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Javier E

Breakfast was the most important meal of the day - until America ruined it - The Washin... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html

breakfast sugar carbohydrates cereals diet food

shared by Javier E on 21 May 17 - No Cached
  • It’s probably more accurate to call breakfast the most dangerous meal of the day. Not only because of the sugar in so many breakfast cereals, but also because the refined grains they’re made of are virtually the same thing, once they reach your bloodstream.
  • All the cereal, whole grain or not, is processed in a way to give it indefinite shelf life. As the nutritious parts of our food are what goes bad on the shelf, just about every processed-grain product on the shelf is nutritionally barren.
  • refined wheat, rice and corn, what most mainstream American breakfast cereals are primarily composed of, is quickly converted to sugar on entering your system, requiring that exact same insulin response.
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  • When you see someone spooning sugar onto a bowl of cornflakes or Cheerios, you should not see the act as sweetening something that’s good for you, you should see it as someone spooning sugar onto sugar.
  • the biggest culprits in America’s bad health are sugar and refined grains, in that order. Sugar, a carbohydrate, now seems to be the chief villain. (In his recent book “The Case Against Sugar,” Taubes suggests it should be considered toxic in the same way cigarettes are.) But its nutritional cousin, the refined-grain carbohydrate, may be a close second.
  • Cereal was not always the morning staple that it is today. It only became so at about the same time that our health problems began to be documented, in the 1960s. A coincidence?
  • cereal was initially eaten on Sundays, when the women of our churchgoing nation didn’t have time to make the family breakfast. Once women entered the workforce, though, we began pouring our convenient breakfasts out of a box in significant numbers daily, a trend that peaked in 1995,
  • it may not even just be cereal that’s had such a huge impact on American health. “Maybe the problem,” Sukol said, “is the huge quantity of nutritionally bankrupt foods that are supposed to stand in for breakfast.”
  • By this she means anything composed primarily of refined wheat, which would be, um, 90 percent of the American breakfast repertoire: pancakes, waffles, bagels, toast, muffins, biscuits, scones, croissants, and so on.
  • eating this stuff on an empty stomach (i.e. in the morning), may be especially bad for your system, as there is little fiber, fat or protein in your system to slow the sugar absorption. Our breakfast staples might all best be considered as a single category of food: sugar bomb.
  • she nevertheless recommends that all her patients avoid what she calls “stripped” carbs, carbohydrates stripped of their fiber matrix, before noon.
  • What does she recommend for breakfast? Steel-cut oats, not cooked but rather soaked overnight with a dash of vinegar. I add whole-fat Greek yogurt and some nuts if I have them
  • Beans are great too. I had a delicious dish of lentils and a small amount of basmati rice
  • An egg and some cheese are also a nourishing and satisfying way to begin the day.
  • it throws a different light on the cereal aisle. That hulking behemoth in the middle of the grocery store, the racks of cereal, is stripped-carb and sugar ground zero, representing a kind of unrecognized terrorism wrought on parents by our own food makers
Javier E

What Eating 40 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day Can Do to You - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...s-of-sugar-a-day-can-do-to-you

sugar diet weight loss

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • In “That Sugar Film,” which first had its debut in Australia this year, Mr. Gameau gives up his normal diet of fresh foods for two months to see what happens when he shifts to eating a diet containing 40 teaspoons of sugar daily, the amount consumed by the average Australian
  • What was your diet like before the start of the film? A. I kept away from processed foods as much as I could. I’d have eggs for breakfast. I’d eat healthy fats like avocado, and I’d snack on nuts and a little cheese. I’d have lots of fruits and vegetables and protein sources like fish. I just tried to eat real foods, and I kept it really simple.
  • Mr. Gameau finds that his health and waistline quickly spiral out of control.
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  • These are the foods with flowers and bees and sunsets on their labels. That’s the whole point of the film. If I had been eating chocolate doughnuts and soft drinks, we know what would have happened to me. But the fact that this happened when I was following the low-fat diet that we’ve all been prescribed for 35 years – that was surprising.
  • The twist is that Mr. Gameau avoids soda, ice cream, candy and other obvious sources of sugar. Instead, he consumes foods commonly perceived as “healthy” that are frequently loaded with added sugars, like low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, health bars and cereal.
  • How did it change during the film? A. I swapped all that for the refined carbohydrates. Cereals, low-fat yogurts and apple juice would be my breakfast instead of eggs and avocado. And lunch would be pasta with pasta sauce, or some vegetables or fish with a teriyaki sauce or some kind of dressing that had added sugars in it.
  • My calorie intake didn’t change. What I was eating before – the avocados and nuts and other foods – are high in calories. So I kept a similar calorie intake. But on the diet with all the added sugars, I was snacking a lot more. I just never felt full, and it was affecting my moods. What I learned was that I was triggering insulin and all sorts of hormones that were trapping fat in my body.
  • I don’t think we should ever demonize one nutrient. But when that one single nutrient is now in 80 percent of all foods, we do need to look at it. This is not just about putting sugar in your tea or coffee. It’s pervaded our entire food supply, and people are having far too much of it. And I think most of those people don’t realize how much they’re having.
  • When I went back to just drinking water and eating food again, the weight dropped, and all my symptoms went away. I think we just need to simplify things. Stick to the perimeter of the supermarket where all the fresh foods are. Buy real foods as much as you can.
Javier E

The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...551528

sugar dementia diet research brain science

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A longitudinal study, published Thursday in the journal Diabetologia, followed 5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar
  • In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.
  • “Currently, dementia is not curable, which makes it very important to study risk factors.”
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  • People who have type 2 diabetes are about twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, and people who have diabetes and are treated with insulin are also more likely to get Alzheimer’s, suggesting elevated insulin plays a role in Alzheimer’s. In fact, many studies have found that elevated insulin, or “hyperinsulinemia,” significantly increases your risk of Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, people with type 1 diabetes, who don’t make insulin at all, are also thought to have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. How could these both be true?
  • Schilling posits this happens because of the insulin-degrading enzyme, a product of insulin that breaks down both insulin and amyloid proteins in the brain—the same proteins that clump up and lead to Alzheimer’s disease. People who don’t have enough insulin, like those whose bodies’ ability to produce insulin has been tapped out by diabetes, aren’t going to make enough of this enzyme to break up those brain clumps. Meanwhile, in people who use insulin to treat their diabetes and end up with a surplus of insulin, most of this enzyme gets used up breaking that insulin down, leaving not enough enzyme to address those amyloid brain clumps.
  • this can happen even in people who don’t have diabetes yet—who are in a state known as “prediabetes.” It simply means your blood sugar is higher than normal, and it’s something that affects roughly 86 million Americans.
  • In a 2012 study, Roberts broke nearly 1,000 people down into four groups based on how much of their diet came from carbohydrates. The group that ate the most carbs had an 80 percent higher chance of developing mild cognitive impairment—a pit stop on the way to dementia—than those who ate the smallest amount of carbs.
  • “It’s hard to be sure at this stage, what an ‘ideal’ diet would look like,” she said. “There’s a suggestion that a Mediterranean diet, for example, may be good for brain health.”
  • there are several theories out there to explain the connection between high blood sugar and dementia. Diabetes can also weaken the blood vessels, which increases the likelihood that you’ll have ministrokes in the brain, causing various forms of dementia. A high intake of simple sugars can make cells, including those in the brain, insulin resistant, which could cause the brain cells to die. Meanwhile, eating too much in general can cause obesity. The extra fat in obese people releases cytokines, or inflammatory proteins that can also contribute to cognitive deterioration, Roberts said. In one study by Gottesman, obesity doubled a person’s risk of having elevated amyloid proteins in their brains later in life.
  • even people who don’t have any kind of diabetes should watch their sugar intake, she said.
  • as these and other researchers point out, decisions we make about food are one risk factor we can control. And it’s starting to look like decisions we make while we’re still relatively young can affect our future cognitive health.
  • “Alzheimer’s is like a slow-burning fire that you don’t see when it starts,” Schilling said. It takes time for clumps to form and for cognition to begin to deteriorate. “By the time you see the signs, it’s way too late to put out the fire.”
Javier E

I Was Powerless Over Diet Coke - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...diet-coke-addiction.html

diet caffeine sugar addiction habit psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • What makes it so hard to quit?
  • two culprits: aspartame and caffeine. Or, to be more precise: addiction to sweetness and to caffeine. Individually, they’re bad; together, they’re an addict’s nightmare.
  • A 12-ounce can of regular Coke has 34 milligrams of caffeine, whereas Diet Coke has 11 milligrams more, according to Coca-Cola. (An 8-ounce cup of coffee has about 95 mg.) Artificial sweeteners activate the brain’s reward system, but only about half as much as regular sugar, said Dr. Peeke. Faux sugar doesn’t pack the same wallop as the real stuff, so it keeps you wanting more and more.
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  • Not only is this tied to weight gain, especially in the belly, but it also leaves you with cravings. Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than table sugar. Serious drinkers are so used to the super-sweet taste that everything else seems bland in comparison.
  • Coca-Cola has a different take on what people refer to as an addiction. “Food and beverages, like chocolate, for example, can trigger what scientists call ‘reward centers’ in the brain, but so can other things like music or laughter,” said Daphne Dickerson, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola. “Regularly consuming food and beverages that taste good and that you enjoy is not the same as being addicted to them.”
  • In September 2020, Ms. Beller was diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn’t quit Diet Coke until after surgery, when doctors found more cancer and she realized she’d have to undergo chemotherapy.
  • She used the Quitzilla app, a habit breaker and sobriety counter, which tracked her progress. “Every time I had a craving, just looking at the app did something good in my brain,” she said. She didn’t have a lot of physical side effects, but she did long for the drink. She credits the app with helping her stay on track.
sissij

Common Science Myths That Most People Believe | IFLScience - 0 views

www.iflscience.com/...ence-myths-most-people-believe

myths science knowledge

shared by sissij on 10 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • We only use 10% of our brains.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by TeadsADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads It's true that there’s a great deal we don’t know about the brain, but we certainly do know that we use our entire brain.
  • Sugar makes children hyperactive. Attending any child’s birthday party where cake, ice cream, and sugary drinks about would make just about anyone a believer that sugar influences hyperactivity. There has not been much evidence to suggest that the so-called “sugar buzz” is actually real for children (aside from a small subset with an insulin disorder coupled with certain psychiatric disorders).
  • Antibiotics kill viruses.  This one pops up every cold and flu season. Antibiotics, by their very definition, kill bacteria.
  • sissij on 10 Jan 17
     
    This article really surprise me that some of my intuitions are wrong. I always thought that if we swallow the gum, then the gum will stick in our stomach and never go away. However, it will pass along as waste. This shows that for many people, some fields of science they learned about are usually second-handed. Many "scientific knowledge" we have are not first handed and they have been modified. Before we are using them as scientific knowledge, we need first to make sure that they are really science, not another myth. --Sissi (1/10/2017)
anonymous

This Is Your Brain on Junk Food: In 'Hooked,' Michael Moss Explores Addiction - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hooked-junk-food.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
  • Yet after writing the book, Mr. Moss was not convinced that processed foods could be addictive.
  • In a legal proceeding two decades ago, Michael Szymanczyk, the chief executive of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, was asked to define addiction.
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  • “My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”
  • Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.
  • In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
  • Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
  • In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.
  • Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.
  • “The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”
  • “I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”
  • The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.
  • In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.
  • “I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”
  • Witness
  • But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed
  • One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.
  • The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.
  • That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch
  • : Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.
  • But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,
  • This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.
  • Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.
  • In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.
  • As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.
  • It may have been on to something.
  • “Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
  • But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.
  • For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.
  • Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent
  • Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.
  • Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.
  • “It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    Really interesting!! How food affects your brain:
anonymous

Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...exercise-hiit.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health
  • A new study hints that excessive HIIT may harm your mitochondria, the energy generators found in every cell of your body.
  • If high-intensity exercise is good for us, is more necessarily better?
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  • Maybe not, according to an admonitory new study of the molecular effects of high-intensity interval training
  • suggesting that the benefits of extremely vigorous exercise may depend on just how much we do.
  • for example, that intense bursts of exercise increase the number of mitochondria in our muscle cells, and more mitochondria are thought to contribute to better cellular and metabolic health.
  • HIIT also may have unexpected downsides. In a study I wrote about in January, people who worked out with HIIT routines three times a week for six weeks did not improve their blood pressure or body fat as much as people who exercised far more moderately five times a week.
  • by being sedentary for four days each week, the intense exercisers in the study may have undermined the otherwise potent effects of their HIIT sessions.
  • These volunteers visited the researchers’ lab for tests of their current fitness and metabolic health, including blood-sugar levels over the course of a day.
  • Then they compared how people’s bodies had changed week over week.
  • At first, the findings were encouraging. By the end of week two, the riders were pedaling harder and appeared to be getting fitter, with better daily blood-sugar control and more total mitochondria in their muscle cells.
  • But something began to go wrong during week three. The volunteers’ ability to generate power while cycling flattened, and their subsequent muscle biopsies showed sputtering mitochondria, each of which was now producing only about 60 percent as much energy as during the previous week. The riders’ blood-sugar control also slipped, with se
  • The researchers are not sure precisely what changes within their volunteers’ bodies and muscles precipitated the negative results in week three.
  • Even so, the findings strongly suggest that anyone interested in high-intensity interval training start small, Mr. Flockhart says. Train a few times a week and on the remaining days, maybe take a walk.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 21
     
    We're constantly discovering more about the body, even if it seems contradictory to prior thought.
Javier E

Sugar Substitutes Surprise | Science | AAAS - 0 views

www.science.org/...sugar-substitutes-surprise

sugar substitute research science

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Exposure to saccharin and sucralose significantly impaired glycemic response, but this was not seen with the aspartame or stevia groups
  • None of the blood markers show real changes in any group except for insulin levels going up in the glucose and stevia groups (and since everyone was getting glucose as part of the dosing, that suggests a lowering of the glucose-driven insulin response overall).
  • what all of the sweetener patients showed, though, were significant changes in the gut microbiome, and these correlated with the glycemic response changes in the saccharin and sucralose groups. These changes were apparent at both the species distribution level and at the metabolome level.
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  • Collectively, our study suggests that commonly consumed NNS may not be physiologically inert in humans as previously contemplated, with some of their effects mediated indirectly through impacts exerted on distinct configurations of the human microbiome.
  • all four of them significantly altered the gut flora, and in ways whose further effects are difficult to predict.
Javier E

The Government's Bad Diet Advice - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ent-tells-you-what-to-eat.html

diet government nutrition research fat meat epidemiology science

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • How did experts get it so wrong?
  • the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation.
  • Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.
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  • In clearing our plates of meat, eggs and cheese (fat and protein), we ate more grains, pasta and starchy vegetables (carbohydrates). Over the past 50 years, we cut fat intake by 25 percent and increased carbohydrates by more than 30 percent, according to a new analysis of government data. Yet recent science has increasingly shown that a high-carb diet rich in sugar and refined grains increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — much more so than a diet high in fat and cholesterol.
  • In 2013, government advice to reduce salt intake (which remains in the current report) was contradicted by an authoritative Institute of Medicine study. And several recent meta-analyses have cast serious doubt on whether saturated fats are linked to heart disease, as the dietary guidelines continue to assert.
  • Much of the epidemiological data underpinning the government’s dietary advice comes from studies run by Harvard’s school of public health. In 2011, directors of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences analyzed many of Harvard’s most important findings and found that they could not be reproduced in clinical trials.
  • Today, we are poised to make the same mistakes. The committee’s new report also advised eliminating “lean meat” from the list of recommended healthy foods, as well as cutting back on red and processed meats. Fewer protein choices will likely encourage Americans to eat even more carbs. It will also have policy implications: Meat could be limited in school lunches and other federal food programs.
  • It’s possible that a mostly meatless diet could be healthy for all Americans — but then again, it might not be. We simply do not know. There are no rigorous clinical trials on such a diet, and although epidemiological data exists for adult vegetarians, there is none for children.
  • We have to start looking more skeptically at epidemiological studies and rethinking nutrition policy from the ground up.
  • Until then, we would be wise to return to what worked better for previous generations: a diet that included fewer grains, less sugar and more animal foods like meat, full-fat dairy and eggs
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
grayton downing

Biofuel Mimicry | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37587/title/Biofuel-Mimicry/

biofuel scientist mimicry research

shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • ants create the largest colonies of any ant, with some comprising 8 million individuals. To sustain themselves, they march across the forest carrying vast quantities of leaves, piece by piece, in great green convoys, back to the nest. The ants use the leaves as fertilizer to cultivate gardens sown with bacteria and Leucoagaricus gongylophorous, a fungus that produces fruiting bodies packed with nutrients for the ants to feast on.
  • could also provide a model for the more efficient production of renewable biofuels.
  • confirmed that 145 lignocellulases were actually present. “That’s pretty definitive proof that the fungus is the primary driver of biomass breakdown,
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • offers new insights into the contributions made by the fungus to plant degradation
  • identification of enzymes capable of degrading lignocelluloses could also be a boon for the biofuels industry. Biofuel companies already use enzyme blends to break down starches from plant biomass, most commonly corn, into sugars to be fermented into ethanol. But the enzymes currently available can’t break down tough-to-degrade molecules such as lignocelluloses on an industrial scale.
  • idea is that the genes coding for these enzymes in the fungus gardens of leafcutter ants can be mass-produced in the lab by inserting them into E. coli or yeast, then used to break down feedstocks that require less land, fewer resources, and that don’t compete with food crops. “This is a highly evolved system, so the hypothesis is that the enzymes would be highly tuned to break down plant biomass,”
  • researchers will also need to take into account the role of bacteria. “It could be that bacteria are producing some enzymes that enhance the efficacy of the fungal enzymes,” says Aylward. “Integrating the bacterial component is likely to be important, because the synergism we see with leafcutter gardens is on the level of the entire symbiosis.”
Javier E

Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kristof-our-biased-brains.html

racial bias genetic racism evolution psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face
  • Racial bias also begins astonishingly early: Even infants often show a preference for their own racial group. In one study, 3-month-old white infants were shown photos of faces of white adults and black adults; they preferred the faces of whites. For 3-month-old black infants living in Africa, it was the reverse.
  • in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death.
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  • I encourage you to test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu. It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.
  • unconscious racial bias turns up in children as soon as they have the verbal skills to be tested for it, at about age 4. The degree of unconscious bias then seems pretty constant: In tests, this unconscious bias turns out to be roughly the same for a 4- or 6-year-old as for a senior citizen who grew up in more racially oppressive times.
  • Many of these experiments on in-group bias have been conducted around the world, and almost every ethnic group shows a bias favoring its own. One exception: African-Americans.
  • in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.
  • even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.
  • “We wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and, likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.
  • Deep friendships, especially romantic relationships with someone of another race, also seem to mute bias
Javier E

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption | Brain Pickings - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...-information-diet-clay-johnson

information diet consumption health

shared by Javier E on 22 May 12 - Cached
  • “You are a mashup of what you let into your life,”
  • Brain Pickings — a filtration mechanism that lets into your life things that are interesting, meaningful, creatively and intellectually stimulating, memorable.
  • we’re wired to love certain kinds of information, most notably affirmation, so we seek out information that confirms, rather than challenges, our existing beliefs
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  • It’s a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.”
  • just like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly.
  • Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?”
  • the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits.“
  • Johnson has provided a toolkit of helpful (mostly) free software for a healthy information diet on the book’s site, ranging from productivity apps to ad blockers to various setting hacks to make your favorite services and social web platforms more conducive to info-wellness.
Javier E

Buying stock in love - Great Recession | Economic Recession, Economic Crisis - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...love_money

romance sex mating research results age beauty

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • people seem to be increasingly casting a cynical, calculating eye toward romance. The past few years have seen the explosion of "sugar daddy" dating sites
  • "In the past, you didn't see as much as you do now of shows like 'Millionaire Matchmaker' and 'The Real Housewives' -- all showing off their bling-bling. You begin to absorb the same kind of values that you see on TV."
  • WhatsYourPrice.com, which lets "generous" men and "beautiful" young women "buy and sell first dates." The Econ 101 concept behind it is that for a beautiful and in-demand woman, there is an opportunity cost associated with a first date (or, more simply, time is money). So, men evaluate how much a particular woman is worth in their mind and place a bid; then the woman has to weigh her options, consider the competition, and decide whether that's what her time is truly worth.
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  • all you're guaranteed is a chance to make the woman fall for you.
  • Based on a six-month study of dates successfully brokered through the site, they found that "men who want to date women over 10 years younger than themselves have to pay approximately 13% more than the average to close every year of age gap." A man 40 years older than his object of affection "will have to pay approximately 400% (or 4 times) more than a man who is only 10 years older to attract the interest of the same woman,"
Javier E

Here's what the government's dietary guidelines should really say - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html

dietary government guidelines science nutrition reproduction results

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.
  • Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.
  • Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin
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  • He came down hard on nutrition in a pull-no-punches 2013 British Medical Journal editorial titled, “Implausible results in human nutrition research,” in which he noted, “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome.”
  • Ioannidis told me that sussing out the connection between diet and health — nutritional epidemiology — is enormously challenging, and “the tools that we’re throwing at the problem are not commensurate with the complexity and difficulty of the problem.” The biggest of those tools is observational research, in which we collect data on what people eat, and track what happens to them.
  • He lists plant-based foods — fruit, veg, whole grains, legumes — but acknowledges that we don’t understand enough to prescribe specific combinations or numbers of servings.
  • funding bias isn’t the only kind. “Fanatical opinions abound in nutrition,” Ioannidis wrote in 2013, and those have bias power too.
  • “Definitive solutions won’t come from another million observational papers or small randomized trials,” reads the subtitle of Ioannidis’s paper. His is a burn-down-the-house ethos.
  • When it comes to actual dietary recommendations, the disagreement is stark. “Ioannidis and others say we have no clue, the science is so bad that we don’t know anything,” Hu told me. “I think that’s completely bogus. We know a lot about the basic elements of a healthy diet.”
  • Give tens of thousands of people that FFQ, and you end up with a ginormous repository of possible correlations. You can zero in on a vitamin, macronutrient or food, and go to town. But not only are you starting with flawed data, you’ve got a zillion possible confounding variables — dietary, demographic, socioeconomic. I’ve heard statisticians call it “noise mining,” and Ioannidis is equally skeptical. “With this type of data, you can get any result you want,” he said. “You can align it to your beliefs.”
  • Big differences in what people eat track with other differences. Heavy plant-eaters are different from, say, heavy meat-eaters in all kinds of ways (income, education, physical activity, BMI). Red meat consumption correlates with increased risk of dying in an accident as much as dying from heart disease. The amount of faith we put in observational studies is a judgment call.
  • I find myself in Ioannidis’s camp. What have we learned, unequivocally enough to build a consensus in the nutrition community, about how diet affects health? Well, trans-fats are bad.
  • Over and over, large population studies get sliced and diced, and it’s all but impossible to figure out what’s signal and what’s noise. Researchers try to do that with controlled trials to test the connections, but those have issues too. They’re expensive, so they’re usually small and short-term. People have trouble sticking to the diet being studied. And scientists are generally looking for what they call “surrogate endpoints,” like increased cholesterol rather than death from heart disease, since it’s impractical to keep a trial going until people die.
  • , what do we do? Hu and Ioannidis actually have similar suggestions. For starters, they both think we should be looking at dietary patterns rather than single foods or nutrients. They also both want to look across the data sets. Ioannidis emphasizes transparency. He wants to open data to the world and analyze all the data sets in the same way to see if “any signals survive.” Hu is more cautious (partly to safeguard confidentiality
  • I have a suggestion. Let’s give up on evidence-based eating. It’s given us nothing but trouble and strife. Our tools can’t find any but the most obvious links between food and health, and we’ve found those already.
  • Instead, let’s acknowledge the uncertainty and eat to hedge against what we don’t know
  • We’ve got two excellent hedges: variety and foods with nutrients intact (which describes such diets as the Mediterranean, touted by researchers). If you severely limit your foods (vegan, keto), you might miss out on something. Ditto if you eat foods with little nutritional value (sugar, refined grains). Oh, and pay attention to the two things we can say with certainty: Keep your weight down, and exercise.
  • I used to say I could tell you everything important about diet in 60 seconds. Over the years, my spiel got shorter and shorter as truisms fell by the wayside, and my confidence waned in a field where we know less, rather than more, over time. I’m down to five seconds now: Eat a wide variety of foods with their nutrients intact, keep your weight down and get some exercise.
Javier E

Older Americans Are 'Hooked' on Vitamins - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...amins-dietary-supplements.html

vitamins health supplements research

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease.She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
  • But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause.
  • More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29 percent take four or more supplements of any kind
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  • Often, preliminary studies fuel irrational exuberance about a promising dietary supplement, leading millions of people to buy in to the trend. Many never stop. They continue even though more rigorous studies — which can take many years to complete — almost never find that vitamins prevent disease, and in some cases cause harm
  • There’s no conclusive evidence that dietary supplements prevent chronic disease in the average American, Dr. Manson said. And while a handful of vitamin and mineral studies have had positive results, those findings haven’t been strong enough to recommend supplements to the general American public, she said.
  • The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $2.4 billion since 1999 studying vitamins and minerals. Yet for “all the research we’ve done, we don’t have much to show for it,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.
  • A big part of the problem, Dr. Kramer said, could be that much nutrition research has been based on faulty assumptions, including the notion that people need more vitamins and minerals than a typical diet provides; that megadoses are always safe; and that scientists can boil down the benefits of vegetables like broccoli into a daily pill.
  • when researchers tried to deliver the key ingredients of a healthy diet in a capsule, Dr. Kramer said, those efforts nearly always failed.
  • It’s possible that the chemicals in the fruits and vegetables on your plate work together in ways that scientists don’t fully understand — and which can’t be replicated in a table
  • More important, perhaps, is that most Americans get plenty of the essentials, anyway. Although the Western diet has a lot of problems — too much sodium, sugar, saturated fat and calories, in general — it’s not short on vitamins
  • Without even realizing it, someone who eats a typical lunch or breakfast “is essentially eating a multivitamin,”
  • The body naturally regulates the levels of many nutrients, such as vitamin C and many B vitamins, Dr. Kramer said, by excreting what it doesn’t need in urine. He added: “It’s hard to avoid getting the full range of vitamins.”
  • Not all experts agree. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says it’s reasonable to take a daily multivitamin “for insurance.” Dr. Willett said that clinical trials underestimate supplements’ true benefits because they aren’t long enough, often lasting five to 10 years. It could take decades to notice a lower rate of cancer or heart disease in vitamin taker
  • For Charlsa Bentley, 67, keeping up with the latest nutrition research can be frustrating. She stopped taking calcium, for example, after studies found it doesn’t protect against bone fractures. Additional studies suggest that calcium supplements increase the risk of kidney stones and heart disease.
  • People who take vitamins tend to be healthier, wealthier and better educated than those who don’t, Dr. Kramer said. They are probably less likely to succumb to heart disease or cancer, whether they take supplements or not. That can skew research results, making vitamin pills seem more effective than they really are
  • Because folic acid can lower homocysteine levels, researchers once hoped that folic acid supplements would prevent heart attacks and strokes.In a series of clinical trials, folic acid pills lowered homocysteine levels but had no overall benefit for heart disease, Dr. Lichtenstein said
  • When studies of large populations showed that people who eat lots of seafood had fewer heart attacks, many assumed that the benefits came from the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said.Rigorous studies have failed to show that fish oil supplements prevent heart attacks
  • But it’s possible the benefits of sardines and salmon have nothing to do with fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said. People who have fish for dinner may be healthier as a result of what they don’t eat, such as meatloaf and cheeseburgers.
  • “Eating fish is probably a good thing, but we haven’t been able to show that taking fish oil [supplements] does anything for you,
  • In the tiny amounts provided by fruits and vegetables, beta carotene and similar substances appear to protect the body from a process called oxidation, which damages healthy cells, said Dr. Edgar Miller, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Experts were shocked when two large, well-designed studies in the 1990s found that beta carotene pills actually increased lung cancer rates.
  • Likewise, a clinical trial published in 2011 found that vitamin E, also an antioxidant, increased the risk of prostate cancer in men by 17 percent
  • “Vitamins are not inert,” said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic who led the vitamin E study. “They are biologically active agents. We have to think of them in the same way as drugs. If you take too high a dose of them, they cause side effects.”
  • “We should be responsible physicians,” she said, “and wait for the data.”
Javier E

This Is Your Brain on Gluten - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282550

diet gluten cholesterol carbohydrates paleolithic health research

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • that’s how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it’s classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We’ve got Rob Lustig saying it’s all fructose; we’ve got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it’s all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it’s all grain. There’s either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book.”
  • The recurring formula is apparent: Tell readers it’s not their fault. Blame an agency; typically the pharmaceutical industry or U.S. government, but also possibly the medical establishment. Alluding to the conspiracy vaguely will suffice. Offer a simple solution. Cite science and mainstream research when applicable; demonize it when it is not.
  • “It makes me sad that somebody like you is going to reach out to me, so you can get what I’d like to think are sensible comments about a silly book. If you write a sensible book, which I did—it’s called Disease Proof , and it’s about what it really takes to be healthy, brain and body—nobody wants to talk about that. It has much less sex appeal. The whole thing is sad.
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  • “Is there a weight of evidence that says we can totally ignore both dietary cholesterol and LDL? Absolutely not,” he said. “You can legitimately say we’re starting to rethink some things, but ignoring LDL could absolutely result in heart attacks and strokes.
  • The medical community’s understanding of the danger of cholesterol is changing. Many cardiologists are starting to think that independent of other considerations, the level of LDL in our blood may not be as important as it previously seemed.
  • In November, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology released new guidelines that redefined the use of statins. While they continue to recommend that people at high risk for heart disease and people with LDL levels above 189 take a statin, the long-standing goal of lowering one’s LDL level to 70 is no longer deemed worthwhile to monitor.
  • Katz acknowledges that dietary cholesterol may be an innocuous part of an overall healthy diet. “The problem is that people are going to get their dietary cholesterol from things other than fish and eggs; they’re going to get it from meats and dairies. The problem with diets like that is if you eat more of A, you’re probably going to eat less of B. So people who are eating more meat and dairy and high-fat, high-cholesterol foods are eating fewer plants—they’re not eating beans; they’re not eating lentils. So yes, I think it’s entirely confabulated and contrived, and potentially dangerous on the level of lethal.”
  • Having talked to all of these people and read their work, here is how I walk away from this. Oxidative stress will increasingly be the target of medical treatments and preventive diets. We’ll hear more about the role of blood sugar in Alzheimer’s and continue to focus on moderating intake of refined carbohydrates. The consensus remains that too much LDL is bad for you. We do not have reason to believe that gluten is bad for most people. It does cause reactive symptoms in some people. Peanuts can kill some people, but that does not mean they are bad for everyone
  • I agree with Katz that the diets consistently shown to have good long-term health outcomes—both mental and physical—include whole grains and fruits, and are not nearly as high in fat as what Perlmutter proposes.
ilanaprincilus06

The FDA Has Approved An Obesity Drug That Helped Some People Drop Weight By 15% : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-some-people-drop-weight-by-15

diabetes FDA obesity

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.
  • In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing.
  • "With existing drugs, you're going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,"
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  • In the U.S., more than 100 million adults — about 1 in 3 — are obese.
  • Dropping even 5% of one's weight can bring health benefits, such as improved energy, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, but that amount often doesn't satisfy patients who are focused on weight loss
  • The drug carries a potential risk for a type of thyroid tumor, so it shouldn't be taken by people with a personal or family history of certain thyroid and endocrine tumors. Wegovy also has a risk of depression and pancreas inflammation.
  • Like other weight-loss drugs, it's to be used along with exercise, a healthy diet and other steps like keeping a food diary.
  • Wegovy builds on a trend in which makers of relatively new diabetes drugs test them to treat other conditions common in diabetics.
Javier E

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html

collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture complexity

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
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  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
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