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Eating food from plants that have struggled to survive toughens us up as well
- chrismeller 7y agoI knew Kale didn’t taste like something man was meant to eat...
- dehrmann 7y agoIt's a garnish.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoNo more of a garnish than collard greens or other vegetables in its family. Interestingly, it's commonly mixed with potatoes across cultures in the culinary examples you can find on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale#/media/File:Kogt_skinke_brunede_kartofler_gr%C3%B8nlangk%C3%A5l.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale#/media/File:Kogt_skinke_b...
- HarryHirsch 7y agoOnly Yankees eat it raw. The rest of the world knows to cook it to death to deactivate the thioisocyanate and give it the proper sweet flavour.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoWhat's up with the casual, snooty condescension? Pretty much every time I've had kale in the USA, it's been cooked or baked like other plants in the brassica oleracea family. Okay, some people eat it raw like in smoothies or salads and have decided that the taste doesn't bother them. Why assume they couldn't make that decision for themselves or that they're missing out on some sort of ancient wisdom?
- HarryHirsch 7y agoIt's that in the US it's a fashion vegetable that is too coarse to be eaten raw. If you want fresh greens on your sandwich you are better advised with watercress, arugula or spinach.
- undersuit 7y agoJust raw kale on my medium rare burger is one of my favorite flavor combos.
- honestoHeminway 7y agoThe pythons where right all along. Its conspirancid!
- mig4ng 7y agoEverytime I read "resilience" I instantly remember "antifragility" concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book Antifragile goes in more depth about stress causing improvement in systems (therefore antifragility), both in human body and other systems (economics, social, political, etc).
- decebalus1 7y agoEvery time I read "antifragility" I instantly remember a web of pseudo-science babble built around a core of repackaged bullshit and regurgitated by someone who comes off as a whiner and an arrogant ass at the same time.
- yathern 7y agoThere are very valid criticisms of Nassim. However, only one person seems whiney and arrogant when you make those criticisms like that.
- nradov 7y agoHis whole "antifragility" concept is mostly just cherry picked examples with little basis in science or true systems analysis. He has extremely high self confidence which many people confuse with actual knowledge. Don't take it too seriously, it's just entertainment.
- ksdale 7y agoI've thought that "antifragility" as a concept has been a useful way to think about a lot of different things, could you clarify what you mean by true systems analysis? I'm always interested in learning more about this stuff!
- jgalt212 7y ago> He has extremely high self confidence Agreed, and I would add he's extremely combative with those of opposing view points. So much so, that he spends large portions of his books (and social media posts) not expounding upon his theories and why they are right, but why his opposition is so stupid and wrong. In any event, I do think many/most of the things Talib expounds upon are correct/have merit. The best way to read his is probably through via second hand accounts of his work.
- ljcn 7y agoVery interesting. Will add it to the (already large) "eat lots of (and a good variety of) fruit and veg and do enough exercise" pile of life advice.
- jnty 7y agoI get this for vegetables, but surely the 'strategy' for a lot of fruit is that they are tasty when ripe and get eaten so that the seed is spread?
- jrkatz 7y agoSome animals are better than others for eating and spreading seeds. If a plant could choose it might prefer birds eat its fruit, especially over animals with molars that crack the seeds. Not coincidentally, the active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, impacts mammals but not birds.
- purple_ducks 7y ago> Not coincidentally, the active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, impacts mammals but not birds. It is coincidental. Evolution doesn't plan.
- Yeehaw789 7y agoUnderstanding this must be a prerequisite to commenting on this article. Else you're just wasting time. edit: assuming 'coincidental' doesn't mean there is no framework at all in which all of this happens. That would also be wrong.
- DennisP 7y agoSaying it's not coincidental does not mean it's planned. The whole point is that random variations that are advantageous are the ones that survive; that's not coincidence, it's consequence.
- ip26 7y agoThere's different ways to look at it. Evolution doesn't plan, and the development of this or that compound is driven by random mutation- but it reliably exhibits all kinds of emergent behaviors, like evolutionary arms races, convergent evolution, and so forth. Like many other systems with feedback, given a set of constraints it reliably trends towards a local optima.
- raintrees 7y agoThis information seems to combine well with information offered by Mark Sissons of "Primal Lifestyle" fame. I am currently exploring that specific avenue, I have lost over 10 pounds in 2 weeks, and it does not seem to be all based on water retention. I am awaiting blood work lab results to make sure I do not have anything out of whack, and if I get a green light, I'll continue. Insulin response is quite a weighty subject to study, and the Standard American Diet (I bet some love the initials of that) appears to aggravate that system within us. YMMV, consult with your health partner expert.
- leshow 7y agoAll that's telling you is that you're in a caloric deficit, which is probably a result of restricting the food groups you are eating. You often see this with people who do a low carb diet. They lose a bunch of weight initially, and think it was because carbohydrates were making them fat. The reality is they just eliminated one of the 3 big macronutrients, and as a result their caloric intake went down.
- kareemm 7y agoI’m not sure this is true. As you ramp down eg carbs you ramp up protein and fat, sometimes significantly. It’s not clear that a caloric deficit is the reason you’re losing weight.
- phkahler 7y agoThere are a lot of people, especially on HN, that think delta_weight = calories_in - calories_burned is all there is to it. There is a lot of truth in that, but it seems to not be the whole story. Some eating habits cause us to eat more or less, while others seem to change our metabolism. What you eat and when you eat it seem to make a difference beyond just that simple equation.
- anthonypasq 7y ago> What you eat and when you eat it seem to make a difference beyond just that simple equation. evidence?
- Nasrudith 7y agoI can't help but think this line of claims has an eerie resemblance to homeopathy, naturalism, and assorted fallacies mixed within. Not hard disproof but enough to raise alarm bells and frustrating to try to pick through truth from the dubious. Oxidation both being damaging in too much and having a purpose? Perfectly consistent with prior health experience and toxicology that adding something everywhere like a toddler doesn't generally help. Communication with herbivores? That is assuming too many mechanisms and ascribing agency which doesn't exist. Self-propagation can look remarkably like agency but it isn't it. If a plant puts energy into making its fruits delicious to an animal and gets its seeds distribuited far and wide that plant will spread more than the one whose fruit is horrifyingly toxic. Never did a plant decide "lets be tasty".
- Yeehaw789 7y agoHomeopathy and something that is scientifically verifiable is already at odds with each other. Also 'a plant putting energy' into anything specific other than existing implies agency, doesn't it? Evolution is hard to understand and I distrust anyone who claims to have figured it out fully. Being tasty and toxic doesn't exclude itself simply because we like to think that. I think the whole point of the article is that we don't understand things nearly as much as we think we do. Especially the part about caffeine is fascinating. It'll probably require a paradigm shift to make sense of it all. I have a hunch but I can't articulate it right now.
- leshow 7y agoThis sounds like a gross exaggeration: > Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout. I find it hard to believe that they didn't benefit at all from a workout because they took vitamin C or E. I'd like to see the methodology of this study if that's really the conclusion they came to.
- refurb 7y agoHere is the study if you want to dig into it![1] We know exercise improve insulin resistance and glucose uptake, so that's the benefit of exercise they measured. It's actually not that surprising. Vitamin C and E have anti-oxidant properties. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated during metabolism. Generally we think of them as being bad since they can damage molecules in the body, but it appears that ROS are actually a signal to the body that causes it to improve cardiovascular fitness. Take too much vitamin C and E and you're blocking that signal. Derek Lowe has a nice blog post on it.[2] It's a good lesson in Chesterson's Fence. Before you tear down the fence (ROS), you may want to double check why it's there in the first place. [1]https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903485106.short?rss=1 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903485106.sho... [2]https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2009/05/13/exercise_and_vitamins_now_wait_a_minute_ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2009/05/13/ex...
- leshow 7y agoThanks for the link. IMO that's a pretty narrow definition of what constitutes "benefit". You could say that about what they call a workout too I guess.
- LinuxBender 7y agoThey should also be careful with E. Most supplements only have α-Tocopherol and not gamma. The imbalance increases risk of prostate cancer in males. Some studies found that increasing selenium offset the risk, but there is a point of diminishing returns where selenium becomes toxic.
- nikofeyn 7y agothe headline remains me of the short film by adam curtis how we are all becoming richard nixon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA
- hirundo 7y agoLow levels of stress are health-inducing on the individual organism in the form of hormesis. Similarly, low levels of stress can benefit a population, e.g. predation on a herd of ungulates results in a healthier herd. So too little of bad things is also a bad thing, including toxicity and even death itself. When too little evil is evil, it makes ethics complicated.
- im3w1l 7y agoI can't help but imagine monsters coming out at night and killing the homeless. I think most people would in fact consider that a bad thing.
- perl4ever 7y agoCf. Cliff Claven's Buffalo Theory.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago> When too little evil is evil, it makes ethics complicated. I have considered the same thought, but I always dismiss it as possible true, but too unlikely to occur to be worth including in ethical calculus. Do you think it actually happens in real life? Such profoundly little evil happening that things start to suck?
- SllX 7y agoIt’s worth noting that one of the more successful ways to evolve is to be so appealing to humans that we cultivate the species and farm it. Incidentally, we are the only species on the planet that will sit there with our mouth burning from a jalapeño and wonder, “how can we make this hotter?”
- MisterOctober 7y agoYep, this is more or less the thesis of M. Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire,' which, whatever one thinks of his stance or other works, is a thought-provoking read [misguided treatment of Appleseed expert W.E. Jones aside]
- kpU8efre7r 7y ago+1 for Botany of Desire Great book.
- hinkley 7y agoSomeone made a joke last week about 'dogs domesticating us' and I pointed out that may not be quite as ha-ha crazy as it sounds. There's also a thing about jackfruit and elephants? Aside from tool users they're the primary consumer, and they'll grab one while they're on the march and eat it when it's break time.
- tracker1 7y agoNot so sure... considering we tend to eventually isolate a few characteristics and bread widely for them, practically eliminating most variety and creating huge mono-crop environments. Regarding another thread, if plants could chose their characteristics I would imagine we'd see anti-veg memes much like we see anti-meat memes. While there are carnivores out there as a lifestyle, it's nothing compared to what over a century of SDA has brought to veganism.
- SllX 7y agoI agree with you insofar as what you said properly applies to industrial scale agriculture. Mono cultures are easier to scale with fewer people, and only about 1% of the workforce in the US, maybe less, is a farmer in any meaningful capacity despite the sheer quantity of food that we grow and even export. We have only been doing industrial scale agriculture for about two hundred years though, and we’ve been farming for at least eleven thousand years.
- a0-prw 7y agoStrange how I instinctively knew this as a kid ;)
- stevespang 7y agoMoises Velasquez-Manoff has a master of arts degree, no science degrees or background even remotely related to nutrition or biology or aging. This article is hocus pocus.
- noetic_techy 7y agoI hate to say it and know I'm going to get a lot of flack especially from vegans, which I have a lot of respect for from an ethical standpoint. Realize that my critic comes purely from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint. So here goes: The growing body of evidence is that humans are not evolutionary cut out to eat plants to the level we do today. This article somewhat reinforces that point. The reason we stand out from other apes is likely the fact that we diverged to become a carnivorous ape roughly 3 million years ago, leading to our massive brain size as well as other abilities. Evidence: -Bone analysis of our ancestors indicates they were primarily carnivorous over the last 3 million years before the advent of agriculture. Probably only 10-15% of our food was plant based. That puts us in the same place as wolves and bears in the food chain. -Humans require vitamin B12 to thrive, which can only come from animal sources or certain bacteria (vegans must supplement their diet). -Your gut structure closely matches that of a carnivore, not a herbivore. Just because you can tolerate plants doesn't mean you should. -Humans are the only living primate adapted for endurance running. This was likely to out last running prey. -The healthiest populations on the planet are those that still maintain hunter gatherer lifestyles with no spill over of modern food. Plenty of anthropological field research pointing this out. -Humans are among the few mammals that don't produce vitamin C naturally. A sign we primarily got this from eating animal organs since access to citrus fruit is seasonal. -The prevailing theory is that our large brain capacity came along with the fact that we high and easy to access sources of Omega-3 fats. Fish or large game primarily. There is also a related theory that we were primarily aquatic apes, since we also have a lot of adaptations for water. -Tapeworms: Without infecting a human host, at least four species of tapeworm would be unable to reproduce. Humans are a definitive host for them. The only other mammals to be definitive hosts for tapeworms are carnivores like lions and hyenas. -Smaller canine teeth compared to great apes indicates they were less used for male to male conflict like we see in great apes, and more so used for meat eating. This falls in line with the time frame we see a switch to carnivore. -Interestingly, we have very powerful livers for detoxification and a very strong ability to smell rot, decay and decomposition relative to other animals. This suggests we may have evolved first as scavengers then grew into hunting more. -Egyptian mummies are the first times we see heart disease and tooth decay, as well as less robust skeletal features. In fact anthropologist recognize pre and post agricultural specimens pretty easily. As I read this article I can only see another drop in the bucket that reinforces the point: Humans are not meant eat this many plant. We keep fooling ourselves with this notion that hormetic responses are "good for you" and "toughen you up". Its like telling a wolf that eating a salad is "good for you". Sure you can't feed the planet without agriculture nor can we feasibly go back to being hunter gatherers, and the vegans do hold the ethical high ground. However if the question is simply: "What are humans evolved to eat." The answer is right in our face and our modern culture hates to accept it: meat. Primarily nose to tail. Vegan diets tend to be healthy in the short term especially when you switch from the Standard American Diet, and deleterious in the long term without serious hacks to make up for nutrient deficiencies and the accumulation of plant toxins. Look at the high rates of infertility in vegan communities, the likely culprit is plant toxin accumulation and malnutrition. Especially when you look at the research involving the long term accumulation of plant oxylates.