Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35434169

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It began declining in 1859 [3] but the changes have increased in recent times, with the magnetic pole shifting significantly such that even airport runways had to be renumbered [4].

The weakening geomagnetic field leaves earth more vulnerable [5] to inclement space weather [6].

It has been shown in mice, the negative behavioral effects of increased space radiation [7]:

"Studies in murine models have shown that exposure to high-energy 56Fe particles, which are the largest effective dose contributor in the space radiation environment, impairs cognitive function. These impairments include deficits in spatial learning and memory, object recognition, and operant conditioning, which parallel the cognitive decline observed in aged animals. [...] These behavioural studies, taken together with investigations into low dose HZE radiation effects on neurons and neural tissue, illustrate the risks that space radiation may pose to human health."

and [8]:

"Acute and chronic tissue alterations arise from the damaging effects of highly energetic charged particles that penetrate the spacecraft and traverse though the tissues of the body. These fully ionized nuclei are derived chiefly from solar ejection events (e.g. protons) or galactic cosmic rays (GCR) composed of light and heavy ions (Z from 1 to 26)

Past work with rodents has demonstrated that whole body and/or brain exposure to charged particles can elicit various behavioral decrements that can be linked to impairments in the hippocampus, amygdala, basal forebrain, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and other brain domains."

If this model holds true, we can expect things to get worse and worse at an increasing rate in the coming years/decades until the field strengthens.

[1] (2014) Earth's Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now https://www.livescience.com/46694-magnetic-field-weakens.htm...

[2] (2020) Earth’s magnetic field anomaly: Scientists have no clue why it is weakening and if it will disappear https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/article/eart...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

[4] (2021) https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/airport-runway-names-shift-ma...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Signi...

[6] Space Weather Prediction Center: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration https://www.swpc.noaa.gov

[7] Space-like 56Fe irradiation manifests mild, early sex-specific behavioral and neuropathological changes in wildtype and Alzheimer’s-like transgenic mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48615-1

[8] Persistent nature of alterations in cognition and neuronal circuit excitability after exposure to simulated cosmic radiation in mice https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.expneurol.2018.03.009

Among the oldest, no surprises to paleo/ancestral/traditional:

American bison---8,000BC

pigs, goats & sheep---7,000BC

lard---7,000BC

cattle domestication---6,500BC

milk & yogurt, & sour cream---5000BC

...but at the other end, these foods were older than I had expected, still over a thousand years ago (!):

loquats & flower waters---10th century

cod & nutmeg---9th century

spinach & sago---7th Century

eggplant---6th Century

pretzels---5th Century

lemons ---3rd Century

costmary & blood as food---1st Century

He also compared transwomen genitalia to vegetarian meat substitutes (Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger)

I ran into this same problem, but found a slightly different product without sugar:

South African-style beef jerky, known as "biltong" - it is also a spiced dried meat, but is more meatier and almost always unsweetened.

Biltong can be found at specialty/ethnic food stores, my local grocery shops carry it but display it separately from the American jerky, you have to know where to look (or order online), but it is worth it.

Or, it is easy enough to make jerky at home if you have a dehydrator - slice strips of lean beef (I've used top round, bottom round, eye of round, and tenderloin), cover with salt/pepper and/or spices to taste, then dehydrate overnight for a tasty sugar-free treat.

Likely this is an attempt at what is known as "grounding" or "earthing", with the goal of reducing inflammation.

There is some intriguing research in this area, here is an informative article from Journal of Inflammation Research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/pdf/jir... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/

Figure 4 shows a grounded sleep system similar to your friend's.

> Abstract: Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health. Such effects relate to inflammation, immune responses, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The purpose of this report is two-fold: to 1) inform researchers about what appears to be a new perspective to the study of inflammation, and 2) alert researchers that the length of time and degree (resistance to ground) of grounding of experimental animals is an important but usually overlooked factor that can influence outcomes of studies of inflammation, wound healing, and tumorigenesis. Specifically, grounding an organism produces measurable differences in the concentrations of white blood cells, cytokines, and other molecules involved in the inflammatory response. We present several hypotheses to explain observed effects, based on current research results and our understanding of the electronic aspects of cell and tissue physiology, cell biology, biophysics, and biochemistry.

This is dangerously wrong. Vision damage is not prevented by the wavelength not being in the visible spectrum. Even if you can't see it, and even if it is non-ionizing, electromagnetic waves still impart energy.

Eyes cannot efficiently dissipate heat, so sufficiently strong EMF will damage the eye. This is a well-known risk when operating with strong microwave signals, for example.

"Effects of Microwave and Millimeter Wave Radiation on the Eye", J. A. D’AndreaS. Chalfin, NATO Science Series book series (ASHT, volume 82)

> Most of the early research was carried out in the lower portion of the microwave spectrum (at 2.45 GHz) and demonstrated a high dose response relationship between microwave exposure and cataract induction. For example, Carpenter and Van Ummersen irradiated anesthetized rabbits at 2.45 GHz and showed a decreasing threshold for cataractogenesis from 4 minute exposure at 400 mW/cm2 to 40 minutes at 80 mW/cm2• Guy et al. ... repeated some of the earlier research and found essentially the same threshold for cataract production in rabbits exposed with a near field applicator at 2.45 GHz. At minimum, they determined that 150 mW/cm2 was required for 100 min to produce a cataract.

Not saying your Wi-Fi router is going to cause cataracts, but don't think just because you can't see something it can't hurt your vision. In fact, it could be argued invisibly strong EMF is _more_ dangerous than visible light because it doesn't trigger the self-protective blink reflex.

"Because it doesn’t contain its own minerals, distilled water has a tendency to pull them from whatever it touches to maintain a balance.

So when you drink distilled water, _it may pull small amounts of minerals from your body, including from your teeth._"

How does this contradict lr4444lr's claim "drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body"?

Are you arguing it is a matter of degree, that while distilled water does remove minerals from your body, the "myth" is that it is significant?

> Food has plenty of minerals etc compared to what you get via tap water.

How many minerals do you receive from food and how do you know this is sufficient?

There is research showing a (weak) correlation between hard water (high in mineral content, as opposed to the low/zero mineral content of distilled water) and cardiovascular health, eczema, and dermatitis:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896978... Studies of water quality and cardiovascular disease in the United Kingdom

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393510... Ecological association of water hardness with prevalence of childhood atopic dermatitis in a Japanese urban area

https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(16)30187-7/ful... Association between domestic water hardness, chlorine, and atopic dermatitis risk in early life: A population-based cross-sectional study

I first found out about soaked oats from _Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods_ by Sandor Ellix Katz, but interestingly it is an older practice, we now know improves digestability (excerpt from page 118):

> Oatmeal (or "oytmeal", as my father always calls it, in imitation of his immigrant grandmother) is the quintessential comfort food. It is soft and mushy, harkening back to that long ago time of infancy, when all our food was of such a consistency and lovingly spoon-fed to us. In early modern Europe, according to an article by Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen in the anthropology journal _Food and Foodways_, porridges were generally fermented and eaten as a "sour soup"[10]. Fermenting oats before cooking them not only makes them more nutritious and digestible, it makes the resulting oatmeal much creamer as well. For the freshest, most nutritious oatmlea, coarsely grind whole oats yourself when you are ready to use them, though steel-cut oats or rolled oats will work fine, too.

[10] _Food and Foodways_: "New Chapter Health Report", Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, 2000

Interestingly, the fat content of milk can vary drastically between species, from Holstein cows 3.6% (popular for high volume milk production, but less fatty), Brown Swiss cows 4.0%, Jersey cows 5.2% (prized for their rich creamy milks), Zebu cows 4.7%, goat 4.0%, up to buffalo 6.9%, yak 6.5%, sheep 7.5%, reindeer 17%, and even fin whale a whopping 42% fat and a similarly staggering 12% protein. (Source: _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, page 13).

Astute as ever, America's finest news source turns this marketing-driven terminology on its head.

This has happened before, industries creating imitation products deceptively similar to the real thing. For example in the early 1900s, states fought back against fake butter, but were ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...

> Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public. (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.)

> By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black. The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained. (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)

It may be unsweetened, but it has a lot of added ingredients you might not want. Here are the nutritional facts: https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/...

* Organic Almond Base (Filtered Water, Organic Almonds)

* Organic Vanilla Flavor

* Sea Salt

* Sunflower Lecithin: this is an emulsifier

* Organic Locust Bean Gum: a thickening and gelling agent

* Gellan Gum: another gelling agent

* Vitamin A Palmitate: an ester of retinol, less bioavailable than the retinol vitamin A found in animal foods

* Ergocalciferol (Vitamin D2): a different type of vitamin D than D3 (cholecalciferol) which is found in organ meats, eggs, diary,

* DL-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E): a synthetic ester of alpha-tocopheryl, with less than half the bioavailability as alpha-tocopheryl vitamin E, but longer shelf life

* Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)

* Zinc Gluconate

* Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12)

I came to the same conclusion, to expand on this point: lactose = glucose + galactose, and there is some interesting research on the benefits of galactose:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240634/ Galactose Enhances Oxidative Metabolism and Reveals Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Human Primary Muscle Cells

normally it is broken down to glucose, which can be quickly used for energy by the muscular system. In contrast, sucrose = glucose + fructose, the fructose requiring a complex breakdown process by the liver (see Robert Lustig's research, especially his 2009 lecture _Sugar: The Bitter Truth_).

Milk can actually be quite healthful, an excellent source of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K2, depending on the conditions the cow was raised in and the forage and pasture she was fed. It is also absent of many of the compounds found in nut-based products, including phytoestrogens: plant-based estrogen found in soybeans, phytic acid: inhibits absorption of dietary minerals calcium/iron/zinc found in oats (although the phytate content can be reduced by soaking the oats overnight, how many producers of oat-based products do this?) and almonds/hazelnuts/peanuts/tiger nuts/walnuts/cashews, lectins: carbohydrate-binding proteins found in legumes including peas and soybeans.

From a purely nutritional standpoint, these alternative "mylks" (hat tip to the EU for preventing a corruption of the meaning of the word "milk") seem to be strictly inferior: lower in the good stuff, higher in the bad stuff.

> Otherwise, I might as well drink soda,--from looking at the sugar content of most of these "milks" it's roughly as healthy.

This reminds me of the push to replace soda with fruit juice, but then it turned out they both often have a comparable sugar content: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/09/319230765/fr...

History repeats, and yet again we see a similar push. Personally I am sticking with good old-fashioned milk myself, the bar to replace a 10,000 year old (estimated 9000-7000 BCE) food is quite high.

- Fiber doesn't ward off colon cancer, according to the Harvard School of Public Health: "For years, Americans have been told to consume a high-fiber diet to lower the risk of colon cancer [...] Larger and better-designed studies have failed to show a link between fiber and colon cancer."

- Fiber doesn't reduce the risk of heart disease, according to the American Heart Association: "A fiber supplement added to a diet otherwise high in saturated fat and cholesterol provides dubious cardiovascular advantage." Furthermore, these supplements caused "reduced mineral absorption and a myriad of gastrointestinal disturbances" - factors that in fact, contribute to heart disease.

- Fiber doesn't prevent breast cancer either, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, it's the complete opposite: "Carbohydrate intake was positively associated with breast cancer risk." Fiber happens to be a carbohydrate too, and carbohydrates are the only food that contains fiber.

- Fiber doesn't counteract diabetes, according to the Harvard School of Public Health: "Fiber intake has also been linked with the metabolic syndrome, a constellation of factors that increases the chances of developing heart disease and diabetes." Truth is, fiber requires more insulin or drugs to control blood sugar, and makes diabetes even more devastating.

(excerpts from Fiber Menace by Konstantin Monastyrsky)

The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior by Craig B. Stanford

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

Craft Beef: A Revolution of Small Farms and Big Flavors by Joe Heitzeberg, Ethan Lowry, and Caroline Sanders

Don’t Eat the Oil! The Health Consequences of Consuming “Vegetable” Oils by Thomas L. Copmann, MS, Ph.D.

Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson

This year I became ex-vegan and the books I read center around nutrition as such. I would recommend all of them. The Vegetarian Myth was the most shocking, one woman's struggles with health which finally opened my eyes. The Case Against Sugar was surprising for the depth of how many people and corporations were involved in promoting sugar on an unsuspecting public. Skin in the Game is Taleb's insightful observations as usual. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is thorough and prescient, intriguing to see the drastic physical changes due to nutrition, and was I impressed by the dedicated research to study the effects of what was not known at the time but is now believed to be vitamin K2.

The most cooking can do is reduce or mitigate the harmful effects to some extent. Fermentation is another technique but neither reduces the risk to zero.

"(as any other protein)" is not true either, consider for example peanut allergies, and related allergies such as tree nuts and soy. Cupins, prolamins, profilins are known protein families which can cause allergic reactions. Hence the warning you may see on food labels:

Allergy information: This product was processed in a facility that processes peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, and dairy products.

even if they are cooked.

We are beginning to understand the effects of seed oils (marketing term: vegetable oils) and it is not looking good. Excerpt from _Don't Eat The Oil! The Health Consequences of Consuming "Vegetable" Oils_ by Thomas L. Copmann:

---

This book is a compilation of two and a half years of research based entirely on peer-reviewed publications. While I wasn't planning on publishing a book, the further I looked into the interrelationship of a number of major diseases, there slowly appeared to be a common denominator - the levels of polyunsaturated oils in our fatty tissues from consuming vegetable oils. Finally, the weight of evidence compelled me to write this book.

Polyunsaturated oils are a fairly new addition to the modern diet. Prior to their introduction at the turn of the century, cooking fats were mostly beef tallow and butter. Corn oil was introduced in 1911, followed by cottonseed, soybean, and rapeseed (Canola) oil labeled as "vegetable" oils. The fact is however, these oils have nothing in common with vegetables, but are the product of solvent extraction of oils from seeds.

The problem with these oils is their molecular structure. They are rich in polyunsaturated fats which means they have multiple double bonds between carbon atoms. Oxygen reacts with the double bonds in a process called _lipid peroxidation_. The end result is the formation of highly reactive free radicals which interact with cellular membranes, nuclear DNA, and deplete cells of their antioxidant defenses.

As you read the following chapters, the important thing to remember is exposing polyunsaturated fats to oxygen leads to free radical formation, while saturated fat cannot undergo this reaction because of their lack of double bonds. During the process of oil extraction, the oil is subject to high temperatures which accelerate the peroxidation reaction.

Polyunsaturated fats break down as their double bonds are exposed to oxygen. And heating accelerated this process. Therefore, lipid peroxidation is the degradation process involving the double bond(s) found in polyunsaturated fatty acids, causing a deterioration of food quality (odor, flavor, color, texture, toxicity). This is collectively known as turning "rancid". According to one analysis, a total of 130 volatile compounds were isolated from a piece of fried chicken alone!

... In summary, polyunsaturated fats are highly unstable and are readily oxidized to form toxic compounds that are implicated in most of our modern diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, immunological disorders, neurological disease processes, dysbiosis, lipofuscin, and premature aging). We will explore each of these in detail looking at mechanistic as well as epidemiological evidence.

---

Long story short, it took nearly a century to assess the consequences of the oil of cottonseed, declaring "New Cottonseed Is Safe for People to Eat" is irresponsibly premature. Only time will tell.

I keep coming back to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book _Antifragile_, where he explains how he doesn't eat any fruit that doesn't have an ancient Greek/Hebrew name, and doesn't drink any liquid that hasn't existed for a thousand years. Will this new "safe" cottonseed survive the test of time, or be looked upon hundreds of years from now as another catastrophic dietary mistake?

> Start with Africa seven million years ago, because that’s where human life began. The climate, the creation of our ancestors—our beloved kin of bacteria, fungi, and plants—eased from wet to dry. The trees gave way to grasses and a tide of savannas rippled across the world. Cradled in the grasses were large herbivores. Twenty-five million years ago, in the exuberance of evolution, a few plants tried growing from their bases instead of their tips. Grazing would not kill these plants; quite the opposite. It would encourage them by stimulating root growth. All plants want nitrogen and predigested nutrients, and ruminants could provide those to the grasses as they grazed. This is why, unlike other plants, grasses contain no toxins or chemical repellents, no mechanical deterrents like thorns or spines to discourage animals. Grasses want to be grazed. It was grass that created cows; human “domestication” was, in comparison, just the tiniest tug on the bovine genome, and cows tugged back with the lactose tolerance gene.

- Lierre Keith, _The Vegetarian Myth_: Chapter 4, Nutritional Vegetarians, pg. 139

Put another way, the grass depends on the cows as much as the cows depend on the grass. A symbiotic interdependence.

If the implied argument is to instead of eating animals that eat plants, to eat their plants directly, in the spirit of "refuting the central point" in Paul Graham's hierarchy, I responded in depth to @maxxxxx elsewhere in this thread who made the same point, but long story short humans cannot digest the grass which cows (naturally) eat. I definitely wouldn't advocate for grain-feeding, it is indefensible, but even grain-finished cows eat grass. Through the marvel of the rumen, indigestible (to us) cellulose is turned into delicious meat, milk, and (to grass) fertilizer.

Pastured grassfed beef does not depend on industrial agriculture/grain farming (corn, wheat, soy, etc.), and is in fact directly opposed to it. Instead of disrupting ecosystems by planting rows and rows of monocultures, grasslands of clover, millet, bluegrass, plantain timothy, sweet grass, fescue, etc. are sustainably nurtured by ruminants. Working with nature, instead of against it.

The problem is although plants have nutrients, most of them are inaccessible to the human digestion system.

Cellulose = indigestible fiber, yet forms the bulk of the structural component of green plants. C6H10O5, a polysaccharide which would be very valuable if we could use it. The most abundant organic polymer on earth. But we can't eat grass; or we can try, it is non-toxic but no nutrients to speak of will be acquired from chewing and swallowing it.

Grasslands cover about 30% of the earth's surface (more before the rise of agriculture), an abundant resource which cannot be ignored. So how can we derive nutrition from it?

Ruminants have found an answer: bacteria. More specifically, 200 trillion bacteria, 4 billion protozoans, millions of yeast and fungi present in the rumen of a cow, the first of the cow's two stomachs. The cow can't directly digest grass either, but the contents of her rumen can do it for her, then she absorbs the output.

This large complicated digestive system however is very expensive. Is there a more efficient mechanism of acquiring nutrients? Fortunately, early primates discovered a way. "Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains" (Harvard Gazette, 2008). Encephalization, the 3rd stage that led humans to civilization (1st: terrestriality, going down from the trees, 2nd: bipedalism), trading off a larger brain for a smaller gut:

> But growing brain size presented a metabolic problem. A gram of brain tissue takes 20 times more energy to grow and maintain than a gram of tissue from the kidney, heart, or liver, she said. Gut tissue is metabolically expensive too — so as brains grew gut sizes shrank.

> It’s likely that meat eating “made it possible for humans to evolve a larger brain size,” said Aiello. Early human ancestors probably consumed more animal foods — termites and small mammals – than the 2 percent of carnivorous caloric intake associated with chimpanzees.

There are quite a few essential nutrients not present in plants. Of those that are, they are often less bioavailable or are found along side anti-nutrients. I'll mention just one: docosahexaenoic acid, an essential omega-3 fatty acid important for normal brain function. Has been with us for a while, Michael A. Crawford calls it "nutritional armor in evolution", and curiously it is photosensitive; photoreceptor cells contains high levels of DHA.

The human body can make DHA itself (being an essential nutrient after all, you would hope so), by converting from ALA, but this process is inefficient so vegetarians often have lower levels of DHA than meat-eaters. Apparently it is also found in microalgaes so some vegetarians supplement. But what else are they missing? What are they missing that we don't even know about yet?

An example of an anti-nutrient in plants: phytic acid in legumes, interfering with the absorption of iron, zinc, and calcium. Some plant foods do contain iron, but it is less easily absorbed than the type of iron only found in meat: heme-iron. This makes vegetarians especially women more prone to anemia. I've even heard of women who stopped having their periods after a vegan diet for many years, which promptly resumed when eating meat. Other animals with larger stomachs are more equipped at processing these substances in plants than humans.

Granted there are other mechanisms for unlocking the nutrients caged away in plants. The Aztecs invented grinding corn soaked in limewater, now known as nixtamalization, to increase nutritional value (converting bound niacin to free nicin, helping prevent pellagra) and decrease mycotoxins. But having ruminants eat grass, which humans then in turn eat in the form of meat and milk, is a very efficient and effective process.

This process repeats itself in other systems: for example, small crustaceans/plankton eaten by feeder fish like herrings, eaten by larger fish like salmon, eaten by mammals like bears. The "Food Chain".