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Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

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Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#191

Post by hnbad »

jongjong wrote: post #126

It's not surprising... I mean look at them. There is an evolutionary reason why insects look disgusting to us. Same reason why feces look disgusting - We're not supposed to eat that.

They're spooky because they move erratically and their bodies are so different from ours that we can't intuit where they are looking or what they are about to do.

Disgust is largely a learned response, i.e. cultural. Many people find crutaceans disgusting to look at. Rodents are also extremely polarizing. Personally I find dogs mildly disgusting because they often drool, roll in dirt and residue of urine and fecal matter can cling to their coat since they don't clean themselves like cats do. On the other hand some people find cats disgusting exactly because they clean their butts with the same tongues they use to clean their coat and maybe you.

The reason most people find insects digusting isn't the insects themselves but that insects are a signal of decay. Spoiled and rotting food attracts flies and other insects, so food with insects on it is unappealing. Countries that don't have a tradition of dairy consumption often find cheese disgusting because it is practically rotten milk.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#193

Post by tommit »

washbrain wrote: post #67
tuatoru wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years I've seen several female friends try to stay vegan. One managed a decade before she couldn't put up with the anemia any more. The others quit sooner, because of weight loss, malnutrition, and other issues. It seems humans were evolved to scavenge animals as well as eating plants. It's not just protein, it's iron and fats, and a few other things.

Maybe it was challenging before, but honestly, getting enough iron and protein in a vegan diet today is pretty trivial. There are plant based alternatives to more or less everything these days. I'm vegetarian,, and only for 3 or 4 years, but honestly there's nothing really missing at all for me.

On every HN thread about meat there are people claiming they know dozens of people that nearly died because they stopped eating meat, completely neglecting that there are entire cultures that eat pretty much no meat[0]. Or the fact that there are numerous studies about how we eat too much meat and how it affects our health[1]. Sorry, I just don't believe it. Or my experience is just vastly different, because nobody I know that went vegan had side-effects as described by these comments. It's like you said, getting your nutrients on a vegan diet is trivial nowadays, especially if you live in a developed country. The only explanation I have is that people are scared to lose their burgers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country [1]: https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/new-study-finds-links-between...

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#194

Post by mypastself »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #145
justthinkhn wrote: post #119

Don’t eat the bugs. You have an innate disgust reaction to bugs and to the idea of eating them. It evolved over millions of years. Heed nature’s warning. They only eat bugs in places where it was historically necessary due to extreme famine. These activists trying to get you to eat bugs don’t have your best interests at heart. Eat meat. It is one of the great liberties man enjoys.

What's with the sudden uptick in people talking about eating bugs and eating meat (and liberties, billionaires, elites?)? Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.

They’re likely alluding to articles posted on The World Economic Forum’s website. WEF is a group of wealthy, influential individuals whose goals include building what they believe is a more sustainable global economy (and society). Some of their more infamous articles have become memes (“You’ll own nothing and be happy”, “You will eat the bugs”).

The kookier versions of anti-WEF arguments veer into conspiracy theory territory, but there’s something to be said about out-of-touch wealthy individuals attempting to wield their influence to reduce e.g. developing nations use of cheap-but-nonrenewable energy sources, or reduce their consumption of more efficient sources of protein.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#195

Post by ZeroGravitas »

hsn915 wrote: post #186
nivertech wrote: post #109

Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases. Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high. Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce an…

> Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. This is the most important bit. Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.

I thought the generally accepted science was that humans can learn disgust reactions socially, so that they are more adaptable on a non-evolutionary timescale.

> The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/

I know a bunch of people who have gone off specific foods after being coincidentally sick and associating the two things.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#196

Post by hnbad »

tommit wrote: post #185
ferruck wrote: post #175

Quoted post unavailable.

Yeah, I have noticed that with a lot of HN threads that resolve around eating meat. It gets to a level of tinfoil-hat that I'm absolutely not used to on this website, but maybe I've simply not been here long enough. The other day someone unironically said they feel there is "a war on protein" going on, because apparently it's more likely to have an "elite intellectual class" in the background, scheming to deprive us…

HN has always been tolerant of this kind of fringe, it comes with the territory of its (right) libertarian bent. The fringe just didn't have as much political potential until a few years ago and has been emboldened to be more open about its views. They've also had years to test out ways to be open about their beliefs while hiding behind a guise of "civility" or "curiosity" and spreading blatant lies only to discard them and move on to the next talking point when caught.

HN is incapable of fixing this "problem" because doing so would go against its supposed neutrality and impartiality while the people in question are usually lucid enough not to resort to outright slurs or insults that would allow them to be banned for a breach of civility.

As a German I have heard many stories about the nice neighbor or uncle who just happened to actively go on to do war crimes despite otherwise being such a nice person. Civility is not a basis for productive debate, it's a shield for reprehensible views you wouldn't dare to spell out in polite company.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#197

Post by ZeroGravitas »

mypastself wrote: post #194
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with the sudden uptick in people talking about eating bugs and eating meat (and liberties, billionaires, elites?)? Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.

They’re likely alluding to articles posted on The World Economic Forum’s website. WEF is a group of wealthy, influential individuals whose goals include building what they believe is a more sustainable global economy (and society). Some of their more infamous articles have become memes (“You’ll own nothing and be happy”, “You will eat the bugs”). The kookier versions of anti-WEF arguments veer into conspiracy theory…

I checked out their site, their news section has this link at the moment:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-world-econom...

> Own nothing, be happy. You may have heard the phrase. It started life as a screenshot, culled from the internet by an anonymous antisemitic account on the image board 4chan. “Own nothing, be happy – The Jew World Order 2030,″ said the post, which went viral among extremists.

Well, that's reassuring.

Meanwhile, the actual content on the WEF site is monumentally boring:

> Greater action on food loss to ensure more food is preserved for human consumption

> According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, globally 13.8% of food is lost from harvest to retail. And, of course, mitigating food loss also brings cost savings and economic benefits, while reporting can help assess the efforts to minimise food loss.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#198

Post by easytiger »

sacrosancty wrote: post #120
noduerme wrote: post #91

My modest goal these days is to set myself and my descendants up so that none of us ever has to eat bugs. I don't care what it costs. Life isn't worth living if you can't happily chomp a steak, suck down a martini and light a cigarette at the table. It's not to piss people off. It's for enjoyment. Fuck people who can't enjoy life and want to make everything a disgusting misery for other people. If eating cockroaches…

There is a lot of puritanicalishism in current western culture. I miss the 1990's when people were excited for the future and the upward course of human history.

How is eating bugs to satisfy the scalability and reporducibility goals of a software developer who spends hundreds of billions lobbying governments to change what i eat because it meets both his pseudo moral and investment portfolio agendas "the upward course of human history."?

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#199

Post by ferruck »

tommit wrote: post #185
ferruck wrote: post #175

Quoted post unavailable.

Yeah, I have noticed that with a lot of HN threads that resolve around eating meat. It gets to a level of tinfoil-hat that I'm absolutely not used to on this website, but maybe I've simply not been here long enough. The other day someone unironically said they feel there is "a war on protein" going on, because apparently it's more likely to have an "elite intellectual class" in the background, scheming to deprive us…

The most interesting part - at least for me - is how unapologetic such conspiracies can be expressed in these "no more meat" threads, whereas other conspiracies in other threads are heavily downvoted and countered through comments. I slowly tend to believe that at least a vocal minority of the Bay Area tech bros are really creeping out on the idea that they might be loosing their beloved meat.

Just for disclosure: I eat meat myself, I love it and I want to continue to do so. But I also see the need to reduce meat consumption generally and personally, for health and ecological reasons. But billionaires wanting to forbid meat consumption to follow some new world order? Please stop the shit-chat. At least here in Germany meat production is still heavily subsidized [0].

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/tierwirtschaft-erhaelt-13-...

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#200

Post by BiteCode_dev »

lelanthran wrote: post #52
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have been eating insects for a long time. In south africa they eat ants, china they eat scorpio, thailand they eat crickets... The ants and the scorpio are quite tasty IMO. On the other hand, I know of places where their casual vegetables are dangerous because their hold traces of animals feces with pathogens but you couldn't tell when buying them. And finally, I remember eating the best eggs ever from my moth…

> Humans have been eating insects for a long time. In south africa they eat ants, china they eat scorpio, thailand they eat crickets... I'm in South Africa. I've never heard of the ants thing, but it is most definitely NOT NORMAL over here to eat those things; rich people may do it as a delicacy, like they would eat caviar, but it never was normal to eat insects over here.

Normal for who ? There are 11 official languages in SA, the population is very diverse, and indigenous people have different habits than city dwellers.
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