Expect a Czech-Polish brawl in the comments (if it gains any traction). This is the most sensitive point of our entire relationship.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361558

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Several hundred years is certainly possible, Medieval cemeteries can be analyzed like that.

(Whenever my dentist cleans my calculus, we joke that we are ruining some future archeologist's work :)

If you really did something material to improve our food choice and food quality, I salute you. But this is rare enough for me to doubt it. Most people are content with wagging their fingers on strangers.

I agree that the fact that this meat and fat is wild may be the root cause of the differences between their and our health outcomes. That indicates, though, that we may have something in our forms of meat and dairy that potentially harms us - and that if we identify what, we may be able to get rid of that specific problem.

From what I have heard from doctors, there is a clear sequence:

intra-organ fat (really bad) > visceral fat (quite bad) > subcutaneous fat (relatively harmless).

The nasty detail is that some people gain relatively more visceral fat than others. These three fats are correlated, but the correlation isn't the same in every human. Some have better metabolism and don't store as much fat inside as others do.

The Maasai are also known to eat a lot of meat and dairy.

GLP-1s are ultimately treatments that act on our neurohumoral regulation, and hormones tend to have a lot of functions all around the body. Claude would say that the expected "blast radius" of fiddling with hormones is much bigger than that of just losing weight.

Mental issues is a broad category as well. Are food cravings a "mental issue", or a "physiological/hormonal issue"? No clear difference between those two, and given how GLP-1s quench cravings in general - not just food cravings, plenty of people on those report losing their compulsive behaviors, even such as gambling or shopping - the hormonal variant sounds quite plausible.

Which may be actually good. We are a lot better in treating hormonal issues than mental issues.

What really changed is the foodscape. And quite thoroughly so. Even basic agricultural products like wheat, corn or fruit are different from the variants 50+ years ago, there was a concerted effort to make them bigger, pesticide-resistant, more sweet, more energy-dense...

I remember the apples of the 1980s. Nowhere near as sweet as today, some were thoroughly sour. And these are considered the healthy choice now.

"The only solution is behavioural, everything else is cope."

This is like, your opinion, man. An opinion that can make you feel smug, but that is no victory. In practice, GLP-1s are doing what a generation of preachers like you could not - making people more thin and healthier.

In a sense, it is you who is coping hard and defending a "solution" which provably never worked on a population scale.

I used to live in lower Vltava valley, and for a single ship that would pass (mostly carrying sand or stone; I don't remember any single container ship), about 100 freight trains would thunder along the same river, mostly from/to Hamburg.

The college may have an ulterior motive, as others in this discussion say: to select for scions of richer families and increase the likelihood of gaining an alumn that they can siphon some money from. If someone spends their afternoon playing polo, it is a good signal of riches to be inherited.

One thing that always surprises me during American conversations on wealth and greed is how the academic sector somehow gets a moral pass, even though it is quite obviously geared towards milking young people for every penny.

Always nice to sample the neighbors cuisine :)

OTOH if America loses, nothing will happen to any member of the current US government nor to their kids etc.

Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career.

If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a remarkably strong early signal. Not impossible, but worth extra scrutiny. For the vast majority of old age conditions, we cannot predict them so long in advance.

2. The original study didn't just study taxi drivers, but also ambulance drivers. I doubt that their life expectancy is that much lower.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur, at least as far as Eurozone's anemic growth is concerned. France and Germany stagnating isn't caused by Poland or Romania growing. It is mostly their own internal systemic problems. There were times when German and Polish economies were both healthy, as little as 10 years ago.

Sweden, another rich EU member, should grow by healthy 2.2 per cent this year, but Sweden is a lot more willing to actually reform its way out of problems than Germany is. Smaller countries have less inertia in such situations, and more maneuvering space.

You need an independent constitutional court with actual teeth for any constitution to work.