Saturday, February 03, 2007
Why do we have favorites?
What's your favorite color?
Why do you HAVE a favorite color?
Why do you have a favorite ANYTHING?
Put another way; why would primitive humans have had a need for favorites... what was the survival advantage? I'm not talking about the rational preference for one non-trivial thing over another, such as "That valley is my favorite because it has more fruit trees than any other" or "That river is my favorite because it has more fish in it than any other"; these boil down to "That valley/river gives me a better chance of surviving than any other" and thus are useful, but things like "This flower is my favorite color" are different... what could have led to the 1st primitive human to choose that sort of favorite having such a thought, which was not only not related to survival but wasn't related to anything they were doing? (It's not like they were choosing a color to paint their cave, right?) What led to them having a favorite bird, not because it tasted best or was easiest to catch, but because it was the prettiest? What led to them picking a species of tree as their favorite, not because it gave better shade or produced more fruit or nuts, but because it smelled the best or had the most interestingly shaped leaves? What benefit did they gain from this sort of analysis and choice-making, and its associated emotional component (because we tend to feel inexplicably strongly about our favorites), that led to the ability and willingness to make the effort to select favorites spreading throughout the human race?
Is the tendency to choose favorites biologically encoded, or is it a learned behavior that got incorporated into human cultures because... why, because picking and having favorites is so much fun that once one person did it everyone else wanted to too? Do ALL cultures have this picking of favorites, in other words do people in remote tribes deep in the rain forests have favorite colors and such, or is it just people in "modern" cultures that've exchanged information between them for ages that have them? How far back do favorites go? 1000 years? To the dawn of civilization? To cave days? I don't suppose we'll ever know; until writing became widespread enough for lots of people to be doing it, and to be doing it to record stuff less important than religious and legal matters, there wouldn't have been records of something like that, so tracking down the 1st written reference wouldn't give an accurate answer.
And; why do we have favorites of things that didn't even exist in our primitive days? Do you know anyone who doesn't have favorite music, for example? Many of us have a deep, visceral reaction the 1st time we encounter the music that'll be a favorite... but WHY? Why any reaction at all to something beyond the experience of early humans? Why are there so many KINDS of music that can be favorites? Very similar-seeming people can have wildly differing musical preferences, and totally disparate folks can love the same music; what is it in our biologies or our brains that causes us to have certain sorts of music that resonate powerfully within us, while others are indifferent to or actively dislike our favorite music? What's the survival value of music appreciation, either in general or in so many different forms?
AND; in a broader sense, why do we have preferences for certain abstract, esoteric or trivial things over others? It's common, for example, for car enthusiasts to prefer the shape of one car's hood to the similar hood shape of another car; do you think primitive people stood around saying, "Yeah, I like the curve of that boulder more than the curve of that other boulder?" You might love plaid but hate polka dots; did primitive people look at a snake's skin and say, "Yeah, this pattern's nicer than the pattern on the gourd we ate yesterday"? When Oog grunted, did his buddy say, "The grunt you made yesterday was far more melodious"?
Why do we have ANY favorites/preferences that don't relate to survival? How was that 1st favorite created, and how did it benefit its "owner" so much that either we developed something physical in our brains that leads to having preferences and favorites, or "preference choosing" became a part of overall human culture? How and why are we even ABLE to form non-survival, non-facts-based preferences? Why can you and I both look at the same painting, and one of us goes "wow" and the other goes "yuck"?
I have no idea; it makes good food for thought, though.
Why do you HAVE a favorite color?
Why do you have a favorite ANYTHING?
Put another way; why would primitive humans have had a need for favorites... what was the survival advantage? I'm not talking about the rational preference for one non-trivial thing over another, such as "That valley is my favorite because it has more fruit trees than any other" or "That river is my favorite because it has more fish in it than any other"; these boil down to "That valley/river gives me a better chance of surviving than any other" and thus are useful, but things like "This flower is my favorite color" are different... what could have led to the 1st primitive human to choose that sort of favorite having such a thought, which was not only not related to survival but wasn't related to anything they were doing? (It's not like they were choosing a color to paint their cave, right?) What led to them having a favorite bird, not because it tasted best or was easiest to catch, but because it was the prettiest? What led to them picking a species of tree as their favorite, not because it gave better shade or produced more fruit or nuts, but because it smelled the best or had the most interestingly shaped leaves? What benefit did they gain from this sort of analysis and choice-making, and its associated emotional component (because we tend to feel inexplicably strongly about our favorites), that led to the ability and willingness to make the effort to select favorites spreading throughout the human race?
Is the tendency to choose favorites biologically encoded, or is it a learned behavior that got incorporated into human cultures because... why, because picking and having favorites is so much fun that once one person did it everyone else wanted to too? Do ALL cultures have this picking of favorites, in other words do people in remote tribes deep in the rain forests have favorite colors and such, or is it just people in "modern" cultures that've exchanged information between them for ages that have them? How far back do favorites go? 1000 years? To the dawn of civilization? To cave days? I don't suppose we'll ever know; until writing became widespread enough for lots of people to be doing it, and to be doing it to record stuff less important than religious and legal matters, there wouldn't have been records of something like that, so tracking down the 1st written reference wouldn't give an accurate answer.
And; why do we have favorites of things that didn't even exist in our primitive days? Do you know anyone who doesn't have favorite music, for example? Many of us have a deep, visceral reaction the 1st time we encounter the music that'll be a favorite... but WHY? Why any reaction at all to something beyond the experience of early humans? Why are there so many KINDS of music that can be favorites? Very similar-seeming people can have wildly differing musical preferences, and totally disparate folks can love the same music; what is it in our biologies or our brains that causes us to have certain sorts of music that resonate powerfully within us, while others are indifferent to or actively dislike our favorite music? What's the survival value of music appreciation, either in general or in so many different forms?
AND; in a broader sense, why do we have preferences for certain abstract, esoteric or trivial things over others? It's common, for example, for car enthusiasts to prefer the shape of one car's hood to the similar hood shape of another car; do you think primitive people stood around saying, "Yeah, I like the curve of that boulder more than the curve of that other boulder?" You might love plaid but hate polka dots; did primitive people look at a snake's skin and say, "Yeah, this pattern's nicer than the pattern on the gourd we ate yesterday"? When Oog grunted, did his buddy say, "The grunt you made yesterday was far more melodious"?
Why do we have ANY favorites/preferences that don't relate to survival? How was that 1st favorite created, and how did it benefit its "owner" so much that either we developed something physical in our brains that leads to having preferences and favorites, or "preference choosing" became a part of overall human culture? How and why are we even ABLE to form non-survival, non-facts-based preferences? Why can you and I both look at the same painting, and one of us goes "wow" and the other goes "yuck"?
I have no idea; it makes good food for thought, though.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
It looks like low-fat diets do NOT protect against disease
From the "The Top 13 Medicine Stories of 2006" section of the January 2007 issue of Discover magazine comes the following (asterisks are mine):
"Low-Fat Diet A Bust?
The largest-ever experimental study examining whether a low-fat diet can prevent cancer and heart disease brought discouraging results. After following 48,835 postmenopausal women for eight years, scientists concluded that cutting fat from the diet doesn't significantly reduce the incidence of breast or colorectal cancer, heart disease, or stroke. Results of the $415 million trial, part of the National Institutes of Health's Women's Health Initiative, were reported in three papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Revised ideas about the role of fat in disease could help explain the murky data, notes Michael Thun, who heads epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. For example, women in the study cut their total fat intake rather than specifically targeting saturated fats and trans fats, which are now known to contribute to heart disease risk. Cancer researchers are also starting to focus more on risks from obesity. 'The evidence base has become very strong that ****it's being fat rather than eating fat that's associated with risk,'**** Thun says."
How many times have *I* made that final point? It's nice to see science catching up with me, or rather with common sense; fat is contained in many foods that are part of our natural diet, and by definition the things that we evolved to eat are NOT bad for us... if the eggheads had kept that inarguable fact in mind for the past 40 years or so we could've been spared all the ridiculous phases we've gone through where various harmless foods, or components thereof, were demonized as "bad for us," only to be sheepishly admittedly years later to be perfectly ok to eat.
Even in the case of that mega-boogeyman, saturated fat, the pendulum is swinging inexorably back, in part because it's come to light that big business was behind the push to declare saturated fats unhealthy in order to market vegetable oils, which means that we should discount much, if not all, of what we've previously been told. And, studies are finding, for example, that the saturated fats in nuts, and in the most reviled fat-bearer, coconut oil, might be GOOD for you... which the much-healthier-than-us cultures who've traditionally consumed them in large amounts could've told us years ago.
And what about the saturated fat in animal products? Dairy is NOT part of our natural diet, as primitive humans didn't consume the milk of other animals (much less turn it into cheese or ice cream), so don't be surprised if the fats and/or other aspects of dairy foods turn out to be honestly unhealthy; dairy is so nutritious, though, with its easily-absorbed calcium (easily absorbed IF digested with FAT, that is) at the top of the list, that a case can be made for eating a modest amount until we know the full story. The fat in meat, the most derided of all, WAS part of the diet of primitive humans, and, since no other creature whose natural food includes meat is harmed by animal fat, it's silly to think that WE are harmed by it. Eggs were also part of what primitive humans ate, BUT, they only ate them when they were naturally available, in early spring, so there MIGHT be a problem with eating them year-round; since the traditional American breakfast used to include eggs every day, though, and they didn't seem to suffer for it, I wouldn't worry too much about having them a couple of times a week.
The trans fats in processed foods, on the other hand, are manmade and thus NOT part of our natural diet; they supposedly adversely affect both the "good" and "bad" cholesterol, but even if they're wrong about that, as they've been about so much else in the "science of fat," we're eating ALOT of this stuff, and as best as I can determine its safety was never tested much less proven, so there's every reason to be cautious about it... luckily, plenty of companies are rushing to produce trans-fat-free products. If ANY fat ends up eventually being proved to be bad for us, my $'s on trans fats; it's also possible that it'll turn out that NO fat is intrinsically bad for us, and that, as the article suggests, obesity is what's problematic, not what fats we eat.
Yes, most obesity comes from excessive consumption of fatty foods (it's hard to get overweight from eating lettuce), but that doesn't mean that the fatty foods themselves are bad, any more than water is bad because drinking excessive amounts of it can cause water intoxication and death; you become obese from over-eating and from being a slug, it's not a magic effect because you ate fat. Obesity has been shown to cause or worsen almost every known ailment (our bodies just don't know how to cope with all that adipose tissue); why do we have this need to believe that something in the fat we eat is ALSO to blame? It is of course possible that eating HUGE amounts of fats of one kind or another might have bad effects other than weight gain, since primitive humans didn't have the ability to drown themselves in fat the way modern people can and so we didn't evolve to handle that... but then again, we didn't evolve to eat the massive amounts of CARBS that obese people consume, either, so to be rational we'd have to study BOTH of those things if we really believed the "excessive consumption brings about bad effects other than weight gain" idea... and have YOU ever heard of any studies about the possible negative health effects of too many CARBS?
In order to PROVE that fat of any variety has a negative health impact beyond obesity, they'd have to do a study comparing people who eat "acceptable" kinds and amounts of fat with the genetically-blessed people who stay thin despite eating mountains of high-fat foods, adjusting for exercise, smoking, etc, and see if those whose ONLY difference from the control group is higher fat consumption have more health problems... and until they do that, none of their conclusions as to the possible harmful effects of fat count for anything, because they're comparing obese, inactive people to "normal" people, which does NOT give scientifically valid results, not by a long shot.
We don't need intensive analyses of every bite of food to prevent heart disease and such, any more than they did 100 years ago, so why do we keep doing it? Because we Americans want an easy, lazy way to live long, healthy lives, so that we can just eliminate something from our diets and then eat what we want and be couch potatoes and not get fat or sick. The hard reality is that you have to make the commitment to quit pigging out and work up a sweat regularly or accept that you'll have poor health sooner or later, probably sooner; either way, stop agonizing over which foods or components thereof are supposed to be good or bad for you THIS year, because it's still the big picture that decides your health, not how many grams of X you ate today.
"Low-Fat Diet A Bust?
The largest-ever experimental study examining whether a low-fat diet can prevent cancer and heart disease brought discouraging results. After following 48,835 postmenopausal women for eight years, scientists concluded that cutting fat from the diet doesn't significantly reduce the incidence of breast or colorectal cancer, heart disease, or stroke. Results of the $415 million trial, part of the National Institutes of Health's Women's Health Initiative, were reported in three papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Revised ideas about the role of fat in disease could help explain the murky data, notes Michael Thun, who heads epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. For example, women in the study cut their total fat intake rather than specifically targeting saturated fats and trans fats, which are now known to contribute to heart disease risk. Cancer researchers are also starting to focus more on risks from obesity. 'The evidence base has become very strong that ****it's being fat rather than eating fat that's associated with risk,'**** Thun says."
How many times have *I* made that final point? It's nice to see science catching up with me, or rather with common sense; fat is contained in many foods that are part of our natural diet, and by definition the things that we evolved to eat are NOT bad for us... if the eggheads had kept that inarguable fact in mind for the past 40 years or so we could've been spared all the ridiculous phases we've gone through where various harmless foods, or components thereof, were demonized as "bad for us," only to be sheepishly admittedly years later to be perfectly ok to eat.
Even in the case of that mega-boogeyman, saturated fat, the pendulum is swinging inexorably back, in part because it's come to light that big business was behind the push to declare saturated fats unhealthy in order to market vegetable oils, which means that we should discount much, if not all, of what we've previously been told. And, studies are finding, for example, that the saturated fats in nuts, and in the most reviled fat-bearer, coconut oil, might be GOOD for you... which the much-healthier-than-us cultures who've traditionally consumed them in large amounts could've told us years ago.
And what about the saturated fat in animal products? Dairy is NOT part of our natural diet, as primitive humans didn't consume the milk of other animals (much less turn it into cheese or ice cream), so don't be surprised if the fats and/or other aspects of dairy foods turn out to be honestly unhealthy; dairy is so nutritious, though, with its easily-absorbed calcium (easily absorbed IF digested with FAT, that is) at the top of the list, that a case can be made for eating a modest amount until we know the full story. The fat in meat, the most derided of all, WAS part of the diet of primitive humans, and, since no other creature whose natural food includes meat is harmed by animal fat, it's silly to think that WE are harmed by it. Eggs were also part of what primitive humans ate, BUT, they only ate them when they were naturally available, in early spring, so there MIGHT be a problem with eating them year-round; since the traditional American breakfast used to include eggs every day, though, and they didn't seem to suffer for it, I wouldn't worry too much about having them a couple of times a week.
The trans fats in processed foods, on the other hand, are manmade and thus NOT part of our natural diet; they supposedly adversely affect both the "good" and "bad" cholesterol, but even if they're wrong about that, as they've been about so much else in the "science of fat," we're eating ALOT of this stuff, and as best as I can determine its safety was never tested much less proven, so there's every reason to be cautious about it... luckily, plenty of companies are rushing to produce trans-fat-free products. If ANY fat ends up eventually being proved to be bad for us, my $'s on trans fats; it's also possible that it'll turn out that NO fat is intrinsically bad for us, and that, as the article suggests, obesity is what's problematic, not what fats we eat.
Yes, most obesity comes from excessive consumption of fatty foods (it's hard to get overweight from eating lettuce), but that doesn't mean that the fatty foods themselves are bad, any more than water is bad because drinking excessive amounts of it can cause water intoxication and death; you become obese from over-eating and from being a slug, it's not a magic effect because you ate fat. Obesity has been shown to cause or worsen almost every known ailment (our bodies just don't know how to cope with all that adipose tissue); why do we have this need to believe that something in the fat we eat is ALSO to blame? It is of course possible that eating HUGE amounts of fats of one kind or another might have bad effects other than weight gain, since primitive humans didn't have the ability to drown themselves in fat the way modern people can and so we didn't evolve to handle that... but then again, we didn't evolve to eat the massive amounts of CARBS that obese people consume, either, so to be rational we'd have to study BOTH of those things if we really believed the "excessive consumption brings about bad effects other than weight gain" idea... and have YOU ever heard of any studies about the possible negative health effects of too many CARBS?
In order to PROVE that fat of any variety has a negative health impact beyond obesity, they'd have to do a study comparing people who eat "acceptable" kinds and amounts of fat with the genetically-blessed people who stay thin despite eating mountains of high-fat foods, adjusting for exercise, smoking, etc, and see if those whose ONLY difference from the control group is higher fat consumption have more health problems... and until they do that, none of their conclusions as to the possible harmful effects of fat count for anything, because they're comparing obese, inactive people to "normal" people, which does NOT give scientifically valid results, not by a long shot.
We don't need intensive analyses of every bite of food to prevent heart disease and such, any more than they did 100 years ago, so why do we keep doing it? Because we Americans want an easy, lazy way to live long, healthy lives, so that we can just eliminate something from our diets and then eat what we want and be couch potatoes and not get fat or sick. The hard reality is that you have to make the commitment to quit pigging out and work up a sweat regularly or accept that you'll have poor health sooner or later, probably sooner; either way, stop agonizing over which foods or components thereof are supposed to be good or bad for you THIS year, because it's still the big picture that decides your health, not how many grams of X you ate today.
