331–340 of 412 posts
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Change in complex system is risky. Some people are risk averse.
Is lack of change in complex systems safe? I'd guess it's more that complex systems are inherently risky.
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I make that argument, but I would never say "It's all perfectly harmless." The point is that the technique used to produce an organism isn't its self harmful. The question is whether the organism is harmful. Resistance to disease is good. Lower nutrient density is bad. It really doesn't matter whether we got here by selective breeding or modifying genes directly.
We didn't set out to lower nutrient density, though, that was a side effect of ignoring it and focusing on other things which we thought were good.
I know geeks love Norman Borlaug, but there was a catch: the new high-yield varieties are dependent on fertilizers made from fossil fuels. These plants grow fast and have more carbs and less of everything else. There needs to be a second Green Revolution, this time sustainable.
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Completely unscientific - but when you see programs on TV about people that eat a lot, the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients, I've been wondering the same thing.
> the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients This type of food is - coincidentally - always extremely high in calories. But the relationship is orthogonal. You can make processed non-nutritious food that is low in calories, and you can make healthy food that is high in calories. The former happens rarely.
6 raw eggs lemon juice (1 lemon, squeezed) 378 calories in total, of which 227 are fat and 144 protein. just enough sugar to help you digest it without bloat. awesome anabolic effects from the eggs.
lunch: 6 raw eggs 200ml whole unhomogenised milk (raw if possible) similar effect but even more anabolic
dinner: 200-300g of fresh steak (beef) cooked blue. can be replaced with lamb or other nutritious meats, but certainly not chicken breast which has nearly no nutritional value whatsoever compared to something like sardines
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We didn't set out to lower nutrient density, though, that was a side effect of ignoring it and focusing on other things which we thought were good.
Yup, that's true. And the things we were focussing on are good. They're just not everything.
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I wonder if there's a relationship to the obesity epidemic, especially since it's not just humans that are getting larger but also lab animals, pets, and wild animals living close to humans [1]. What if we're compelled to eat more calories when we're not getting enough nutrients in our diets? This would impact any animals consuming lower quality fruits and vegetables. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.628
Anecdotally, this has been my personal experience. I have gone through phases of my life where I ate a lot of junk food. I would feel constantly hungry during those phases, until I ate something nutritious, green and easily-digestible, like steamed broccoli or green peas.
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People I know who grew up in Asia remark consistently that the chicken here in the US is larger, softer, and tasteless. They are used to smaller chickens and toothier meat with a stronger taste. It is probably breeding practices here, to promote attributes other than taste.
Chickens have been bred in the US to maximize yield to feed ratios and breast size. This news article has a figure from a paper from the University of Alberta showing chickens breeds from different decades as well as their size given the same amount of feed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/chickens-are-4-times-...
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Agricultural policy in the US shapes a lot of this, though, via subsidies. The financial system also shapes this through its lending policies. The implements of industrialized farming are what the ag lending sector is designed around; try to step out of that mainstream and you will have trouble accessing capital. Wheat, corn, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the US gov't and vegetables are not at all. Every lit…
That's because wheat, corn, and soybeans are staples, while vegetables are luxury food items, especially fresh ones. At no point in history, regular people in agricultural societies ate as much vegetables as we do right now. The diets has always been based in overwhelming majorities on grains, roots and beans, and in places with lactose tolerance, also on dairy. A single bell pepper today costs something between $1 a…
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I suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible. This seems really, really hard to regulate.
When reading comments like this, which are good-natured, and a natural response, do you ever think “wouldn’t be great if we as humans had more trust built into our systems, and people actually making a best-effort attempt at honouring that trust”? Instead of everything being a scam until proven otherwise, and even then the scam is probably just one level deeper in what triggered the interest in that product in the fi…