lithocarpus

"The condition results from past exposure to certain tick bites"

This is a real thing I know two people who have it, but I haven't heard of any evidence that it applies to all people even in a small way. I'm open to hearing if you have, though.

Yes that makes sense. I'd still rather eat the grain fed meat than the grain itself, but best would be grass fed meat.

I am dubious about "red meat" being called pro-inflammatory.

Are there any studies showing that real red meat - say venison or grass fed beef or acorn-fed pork is inflammatory or harmful?

I'd not be surprised if a comparative study of diets could show that higher amounts of red meat in the diet correlated with bad health, but I have never seen anything suggesting the red meat itself is a problem other than perhaps processed meat like hot dogs.

Processed food - for sure, there are many aspects of most processed food that I think are harmful. Inflammatory I think generally means it's damaging the body in some way which causes inflammation.

Ok. All of the handful of folks I've heard talk about chemtrails used the word to refer to the contrail that they thought had something added to it.

So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.

Language sure is interesting.

I guess there's also a spectrum of what covert means. If a government does this but only announces it in places where only a few people hear about it from the official source, I guess that still counts as public and so not chemtrails.

Really?

All this time the chemtrail people I know have been talking about weather control, I hadn't heard of mind control being part of it.

My take has been yeah I know cloud seeding and solar geoenhineering is real, ergo some amount of chemtrails are "real" in that they are deliberate particulate being sprayed and not just water. While the thing the chemtrail people claim that seems dubious is the scale and other nuances - claiming that all contrails are chemtrails. It's the scale that we don't know and that I assume it's pretty small because it seems expensive and pointless to do it constantly. But I don't know how I could ascertain the scale at which it's done either.

Same way people choose what to listen to in other kinds of media most likely.

I am constantly asking people who I admire or respect where they get their news/information from because I'm trying to find better ways since the general media landscape is very dismal.

It's been a lot of things but the gist was to get out of the office and city and computer and be mostly outdoors in nature and learn all the practical skills and other things like music. Ironically I've ended up on the computer a fair amount doing conservation work to protect the places I've come to love. But still am off grid and in the woods every day and I love it.

I'm close with a number of people living a relatively hard working life producing food and I've not seen this at all personally, no. It can be very rough but for these people at least it is very fulfilling and the idea of going to be in an office would look like death. People joke about it a bit but no way.

That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.

Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.

This trend and direction has been going a long time and it's becoming increasingly obvious. It is ridiculous and insane.

Go for your plan B.

I followed my similar plan B eight years ago, wild journey but well worth it. There are a lot of ways to live. I'm not saying everyone should get out of the rat race but if you're one, like I was, who has a feeling that the tech world is mostly not right in an insidious kind of way, pay attention to that feeling and see where it leads. Don't need to be brash as I was, but be true to yourself. There's a lot more to life out there.

If you have kids and they depend on an expensive lifestyle, definitely don't be brash. But even that situation can be re-evaluated and shifted for the better if you want to.

Parent isn't saying "totally unmoderated" he's saying the client chooses the algorithm/filters.

That means there can be a bunch of algorithms/filters out there to choose from (any tech savvy person could make their own as a blend of others that exist) and the end user could basically choose which feed[s] to subscribe to.

If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available.

I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.

If their intentions are really different their thinking is probably different.

Not proof, but logic: Without machinery to do the work of processing food, it has to done by hand or not at all, which leads to a lot more jaw work. Especially if you're eating a lot of animals where you'll be eating off of bones. But even with plants too.

Birds can carry insects or their eggs all over the place too.

It's an interesting idea to use it topically. There are all kinds of things that can be absorbed through the skin and used by the body. I don't have any knowledge of this specific mechanism and it may be completely impossible for the body to use anything from this kind of protein. But I'm glad some people are willing to try it.

I agree. That's why I said "most common" for "most people".

Saturated fat is not processed food and is not unhealthy. It is the most common kind of natural fat in the human diet for most people through most of history.

What's wrong with eggs btw?

The only thing I can easily find is that they have saturated fat - but it takes 4.5 eggs to have as much saturated fat as 1tbsp of butter.

Aside from 1 year of strict vegan diet, I've eaten an average of 4 eggs with 1tbsp butter mostly daily for my entire adult life (I'm 34), and also ate eggs regularly in childhood, and I seem to be in excellent health with no known issues. But I'm curious what I should be watching for.

Ok. I wouldn't necessarily call it poison, but would say it's qualitatively a new kind of food that was never eaten until the last ~150 years and is a likely contributor to chronic disease.

You called potato chips junk food but seem unwilling to say what about them makes them junk food, compared to, for example, a boiled potato.

I assume junk food means unhealthy and a likely contributor to chronic disease.

Regarding the reduction in mm Hg due to sodium - my argument is that the kind of impact on blood pressure can be qualitatively different.

In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

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> IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move.

We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

> I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems [etc]

I agree entirely with this. It's very complex, many factors, no single culprit or silver bullet, and that this is extremely important. It's all the things. So it's important to try to tease out which things are having which kind and degree of effect. And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.

I think now is a little golden age for LLMs usefulness before they are further enshittified by people's agendas and profit motives. Not that they aren't already to a degree but I expect it will get a lot worse fast.

So do you think the whole understanding of oxidative stress, antioxidants, etc is all crank panic vibes? I thought that that was pretty widely accepted. I realize that the idea that some oils oxidize easier than others and have less antioxidants and thus might cause more oxidative stress is often ignored or dismissed outright without being looked at.

And, what is it then that makes potato chips junk food compared to a baked potato with butter? The potato? The oil? The salt? The frying? The fact that the oil was fried in many times over and not fresh? A combination of these - but which specifically?

> What’s the evidence for this? Exactly what I paraphrased from the study - they chose three biomarkers that correlate with CVD - A increased 19%, B decreased 9%, C stayed the same. If they had chosen some other biomarker D instead of A, that increased say 5% or less, it would give an equally strong but opposite result as the result from the study.

Meta analysis is only as strong as the studies it's based on. I looked at quite a few studies before that purport to show sodium causing CVD, and none of them strongly support their conclusion - they all had significant flaws, not that they're not useful research just that they don't show what they are used to say they show.

For example, there were studies showing that increased salt increased blood pressure by ~5 mm Hg over long term. I understand that blood pressure can be affected very slightly by salt intake, I would guess because the body is holding more water or some other normal mechanism like that, but this does not suggest it's the long term cause of blood pressures going up from a normal 120 to a chronic 160 or 200 as we're seeing in tons of people. There could be any number of adjustments that would increase blood pressure slightly WHILE the change is in effect and then go back to baseline afterward. The chronic high blood pressure is a disease that doesn't just go back to normal immediately after a change.

Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look through the 11 studies cited in that meta analysis, but if you pick the one or two that give the strongest evidence for salt causing CVD I'd look at them.

I'm genuinely trying to figure this out myself as best I can, because I know way too many people close to me dealing with early stage CVD and diabetes. And a lot of them say they're working on it by avoiding meat and dairy and eggs and salt, and instead of that they end up eating more refined oils and refined flour and sugar. It doesn't seem to be helping them any after years of this, and I think this is backwards advice. I'm not saying we need to eat tons of salt, maybe it does have a minor effect, just that it's not the real culprit.

I agree with you there, that the healthiness of different foods is complex and a binary category of "ultra processed" is not sufficient for understanding it.

In the case of potato chips though, I specifically disagree that they aren't ultra processed - look into the process for creating soybean or canola oil and try to explain how that isn't "ultra processed".

further thinking along these lines:

Consider a boiled potato. That would generally be considered healthy.

Now add butter to it. Those who think saturated fat is unhealthy would say it's unhealthy, I'd say it's healthy - though sure, fat generally has more calories per micronutrients so you also need to get your micronutrients somewhere, like by eating lots of greens too. And with caveat that butter from conventional cows can have issues like the hormones or medications but I haven't dug deep into that. And there are people who have sensitivity to dairy, etc. But for a normal healthy person, adding lard, or butter, or real unrefined coconut oil, or real unrefined olive oil to one's potato while increasing the calories doesn't itself make it junk food or unhealthy.

Frying it could be an issue, proportional probably to the amount and intensity of frying, though I'd argue much more so in cases where the frying oil is reused, as reused frying oil is going to be much more oxidized and thus cause more oxidative stress / free radicals in the body which are understood to be a big cause of metabolic / mitochondrial damage which lead to diseases like diabetes.

And there's one of the nuances - different fats are more or less easy to oxidize. Specifically, saturated fats are the hardest to oxidize, omega 3s are a little easier to oxidize, and omega 6 (polyunsaturated fats / PUFAs) are much easier to oxidize. You can verify this by looking into the chemistry a bit. That's one of the key mechanisms of action as I understand it.

Still, deep frying in tallow that has been reused for a week is still going to be really bad because tallow does still oxidize, just much less readily than PUFAs.

Refined PUFAs are heated several times during the processing, which causes oxidation. Not to mention antioxidants are removed by the process, and also the PUFAs themselves are more prone to oxidize in the first place.

So to recap: 1. boiled potato = fine 2. boiled potato with added butter = more calories per micronutrient, but still real food and no particularly bad thing in it 3. potato pan fried in [butter, lard, tallow, coconut oil] = more oxidative stress than above, but still probably not terrible considering pan frying food is very normal. 4. potato deep fried in [butter, lard, tallow, coconut oil] that has been used repeatedly = significantly more oxidative stress, would not recommend, maybe I'd call it junk food 5. potato deep fried in [soybean oil, canola oil, etc] = significantly more oxidative stress again than #4

This does not yet get into the other potential issues with refined oils: - hexane residue (people eat average of 25 to 250mg per year of hexane in the US in refined oils) - may not matter at all but still something weird about the food. - other chemical residues from the other processes

Thanks - I'd not seen DASH-sodium but only the DASH study whose samples it's based on.

Having read the study now: DASH-sodium barely indicates anything about sodium independently. It looks at three biomarkers which _correlate_ with cardiovascular disease, and finds that reducing sodium from high to low levels for four weeks reduced one of those biomarkers by 19%, _increased_ another biomarker by 9%, and didn't change the third. You could say that this suggests higher sodium increases cardiovascular disease risk but that seems like a stretch when if you'd picked a slightly different set of CVD-correlated biomarkers you would have got exactly the opposite result.

Even if the results had been more convincing, the methods are not - it's an extremely short term study and looks only at correlative biomarkers and not at actual health outcomes. There's no meaningful way to quantify the impact based on this.

The potassium study is indeed interesting. It shows among people who already have CVD, a reduced risk of death of 12%. I think it's pretty well known that modern diets have a significant electrolyte imbalance, i.e. not enough potassium per sodium. I do supplement potassium for this reason sometimes and recommend it, though I'd prefer to just have a ton of natural nutrient dense food available and not feel like I need to. So we're in agreement on that one. That said I don't take that study to strongly show that sodium is a primary driver of CVD - it could just as easily be interpreted that the lack of potassium due to lack of real natural food is a cause of CVD (potassium being mostly in nutrient dense greens, and grass fed meat (i.e. animals that ate more natural diets i.e. greens)).

So, thank you - this helps my understanding of the whole topic - not that I know the answers, but it does make me more curious about sodium/potassium electrolyte imbalance being a factor in CVD. Ideally this would be fixed with a healthier diet but it can be hard/expensive to get enough nutrient dense foods.

Edit: oops - I missed the TOHP study - but that's one where they don't isolate sodium: > The active intervention, described in detail elsewhere,22 involved dietary and behavioural counselling on how to identify sodium in the diet, self monitor intake, and select or prepare lower sodium foods and condiments suited to personal preferences. Individual and weekly group counselling sessions were provided during the first three months, with additional counselling and support less frequently for the remainder of follow-up.

We're talking about what makes ultra processed foods unhealthy - the process used to make each ingredient is exactly what is relevant.

My two sentences above are simple and verifiable with any reasonable definition of "whole food" or "natural food".

Do you know how canola oil is made?

I'm open to being wrong but if it's not the oil or the frying, what is it that makes potato chips junk food?

Except you can buy soybean oil, bleached refined wheat flour, and refined sugar at the store. That's all you need to have ultra processed food. The really weird ingredients are probably also bad but are not necessary for something to be ultra processed.