Stealth Health - for Siggy!
POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Thursday, September 19, 2024 18:05
VIEWED: 5103
PAGE 6 of 8
Well, I hope I can re-establish communication with you. I posted what I did in part b/c of some things you posted that irritated me. Here are the specifics:
This post strikes me as being resistant to facts:
"You can take your Omega 3s, and Vitamin B-12s, and I'll be just fine, thanks, because there's enough pop culture pseudoscience from the nutritionists and dietary specialists and FDA and big industry food companies that I feel I can safely ignore any of their NEW SPECTACULAR FINDINGS that they might want to fuss about."
The fact that B12 and omega-3s are essential - along with a few other fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals - isn't some pop-culture pseudoscience. It's well established. Some of this information has been around for over 100 years:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_vitamins.htm
"In 1905, the first scientist to determine that if special factors (vitamins) were removed from food disease occurred, was Englishmen, William Fletcher. Doctor Fletcher was researching the causes of the disease Beriberi when he discovered that eating unpolished rice prevented Beriberi and eating polished rice did not. William Fletcher believed that there were special nutrients contained in the husk of the rice.
In 1906, English biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins also discovered that certain food factors were important to health. In 1912, Polish scientist Cashmir Funk named the special nutritional parts of food as a "vitamine" after "vita" meaning life and "amine" from compounds found in the thiamine he isolated from rice husks. Vitamine was later shortened to vitamin. Together, Hopkins and Funk formulated the vitamin hypothesis of deficiency disease - that a lack of vitamins could make you sick.
Vitamin A
Elmer V. McCollum and M. Davis discovered vitamin A during 1912–1914. In 1913, Yale researchers, Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel discovered that butter contained a fat-soluble nutrient soon known as vitamin A."
B12 was purified in 1947. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12
With that post, you seem to be arguing that established facts are non-existent, or ... don't apply to people ...
"you only once posted new information I hadn't encountered before"
Granted, I only mentioned some of these things glancingly here:
"If you look at human dietary requirements, we need taurine - only found in fish. B12 - only found in consumers of specific bacteria and algae. Vitamin C - only found in plants. We are - as I phrase it - obligate omnivores. That's how nature made us. I don't see the need for shame or blame about it."
and here:
"And suffer accordingly. Rickets in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Malacia in India and Pakistan. Blindness in Africa. Stunted grow and lack of sexual development in the Mideast. Congenital cretinism in inland Africa, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Alps, central US and across the plains of Russia and China ... and so on. I have whole books documenting this. Just FYI."
but I don't think you can say that my last post is the FIRST TIME you read of such a thing.
Finally, while this is a detail, you posted this:
"I'm sure Omega 3s and fish are ESSENTIAL... Especially considering how people who lived no where near an ocean in the past ages probably ate so much goddamned fish."
Yes, it's a detail, but if your logic hinges on it, it's important to get it right. Green plants make omega-3's. Grains have a lot of omega-6's. Animals which naturally graze on grass - cows, of course, bison, and even horses --- but also elands, kudus, gemsbok, giraffes ... you get the idea - eat a lot of omega-3 fats in the grass and green leaves. Omega-3s, as fats, collect naturally where there's animal fat - liver, bone marrow, brain, testes etc. And primitive hunters select out fat even more than the meat. Yes, fat's a good source of calories. But in naturally-fed animals, it's also a g
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Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Would you say that about gravity? That somehow gravity doesn't apply to us just BECAUSE we're people? Not that we can't develop machines that fly, but that we are exempt from gravity completely? Is that true?
We haven't broken the rules yet. We're just working on it.
I have every confidence that we might someday, though probably not in my lifetime.
Erm, bit late on the draw there - Thomas Townsend Brown broke that one back in the 20's when he gave us the Biefeld–Brown effect, although it is kind of a cheat if you know how it works.
-F
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Because we're not equipped to eat sufficient quantities of bacteria and archaebacteria to get enough B12.
Ruminants (cows, bison, buffalo, goats, antelopes, sheep, deer, and giraffes) get their B12 from the friendly bacteria in their multiple stomachs. The bacteria eat the grass and the ruminants digest the bacteria ... eeeewwww. (But FWIW - and this is a complete aside - bacteria also make strange fatty acids. And those fatty acids show up in ruminant milk and meat.) Horses, elephants, zebras, rabbits, hares, and many rodents have large appendixes where bacteria make B12. Rabbits, hares and some other rodents eat their poop to ingest the B12 made by the bacteria in their large intestine. And B12 concentrates up the food chain.
As for B12 and the blood-brain barrier, I did go looking for that specifically, but didn't find anything whne it comes to normal function.
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I still don't understand how eating animals makes any difference in vitamin B-12 in that case.
And what I read is that the absorption is still not much to speak of even if your system is working. My understanding is that Alzheimer's and dementia patients have normal amounts of vitamin B-12 in their serum, but the blood brain barrier doesn't allow much uptake into the brain.
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Ah. I'm afraid that my comment about the pop nutrition pseudoscience has some context outside the thread. You said once that because I was vegan I'm in danger of b-12 deficiency induced insanity of some sort.
It was a while ago, but it still hit me the wrong way, like when someone pointedly asks if someone is off their meds to be mean. That's something I don't like and there was recently a thing where Niki thought I was asking that and I didn't mean that at all. Anyway.
I didn't actually mean to suggest that a certain balance in vitamins isn't neccessary. I have only meant to sugest there are a number of ways that might achieve that balance.
Although to be honest I actually do have some doubts about omega 3s in some capacities, such as the purportive protective effects of it against heart issues and cancers. When I feel like the benefits of something are being overstated, I get a little cranky.
There is some pseudoscientific studies about health and diets, though, you must admit. I get very annoyed by constant reports about how "chocolate is actually a superfood and it's really good for you oh wait no it isn't."
And no, I honestly hadn't heard of the middle east zinc deficiency thing or the iodine thing before this thread. I only started to look into it myself after your post, and if you mentioned it before in this thread or on the board I missed it.
I also didn't realize that omega 3s were in anything other than fish. So rather than thinking it was less essential because it could come from a lot of sources, I thought it was less essential because I didn't realize how ubiquitous it is.
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"You said once that because I was vegan I'm in danger of b-12 deficiency induced insanity of some sort."
Well, ahem - it's sadly a possibility. Please understand, while I'm probably on the Asperger's side of the continuum, I have some empathy that comes out mainly as protectiveness. My post was out of (probably intrusive and unwanted) concern.
AS for the ME zinc-thing --- I spent a lot of time studying human dietary requirements b/c I thought it would be instructive in figuring out our evolution. It turns out other people had that idea and did it far better than I did ... but I got and read lots and lots of books chock full of research papers and symposia on the topic ... and came across many very interesting (to me) tidbits like that.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Because we're not equipped to eat sufficient quantities of bacteria and archaebacteria to get enough B12.
Ruminants (cows, bison, buffalo, goats, antelopes, sheep, deer, and giraffes) get their B12 from the friendly bacteria in their multiple stomachs. The bacteria eat the grass and the ruminants digest the bacteria ... eeeewwww. (But FWIW - and this is a complete aside - bacteria also make strange fatty acids. And those fatty acids show up in ruminant milk and meat.) Horses, elephants, zebras, rabbits, hares, and many rodents have large appendixes where bacteria make B12. Rabbits, hares and some other rodents eat their poop to ingest the B12 made by the bacteria in their large intestine. And B12 concentrates up the food chain.
As for B12 and the blood-brain barrier, I did go looking for that specifically, but didn't find anything whne it comes to normal function.Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I still don't understand how eating animals makes any difference in vitamin B-12 in that case.
And what I read is that the absorption is still not much to speak of even if your system is working. My understanding is that Alzheimer's and dementia patients have normal amounts of vitamin B-12 in their serum, but the blood brain barrier doesn't allow much uptake into the brain.
Right, I know it bioaccumulates. What I don't understand is if it's trace amounts and poor absorption from even large oral doses, then why is eating animal meat or products essential for vitamin B-12 when it's not as concentrated a source as a supplement?
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"why is eating animal essential for vitamin B-12"
If you can get a bioreactor going and grow the bacteria and archaebacteria that make B12 you could chug it that way. Plants don't make B12. Nor do fungi. Only bacteria and archaebacteria make it. Since we don't harbor the little critters that make it in our digestive tract we have to consume it. And since we don't consume those little critters directly, we have to consume the things that do consume them - at least, that's how it was in our pre-technological past.
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But the supplements can't compensate for the animal products?
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They can for B12. They can for omega-3s. They can for anything we know about. I just think there are probably things we don't know about that we are adapted to need, that come along with. IMHO
But that's why I was interested in trying to untangle our evolution.
Well, for one thing the Desmond Morris theory and others like it truly irked me. A lot of our behaviors were predicated on assumed environments for which there is very little evidence.
But also, b/c I find it fascinating in itself. To understand where we came from and be able to relate it to what we need as a species. It's very complicated. There are many unknowns. Just a thing I find interesting.
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