varies drastically from person to person, but you've been warned. Best to take it on a weekend or something, and slowly build up to your max dose.
The effect is pronounced if taken with only water, all at once.
Instead you can take it throughout the day be adding it to your water bottle. Taking it with meals also typically subdues the effect.
The effect I suppose is comparable to something like magnesium citrate. I suspect they are doing similar things osmotically.
Most people don't need to care, but amino acid balance can sometimes be a significant factor to health issues because of all the interactions involved, especially if intake has been tilted by a particular way of eating. It's reasonable to balance out whey protein with collagen.
Honestly the topic is so convoluted that with my current grasp of if, I can't currently make a useful or broadly applicable statement beyond "some people find collagen or glycine supplementation beneficial for their X". Individual trial and error basically, much like neurotransmitter affecting medication.
I am in no way an expert and only have experiments on myself to go off, but I've been experimenting on this particular question for a decade or so my anecdata might be thicker than average.
Probiotics to recover from antibiotics, prebiotics to maintain.
Greek yogurt with active cultures and sour milk with lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium lactis. Unripened bananas.
Some whole grains; rye and sourdough breads, whole grain oats.
I also stay away from fast food or anything deep fried, avoid most processed foods and rather do home cooked meals each day.
This isn't probiotic, but I've noticed that my system is much happier with fish than red meat. So there is plenty of that each week.
An excess of comfort is probably still bad, but I doubt it's the main cause of obesity.
- never the amount of processed calories at hand - had to consume these calories on a regular basis.. no vehicles, no powered tools except the occasional mill, most things required walking of lifting
I know that since I dropped using a car I'm living very different days. Less fat, better cardio, more calm.
facetiousness aside, it's really cool to have others return on experience. Even though I kinda made a blanket statement originally, I wasn't trying to enforce my opinion, it was more of a regular result I tried to share.
1. Food intake varies for me, but generally I don’t eat until noon, or sometimes even until 6pm. I generally don’t force this; I’m hungry right now, I’ll often eat right now. 2. (1) has been the case for years, both when exercising regularly and when not. Right now I happen to be exercising regularly. On Saturday I woke up feeling good, so I drank some water and got on the rowing machine to do a half marathon. That was with no food since the evening before, and no water during — it took 1:45, which is a moderate pace for me. After that I still wasn’t very hungry.
Ie today I skipped breakfast since I was too busy with work and kids, no ill effect mentally. But if for example my wife would do the same, her sugar levels would drop low and she would be easily irritable, and generally would suffer quite a bit.
Is this a fact or your personal experience?
My best hypothesis is this review paper inspired the community to investigate the weird relationship.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2011.0009...
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=brai...
[2] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=glyp...
This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.
Except for long-term experimentation and elimination and that's not "scientific", so we don't do that. Doctors just want to prescribe a pill that' fits everyone[0] and call it a day.
[0] everyone they bothered to test it on, so mostly white western males
This has been a staple of gut research for >2 decades. It entered the mainstream in the last one.
The more I've learned about my personal response to various health interventions, the more I've come to believe that a "human being" as a research subject for many medical interventions is very ill-defined simply because there is too much variation between individuals. The research subject should really be a single human individual. Poorly working medical treatments to many weird, complicated, chronic illnesses should really be replaced by an algorithm that allows a person to find the correct treatment or lifestyle adjustments themselves.
The tl;dr is that women, for example, have been excluded from all kinds of medical, scientific and safety studies just because it's too hard to include them. Them having periods and hormones and all that stuff that makes science HARD. It's easier just to test on men =)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women
""" Don’t you know the medical tricks we play? When we don’t know what to do ourselves, we play for time, we keep patients occupied with chatter and little activities so that they won’t notice how baffled we are. Luckily for us, an invalid’s own nature is usually our ally.
Of course she feels better!
Any kind of treatment, eating lemons or drinking milk, cold-water treatment or hot-water treatment, will bring about an initial change in the organism and provide a stimulus that the ever-optimistic patient takes for improvement. That kind of auto-suggestion is our best assistant; it even helps the biggest fools among us doctors.
But there’s a snag—as soon as the charm of novelty has worn off, reaction will set in, and then you have to switch your approach in a hurry, pretend there’s a new treatment, and so we doctors manipulate our approach in really severe cases until perhaps the real, right method of treatment is found. """
Having been skeptical, I think I would recommend elimination diets to people just to see if there’s an unexpected benefit to cutting an unexpected item
Helped me find out I too have a histamine intolerance. No avocados or spinach!
It's primarily for IBS and identification of trigger foods, but the elimination and reintroduction steps may well help you with identifying your triggers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
They've also got a basic, but handy app.
It's done me well over the years.
I have rhinitis flare ups too - I’m not sure I’ve pinpointed exactly what flares mine up, but I most suspect guar gum / xanthan gum. Either as a trigger, or just causing thickening of mucus, which spirals into blocked noses and sinus infection issues and further rhinitis.
What really helps me is lymphatic drainage massage. There’s videos on YouTube showing you how to gently directionally massage the drainage channels to keep your sinuses clear.
This site is a pretty tight digested summary of the same elimination diet that fedup.com.au recommends
The gene mutation is connected to both Crohn's disease and Parkinson's.
So after seeing this article about how glial issues are connected to Crohn's, my immediate thought was - well, what about Parkinson's?
And indeed, it looks like the LRRK2 mutation contributes to Parkinson's by screwing up the glial cells:
Is Glial Dysfunction the Key Pathogenesis of LRRK2-Linked Parkinson’s Disease? (2023): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9856048/
(I can't wait for LLMs to advance enough that parallel discoveries in subdomains are teased out as further cross discipline research candidates.)
It seems like the only thing we do know at this point is that we don't know anything. This is an interesting TEDx talk from Eran Segal "What is the best diet for humans?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z03xkwFbw4
My current conjecture / conspiracy theory / understanding includes:
* Bacteria near the roots of plants generate electricity.
* Plants grow faster in electrified soil.
* Electrical brain stimulation can enhance brain function.
* There are processes and interactions happening in our gut that we really don't understand yet.
* Many ubiquitous things in our environment wreak havoc on our gut biomes (e.g. chlorine, emulsifiers).
* There may be more to establishing and maintaining a healthy gut biome than simply consuming foods rich in pre/probiotics. The right kind of exercise and stress may play essential role in keeping it all humming along.
Basically if I eat stuff that doesn't digest well, my stomach bloats and causes a mild hiatal hernia, which in turn presses on the vagus nerve that travels right next to it.
This causes the _exact_ same symptoms as a panic attack. Cold hands and feet, the feeling of an increased heart rate etc. Not super fun when you have a history of actual panic attacks.
Then I take some medicine to forcibly relax the esophageal sphincter on top of the stomach and within 10-15 minutes I can literally feel the warmth getting back to my limbs just because of the decreased vagus nerve pressure...
Can I ask you, what medicine do you take to relax the esophageal sphincter?
When it comes to food, have you found a pattern in what to avoid or do just stick to some basic kinds to avoid?
But hey, it works and I usually need like 0,5-1 tablets a year so I'm not personally worried about any adverse effects.
As for foods, during the worst reflux times I ate pretty much just unseasoned chicken and rice and drank only water just to let my stomach and esophagus time to heal a bit from the constant acidic assault.
Then it was a matter of slowly adding stuff I ate regularly one at a time and see which cause issues. Weirdly I could eat spicy Indian food and it actually helped my symptoms :D
Because of the elimination diet I dropped red meat from my diet. So no beef or pork, those seem to be the worst ones as far as digestion goes. I have a theory that my stomach acids aren't strong enough to digest red meat and it just sits there slowly dissolving instead of moving on like it should -> acid reflux and bloated stomach -> boom, vagus nerve angry.
Currently I'm feeling a lot better than 10-15 years ago and I can have the odd hot dog, some bacon and pepperoni on my pizza, but I stay away from steaks, briskets and all that - and if I _have_ to eat red meat in quantities, I don't eat much for the rest of the day, just to give it time to digest.
The usual reflux suspects are wheat, sugar, coffee and milk. Those went out too in the beginning, but nowadays I can have them in moderation and the result is just bloating unless I overdo it.
What do you base this claim on?
I have been diagnosed with the reflux disease an a medium sized hiatal hernia. I survive with the proton pump inhibitors, but I have to take them constantly. As far as I know, a hiatal hernia can't be healed and it contributes to the acid reflux rather than the acid reflux causing it.
For understandable reasons I can't physically see what's happening in there, but the best guess I have so far is that extreme bloating pushes the stomach further into the diaphragm causing the "mild hernia" that goes away when the bloating goes away - which it can't because the whole stomach is blocked. If I end up in that situation I can't burp for example, during my worst times I was completely unable to burp for a good six months. Carbonated drinks caused physical pain.
This combined with the fact that my initial bout of reflux went away when I went in for a gastroscopy. My theory is that the camera they shoved into my stomach pushed in whatever was stuck and "fixed" it.
Nowadays I survive by avoiding any situations where I become extremely satiated and bloated at the same time.
The very few times I get severe symptoms I use Metamizole to forcibly relax the internal muscles and the symptoms go away.
One of the things being studied is the involuntary contractions that move food through the gut.
You are what you eat and gut health certainly impacts your brain. "A sound mind in a sound body."
But that's not really what this article seems to be about.
1) The Second Brain by Michael Gershon.
2) Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body's Most Under-Rated Organ by Julia Enders.
Celiac disease [1] is a real and potential serious autoimmune disorder. Whether non-celiac gluten intolerance is a real thing is another question, though there's some evidence for it.
Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is not believed to be fictional-- rather, experts disagree about the details of what it is, how it works, how it is identified, how we should classify different presentations, etc. So yes, the science is shaky, but there is plenty of evidence that it's "a thing"... or "some things".
[0] 1 out of 133 according to https://www.beyondceliac.org/celiac-disease/facts-and-figure...
The prevalence is on the same order of magnitude as peanut allergies.
[1] https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(20)35165-9/...
My kid got diagnosed with celiac and it's hereditary so me and my SO had to get tested. I didn't have it, they do. Undiagnosed for decades.
Switched to gluten-free diet and they feel SO much better now. But the thing is that humans are really adaptive, you don't know what "good" feels if you've been feeling bad all your life - that's your normal level.
I get _really_ bloated if I eat "industrial" wheat bread. Like beach balloon levels of ridiculously bloated.
Sourdough wheat bread: pretty much zero issues. Same with rye bread with no other leavening agents than yeast.
I think this is part of the reason why people feel better when they leave out gluten, it's not the gluten per se but all the other stuff that usually comes with glutinous grains.
Honestly, if you had some chronic, untreated issues with your ankle and foot - something that plagued you daily - it would be hard to take care of your mental health too. Same if you had lupus, for example. Having something wrong with you - especially something chronic - always makes it hard to take care of your mental health. It makes sense that when you don't have the stress of pain and the other things that go with it, you find the mental energy to work on the brain.
Yours just happened to be in the gut, which makes it seem like these articles might be talking about you.
Not really. Gluten makes me ill. I thought it was just the supermarket type bread so I bought my own bread maker.
Still hell.
Also, Kahnemann talked about conscious and unconscious thought, not about "gut thought" and "brain thought." You can teach yourself to behave in certain ways, to just react. That doesn't mean you have a smarter stomach than the next person!
Kahnemann's framework maps neatly onto this idea if you consider the seat of unconscious thought not to be localized in the brain (i.e. that all neurons think to some extent), and the seat of conscious thought to be in the prefrontal cortex and its tight interconnections with other brain regions via the default mode network.
Just to pursue this thread: the Online Etymology Dictionary says
> The notion of the intestines as a seat of emotions is ancient (see bowel) and probably explains expressions such as gut reaction (1963), gut feeling (by 1970), and compare guts. Gut check attested by 1976.
where "guts" says:
> The idea of the bowels as the seat of the spirit goes back to at least mid-14c. (compare bowel).
and "bowel" says:
> The transferred sense of "the viscera as the seat of emotions" is from late 14c.; especially "inner parts as the seat of pity or kindness," hence "tenderness, compassion." Greek splankhnon (from the same PIE root as spleen) was a word for the principal internal organs, which also were felt in ancient times to be the seat of various emotions. Greek poets, from Aeschylus down, regarded the bowels as the seat of the more violent passions such as anger and love, but by the Hebrews they were seen as the seat of tender affections, especially kindness, benevolence, and compassion. Splankhnon was used in Septuagint to translate a Hebrew word, and from thence early Bibles in English rendered it in its literal sense as bowels, which thus acquired in English a secondary meaning of "pity, compassion" (late 14c.). But in later editions the word often was translated as heart.
I started getting panic attacks about 10 years ago and narrowed it down to coffee, so I went from 2-3 cups per day, to 1 cup before noon only and that helped.
Then my life got a lot harder and panic attacks came back, so I'm on strictly decaf for the last 3 years. No more panic. Noticeably less anxiety. It's so directly related for me that sometimes I'm on vacation and have regular coffee. After 2-3 days of relaxing my decaf-only rule, I feel it coming.
nice quote nerds
1. No outside food. For even until a decade ago, eating out was considered a last resort. The idea is that one must be aware of what exactly goes into ones food, and that usually meant home cooked food.
2. There are a variety of foods and flavors in India, that are recommended for various circumstances and contexts. Pregnant women had a well defined diet regimen.
3. Certain foods were not allowed in summers and certain foods were not allowed in winters.
4. For Yogis, the dietary restrictions are even stricter. No spices, less salt, limited sugar, limited meals, etc.
5. Fresh food was always prioritised. Food cooked more than 4 hours ago was considered poison.
6. Fasting is recommended in winter months and even once or twice weekly.
Indian cuisine and cultural norms are very complex, but well defined.
A balanced diet with all tastes, us always insisted. Up until a few decades ago, most items were made with ghee, rather than vegetable oil. And that ghee was also homemade.
Sure, some castes (like Brahmins) have had stricter rules, while some had laxer ones (for Kshatriyas, Vysyas & Sudras)
But I do know that eating out and eating only freshly cooked food was always the norm.
Also, Dhabas and Street Vendors, are a relatively newer thing, starting up in about 1800's.
tbf, a random dish left under Indian room temperature for hours probably is actually unsafe. Mumbai right now is 32C/90F according to Google, which is about the worst temperature to leave food in.
Meanwhile cooked chicken can be safely left on a countertop in Canton for hours? This model needs more variables.
Salads aren't a thing because they're likely to have bacteria in them and they've been sitting out for god knows how long.
Same goes for proteins, if it's still sizzling hot when it's delivered, it was most likely just cooked and thus safe.
Temperature-growth chart for food pathogens is said to show a bell curve peaking at ~35C/95F. Keeping well-flavored food hot(>122F) works to similar effects as refrigerating, just not energy efficient nor good for maintaining flavors.
Some foods were allowed to be taken upto 8-10 hours after cooking.