5 ms·

I feel there are way more complex systems that science haven't fully sorted out, not even close to it. Gut flora, mitrochondria, immune systems, etc. I hope at

I feel there are way more complex systems that science haven't fully sorted out, not even close to it. Gut flora, mitrochondria, immune systems, etc. I hope at the end of the day we haven't harmed a generation of future humans with ultraprocessed food, introduction of forever-chemicals, microplastics, so on and so forth...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
j45 4y ago
Agreed. My health improved when I switched to clarified butter (ghee) and left the “healthy” oils with their surprisingly lower burning temperature. The temperature was not the reason I switched
- rogers18445 4y ago
  Vegetable oils require an industrial process of extraction - with high temperatures and hexane, and the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale. Vegetable oils don't come from actual vegetables, they come from inedible waste which for millions of years has been discarded - seeds etc. Edible oils are those that are not produced from something that was never food.
  - andor 4y ago
    "Vegetable oils require an industrial process of extraction - with high temperatures and hexane" You're talking about refined oils. This method of extraction has a higher yield and is therefore less expensive. It also increases the smoke point of the oil, making it more suitable for high-temperature frying and deep frying. While I don't know what's available to consumers where you live, solvents and other chemical treatment are not required for vegetable oil production. Seeds can be cold extracted. The result is much more expensive though. "the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale" This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods. "they come from inedible waste which for millions of years has been discarded - seeds etc" Seeds are not waste. Do you think bread is made from waste? The notion of using "waste" comes from the production of refined oils. The seeds are initially pressed, resulting in oil and meal as the byproduct. The meal still contains some oil which is extracted with solvents. After the solvent treatment, the meal is used as animal food.
    - m0llusk 4y ago
      There is a detailed four article series about this which was recently shared here on Hacker News. The first article is here: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease , but the second and third articles probably address this most directly. >> "the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale" > > This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods. That is not true. There is evidence that humans have sought out fats and oils for most of our history. Lard and other rendered fats are made from heating animal fats directly with modest heat being sufficient to liquify animal fats. Butter is made from churning milk. Olive oil and Coconut oil are made by squeezing fruits. All of that is quite different from modern vegetable oil processing which requires high temperatures which in turn convert a fraction of the oil into transfats. When oils refined in these ways are then used for cooking they become increasingly dangerous as they are heated.
      - imtringued 4y ago
        And when food is deep fried, the oil is often being reused and reheated repeatedly until it is no longer fit for human consumption at all. This has then lead to the popular misconception that fat inherently makes you fat.
nszceta 4y ago
Look no further than a basic hormone - leptin - to see how you can't give people more of it to lose weight while in fact leptin is the main mediator of obesity. Modern medicine hasn't produced a magic leptin pill to stop obesity because the biology is very complicated. You can't just inject leptin and lose weight (unless you don't produce leptin if you were severely damaged in an accident).
- moremetadata 4y ago
  Ursolic Acid. Check it out!
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  Recent research suggests leptin doesn't really regulate body weight in both directions. It only really protects the body from weight loss, not weight gain. Think of it like a thermostat with leptin being a temperature sensor hooked up to the heater, and the gravitostat is a temperature sensor hooked up the A/C. If you're trying to make the house cooler it doesn't matter how much you tell the heater not to turn on.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    Why though? I’m a little out of date on this, but it seems leptin does strongly inhibit appetite when injected directly into the CSF, but mostly fails to do this in real life because of “leptin resistance.” For example, high triglycerides, block leptin transport across the blood brain barrier.
nicoburns 4y ago
Which is not even to mention the brain!
candiodari 4y ago
Ultraprocessed food ... vs natural food. Look up "Moederkoorn" (Claviceps purpurea). It's a fungus, grows on natural wheat, and goes into bread, essentially impossible to avoid, almost worldwide spread. STILL totally untreatable. Results in slow painful near-certain death. There's a reason we switched to ultraprocessed foods. And that reason largely isn't money, but too many people dying from lack of protection against natural adversaries.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Ergotism ? There are no cure indeed but it's easily preventable, people would be dropping around you if it wasn't It has nothing to do with ultra processed food (unless you imagine people eating raw wheat straight from the plant), plenty of people live without that, just fine, if not better actually
- DuckFeathers 4y ago
  Wheat is only popular because it has been a starvation food for the Europeans for thousands of years. If you are not starving, there is little reason to eat it. The wheat seed has evolved complex phytotoxins as defense to protect itself from being eaten. We try to get rid of a lot of it using yeast and bacterial fermentation and cooking, but residue is enough to poison people to varying degrees. There are grains which are less toxic. Having said that, we may need to preserve a subculture to keep the practice if we ever need it (just for diversification purposes, in case we lose other grains to disease or change in climate).
corbulo 4y ago
Once you know enough to know we barely know anything it pushes you towards extreme nihilism of anyone who uses their credentials to definitively state they know anything. Seeing a headline about cow farts burning the earth down, breathing [or insert flavor of the month random daily behavior] linked to depression, and throw in a dash of chemical imbalance causes [problem only treated by highly profitable medication] is all enough to make me ask, maybe no one has the answers?
- hinkley 4y ago
  The anti intellectuals are unfortunately partially right. The best scientists are full of doubts. What you mostly get in the loud and certain set are emotionally scarred children who sought out science as a life raft, a way to control their environment by “understanding it”. We don’t understand shit, and the people who need you to think we do are broken. We mostly understand physical processes. The bits we do understand let’s us build trains, make them run on time, and stuff a supercomputer into your pocket that lets you argue with anyone in the world in real-time. That’s a lot. But it’s not comprehensive. Biology is just too complex to study by isolating a single variable. We are basically into linear algebra at this point to make any headway, are we not? Analyzing multivariate situations to isolate patterns.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    It's the political enhancement of the intellectual class that is its downfall. Thats what compels them to force it on others 'we have the answers' for something they have a <10% understanding of. It does select for a certain personality, but the ultimate cause is creating the situation for those kinds of broken souls to flourish to the detriment of everyone else. Biology is really difficult to investigate when you get to the sophistication of humans. Thats before the perverse incentives brought on by funding sources.
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      I enjoy science for it’s own sake, and resent all of the careerists and scientismists(?). I often wish it were less lucrative and prestigious.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

j45 4y ago

Agreed. My health improved when I switched to clarified butter (ghee) and left the “healthy” oils with their surprisingly lower burning temperature. The temperature was not the reason I switched

rogers18445 4y ago
Vegetable oils require an industrial process of extraction - with high temperatures and hexane, and the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale. Vegetable oils don't come from actual vegetables, they come from inedible waste which for millions of years has been discarded - seeds etc. Edible oils are those that are not produced from something that was never food.
- andor 4y ago
  "Vegetable oils require an industrial process of extraction - with high temperatures and hexane" You're talking about refined oils. This method of extraction has a higher yield and is therefore less expensive. It also increases the smoke point of the oil, making it more suitable for high-temperature frying and deep frying. While I don't know what's available to consumers where you live, solvents and other chemical treatment are not required for vegetable oil production. Seeds can be cold extracted. The result is much more expensive though. "the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale" This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods. "they come from inedible waste which for millions of years has been discarded - seeds etc" Seeds are not waste. Do you think bread is made from waste? The notion of using "waste" comes from the production of refined oils. The seeds are initially pressed, resulting in oil and meal as the byproduct. The meal still contains some oil which is extracted with solvents. After the solvent treatment, the meal is used as animal food.
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    There is a detailed four article series about this which was recently shared here on Hacker News. The first article is here: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease , but the second and third articles probably address this most directly. >> "the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale" > > This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods. That is not true. There is evidence that humans have sought out fats and oils for most of our history. Lard and other rendered fats are made from heating animal fats directly with modest heat being sufficient to liquify animal fats. Butter is made from churning milk. Olive oil and Coconut oil are made by squeezing fruits. All of that is quite different from modern vegetable oil processing which requires high temperatures which in turn convert a fraction of the oil into transfats. When oils refined in these ways are then used for cooking they become increasingly dangerous as they are heated.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      And when food is deep fried, the oil is often being reused and reheated repeatedly until it is no longer fit for human consumption at all. This has then lead to the popular misconception that fat inherently makes you fat.

nszceta 4y ago

Look no further than a basic hormone - leptin - to see how you can't give people more of it to lose weight while in fact leptin is the main mediator of obesity. Modern medicine hasn't produced a magic leptin pill to stop obesity because the biology is very complicated. You can't just inject leptin and lose weight (unless you don't produce leptin if you were severely damaged in an accident).

moremetadata 4y ago
Ursolic Acid. Check it out!
JamesBarney 4y ago
Recent research suggests leptin doesn't really regulate body weight in both directions. It only really protects the body from weight loss, not weight gain. Think of it like a thermostat with leptin being a temperature sensor hooked up to the heater, and the gravitostat is a temperature sensor hooked up the A/C. If you're trying to make the house cooler it doesn't matter how much you tell the heater not to turn on.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Why though? I’m a little out of date on this, but it seems leptin does strongly inhibit appetite when injected directly into the CSF, but mostly fails to do this in real life because of “leptin resistance.” For example, high triglycerides, block leptin transport across the blood brain barrier.

nicoburns 4y ago

Which is not even to mention the brain!

candiodari 4y ago

Ultraprocessed food ... vs natural food. Look up "Moederkoorn" (Claviceps purpurea). It's a fungus, grows on natural wheat, and goes into bread, essentially impossible to avoid, almost worldwide spread. STILL totally untreatable. Results in slow painful near-certain death. There's a reason we switched to ultraprocessed foods. And that reason largely isn't money, but too many people dying from lack of protection against natural adversaries.

lm28469 4y ago
Ergotism ? There are no cure indeed but it's easily preventable, people would be dropping around you if it wasn't It has nothing to do with ultra processed food (unless you imagine people eating raw wheat straight from the plant), plenty of people live without that, just fine, if not better actually
DuckFeathers 4y ago
Wheat is only popular because it has been a starvation food for the Europeans for thousands of years. If you are not starving, there is little reason to eat it. The wheat seed has evolved complex phytotoxins as defense to protect itself from being eaten. We try to get rid of a lot of it using yeast and bacterial fermentation and cooking, but residue is enough to poison people to varying degrees. There are grains which are less toxic. Having said that, we may need to preserve a subculture to keep the practice if we ever need it (just for diversification purposes, in case we lose other grains to disease or change in climate).

corbulo 4y ago

Once you know enough to know we barely know anything it pushes you towards extreme nihilism of anyone who uses their credentials to definitively state they know anything. Seeing a headline about cow farts burning the earth down, breathing [or insert flavor of the month random daily behavior] linked to depression, and throw in a dash of chemical imbalance causes [problem only treated by highly profitable medication] is all enough to make me ask, maybe no one has the answers?

hinkley 4y ago
The anti intellectuals are unfortunately partially right. The best scientists are full of doubts. What you mostly get in the loud and certain set are emotionally scarred children who sought out science as a life raft, a way to control their environment by “understanding it”. We don’t understand shit, and the people who need you to think we do are broken. We mostly understand physical processes. The bits we do understand let’s us build trains, make them run on time, and stuff a supercomputer into your pocket that lets you argue with anyone in the world in real-time. That’s a lot. But it’s not comprehensive. Biology is just too complex to study by isolating a single variable. We are basically into linear algebra at this point to make any headway, are we not? Analyzing multivariate situations to isolate patterns.
- corbulo 4y ago
  It's the political enhancement of the intellectual class that is its downfall. Thats what compels them to force it on others 'we have the answers' for something they have a <10% understanding of. It does select for a certain personality, but the ultimate cause is creating the situation for those kinds of broken souls to flourish to the detriment of everyone else. Biology is really difficult to investigate when you get to the sophistication of humans. Thats before the perverse incentives brought on by funding sources.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    I enjoy science for it’s own sake, and resent all of the careerists and scientismists(?). I often wish it were less lucrative and prestigious.