Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11480
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Yeah, we see.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
The history of caries goes way, way back into prehistory, and has been prevalent during the entire history of humanity. Caries is the most common disease in the world, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's true for most of history.
If we ate natural food we wouldn't need to brush our teeth, but ever since we started to burn our food we haven't eaten natural food, which is why we have caries. Many diseases like the many forms of cancer are the result of us burning food, which destroys the nutrients in the food and creates toxic chemicals that we then consume. Our bodies have evolved to eat the food that exists in nature, the raw food that animals eat. Our bodies haven't evolved to eat burned food, so we get problems like caries and diseases.
I wouldn't stop brushing my teeth, though.
I would. Raw food contains natural brushes that clean our teeth, like if we eat an apple, the skin sometimes gets stuck between teeth and acts like a dental floss. Thin and flexible tree branches when broken also contain stuff that protects our teeth, better than a toothbrush, which is made of plastic. Tooth paste also contains fluoride which decreases IQ. Source
If we ate natural food we wouldn't need to brush our teeth, but ever since we started to burn our food we haven't eaten natural food, which is why we have caries. Many diseases like the many forms of cancer are the result of us burning food, which destroys the nutrients in the food and creates toxic chemicals that we then consume. Our bodies have evolved to eat the food that exists in nature, the raw food that animals eat. Our bodies haven't evolved to eat burned food, so we get problems like caries and diseases.
What a beautiful example of post-new-age hippie dogma.
Caries goes way back well beyond the times that we started cooking food. Besides, cooking food has nothing to do with caries. The germs that cause caries thrive on carbohydrates, and cooking has nothing to do with this. It doesn't matter if you eat your meat raw or well done, it makes no difference to those germs.
From an evolutionary point of view, cooking food has actually been a crucial step that helped humans to survive and thrive. That's because cooking kills harmful bacteria from the food, lessening cases of food poisoning, increasing chances of survival. It may well be that without it humans might have never become the predominant species.
Say, why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and start eating completely "naturally", ie. eat all your meat and vegetables completely raw, without any kind of cooking. Let's see how long before you get your first food poisoning. (Oh, and when you do get it, don't go to the doctor. After all, they are just evil scientists who fight against Mother Nature and Her ways. Instead, only take natural remedies. Mother Nature is sure to heal you from the food poisoning She gave you in the first place.)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Also, from an evolutionary point of view, whatever happens to you after age of 30 is irrelevant, because by now you should already have kids and be dead :P
From an evolutionary point of view, cooking food has actually been a crucial step that helped humans to survive and thrive. That's because cooking kills harmful bacteria from the food, lessening cases of food poisoning, increasing chances of survival. It may well be that without it humans might have never become the predominant species.
That's what I read in science articles. It's true that burning or boiling food kills bacteria, but the problem is that it also kills most of the nutrients.
Say, why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and start eating completely "naturally", ie. eat all your meat and vegetables completely raw, without any kind of cooking.
I don't want to, because raw food doesn't taste good, because I'm used to eat toxic food, so I rather get poisoned and die from this toxic food than eat healthy raw food. There are some people who eat only raw food though. I don't think they eat meat. That might be dangerous. Eating meat is immoral anyway.
Today, the toxics generated from burning are not enough. In order to sell more, food producers put all kinds of additives into food, most of which are dangerous and/or addictive, which create further problems and increase diseases.
(Oh, and when you do get it, don't go to the doctor. After all, they are just evil scientists who fight against Mother Nature and Her ways. Instead, only take natural remedies. Mother Nature is sure to heal you from the food poisoning She gave you in the first place.)
Most food poisoning is caused by human nature. But some day when we are enough scientifically advanced, we will be able to eat toxic food and prevent the diseases, and still live hundreds of years.
In the past, people lived hundreds of years because they lived in harmony with nature. In the future we will also probably live hundreds of years, because of our technology and science.
I just love the contradiction of the same person talking about the evolutionary history of the human diet (we are omnivores for a reason) and at the same time discussing the "immorality" of eating meat. Effectively you are saying "evolution has made us omnivores, which is good, but we shouldn't eat meat, because it's bad".
Please don't mix tree-hugging and science. The result is not pretty. :P
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Actually not eating meat is not only viable now, it is also smarter as resource management for the society.
Also, eating meat now doesn't help the evolution of the species. It helped ages ago because it forced people to think, but not now. So yeah, part of the evolution of our species is the undeniable result of eating meat, but that has stopped a long time ago.
Actually not eating meat is not only viable now, it is also smarter as resource management for the society.
As long as you don't go fully vegan. (Children require animal products for normal growth and development. There are sad cases of new age hippie vegans permanently damaging their own children by forcing them on a vegan diet.)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I agree completely that there is no need to take that risk. Drinking milk or eating eggs does not necessarily mean the cow/chicken has to suffer or die. Eating meat does.
I'm really looking forward to vat-grown meat. No morality concerns, and it'll be more energy-efficient too since there's no need to e.g. grow a bunch of marginally-edible organs in addition to all that muscle.
I have to wonder how hard it would be to, say, engineer yeast capable of producing milk. Milking and egg production may not kill the animal in question, but that animal's still most likely living on a factory farm, and those are not pleasant places.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Yeah, even though more expensive I would prefer brands that didn't explore the animals as most brands do. But it is kind of surreal to have something like that right now.
You won't get the same health benefits from artificially produced milk. Milk contains anti-bodies and is part of the reason why we are (partially) immune to many cattle-related diseases (Native Americans weren't). You'd also have to manually add the opiates and exorphines that milk contains, which make it so addictive. Kefir is an alternative to milk that already exists, in case you didn't know about it.
If we postulate genetically-engineered yeast (or bacteria, or vat-grown lactation glands, or whatever), then I think we can also postulate genetically-engineered opiate/exorphin/antibody production. :) (Also, this exorphin? Gluten's easy enough to make...)
I wasn't aware of Kefir, but from my reading it's just fermented milk, so how is that an alternative to milk? I have heard of lactose-intolerant people drinking almond milk (which is purely vegetable matter), but it's somewhere around the range of twice as expensive as regular milk.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Kefir made from artificial milk sucks as much as the artificial milk itself, fwiw.
Regarding the point of not eating meat being viable; for instance, here in Russia having a meat/fishless diet with comparable nutritive value would cost you even more in the end. The healthiest food costs a damn lot because cashing-in on concerned people is a proper thing to do in capitalistic environment, and yet it won't in any way reduce the risk of running into boost-grown or genetically modified food by a dishonest manufacturer. Basically, if you want to take any particular stance in your diet, you're forced to choose between bad and worse. For that reason alone I found it better to just eat what I like and pay attention to how my organism reacts to it, with no morals involved.
And I would like to stress that we don't really have any data on genetically-modified food's influence on subsequent generations.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Endorphins and exporphins are collective terms for mood boosting and relaxing morphine-related substances. If your own body produces them (in the hypothalamus/pituitary gland), they're called "endorphins", if they more or less directly come from the food you eat, they're called "exorphins". So if you eat my brain, what's an endorphin to me becomes and exorphin to you. The most prominent exorphins in milk are exorphin C, hemorphin-6 and ß-casomorphin-7 afaik. I don't know if it would be legal to manually add them, as they are mildly addictive. We'd probably be stupid enough to add them in higher doses than actual cows would.
As for the anti-bodies, I don't suspect it'd be possible to simply engineer them. Bacteria are in constant mutation and every cow will produce a slightly different mixture of anti-bodies. I don't think it would be feasible to completely replace milk for quite a while to come.
Kefir in the narrow sense is fermented milk, but you can extract the grains (also known as tibicos) and put them into ordinary water and they'll produce a milky substance, which is also called kefir, or more specifically "water kefir".
As for healthy food, I quite honestly think the best way to get it is to just grow it in your own garden. Almost all of the vegetables I can buy in supermarkets make me want to puke, but I love them if they're self-grown. People tend to severely underestimate how much of a difference it makes.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
moozooh, yes it is surprisingly more expensive to not eat meat, that is how advanced the industrialization of meat is in our society. What I meant is that food would probably be cheaper if there was no need to "produce" meat. I believe that not eating meat right now is one step into making that a reality.
Drinking milk or eating eggs does not necessarily mean the cow/chicken has to suffer or die. Eating meat does.
You understand that in nature animals kill other animals for food all the time, sometimes even in the most gruesome and tortuous ways? Exactly how is that any less "immoral" than humans killing animals for food?
Mistreatment and unnecessary suffering may be seen as immoral, but considering simply eating animals as immoral is just outright hypocrisy IMO. Humans eating animals is exactly as natural as any other animal eating animals.
I think the immoral part here is that we don't have to go through any risk (or any effort at all) to kill for food. In that sense we're now closer to carrion eaters than hunters. Many vegetarians I've asked say they would have no problem eating meat of an animal they'd hunted in person.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I think the immoral part here is that we don't have to go through any risk (or any effort at all) to kill for food. In that sense we're now closer to carrion eaters than hunters. Many vegetarians I've asked say they would have no problem eating meat of an animal they'd hunted in person.
There are all kinds of animals that do not take much risk nor effort to eat other animals. Regardless, I really don't see what effort has to do with morality.
I think this notion is rather utopistic. I see these people envisioning nature in a very idealistic way, such as it consisting of mostly gallant predators (such as wolves, lions, and so on) and beautiful plant-eating galloping prey (such as deers, antelopes and so on), where there's a perfect balance and natural order between hunter and prey.
The reality is much cruder than that.
It's certainly immoral to kill animals. We can choose not to, but we do it anyway. But I think it should be a very low priority issue for now. Similar to how it's much easier to give up on bad habits if you are overall satisfied with your life, it will be easier for mankind to stop eating meat once we've gotten rid of all of our more immediate problems.
Killing animals is ugly and unaesthetic. We have to suppress the idea of it happening to be able to enjoy our meals properly. That might make it easier to suppress the idea that people are dying all across the world, and we could theoretically do something about it, as well. Isn't it tolerable to make inferior species suffer? That's a similar kind of thinking which has allowed us to tolerate the enslavement of black people f.e.
Edit: I'd like to add that "other animals do it as well, therefore it can't be that immoral" is really a very silly argument imo. Where does the presumption come from that everything animals naturally do must be morally alright? Especially if we just copy their behavior without thinking? Granted, some animals may lack the capacity to think about the moral consequences of their actions, so you can't really blame them as severely for acting immorally. Similarly, if criminals lack that capacity, they won't be punished as severely, but that doesn't make the act itself any more moral at all. You can't assume the least possible mental capacity and deduce your moral standards from that. We clearly should assume the highest possible one instead if we don't want to go back to the Dark Ages...
As long as we eat meat, we won't be able to get rid of the notion that life is naturally cruel, that it's all about the survival of the fittest, etc. (Basically it's "God wills it and amen" in a new disguise). That notion if applied in the context of our society may severely hamper our capacity to stand up against unjust practices or social inequalities that we don't agree with. If the masses think that way, any democracy will easily turn into a polyarchy or even a dictatorship. The courage to challenge the status quo is absolutely necessary for a working society. We don't just say "but it's completely natural!" and leave it at that. How are we supposed to advance as a society like that?
About the survival of the fittest, I'd have to say that mankind has certainly not survived because we're the fittest on our own, we're only doing so well because we're highly intelligent social animals, and as a group we are strong. There's absolutely nothing that prevents us from living alongside other social animals as cousins besides our egos and our mad fantasies of being a superior race/species (collective ego). Hopefully, we'll be able to recognize the importance of other species when we start colonizing our first planets. There's still hope. ;p
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
nfq wrote:
Raw food contains natural brushes that clean our teeth, like if we eat an apple, the skin sometimes gets stuck between teeth and acts like a dental floss.
I'm not really behind this idea. As someone with crowded teeth, stuff like corn skin and apple skin STAYS between my teeth. Years and years ago, before I started flossing regularly and right when my wisdom teeth started coming in, my teeth got really crowded and I got a piece of corn skin stuck between my back molars. This led to swollen gums and when I finally got the piece out it had been a while and it was turning black (sorry, I realize that's a bit disgusting).
A couple years later I had three cavities between three different pairs of molars. It's NOT FUN to get those filled (they have to use little wooden wedges to move other teeth out of the way temporarily, it hurts, even while numb, and the pressure is insane).
EDIT: Oh also, about the bed thing: I have no source or anything to back it up, but I've heard a few times that an unmade bed is less likely to harbor bedbugs and mites and stuff. Also, pillows are disgusting (but necessary, for me anyway)
