EGG

@Background Pony #37DD

Yeah, Marxists kinda suck.

also EGG

EGG

@skybrook2
What you're describing is called "social capital." Well, Marxists call it "cultural hegemony," and see it as something to tear down and destroy, something to abolish, in order to create the conditions for The Revolution, but it's the same thing, with a different label applied to it by people who hate it. Over the past century and more in the West social capital has diminished, decade over decade, year over year, since before anyone now alive was born. "Entropy increases," we tell ourselves. Things weren't always this way. Maybe this isn't the way things have to be. But that is abstract, and we must live from day to day in the here and now, in the world as it is. We are anomic, atomized, alienated, deracinated, disconnected, fungible, interchangeable, expendable units of economic consumption and production, living in the existential vacuum that has been carefully crafted for us. This is, obviously, unsatisfactory, but the way forward is not obvious.

@Background Pony #37DD

The real problem is that we don't have any communities anymore. Our society doesn't scale, and it has been scaled despite that, by people who make good use of how it completely fails at scale. The corruption of research is more of a side effect to the real goal of making us all isolated and easy to push around. We judge people as more worthy without any reason to do so other than money, because we have no choice. Any other means of doing so has been brutally suppressed.

So of course you can't trust corrupt researchers, because they don't know you and you don't know them. They have no reason not to screw with you, and if they are, you can't hold them accountable! Nobody you know knows those researchers. There aren't even indirect connections to any of these accreditors, degree holders, or research scientists. You don't know anyone you can trust, and that's deliberate, so all you can trust is your parents who just blindly trust a fancy looking degree on a wall, which is ultimately established by money they have no way to measure the value of. What do you tell your children? That you have absolutely no idea whether anyone's idea of eating healthy is right? Because they have no one else to turn to, anymore.

Our hedgewitches and shamans were often kooks and racketeers, but they're gone now and nothing has taken their place.

@Background Pony #AC2A
Well, that's not crazy. There's so much we think we know, that we don't.

In the 1970s they had elementary school kids singing these songs about the version of the "food pyramid" from fifty years ago. The idea, then, was that there are four groups into which healthy foods can be divided: fruits and vegetables, breads and cereals, dairy products and eggs, and meat. Yes, meat and dairy were at the time considered as separate, which may be more a culinary distinction than a biochemical one. But the slogan at the time was that each day a growing child required four servings of fruits and vegetables, four servings of breads and cereals, three servings of dairy products, and two servings of meat, for which nuts and beans could be partially substituted. And yes, "serving" is a pretty flexible word—the numbers of recommended "servings" have gone way, way up and down over the years. But from today's perspective, that seems like a lot of starch. But in a time before latchkey kids, before video games and the Internet, when children played outside a lot more than they do now, it was maybe not completely crazy, and life expectancies were longer than today. We currently are told that starch, especially refined starch in forms like bleached white flour, is always bad for us, almost as bad as sugar, and something we should minimize in our diets.

But Americans ate a lot more starch, and a lot more white bread and potatoes, a hundred years ago, but there was less obesity. Maybe because a lot more Americans worked brutally strenuous jobs in factories and lumber camps than today. Exercise seems to be a part of it. It looks like it might be. Maybe?

As for artificial sweeteners and insulin, I was curious enough to look it up. The NIH—US National Institutes of Health, for those outside the US—has published studies saying that the pancreas reacts measurably to artificial sweeteners and is stimulated to release measurable and significant amounts of insulin, but also studies saying no such effect was found. They can't both be right, can they? Not when they're in direct contradiction. Someone's trying to sell somebody something again. Once again, we get back to the question of how much of what "the authorities" know is real at all.

And now that they don't sell margarine in a lot of supermarkets at all any more, I am annoyed because I have one recipe calling for it specifically, for an application in which butter does not behave exactly the same way. Margarine was unpopular prior to the Second World War. Then during the war it was widely sought out as a substitute for butter, which was expensive, subject to rationing, and sometimes difficult to obtain at all. There were, maybe still are, USDA and FDA regulations saying that a product sold as "margarine," with that word on the label, has to be, chemically speaking, sufficiently similar to butter that it can be substituted for it in recipes without significant problems. And for a generation after the war, margarine was common, because it cost a third of what butter did, and there was a general perception that it was about the same, more or less. Now you can't even find it in the supermarkets any more, because over the space of a handful of years it became "bad" in the eyes of the public. And there may be merit to the claims that it's unhealthy because it's artificial, or it may be bullshit phony studies paid for by megacorporations that are in the dairy products business. It's impossible to be certain about anything any more. I do know that the "low-fat spreads" that are half water or more by weight with gelatin as a thickener and just a dollop of vegetable oil now cost almost the same as butter, and "vegan baking sticks" that are guaranteed to be an exact one-to-one replacement for butter in baking cost more than butter does. I get the sense that someone saw an opportunity to alter public perceptions and make more money. Maybe I'm too cynical.

But it does seem like exercise is healthy. Pythagoras told us that. The Romans said "exercise is medicine" and scorned idleness as effeminate. So I'm going to the gym.

@Background Pony #37DD
>peer-reviewed papers
Remember over a hundred drugs being tested for Alzheimers, every single one based on the recently-revealed-to-be-bogus premise that Alz is associated with platelets?

Re: food, I think all the fake bullshit is far more damaging than any normal (not outright poisonous or poisoned) food could be. Margarine is worse than butter because it pretends to be butter. Artificial sweeteners are worse than sugar or fructose because they pretend to be sugar (e.g. I've seen a hypothesis that higher incidence of diabetes nowadays is because the body reacts to artificial sweeteners the same way it does to sugar, releases insulin, but they don't interact with insulin → too much insulin fucks the body up). Et cetera et cetera.

Re: burns (and medicine in general), did you know that massive amount of modern medical knowledge comes from the "inhumane" German and Japanese experiments? Life jackets have the back of the neck bump because Germans forced prisoners into ice baths to see what killed them the fastest (back-of-the-head submersion/cooling). We know that humans are 70% water because Japanese dehydrated a bunch of gaijins alive. Et cetera, et cetera.
The discussion on burn treatment would be resolved right quick if some country had the balls to take 200 criminals imprisoned for life, burn them, and do half-half with dry and wet dressings.

@skybrook2
Yes, it's true. In terms of public health in the West, the low-hanging fruit was all snatched up before the First World War. Lister and antiseptics. Sanitary sewer systems that prevent the cholera epidemics that used to kill thousands and thousands of people in the big cities almost every summer—the cholera epidemic of 1854 killed almost 6% of the population of Chicago. Sanitary drinking water. Canned food that you can be reasonably sure won't kill you. Doctors realizing that people do, in fact, need fresh fruit and vegetables in their diets, even when vitamins hadn't been discovered yet. Iodine added to table salt to reduce the prevalence of thyroid disease. These were the big ones. Antibiotics are much smaller by comparison, and those have been around for over three quarters of a century.

By comparison, in the present day we're doing statistical analysis of nutritional studies and arguing over effects four or five points to the right of the decimal place. "Eggs are deadly and the cholesterol will kill you!" "NO! Eggs are nourishing and high in protein, not particularly high in cholesterol, and may be the most perfect human food!" "Butter is high in cholesterol and will kill you! You should buy margarine instead!" "NO! Margarine is artificial and contains trans fats! You should buy butter instead!" In medicine, they've been going back and forth between "Burns should always have dry dressings, because that reduces bacterial growth and promotes healing." and "NO! Burns should always have wet dressings because it is more comfortable for the patient, and that promotes healing." since before the Second World War, with no end in sight.

And you may have heard that these days only about one in three "peer-reviewed papers" from journals of the physical scientists describes something that can actually be replicated in the lab when people actually try it instead of just reading it and nodding along and saying "seems legit." Two in three "totally scientific" papers are filled with false information. Sometimes it's honest mistakes, like Pons and Fleischmann and "cold fusion," which sounded so great that no one wanted to consider the possibility it wasn't real. Sometimes it's bullshit that some grad students made up and wrote up for the prof because the department is angling for a grant. This is a problem. We don't know nearly as much as we think we do, and we don't know what we don't know. And the people giving us this information always have something to sell. Maybe it's obvious, like canned peas. Maybe it's less obvious, like a reseach university selling the government on the need to fund further studies ("further studies are needed!") based on false information.

I now hear so many people saying "high fructose corn syrup will kill you" that I'm already waiting for the talking heads on the news to start saying "no, wait, it's good for you, it's better for you than sugar." In the 1970s when HFCS was being introduced to the processed food industry, that's what the "experts" told us. "High fructose corn syrup is sweeter, weight of sugars for weight of sugars, than sucrose. This means we can use less of it in soft drinks and they will have less total sugar and fewer calories than in the old recipes with cane sugar." I am personally waiting for The Scientific Authorities to switch to that one.

@Background Pony #AC2A

I heard that the digestion of fructose and/or ethanol in your liver (in absence of heavy cardiac exercise) is what produces the worst VLDL cholesterol. Cholesterol that you eat just… y'know… goes in your lymphatic system, never touches the bloodstream. So fructose, HFCS, sucrose (which is 50% fructose) and booze are all much more effective at giving you cirrhosis of the liver and clogged arteries than egg yolks.

(which is to say, not very effective, mostly safe, but they sell us so goddamn much of it that our body can't keep up.)

@8968
@Background Pony #37DD
Food cholesterol is just fat. It's completely digested. The kind of cholesterol that clogs your veins is made entirely by your body, and you avoid it by not being obese.

@8968
Whether cholesterol is harmful for most people is still somewhat debated, and I do not think two eggs have enough of it to be harmful for most people. And the protein is very nourishing, very readily digested, very readily absorbed. They have lots of vitamins A, D, and B12. They're fairly low in fat, too. Unless you are having health issues as a direct result of excessive cholesterol intake, eggs are okay, I think. As long as you don't eat a dozen at once. And hard-boiled eggs don't come with the extra fat from frying.

@Background Pony #3D6C
They are! But beware: the egg yolk contains a lot of cholesterol, which you shouldn't consume too much of. The egg white is very high in proteine!

Eggs are good, quite healthy too I understand

teesty eegs