The Great American Poisoning | Hacker News Reader

The Great American Poisoning

justinmares.substack.com

33 pointsjustinmares41 comments

> For a wild animal, the default state is health.

the default state is “multiple parasitic infections and permanent semi-healed injuries”

default state is dying before reproductive age

Yeah. I'm into reptiles, and I help people who are way more into that hobby than I am.

Any wild-caught reptile basically needs rehabilitation: de-worming, mite treatments, and in many cases anti-fungal treatment.

Same with many types of wild caught fish. Parasites are almost always presents and will sometimes kill the fish due to starvation within months.

I see this type of thinking a lot - where someone assumes that 'in a good natural environment' all animals are just peacefully living their lives and thriving. And to some extent, sure, animals in a rain-forest are gonna thrive better than in an industrial wasteland.

People have a romantic view of nature. Nature is fucking _brutal_, unforgiving, and horrific. Starving to death, living with severe infections, broken limbs, chunks of flesh missing, and hopefully reproducing before you meet your fate - that's how most animals in nature live out their lives.

As humans, we've gained the unique ability to greatly control not only our environment, but also other living creatures' environments, and 'unnatural' is not inherently bad. Nature is, more often than not, extremely horrific for living things.

Could we live in a decent environment, where the food paste we eat tastes pretty good and keeps you at optimal health - somewhere between starving and overweight? certainly possible, some pet owners do this. But that's not natural, that's just 'optimal for long-term health' - which is only one input to life happiness.

> For a wild animal, the default state is health. In normal times, wild animals are an appropriate weight. In the wild, animals don’t become obese. They don’t become depressed or suicidal. They don’t exhibit behavioral disorders. Animals inhabiting their evolved, ancestral environment are healthy — by default.

Excluding the ones that are rapidly killed I guess

I disagree, animals starve if there are too many due to overpopulation and will get fat if they find an easy source of food. They often die from infections, collect tons of diseases, have many parasites.

It's easy to see animals be sad and mourn the loss of a pack member or child in certain species.

America is the second fattest OECD country in the world. Blaming the individual completely denies the partial culpability that for-profit agribusiness socializes the costs through addiction design of ultra-processed foods. Perhaps mega agribusiness revenue should be taxed proportionally to the exponent of the average caloric density of their total products sold. Proceeds of such should be specifically earmarked for nutrition supplementation, effective fitness programs, healthcare costs, and a myriad of preventative and curative interventions.

the only things that have changed is edicts by the government (some good, some bad). So either the government or the individuals are to blame. companies produce goods within the rules of the government that people are willing to buy. 'mega agribusiness' grows food that sells. people buy things they want, these have never changed. The only thing that changes is the government taxing and banning goods and services, thus, the reason we have gotten fat is likely the governments fault. But good luck waiting for them to accept the blame, as the government is the judge, jury, and executioner of sorts.

those edicts include forcing companies to use less animal fats, forcing people to stop smocking, etc.

> Perhaps mega agribusiness revenue should be taxed proportionally to the exponent of the average caloric density of their total products sold.

Rice is among the highest caloric density foods grown.

> Animals in captivity are another story. These animals are often obese, develop tics and other neuroses, and engage in self-harm. In the famous case of Hugo at SeaWorld, an orca repeatedly rammed his head into the side of his pool until he had a brain aneurysm and died1. This phenomenon (known as “Zoochosis”) describes the unnatural coping behaviors that arise when you cage a wild animal.

This is wildly incorrect. I volunteer at our local zoo. The animals there are given highly regulated diets that are tuned to their medical needs. They are stimulated often and receive plenty of exercise and care. This isn't the case for every zoo, but 95% of them operate this way.

Animals can be in zoos for many reasons. Many of them come to us due to sustaining injuries that would have otherwise killed them. Others come to us to avoid illegal poaching or the exotic pet trade. Others still come to us to participate in breeding programs that will, hopefully, accelerate that specie's repopulation. Zoos used to keep animals for entertainment but many of them are moving away from this model, and rightfully so.

This flagrant accusation was enough for me to stop reading.

Pet animals also live longer, sometimes double the lifespan of same wild animal.

The oil diagram is pretty misleading. Steps like "blending" or "fractionation" happen with olive oil[1]. Not to mention that a lot of "cheap" (i.e. grocery store) olive oil is heavily processed[1].

[1] https://exauoliveoil.com/blogs/olive-oil/how-extra-virgin-ol...

[2] https://seloolive.com/en-ca/blogs/olive-oil/are-cheap-extra-...

I think his point was that olive oil when done right is a result of crushing fruit. The bastardization of that product is a travesty but it is still possible to get the real stuff.

> With food, the rule of thumb is to eat like your ancestors ate. Avoid ultra-processed foods, and avoid (or dramatically cut down on) the big 3: corn, soy, and wheat. These crops are in everything and are often the most processed, most pesticide-laden, and most fertilizer-intensive crops in our entire agricultural system.

Or you could buy (or grow, if you're hardcore enough) organic wheat, corn, and soy in their unprocessed forms and learn to cook. You know, like your ancestors did for thousands of years.

The problem is pesticides. Gluten intolerance only became a thing after they started dousing crops in round-up prior to harvest ("crop dessication").

Not to mention that if you have any mesoamerican heritage your ancestors probably ate a lot of corn.

This started out interesting then went off the rails into an ad for paleo diet nonsense.

Well... you can move away from highly processed food without necessarily going to paleo. And it's probably healthier for you to do so. So if you don't like paleo, think it's a fad or whatever, that's fine, but Lucky Charms and Twinkies still aren't a diet that's going to make you healthy.

The author doesn't suggest for the readers to go on paleo. The author says:

> most pesticide-laden, and most fertilizer-intensive crops

which isn't anywhere close to true. Wheat sells for $7/bushel, a bushel is 60 pounds. Corn & soy are similarly low value crops. Farmers just can't afford to put lots of pesticide and fertilizer on their crops. Fruits and some vegetables are far more valuable so spending more on inputs to increase yields makes sense.

This is just not true - corn/soy/wheat are the most sprayed crops in agriculture.

That's just a measure of how big those crops are compared to others. Absolute numbers are not a fair comparison. In terms of chemicals per calorie those three don't even make the top ten.

"For a wild animal, the default state is health."

what

I'm not saying the article is worthless, but it's got a stench of "businessman's succcess qualifies him as an expert on everything"

And I'm on board with "you are what you eat"

I'm curious about carbs/sugar though. My mental state plummets if I eat too much. Or do I eat carbs because my mental state has already plummeted, as they're easy and rewarding...? And closer? (I have a convenience store opposite my house)

This article is absolutely worthless conspiracy theory nonsense.

The FDA is the one to blame. They basically run the healthcare industrial complex. It will all make sense when it is acknowledged that the FDA works only for the healthcare industrial complex, and not at all for the taxpayer. This is because the healthcare industrial complex is what gives funding to the FDA via fees and other legalized bribes.

Just finished The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you want a closer look at the industrial parts of the US food system, and a possible alternative, you could do worse than starting there.

If you're going to note that specialization in our food system is what makes it possible to feed so many people with so few farmers, sure, go ahead.

Wendell Berry and many others that the reduction in the number of farmers enabled by that specialization is what has hollowed out rural communities to the point where many services can't be economically provided to people living in rural areas because there are too darn few people.

I didn't grow up in a rural or agrarian area, but I live in one now. I most recently got to watch this through the lens of the school budget. The four towns that comprise our school district add up to in total 500-some students across 12 grades.

Getting a budget passed took two tries and some cuts because getting enough teachers and students together and transported to school buildings is pretty high. There were other factors, but structurally the low density of students is a huge cost driver.

So yeah, would more farmers farming smaller farms be less efficient? From a food production standpoint, yes. Would it bolster rural communities? Sweeping away a bunch of other diverse issues that are no doubt affecting communities differently, in aggregate, probably yes.

Bringing it back to TFA: would it result in a healthier, more resilient food system in the US? Almost certainly.

I think people are fixating on this sentence at the beginning -

> For a wild animal, the default state is health.

Maybe OP meant a state of balance? For all those that describe injuries and parasites - those kill the host if they aren't 'healthy'. Having parasites is not inherently unhealthy, there's a bunch of symbiotic relationships out there.

I agree though - you eat clean and get rid of the junk, you will be more healthy. Nothing in this article sounded crazy to me, and honestly shadow downvotes on reasonable replies with no reasoning leads me to believe the vested interests are in these forums as well protecting their image.

Also to be clear - OP is not talking about GMOs, they're talking about wonder bread where all the nutrition of the wheat is stripped out during processing, leaving you eating nothing but carbs and sugar instead of a more balanced food with fiber which helps you process the other things.

A related conversation from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650271

Basically: Polyunsaturated Fats are poisoning your Mitochondria, causing all sorts of metabolic illnesses.

Seed oils seem to be poisonous to humans. However, there is a global Trillion-dollar industry that depends on this not being true...

What could go wrong?

This is interesting. But I'm reserving my judgment about PUFAs.

There's a subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/SaturatedFat/. They hate PUFAs, and love saturated fats. But having lurked on that sub for a while, I don't think they've found the magic bullet for weight loss. It's not as if obese people who cut out PUFAs magically go back to a healthy weight.

A lot of this article smells like bullshit to me, but anecdotally speaking, I do think that there is something very wrong with the US food system.

I was in Russia a few years ago and I remember that basically all the food I ate at my relatives' rural town was remarkably, stunningly better than even the best locally grown farmer's market food that I have ever been able to find in the US. It practically radiated goodness.

Now, part of this might be because of childhood nostalgia or some genetic factor that predisposes me to the food of my homeland. But I think I can tell that most of it is not nostalgia. That Russian food I ate in that rural town really was much better than anything I've ever found in the US.

Which is remarkable given that Russia practices the same sort of massive highly technological agriculture that the US does, it is not like when I was there I was eating the products of some small farmstead.

Sans the typical HN quips about "default states" and whatnot, the article has a good point.

It's actually kind of funny that whenever I travel to Europe, like 90% of the junk foods I occasionally indulge in when home (like hot Cheetos for instance) are banned. The US supermarket really is a minefield. It's more important than ever to cook at home, imo.

Does "quip" imply that it is somehow not a valid criticism?

"This is not an evil conspiracy. It’s simply the players in the market responding to incentives."

Leaving the fact that so many big food and ag companies are intertwined at the board level, at some point maybe the distinction becomes irrelevant.

Survivor bias for wild animals… just sayin

A typical mishmash of disproven nonsense and scary-sounding soundbites. With a typical tree-hugging nonsense of "Part 5: Health Is Simple and Natural".

Yeah, sure.

A hand-wave without substance? Yeah, sure. At least point out something that is disproven if you want to make this kind of statement...

E.g. glyphosate causing cancer. Or that eating "natural" is going to make you more healthy. Or that BS factoid:

> And as a society, we see the highest cancer rates for parts of the body that accumulate toxin exposure

Or that nonsense about:

> When an animal is in its natural environment, the natural state of that organism is health.

It basically means that the dipshit author has seen animals only on the Discovery Channel.

The whole screed is basically a naturalistic fallacy with "scary" factoids mixed in.

You can look at other screeds from this author, like "Ozempic Makes You Fatter" to see the full inanity.

That’s not a monkey.

It’s also for some reason not the right animal. The link on the picture should have been showing this guy: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11839659/amp/Uncle-...

CHIMPANZEE THAT

Excellent article, sir. Those dealing with illnesses of self/family know well the cost of lost opportunity.

Did you miss one important thing? Our homes are a minefield: chemicals, VOC, mold.

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