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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

This was probably very common in the human experience prior to the development of agriculture. People didn't eat regular meals. Hunting opportunities would not have come along every day, and sometimes hunts would fail.

I don't think humans would become too weak to throw spears because they didn't have their Cheerios in the morning.

When I hear people who have skipped a meal complain "my blood sugar is low", I worry for their health. We have fat stores for a reason. Skipping a meal should not be a big deal.

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Too weak to throw spears, maybe not. Too weak to churn out top quality code may be another matter, however.

You are severely underestimating the mental difficulty of spear hunting in relation to writing a couple of lines of code.

Really? I've spear hunted fish when I was a kid and shot targets with a bow (if I were a proto-human it could have been small animals instead) and both were pretty damn easy and not mentally taxing at all.

What was the risk of getting mauled while doing this?

The majority of edible animals are not big game (by nature of the food pyramid), and a even a decent chunk of big game are not predators of humans. Plus, it's easy to overwhelm them if you have more than one person.

I've never hunted before, but I can't imagine at all that it's a fair fight. Humans have been known to trap them, net them, flank them, shoot them at a distance, lure them, corner them, smoke them out etc. etc.

None of which requires a whiteboard, drafting paper or a calculator.

Are you really going to argue that any human with any semblance of intelligence (and I don't mean deep thought here) would have to risk mauling to hunt for subsistence?

Your post specifically said SPEAR hunting. You do not hunt small game with a spear. Trapping is usually the most effective way of getting meat in the wild.

Off topic but some of the best traps are large modern mouse-traps. Just make sure to drill a hole and tie it to a tree with a strong rope so the animal doesn't pull it away. Set it, and you will almost certainly capture a small mammal within a day.

He might have edited it, but I read "spear hunted fish", not "spear hunted". That does not look dangerous on TV.

Makes me wonder: when did trapping start? 5,000 years ago? 20,000?

Probably closer to 200,000+. Fishing net's are at least 80,000 years old.

> Are you really going to argue that any human with any semblance of intelligence (and I don't mean deep thought here) would have to risk mauling to hunt for subsistence?

That's why we invented farming, dear.

I love bow-fishing! But shooting targets as a child is hardly the same.

Getting a powerful, accurate shot in itself takes a lot of concentration. But when hunting for sustenance it means getting up before dawn, tracking animals for miles on rough terrain, and managing to approach the animal in complete silence. Once in sight you have to stalk the animal and look for the one perfect opportunity because if you miss or are too loud it will run and you will have to repeat the whole process again. Add in the stress that you and your small group have to be successful or your tribe might go hungry and it's a whole different ballgame then shipping code at the end of the day.

Mental activity requires a lot of glucose, whereas muscles can run on fat, protein or glucose. Additionally, people are adapted to minimise their mental output. So if you're low on blood glucose, producing a lot of mental output for >6 hours is a real stretch.

If you dropped me in a forest and required me to hunt animals with a spear, there would be significant higher-order mental involvement. For someone who has been doing it their whole life, I expect that is not the case in the typical hunt.

"When I hear people who have skipped a meal complain "my blood sugar is low", I worry for their health. We have fat stores for a reason. Skipping a meal should not be a big deal."

That is such a great point. People have been programmed around the 3 meal regime. I have found it fun to experiment with fewer meals and generally it works fine if I have an primarily protein breakfast I sail through to an early dinner.

It's gotten even worse now with many fitness gurus strongly advocating 6 small meals a day.

It's what works best for fat-loss, because that way you keep down the blood sugar spikes after every meal. I don't do it though because it's too much of a hassle - instead, you can also keep to foods which don't spike sugar levels much in general.

> It's what works best for fat-loss, because that way you keep down the blood sugar spikes after every meal.

That's a hypothesis that afaik no study was able to support (e.g. http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/truth-about-6-meals-day-w... about some studies. I don't have more references right now, but in the past I was looking for a study that supports it, and only found negatives)

> instead, you can also keep to foods which don't spike sugar levels much in general.

Google "bulletproof diet". I think you'll like it.

The other issue with people like me who chronically over eat, is that asking me to eat 6 small meals a day is like asking an alcoholic to go to a bar 6 times a day but only order pepsi.

I think a big part of the "low blood sugar" complaint is people misinterpreting their body. I used to get "low blood sugar" if I didn't eat for six hours or so, even getting headaches from it (I think 60% of the headaches I've gotten in my life have been from the placebo effect, and the rest stress-related).

People are just so unused to being hungry that they freak out when it happens.

You are mistaken if you think that hunting was the primary source of food in times before agriculture. For many tribes it was (and still is, in some parts of the world) a secondary "luxury" which augmented the gathered food. As you say, hunting can easily fail, or game can become rare because of environmental hiccups. This happens more often than you should think - there are times when deer can't be found for weeks. Blood sugar was mainly kept up with berries, roots, and fruit - nibbling all day long. Fat stores are not so easily accessed - if they were, then all-week-fasting would be the way to go for fat-loss (which mostly leads to muscle wasting and short-term water loss, and a mighty yo-yo effect). Yes, one can use intermittent fasting to lose weight, but weight-loss usually only kicks in after 2-3 weeks.

I agree that Cheerios are a bad idea generally, but I'm not pro fasting or skipping meals for weight loss. Fat is stored as an emergency reaction to high blood sugar levels, and you get exactly that when eating more between the fasts (you have to). You constantly expose your brain to too much and too low sugar levels, resulting in highs and lows in your ability to focus (and also your mood).

Yes, one can use intermittent fasting to lose weight, but weight-loss usually only kicks in after 2-3 weeks.

Citation needed. I personally know people who've lost weight long term with quite brief periods of intermittent fasting.

I read that somewhere in this ebook on IF, don't recall on which page (great resource btw, one of the few user-friendly books I've seen yet): http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting

I can't say anything about the people you mentioned. I myself had absolutely no progress when IFing for some days, only dizziness and irritability.

I think he's saying after 2-3 weeks of intermittent fasting, not fasting for 2-3 weeks at a time intermittently.

Anecdote alert, but I started doing alternate day fasting after I read the study, then 22 hour a day fasts after I read that people were having results with that. Went from 235 to 185 in 2 years (6' tall, fairly large build.) I'm not strict, and I go off it whenever I'm bored or severely tempted.

I count any drink other than water as a snack, and watch the bread, potatoes, and cornstuffs when I am eating. Who knew it could be this easy? I hadn't really been an overeater for years, I just had never had time to starve.

I think he's saying after 2-3 weeks of intermittent fasting, not fasting for 2-3 weeks at a time intermittently.

Yup, I got that and I'm challenging it.

Just making sure.

Thanks for the anecdote, by the way, very interesting.

Are you sure about that? In the wild plant foods are only availiable in season.

Also, what about tribes that lived in places with cold winters? There are no plants to eat when the ground is covered with snow.

Times have changed. Nowadays we try to minimize our fat stores because overeating is a bigger threat to us than starvation is. If you're eating balanced meals intended to keep you slim, missing one is a bigger deal than if you pig out on a deer you killed and then miss breakfast the next day.

99% of the population has more fat store than in the days when people hunted deer.

The problem is that people aren't used to accessing their fat stores for energy.

> The problem is that people aren't used to accessing their fat stores for energy.

It is my hypothesis that most modern fat stores are not actually energy stores, but rather "toxin" jails (I use "toxin" in the sense of: a substance that the body does not want, possibly because it is harmful, and that takes non-trivial time/effort to metabolize and/or get rid of; think of e.g. mercury).

Which would explain why they aren't being used: In many cases, the body doesn't have a chance to get rid of them because bad stuff keeps coming in.

(You may laugh, but it is not inherently less plausible -- or less supported -- than the idea that fat stores are used exclusively as energy stores).

Doubtful; the primary way that mercury and lead are excreted is through your fingernails and hair.

But that happens at a very slow pace. Where do the mercury and lead spend time until they are excreted? The only answer I was able to get from people who are supposed to know is "all over", "in the cells", "in the blood" and similar meaningless answers.

I have yet to find anyone who has an idea about how it is actually distributed through the body.

> (You may laugh, but it is not inherently less plausible -- or less supported -- than the idea that fat stores are used exclusively as energy stores).

Burning fat for energy isn't an idea. As for your hypothesis, hypothesis doesn't mean making up random stuff.

Indeed, but please read what you quoted. I didn't state that "burning fat for energy is an idea". See the word "burning" in what you quoted? neither do I.

"fat store used exclusive as energy store" IS an idea or hypothesis. One that underlies a lot of other assumptions and theories about nutrition, but is actually known to be wrong -- fat is used for a lot of other things as well (your brain is mostly made of fatty acids, for one; the skin is constantly lubricated with fat for another).

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