61–70 of 139 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.
I know this is the conventional wisdom but it doesn't really make sense. Controlling a sperm whale's body doesn't seem like a hard computational problem.
It's still a bit bizarre watching the western world switch form carbs good, fat bad to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade.
...to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade Not at all. I remember it was a thing in the seventies. The low-carbs diet has been viciously attacked for many decades, so it comes and goes every few years. I first heard of it when Atkins popularized it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet See how Wikipedia says it's "a fad diet" and its claims "questionable", implying that it doesn't work at all. But now…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.
I know this is the conventional wisdom but it doesn't really make sense. Controlling a sperm whale's body doesn't seem like a hard computational problem.
Also, GULO is one of many interesting genes to contemplate resurrecting.
I thought this was known. When my first born was a toddler, she would go into the fridge and eat butter. I expressed concern to my grandmother, a life long nurse who was born in 1920 said to me; “the brain knows that it needs fats to grow, just let her eat butter. It is what her body is saying she needs” She is super smart and it wasnt an issue otherwise.
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"The modern stuff"?
We’ve selectively bred our fruit for a millennia or two to make it significantly larger and sweeter than the versions we evolved with. The advent of pesticides as exacerbated the problem, as pesticide sprayed fruits produce a much lower level of useful anti-oxidants.
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> I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing. I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says. > Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also incl…
> "I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says." To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring t…
Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet? IDK.
One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat. This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones. Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Well it's a massive source of free…
KVJ Bible Psalms: 63:5 (there are many others)
> My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat,
Thoreau in Walden,
> I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says." To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring t…
In an ideal world, a "balanced diet" would mean eating only locally, in season and have none of this fad diet nonsense (vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, keto, etc). This would produce a universal diet that adapts to environment, wild life and the success and failures of local agriculture. It would be a cyclical diet, ever changing. Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet…
Also, literally every religious tradition in the world follows the "keto" diet on a semi-regular basis: it's called fasting.
One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat. This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones. Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Well it's a massive source of free…
Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Wait - I thought hyenas were specifically bone-busting / eating: "Spotted hyenas are some of Africa's most proficient predators. A frenzied scrum of them can dismantle and devour a 400-pound zebra in 25 minutes. An adul…
Another part of that same article, talking about a rare hyena that made it to old age, mentions "She still had perfect teeth, too, since her rank assured her the best cuts of meat, whereas the teeth of lower-ranking animals get chipped and worn from crunching bones", which fits in with the bones not being something that they actually want.
So maybe if an animal is killed by a hyena pack that is small enough for everyone to get a good chunk of meat, they leave the less desired bones behind?