31–40 of 62 posts
The editorializing of the headline here is changing the argument. The article (titled "The Myth of Big, Bad Gluten") is arguing that gluten may not itself be bad, but rather the body's reaction. This new title implies gluten intolerance is a myth, which is contradicted by stuff like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21224837 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it so urgent to kill this? It does nobody harm if some people choose to avoid gluten, and greatly benefits coeliac sufferers who have increasing good nutrition options.
anecdote: my wife has had exema her entire life. after a particularly bad episode, we eventually we tried an elimination diet methodically eliminating one food category at a time. it took about 2 months to rotate through all the possible suspects but in the end, eliminating wheat completely cleared the problem. then, one morning we had meatless sausage and she had a bad reoccurrence. first ingredient on the sausage?…
There are many thousands of active users on Hacker News. If there are 50 active users over an hours time looking at a given topic, and those 50 active users know an average of 50 people fairly well, that means there's potentially ~2500 anecdotes for any given topic.
Say something happens in .1% of the general population, but it's noteworthy enough to be an anecdote. For any given topic, it's quite possible to drastically over represent that anecdote, as it's quite possible that there will be ~3 such anecdotes for any given topic and the normal case, which isn't especially noteworthy, gets no mention.
Lesson: At a large enough scale, one-in-a-thousand anecdotes can occur several times for a given topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it so urgent to kill this? It does nobody harm if some people choose to avoid gluten, and greatly benefits coeliac sufferers who have increasing good nutrition options.
anecdote: my wife has had exema her entire life. after a particularly bad episode, we eventually we tried an elimination diet methodically eliminating one food category at a time. it took about 2 months to rotate through all the possible suspects but in the end, eliminating wheat completely cleared the problem. then, one morning we had meatless sausage and she had a bad reoccurrence. first ingredient on the sausage?…
Not one single mention of RoundUp or any of the other toxic chemicals farmers spray on crops (especially wheat) right before/during harvest to kill them and dry them out faster. Like the article says, we as a species have eaten wheat for thousands of years with little problem. Why now? The correlation between gluten intolerance and the rise of late-crop RoundUp raises some big questions.
Not one single mention of RoundUp or any of the other toxic chemicals farmers spray on crops (especially wheat) right before/during harvest to kill them and dry them out faster. Like the article says, we as a species have eaten wheat for thousands of years with little problem. Why now? The correlation between gluten intolerance and the rise of late-crop RoundUp raises some big questions.
Um... The whole point here is that unscientific nonsense needs to be killed. And specifically that non-Celiac gluten sensitivity has no real evidence for it. So your response is to trot out an equally unfounded (AFAIK) hippie-inspired pseudo-theory. Seriously?
This one actually seems testable. Get a bunch of volunteer non-Celiac "gluten sensitives" and put them on a controlled diet. Measure some objective physiological metrics. Blindly introduce gluten to random subjects. Determine which metrics, if any, change in response to gluten.
And then, to check out placebo/nocebo, you tell all the subjects that gluten will be introduced into their diets that day, and continue monitoring the metrics.
A similiar experiment could be performed on a random sample of ordinary people, with glyphosate.
The editorializing of the headline here is changing the argument. The article (titled "The Myth of Big, Bad Gluten") is arguing that gluten may not itself be bad, but rather the body's reaction. This new title implies gluten intolerance is a myth, which is contradicted by stuff like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21224837 .
Being shot with a gun isn't bad. It's the destruction of tissue from the kinetic energy of the bullet that's bad.
The point is that there's (apparently) a great deal of variability among individuals, with respect to gluten.
“If eating wheat was so bad for us, it’s hard to imagine that populations that ate it would have tolerated it for 10,000 years,” Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies lactase persistence, told me. Sarah, turn on your brain. What about Game Theory? What if wheat is addictive and mankind did not enslave Wheat but wheat (and possible other crops) "enslaved" mankind? There is evide…
“If eating wheat was so bad for us, it’s hard to imagine that populations that ate it would have tolerated it for 10,000 years,” Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies lactase persistence, told me. Sarah, turn on your brain. What about Game Theory? What if wheat is addictive and mankind did not enslave Wheat but wheat (and possible other crops) "enslaved" mankind? There is evide…
The reason we're eating wheat even though we're not made for it is because we could support larger populations on that versus hunting and gathering. Farming societies eventually won, even though hunters and gatherers were more healthy, because farming societies have a food surplus (which it can store), and can then afford to wage war and expand. If you look at skeletons from before and after farming, you see that hun…
If that theory were correct, Asian people would be the least healthy on the planet. When in fact the people of eg Japan have been among the most healthy for thousands of years.
Caucasians - for example in Scandinavia - getting taller did not equate directly to being far healthier than their Japanese peers.
Height increases over time are driven by the type of diet consumed. The Japanese diet did not lead to height, however it did lead to health and longevity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason we're eating wheat even though we're not made for it is because we could support larger populations on that versus hunting and gathering. Farming societies eventually won, even though hunters and gatherers were more healthy, because farming societies have a food surplus (which it can store), and can then afford to wage war and expand. If you look at skeletons from before and after farming, you see that hun…
There's zero scientific basis for the claim that height inherently has anything to do with health, such that taller people are healthier. If that theory were correct, Asian people would be the least healthy on the planet. When in fact the people of eg Japan have been among the most healthy for thousands of years. Caucasians - for example in Scandinavia - getting taller did not equate directly to being far healthier t…