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What are your unpopular opinions about health / fitness?
Replies
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Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Still discounting the obvious in favor of a conspiracy theory. Before refrigeration and canning, salting was one of the more common food preservation methods - far from recent. My grandparents, back around the beginning of the 20th century, almost certainly ate more fat, especially saturated fat, than I do.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, any argument about "addictive foods" is a denial of our own complicity: Responsibility-shifting to some big, powerful "they".13 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
13 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
It seems to me that you are trying to change the subject or link things that aren't really related.
Basically, your argument seems to be "certain contemporary food products aren't all that healthy if consumed in excessive amounts" so "we aren't meant to eat dairy because it also was a new food once upon a time." That doesn't seem to make sense to me. Are you actually defending the claim that humans aren't meant to consume dairy or gluten? If so, it has nothing to do with the fact that Twinkies exist.
As for the Moss book (which I have read and liked), it is true that for various reasons there are lots and lots of low nutrient cheap snack food items available now. However, that we enjoy foods with lots of fat, salt, and sugar is NOT new and you certainly can't use biological arguments to say that we aren't MEANT to eat fat, salt, and sugar. If you look at, say, the Stephan Guyenet theories, that focuses on how way back when, we of course had a biological reason to favor high sugar and high fat foods (easy source of calories) and so it's not surprising that we have evolved to crave those foods and, unfortunately for us now that nothing is scarce, to overeat them quite easily. Salt is pretty similar (and we are hardly the only animal who enjoys salt).
For some time, since scarcity stopped being an issue for at least some portion of the population and since we learned to free sugar from cane and beets, we have been using sugar, along with fat and salt, to make food more desirable (and to preserve it, as French Peasant notes). Indulgent foods with fat (butter, olive oil) and sugar (or before that, honey) are not new or only a product of modernity. They are now much cheaper and less time consuming than before, that matters, but not that we are now eating things we did not before and are not "meant" to eat. If I were rich enough to employ a chef or go out every night, I could easily avoid the kinds of packaged foods that Moss talks about (indeed, I rarely ate those things even when I was getting fat), and still stuff my face with sugar (or honey) and fat filled treats that the French aristocracy might have consumed in the 18th century (pre Revolution) or as the Romans did, even. I'd get equally as fat and unhealthy if I had an excessive and unbalanced diet.
And NOT because my diet contained dairy and gluten.8 -
French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.2 -
Oh, and on the Moss book, he does not claim that people got hooked on mysterious "additives." The book is focused on sugar, salt, and fat, all of which are longstanding in the human diet, as I mentioned in the prior post.
He does talk about our innate liking for sugar, fat, and salt, that adding those ingredients can increase the demand for inexpensive packaged foods (and thus as companies fought for market share those things tended to go up) and that as we eat more of these foods (especially sugar and salt and especially sugar as kids) our demand for them seems to increase -- in other words, if you eat lots of salty food you crave saltier food (it's easy to change your palate when it comes to saltiness, usually), and the same with sugar, although it's especially so if you eat lots of sugar as a kid -- kids are more responsive to this.
I think this is true, and I do wonder when people say they didn't appreciate non sweet foods and wanted even savory foods with sugar added and didn't see fruit as sweet until quitting sweets for a while if they didn't have a balanced diet as a kid and messed up their palates. But the bigger point is that this is NOT about the idea that we are eating foods (salt, sugar, and fat) that we were not "meant" to eat. We crave these foods because they are the tastes we needed and craved even back before we raised cattle for dairy.6 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.
There's a distinction in the motivation for adding it, but there's no distinction in the impact on your body. It's not like your body "knows" that the salt in salt pork is there to preserve it and somehow discounts it, but the salt in a can of tomato soup is processed differently.
Whether or not it makes "sense" to add salt to something is irrelevant when determining whether or not the salt has an impact on obesity rates.10 -
SusanMFindlay wrote: »
- I think that 1200 calories is an absurdly low target for the vast majority of people.
- I think that the distinction between "purposeful" and "nonpurposeful" exercise is meaningless.
- I think that, if you don't have a medical condition preventing it, you shouldn't allow yourself to be "sedentary". As per point #2, I would consider someone who is sedentary for much of the day but exercises to be "not sedentary" in this respect. If they want to use MFP's sedentary setting, that's their business and not my point.
- Someone can increase their calorie intake and, as a result lose more weight. All it takes is for that increase in calorie intake to shift hormone balance enough to increase their energy level and increase calorie output. While this would never be my *first* response to someone who's having trouble losing weight, it's a valid option for some.
- Incorrect database entries and forgetting to log some of your food (and/or thinking you don't have to log some of your food) are probably bigger problems for most people than using measuring cups instead of a scale. A scale is much *easier*, but weight discrepancies will go in both directions. Thinking you don't need to log fruit/veg (or the cream in your coffee) doesn't.
- There is no material difference between a BMI of 24.5 and 25.5 for the same person. The BMI categories were completely arbitrary, chosen for generating convenient groups of equal size: 15-20, 20-25, 25-30, 30-35, etc. *After* the categories were chosen, the 20-25 category turned out to be the healthiest. This is hardly surprising since most people have their ideal weight fall roughly in that region. But many shorter people are fine in the 18-20 range and many taller people are fine in the 25-27 range. And it's as easy to find someone who is overfat with a BMI of 24 as it is to find someone who isn't with a BMI of 26. Humans just happen to like numbers that are multiples of 5. How many people have a goal weight that is a multiple of 5?
Don't even get me started on the nonsensical "how do you gain weight if you're nauseous all the time?" question. When 99% of foods make you vomit, you very quickly work out what are the remaining 1% of foods that you can usually keep down, and you do your best to make healthy choices given that very restrictive list. Calorie counting under those circumstances would very tough because you wouldn't know how much stayed down vs. how many calories went into the toilet (or whatever receptacle you were able to reach in time). Also, you can gain water weight without any calorie surplus.
All this from a woman who spent 6 months of pregnancy puking and dropped 30 pounds within a week or two of giving birth. Yes, I gained "too much" weight. Baby + fluid retention was 30 pounds. You would have had me gain 20?! Pregnancy can be hell on earth. If you haven't been there, you have no clue.
These are some great points. Another point is, and Ann's comment about the CO side of the equation made me think about this, is that while pregnant many women are severely restricted from their customary exercise. I went from aggressive mountain biking, hard core gardening, and riding hunter-jumper several times a week to taking a gentle yoga class twice a week, because that is what I was permitted to do by my doctor. I ate like I always ate, not realizing at the time that my typical daily burn probably decreased by hundreds of calories. I had just never had to think about calories before (and probably would have guessed that several hours of mountain biking would have burned 200 calories or so, I was that ignorant) but once I hung up my bike and put my boots and breeches away in a tack trunk, the equation had totally changed, and that is some that to my knowledge was never pointed out in "What To Expect When You're Expecting" or anything else that I saw on pregnancy weight guidelines.
So, to accuse pregnant women of this grotesque carnality and piggishness--when actually a lot of them are just trying to protect the baby--is an uncharitable stance of equal grotesquery.
That being said, I think MFP would be a brilliant tool for assisting pregnant women with getting it exactly right.16 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.
Much more salt needs to be added to a food when said salt is being used for food preservation. Perhaps you can explain why eating that salt residue would be any less injurious?
But seriously: Salt is added to the TV dinner because people think the TV dinner tastes better that way. Yes, people tend to buy and eat more of foods they consider tasty. Companies sell us more of those foods we've demonstrated, by buying, that we find tasty (or convenient, etc). If that were single-serve sodium-free roasted organic non-GMO brussels sprouts, that's what they'd sell us - no conspiracy required.6 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Take a moment and cup up for air every once in awhile, you may be shocked at what is really happening outside of that hole...
2 -
jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.13 -
stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
He was joking, hence the wink.6 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.
wait, so salted mutton is OK, but added salt is somehow bad????4 -
stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
But thanks for...explaining that to us.20 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Take a moment and cup up for air every once in awhile, you may be shocked at what is really happening outside of that hole...
no thanks...
I refuse to give food power over me or to believe that the "evil food masters" have all conspired in some cabal to fore me to eat what they want, when they want ..
I prefer to believe that I am responsible for my own choices.11 -
stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
Irony.9 -
Penthesilea514 wrote: »stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
But thanks for...explaining that to us.
umm... I'd expect my female oncologist to know more about my prostate cancer than I do even though she doesn't have a prostate. (example only I don't have cancer thankfully) How is that different?5 -
My unpopular opinion is that the obesity epidemic is caused by three things: over consumption, lack of physical activity, and a refusal to take any personal responsibility for ones behavior.21
-
Chef_Barbell wrote: »stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
Irony.
LMAO0 -
I didn't get the reference, no sarcasm font required
eta: I know I'm a little quick to jump on what I perceive as automatic gender assumptions, my excuse is I have a gender-neutral name and am usually assumed to be male by long-distance co-workers because of the industry and company I work for.1 -
stormcrow2 wrote: »Penthesilea514 wrote: »stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
But thanks for...explaining that to us.
umm... I'd expect my female oncologist to know more about my prostate cancer than I do even though she doesn't have a prostate. (example only I don't have cancer thankfully) How is that different?
Did you read the thread? Or are you just HIPPOing?2 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Take a moment and cup up for air every once in awhile, you may be shocked at what is really happening outside of that hole...
no thanks...
I refuse to give food power over me or to believe that the "evil food masters" have all conspired in some cabal to fore me to eat what they want, when they want ..
I prefer to believe that I am responsible for my own choices.
That is great, so am I. That doesn't change the reality found in Moss's book that the food industry loaded extra sugar and salt into food during a time period when there were no labels (not required until 1990) on anything and people consumed these foods to the detriment of their health in many cases. That isn't tinfoil hat conspiracy, the ingredients of the food and the tactics / strategies of the corporations is completely verifiable.0 -
Chef_Barbell wrote: »
No pregnancy?
I have trouble taking (insert victimized demographic here)-splaining seriously and just think about this:
3 -
Chef_Barbell wrote: »
No pregnancy?
I have trouble taking (insert victimized demographic here)-splaining seriously and just think about this:
Lol this is the right thread for those unpopular opinions. :laugh:1 -
jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
I'm pretty sure a highly trained male OBGYN knows more about pregnancy than most women. Maybe not exactly how it feels to birth a 10 pound baby, but more.0 -
9 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.
Dude--seriously? You may not have noticed this, but salt tastes really freakin' good. Try making a loaf of bread without salt and see how you like it. I can assure you, people have been adding salt to food to make it taste good for millennia. Or did you want an actual discourse on medieval and ancient salt trade routes and the uses of this precious commodity in regional cuisine? I can go on at some length, having specialized in a very obscure corner of the humanities dealing with agrarian issues. 17 -
French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »French_Peasant wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll 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.
To the bolded passage:
Having been alive and old enough to be aware through most of the past 50 years (I'm 61), there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that the obesity epidemic's main causes are a dramatic decrease in the average person's NEAT, in tandem with changes in eating norms that have dramatically increased the average person's calories consumed. I could list a dozen specific examples of these trends.
Occam's razor: CO decrease coupled with CI increase is a much simpler explanation for widespread excess weight than is a vague, poorly-substantiated theory about Evil Additives.
Someone else has already commented on the portion of the argument about diabetes, cancer, etc. I agree and won't repeat it.
Beyond the additives I listed, salt and sodium and ingredients high in fat have been systematically added to industrially produced foods and fast food since the 1950s. (see "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss for a nice overview). The purpose of this was to make foods have a longer shelf life (sodium) and to get people hooked on the additives. And this worked brilliantly and contributes significantly to our obesity epidemic.
Are you aware of the single most popular food preservation method for thousands of years pre-refrigeration? See if you can guess.
There is a distinction between using salt to preserve something and using it to add taste (and increasing heart attack and stroke, and high blood pressure vulnerability if too much is consumed over a long period of time). Salt in the pre-refrigeration era makes sense - perhaps you can explain why salt needs to be added to a frozen TV dinner.
Dude--seriously? You may not have noticed this, but salt tastes really freakin' good. Try making a loaf of bread without salt and see how you like it. I can assure you, people have been adding salt to food to make it taste good for millennia. Or did you want an actual discourse on medieval and ancient salt trade routes and the uses of this precious commodity in regional cuisine? I can go on at some length, having specialized in a very obscure corner of the humanities dealing with agrarian issues.
still mind blown that salting food for preservation in the middle ages was OK, but once it was done by companies in the 1900's it somehow became evil....12 -
I rebut with the sheer deliciousness of Mr. Salty:
19 -
stormcrow2 wrote: »Penthesilea514 wrote: »stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
But thanks for...explaining that to us.
umm... I'd expect my female oncologist to know more about my prostate cancer than I do even though she doesn't have a prostate. (example only I don't have cancer thankfully) How is that different?
Going to a medical professional for advice has nothing to do with mansplaining. It's not even in the same ballpark.
5 -
French_Peasant wrote: »stormcrow2 wrote: »jseams1234 wrote: »My wife's OB/GYN was a man. He used to mansplain every appointment. Men couldn't possibly know more about pregnancy than a woman.
Actually an OB/GYN who's been practicing for decades can absolutely know more about pregnancy than a woman who has had 1-2 children. That's not manspalining (which is a *kitten* term to begin with) its experience.
He was joking, hence the wink.
Thanks - I had thought it was pretty obvious. Obviously it wasn't obvious.
Lesson learned.... more winks! 8
This discussion has been closed.
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