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What are your unpopular opinions about health / fitness?

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  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Jruzer wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    The use of the term "meant" leads to the question "meant by whom?" Especially since we are talking about things humans obviously CAN biologically do (here, consume dairy).

    I've linked this before, since it's interesting (IMO): http://www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/what-the-irish-ate-before-potatoes

    (Answer: largely dairy.)

    To me it could just as easily lead to "meant by what?"

    Evolution could answer that question.

    I think it depends on your worldview, and though I generally do agree with what you're saying. I'm just picking nits for the fun of it because I think this whole thread jumped the shark with the mansplaining pregnancy fat shaming.

    Is this the part where I call you baby to try to make things right now?

    I prefer "babe." ;-)

    I'm cool with the nitpicking, but I usually think when people use "meant" they are implicitly assuming some sort of purposeful or directed creation, which is not the normal idea of evolution as I understand it.

    My bigger issue, of course, is why wouldn't I be "meant" to eat something my ancestors have for ages and that I can digest quite easily and get nutrients from. (And you weren't saying we weren't, of course, but quite the opposite. That humans are adaptable omnivores and so by nature seem to be "meant" (meaning "adapted") to eat a ridiculous number of things we never ate until recently, many of which we invented, like bananas in their current form, or corn in same, is something I would not argue with!)

    If by "meant," someone is referring to the circumstances in which we evolved (as opposed to someone's intention), I would consider that to be unclear phrasing. That's just me, but I always think "meant" refers back to an intention.

    If I saw someone doing something dangerous that would lead to harm, I would never say "You aren't meant to do that." I would warn them about the harm that would likely result. I would say "You aren't meant to do that" if I saw someone doing something that was against a rule or regulation (that is, if I was being a busybody. I'd be more likely to mind my own business unless someone was going to get hurt).

    I'm also OK with going along with the fun. All language is metaphor, but sometimes our choices of words belie our understanding. To echo @janejellyroll, you wouldn't say that "humans aren't meant to eat cyanide". (At least I wouldn't.) You say that "cyanide is poisonous".

    The dose makes the poison.

    Sublethal doses of cyanide and cyanide compounds show moderate health benefits. :)



  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Chef_Barbell wrote: »
    SezxyStef wrote: »
    I can't believe this has turned into a discussion on what "meant" means...smh.

    Better than the mansplaining pregnancy. I guess. :/

    So glad we moved on from that....
  • Bry_Fitness70
    Bry_Fitness70 Posts: 2,480 Member
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    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    Jruzer wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    The use of the term "meant" leads to the question "meant by whom?" Especially since we are talking about things humans obviously CAN biologically do (here, consume dairy).

    I've linked this before, since it's interesting (IMO): http://www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/what-the-irish-ate-before-potatoes

    (Answer: largely dairy.)

    To me it could just as easily lead to "meant by what?"

    Evolution could answer that question.

    I think it depends on your worldview, and though I generally do agree with what you're saying. I'm just picking nits for the fun of it because I think this whole thread jumped the shark with the mansplaining pregnancy fat shaming.

    Is this the part where I call you baby to try to make things right now?

    I prefer "babe." ;-)

    I'm cool with the nitpicking, but I usually think when people use "meant" they are implicitly assuming some sort of purposeful or directed creation, which is not the normal idea of evolution as I understand it.

    My bigger issue, of course, is why wouldn't I be "meant" to eat something my ancestors have for ages and that I can digest quite easily and get nutrients from. (And you weren't saying we weren't, of course, but quite the opposite. That humans are adaptable omnivores and so by nature seem to be "meant" (meaning "adapted") to eat a ridiculous number of things we never ate until recently, many of which we invented, like bananas in their current form, or corn in same, is something I would not argue with!)

    If by "meant," someone is referring to the circumstances in which we evolved (as opposed to someone's intention), I would consider that to be unclear phrasing. That's just me, but I always think "meant" refers back to an intention.

    If I saw someone doing something dangerous that would lead to harm, I would never say "You aren't meant to do that." I would warn them about the harm that would likely result. I would say "You aren't meant to do that" if I saw someone doing something that was against a rule or regulation (that is, if I was being a busybody. I'd be more likely to mind my own business unless someone was going to get hurt).

    I'm also OK with going along with the fun. All language is metaphor, but sometimes our choices of words belie our understanding. To echo @janejellyroll, you wouldn't say that "humans aren't meant to eat cyanide". (At least I wouldn't.) You say that "cyanide is poisonous".

    To say that "meaning" is a religious argument doesn't mean that great father god in the sky dictated something, it means that the speaker understands there is an imposed framework on the universe. Perhaps I should have said that it's a philosophical statement. There are shades of meaning between "X isn't meant to do Y", "X shouldn't do Y", and "It is wrong for X to do Y."

    I get a little iffy about invoking natural selection to describe observed biological processes, because so often these explanations devolve into "just so stories." Q: Why do male robins have a red breast? A: Because robins with red breasts had an evolutionary advantage, either in breeding or in survival. It doesn't really explain anything. Natural selection is a blind process involving large numbers and random happenstance.

    I can also invoke natural selection to say that certain people with certain genetic mutations can digest lactose as adults, and thus are meant to eat dairy.

    Well said. I think another issue with using natural selection to determine what or how we should eat is that natural selection isn't necessarily about living the longest life or the one where we feel our best. It's about successful reproduction. Looking at what humans ate while we evolved won't necessarily help me be vibrant and healthy into my 80s -- that's a whole separate issue. To be "successful" from a biological POV looks rather different than my personal definition of success.

    Yes, good points.

    Jruzer's point (as well as yours) is also why I am queasy about the idea of "we used to do this, so it must be the way we were MEANT to eat."

    Beyond that, we ate what was available to us, that doesn't mean we were perfectly evolutionarily suited to just thoe foods and no others -- the diversity of the human diet (and our ability to adapt, a strength of ours!) says otherwise.

    I brought this point up before, but I think it is a relevant one: evolutionarily, that we can and want to eat when food is available (well, many of us) even if we have eaten over our TDEEs for the day or week was a STRENGTH, because food availability would vary quite a lot. In the current surplus environment, it means it's easy for many of us to gain weight, unless we exercise vigilance. Does this mean that we are "meant" to overeat when food is available, even if that means gaining weight, even now when of course that is not evolutionarily advantageous and probably even bad for our health (2 separate things, as you note)?

    If not, then why should the fact that most humans 50,000 years ago couldn't digest lactose as adults mean that I (who can) am not "meant" to consume milk?

    Usually the dairy argument is a bit different -- it's that for mammals milk is produced specifically for the biological purpose of being infant food, so it's "meant" for that and therefore not for us. Okay, fine, but carrots also don't grow biologically in order to be our food, deer doesn't reproduce for the privilege of being eaten by us, so I really don't see how this makes cow's milk different from everything else we eat (other than maybe Soylent 2.0). ;-)

    I don’t think most people will change their eating habits based upon the perception of what we are “meant” to eat (except for Paleo types of people). To me, it is more of a philosophical discussion about how cultural advancement has impacted our eating habits. The widespread practice of drinking animal milk was only made possible by the domestication of animals as large groups of humans emerged from the hunter/scavenger period. Previous to this, chasing, capturing, and tying down wild animals to extract milk was a bit labor intensive.

    I think that the point of noting this is to achieve some level of mindfulness regarding our modern food supply. There is a drastic increase in obesity, cancer, diabetes, food allergies, etc. that has emerged over the past 50 years, and a part of the problem is arguably caused by the industrialization of our food supply and the introduction of additives that were never a part of the human diet throughout most of our evolution. In the past, new items were slowly introduced into our food supply over the course of thousands of years, like animal milk. In contemporary times, additives like food dyes, steroids, antibiotics, laboratory preservatives, etc., were introduced into the food supply of billions of people in a very short amount of time. How humans will tolerate these modern diet alterations long term remains to be seen.

    How well did the original drinkers of animal milk tolerate it? I’m assuming that the practice of drinking it was originally motivated out of desperation. Perhaps many could not tolerate it and died of malnutrition, if there was a food shortage and that was one of the only sources of nutrition available (beyond slaughtering and eating the animal), which would have thinned the population of non-milk drinkers and perpetuated the enzyme which allowed lactose tolerance.
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