My Dad has to be gluten free and my D2 is lactose intolerant, but for me (and for all of us) it begins and ends there. Chia seed, sauerkraut and lard are fine (in moderation of course), but they’re not going to cure cancer! It seems like the same logic that the anti-vaxxers use and it drives me crazy.
Not from a Medical Genetics viewpoint, it doesn’t.
My best friend from elementary school on up came to visit and she brought an old photo album of our high school days with her. My Ds were flipping through it and one of them remarked “Everyone in these pictures is SKINNY! Every single person!”
@bunsenburner:
Thank you, that was a really great description of why claiming the baby was genetically changed by the mother’s diet or what not is wrong, it is a perfect description. Genes of course can mutate, but that is not what is at work here. The point is that genes themselves only do so much, and for example, in utero the mother’s environment can change things about a baby that have nothing to do with genes, a women eating a certain diet, for example, potentially could change what the metabolism of the baby being born or, or potentially could cause the baby to have allergies or problems eating certain foods, and a lot of these pathways are not necessarily understood. I wonder if anyone has ever done studies of the base metabolism of babies whose mothers were overweight or had bad nutrition and saw what the effects were there, for example.
One of the things that drives me up the wall is when I hear words like genes and genetics thrown around randomly, those who claim the genes are everything, those who claim like that idiot Leschenko (proof positive Stalin was a moron) that you can change the nature of genes by the environment (ie have sweetened soil around wheat plants, the wheat plant will produce sweeter wheat and its offspring will produce sweeter wheat, too),when the reality is you can’t, not in that way (there are some ties between environment and inherited characteristics, but it isn’t that simple and requires a lot of things for it to happen, last I read).
It is interesting, there was an article in the NY Times about courses in ignorance, specifically scientific ignorance, in places like med schools and the like, and they were not exactly looked at very positively at first. Basically, what the idea is is to push back on the notion that science knows everything, and also to talk about how much ignorance there is in science, not stupidity, but rather simply how much they don’t know. One professor pointed to a med school neurology textbook, all 1400 pages of it, and the notion that somehow they know so much about the brain, because hey, if the book is that big, must be comprehensive…when the reality is there is a ton we don’t know about the brain. It is kind of sad that in society there seems to be two kinds of scientific ignorance, there are those who have this notion that science is like religion, with belief being the basis for scientific knowledge, then there are those who think somehow that much of science is truly settled, that it ‘knows everything’, and in a sense wonders why we need research and such to be ongoing. I think this applies to the whole notion of healthy eating, that we can never sit back and say something is the ‘absolute truth’ and stop investigating, science at its best is “this is what we understand today, but we expect it will be different tomorrow”. Just think of the whole idea of dietary cholesterol and heart disease, that saturated fat in the diet is the prime cause of heart disease, that held sway for a long time, that turned out in many ways to be almost primitive medical thinking ie since fats tend to be sticky and goey, especially saturated fat (think butter, or fat from meat), they must of course clog the artery, like grease in a drain or something, despite the fact that studies going well back into the 70’s were questioning that.
Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko.
See also Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
@JustOneDad - I was responding to your post #75. Regarding the Dutch Hunger Winter and it’s later effects.
Thank you, I didn’t look the name up when I wrote that, I should of. And yes, Lamarck thought the same thing with genetics, about inheriting characteristics from the environment. I understand the attraction of this kind of thought, because to quote Shaw, sounds a lot more humane then Darwinian evolution, but that doesn’t mean it is true. There is some indication of inherited traits from environmental influences, where straight Mendelenian genetics and Darwin’s natural selection are somewhat modified, but those effects as far as I know are limited and nuanced.
“@JustOneDad - I was responding to your post #75. Regarding the Dutch Hunger Winter and it’s later effects.”
You might be interested in looking at this site then:
http://www.news.leiden.edu/news/dutch-hunger-winter.html
One nitpicking: “methyl” is not a “molecule,” it is a radical, a substitutent, etc.
Other terms for this are “normal weight obesity” (see http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/expert-answers/normal-weight-obesity/faq-20058313 ) and “skinny fat” (sometimes mentioned in fitness circles).
My yds’s gf has taken it upon herself to go clean-eating. She says her face has cleared up for the first time ever (I never noticed a problem before, frankly) and G.I. wise she feels better. She is not diagnosed w/ celiac disease. She eats gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, no grains, no potatoes…is this also the Neanderthal diet? She has gotten noticeably thinner, verging on “too thin”. I wonder if her parents are concerned. So, anyway, when she comes for dinner, we will provide her w/ plain meat and a salad and/or veggies if we are having something forbidden. Must keep my thoughts to myself. I did ask yds if he thought she had gotten too thin and he says no, so… : X
@vabluebird:
what you are describing is the so called paleo diet, which is supposed to mimic what people ate 10,000 years ago before man started settled agriculture. The basics of the diet are supposed to be eating green vegetables and meat protein, which would be similar the claim is to what paleolithic man would eat. The problem is like many things, they take it to extremes, the real basis for the paleo diet is to limit simple carbs like grains, eat a lot more vegetables and some fruit, eat lean protein, and to stay away from processed foods. There are real problems with the claims, for example, that somehow man wasn’t meant to eat grains, our bodies evolved through 6 million years as omnivores (and primates are omnivores), and also, paleo man being nomadic hunter/gatherers, would eat anything they could find. They did eat grains, they would eat eggs if they could find them, and some of them may very well have eaten dairy, there were already nomadic tribes in those days who lived off herded animals, the way people in tibet and mongolia still do. Not ot mention that paleo man may not have been the healthiest thing around…I think the basics of it have some sense to them, but I also think personally trying to literally eat ‘like paleo man’ is kind of fruitless, and it is stupid IMO to give up eating beans and legumes because ‘paleo man didn’t eat them’ when a)they probably did eat at least some and b) they are healthy.
Paleolithic humans also got a lot more exercise than modern humans in rich countries since they had to walk and run all over the place to hunt and gather their food.
http://qz.com/479123/scientists-confirm-that-the-paleo-diet-is-nonsense/
They also ate potatoes too. But modern Paleo diet don’t eat them because of high glycemic index.
@musicprnt, yes, we discussed that with her, how scientists say mankind started “processing” grains only 10,000 years ago so they aren’t really “natural” to man. Well, if we are evolved from apes, then why did man start killing and eating animals? To take it to the origin, we should be strictly vegetarian, right? I don’t know how to judge all this. I really don’t. I just don’t see how natural grains (as unprocessed as possible), eggs, rice and beans and legumes, as you say, can be harmful. I worry that it is a new anorexia, an extreme means to stay abnormally thin. But…must keep my mouth shut!!!
Edited to add…ROFL, I called it the Neanderthal diet. LOL. Duh.
“Well, if we are evolved from apes, then why did man start killing and eating animals?”
Our closest “relatives”, chimps, are omnivores. They prefer fruit, but will eat anything… birds, eggs, veggies, insects…
Here’s my take.
I am not into fad diets (I am not into any diets. Period.) I AM a vegetarian, but that’s due to my love of animals - I became a vegetarian long before eating healthy.
However, I AM ambivalent about wheat. I do feel a lot of rice is way too processed. Don’t really eat many potatoes. I am not low-carb in that I eat a lot of fruit (at least 6 a day), but I don’t eat a ton of grains and what grains I do eat I try to eat minimally-processed (steel cut oats every day and Ezekiel bread). That’s it for grains. For dinners, I usually do a protein and a variety of veg, but no grains or starches. I do eat quite a bit of full-fat dairy (milk, Greek yogurt). For an occasional dinner out, I will have pasta, pizza, etc., but it’s not how I eat every day. Non-processed is really the key to what I eat.
My goal is not to stay abnormally thin - it’s to get strong - build muscle in my legs and arms, develop endurance. And the way I am eating has helped tremendously. I can do things now that I couldn’t even do back in high school, when I was at the same weight, but ate differently.
I bet some people think that what I eat is too restrictive, etc. I bet some people think I diet or restrict calories (I don’t -eat around 2300 a day - never went on a low-calorie diet - when I changed my lifestyle it was all about getting healthy, not fitting into a dress or losing weight - the weight did come off, due to the lifestyle change). Does the girl’s diet sound restrictive? To me, yes. But my point is, sometimes it’s hard to judge from the outside what works and doesn’t work for people and what their goals are. Maybe try to talk to her about what she eats, in a non-judgmental way, and really try to hear her. Maybe she is not trying to get abnormally thin. Maybe certain foods really don’t agree with her. Maybe she doesn’t eat eggs because she doesn’t agree with how chickens are treated. I don’t know. Just throwing it out there.
Modern day chimpanzees do eat meat (insects and mammals).
being able to eat almost anything…fruits, vegetables, meat fish, bugs etc…
is a tremendous evolutionary advantage. what happens when you can only eat one type of food or worse one subset…and there is none around?
Well, if we are evolved from apes, then why did man start killing and eating animals? To take it to the origin, we should be strictly vegetarian, right?
Modern day chimpanzees do eat meat (insects and mammals).>>>
I honestly did not know that. Well, insects, yes but I didn’t realize they hunt, kill and eat mammals.
Here is an interesting read on chimp diet: