I follow a yeast-free diet to control an auto-immune disease called Hidradenitis suppurativa. Some doctors produced a study a while back where they found anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae autoantibodies in HS patients. When patients followed a yeast and wheat-free diet they would see 100% remission of symptoms. The hardest part of following this diet is avoiding yeast as it is a major flavor component in almost all "ultra-processed foods", especially the "healthy" ones. Vegan and plant-based foods add yeast proudly. The problem is that our bodies have an innate immune system that is coded to recognize and fight fungi. Our DNA even codes for pattern recognizers that specifically target saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as bread/baker's yeast. It's alarming to me that scientists know with certainty that yeast is innately inflammatory, and that inflammation is the majorcause of chronic disease, but have not put it together that maybe yeast should be avoided as a food additive.
Not exactly the same, but my dad has (diagnosed) celiac disease and, being stubborn, refused to adhere to the diet. He had early onset vascular dementia within a couple of years (no history of this in the family). Eating wheat when you have celiac disease is similarly inflammatory, it seems, and can cause all sorts of seemingly unrelated problems.
For me, the diet puts HS completely into remission. I've been on the yeast and wheat-free diet for about six years. While the diet is hard to follow, I never have any boils, sinus tracts or any skin inflammation. Also happily (and anecdotally) I no longer experience headaches or migraines of any kind.
Sure. But what is known about atherosclerosis is that plaques are not _on_ the arterial wall, but _inside_ the arterial wall. For plagues to form, fats have to be pulled into the arterial wall. How does this happen? Inflammation as designed opens up the arterial wall as a way to allow immune cells passage. Atherosclerosis happens when you have a bunch of fat in your arteries and you open them up to go inside. That's why cheeseburgers and pizza are the perfect heart disease vectors (Western diet). The bread parts cause inflammation via innate immunity (saccharomyces receptors) and the saturated fat parts (cheese and meat) flow in.
Thanks for providing some scientific literacy to my argument. The western diet is designed around eating fatty foods wrapped around some innately-inflammatory bread product. If I was trying to give myself arterial plaque I would eat something that causes inflammation (yeast) and at the same time eat lots of fat. It boggles my mind how researches have failed to synthesize that yeast is the cause of so much disease.
From the paper... "Thus, an important mechanism by which reductions in dietary saturated fatty acids decrease LDL-cholesterol in humans..."
unsaturated (e.g., polyunsaturated) fats do not have the same association.
There are now many studies and papers linking saturated fat to increased LDL cholesterol. This is why groups, like the American Heart Association, recommend low intake of saturated fats (20 grams per day or less).
It’s not at all clear that LDL is actually bad. Some studies show that LDL is inversely correlated with all cause mortality. That is, the lower your LDL, the sooner you die.
Did you look at the study, the details, the limitations, how info was collected, and so forth? I just did a quick read. The data set they're working with is incomplete and poor. It also deals with LDL levels while only looking at baseline and takes no account in for people on drugs to alter it.
So much detail is missing, poor, or uncontrolled for that it's only good to show you published, have something on your resume, and use to justify more research could be useful in the space.
I don't disagree. It's actually my belief that most nutritional and health science is likely bunk. Partially, it is for the same reasons there is a lot of bad science, which you touch on. But it also has it worse than other fields - look how bad a lot of CS papers are, where you're dealing with a domain that is, relatively speaking, one in which you can generate immediate, obvious, and empirically demonstrable results. Now, imagine a field dealing with the most intricate and complex system known to man, where actual clear, concrete results may take decades to manifest, there are zillions of confounding factors, the code is insane spaghetti, truly controlled experiments are practically impossible, and every individual is slightly different and may operate differently. It's really a field where can have very little practical faith that it will ever be much good, but we can hope.
That's why I prefer for myself to hold to heuristics. We have good life expectancy and diet data going back a long time. We can see, for example, various periods and places where, excluding childhood mortality, people lived as long or longer than they do now - remarkable and slightly horrifying, considering the advances in medical science in the past 50-70 years. This included peoples with diets high in saturated fats. The best practical advise you can give anyone, I believe, is simply to eat traditional foods your ancestors have eaten for hundreds of years, and to therefore avoid anything prepared, sticking to fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and meats. And if at all possible, try to get the food you buy grown in a closer-to-traditional matter; ruminants should eat grass, not soy and corn, for example; oats, if possible, should not have been treated with Roundup. And naturally, whatever your diet, do not let yourself get overweight and try to maintain a high level of productive physical activity (of course, unproductive is better than none at all!)
I support this as an avid DDG user. Russian disinformation is a new kind of warfare that we've not inoculated ourselves against yet. This is a step in that direction. “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
You present tolerance as binary: you are tolerant or you are intolerant. There are degrees of tolerance. If you wish to foster a more tolerant society, you can refuse to tolerate the least tolerant people and thereby make the net level of tolerance in the society higher. Basically, you ban the bigots. Is this bigotry against bigots? No, actually, because bigotry is holding an unjustified negative opinion against someone and this would be a justified opinion, but setting that aside, it would result in less bigotry.
And tolerating people when they behave and not tolerating them otherwise is different from not tolerating people because of innocuous characteristics which are outside their control, like their skin color, their gender, or their place of birth. You can choose not to abuse the disabled and thereby make yourself less bigoted. You can't choose not to be disabled.
Imagine two societies that have ten kinds of ideologies in them. In each society, one ideology rules.
One society will never give people like Lenin the time of day, but people of most other creeds are free to speak and act how they wish to.
In another, only people like Lenin will be approved, and a couple others tolerated grudgingly.
The first is easily much more free than the second, and I don't think you'd find a 100% free society pretty much anywhere, because even though the Paradox of Tolerance is endlessly abused, actually letting Lenin go about being Lenin is a really bad idea.
The issue is not necessarily in the argument, it's that it's wielded primarily by wokelets and other censorship-happy people in the present day, and their intolerance is not defined and narrow at all: their tolerance chart looks a lot more like Lenin's one than the anti-Lenin society's. When these people speak of tolerance, they speak of adherence with their own program since their own program is ostensibly a "tolerant" one.
The woke are, of course, tolerant the same way North Korea is democratic and the Berlin Wall was an "anti-Fascist protection rampart". "Bigot" just means "not on board with the ideological program" and is pretty expansive in definition. Lenin.
> So it all boils down to "but I am right, trust me, my bigotry is totally justified"
Are you suggesting here that bigotry against Nazis is not justified? Or if not then what argument are you making? What do you hope to achieve with it? Nazis will always argue freedom of expression and make the argument you are making while it benefits them. They were democratically elected after all. But this doesn't mean they actually believe them. It's going to get thrown out the window the moment they are put in a position of power. Good on you for supporting that I guess?
> Are you suggesting here that bigotry against Nazis is not justified?
What exactly do you expect me to answer here?
If I say no, I created kind of an ex falso quodlibet situation, a contradiction (from some points of view)
If I say yes, I am labeled as a Nazi, because what else could I be?
This technique didn't work in ancient Rome, it doesn't now.
I never was a Nazi, nor will I ever be one. I can sleep well saying that not once in my life have I felt superior to anyone because my skin color is white or because I am male. The thought simply never occurred to me (apart from analyzing the existence of such thoughts in others)
But, yes, I want to reach out to Nazis, because the majority of them are "lost souls" (no, I am not religious by any means) and not the hardcore people that really know what they are doing.
> Good on you for supporting that I guess?
See, ad hominems also don't work on me. (They may work on bystanders though)
Intolerance is something like Nazism. That’s an ideology, not information/disinformation. You can’t disprove an ideology.
Take Russia’s falsehood that the war is a “special military operation”. This is a statement which is neither tolerant nor intolerant. We can clearly see that Russia has launched a full-scale operation against Ukraine, that it is unprovoked, and thus that it is illegal. So we can conclude that “special military operation” is disinformation; just a euphemism for a crime.
A tolerant society can deal with falsehoods just fine.
This will be an interesting experiment to see what happens when these companies spurn the customers that created the conditions for this market to exist. I hope Apple or another company is smart enough to use this opportunity to scoop up disenfranchised customers and let AMD and NVIDEA waste more time serving the Ponzi industrial complex.
This would have to be a shallow definition of illicit. I think wasting energy, hoarding GPUs, baiting unsophisticated investors could be all be considered illicit activity. By that definition all of cryptocurrency is illicit.
It sucks that people can't purchase GPUs to fill real needs because an illicit need for has been found for them instead. We now have an actual value lost in our civilization so that people can be separated from their money in an investing facade. I wish the pump and dumpers would move back into penny stocks and not waste electricity and GPUs.
Your definitions of 'real needs' and 'illicit needs' don't line up with mine.
It's one use case versus another, neither being illegal, and neither, arguably, being specifically positive for humanity.
I'd like to buy a GPU for both gaming and mining, but I'm also unwilling to pay the exorbitant cost, but I understand the reason, and that's life. I also want Telsas to be cheaper in Australia, but they're also prohibitively expensive for the likes of me.
If those GPUs were on shelves, they’d predominantly be sold to people to play AAA title video games instead. It does suck that I have to play my games at a lower frame rate, but my plight of retail inconvenience is hardly a grievous moral injustice.
Putting carbon into the atmosphere (to the detriment of unborn people) in order to circumvent the laws of society and intentionally create a speculative bubble meant to pray on the unsophisticated investors and rob them of wealth is the definition of immoral behavior. Cryptocurrency was designed to disrupt laws (and has been used, see selling drugs on crypto, ransomware), so it must also be considered unlawful.
Your point 1 completely disregards duplicity or the prospect of bait-and-switch.
A con that is pitched out the gate as a con does not gather suckers with anything near the success rate of a rationalizable technology. It's a well known fact that "intelligent" marks can be easier to grift if they can be sold that their "getting grifted" is "getting ahead of the idiots on the next big thing". They practically fill in all the blanks for you with their own imagination.
The ones who take the time to sit down and actually think about how the value proposition is backed, and look at "what a system does, rather than what it's pitched to do" are far more difficult to tap.
Frankly, I assume everything starts as a grift, and only becomes not one through the stakes becoming so large for the "Emperor's New Clothes" moment that no one wants to talk about it.
I'd think a board full of VC's would be somewhat more aware of this. Or is this one of the parts no one talks about because it gets the marks nervous?
I would like to see a new web with a reduced feature set. Something like web 1.0 pages but with only semantic tags like RSS. Remove the ability to create user interfaces and forms. Could we build a spec for this new WWW and create a way for it to crawl and search RSS at the same time? It's time to go backwards. We lost the good Internet along the way to getting the crap we have today. Let's build Web -1.0
It seems like there is some new undetected "lead in the pipes" thing going on these days where everyone is going crazy. Sociopathy is running amok. Our institutions used to be able to control these people. We need new ways of identifying bad actors and marking them to the rest of society. Maybe with Elizabeth Holmes getting found guilty the trend can start reversing. Hey you know what? Maybe we could create a trust-less distributed database to keep track of conmen, like a Equifax for bad actors on the blockchain ;).
I wonder if there will come a time when society decides it's better to fix ruins such as the Colosseum and the pyramids instead of letting them just rot away.
With the Colosseum at least, it didn't just sit there untouched for two thousand years. The locals have repaired it after disasters. And also partially torn it down. And then rebuilt it.
About 150 years after it was built, it was partially destroyed by fire. And rebuilt. Another 200 years later there are inscriptions from late emperors who did more repair work. In the medieval era it was stripped of marble and suffered serious damage from an earthquake. In the 18th century it seems the Popes started to appreciate that it was historically significant, and various repairs and preservation activities have gone on ever since. One of the largest cleanings and repairs ever has just started in the last decade.
How much to repair though? At a certain point you have to start taking out original work to replace the ruined interior, and I can understand the extreme reluctance to do that.
As to the Pyramids, they've been rotting for 4300 years and they're still there mostly intact. The most severe damage was intentional acts in relatively recent history. As long as we don't decide to start tearing them down again for free stone, they'll probably outlast humanity.
It blows my mind that the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for 4,440 years (give or take 10), until the Eiffel Tower finally dethroned it.
IIRC there was a protective limestone layer with a gold cap (removed for use in other buildings by later civilizations) on top of the pyramids versus leaving them as is, they originally did not look like unfinished stone. There is constant wind erosion on the exposed stone layer now. I don't know what a good solution to this now.
I think it would be cool to imagine ourselves as part of the process of civilization that created these buildings and restore them to their former glory. If the Mona Lisa was ripped in half we would surely restore it back to a single piece. Why should we not rebuild ancient Rome and host pop-up shops and events in the Forum?
It is an interesting thought, but I think your example doesn't work. In that we have two complete halves in need of minor repair. For ruins, we have parts left, and don't really even know for sure what it's supposed to look like. I mean, a very good idea, but not for sure.
And especially, over time, you can end up with a bit of a ship of theseus.
Also interesting -- if some day one of the earthquakes there knocks down part of the colosseum, will we rebuild the ruins to their ruinous state?
I absolutely agree with this. My great grandmother had Alzheimers as well as Hidradenitis suppurativa, which I have inherited from her. I switched to a yeast and wheat free diet many years ago to relieve symptoms of HS. Not only did it resolve my HS, but also migraines and many other inflammatory issues. Looks like there is research around Alzheimer's and Dectin-1 signaling which is involved in innate immunity to fungi, including bread yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). It's absolutely insane to me that people eat a pathogen that triggers an innate immune response. A inflammation response to yeast is coded into our cells, if it weren't we'd be killed by unbaked bread. Why then do most processed foods contain it? We're taxing and confusing our immune systems by eating it.
> We're taxing and confusing our immune systems by eating.
Well this is not wrong. I'm no expert, but it seems as though not eating (or drinking) would result in less need for inmune system activity, at least in the digestive track. Of course, you'd die, but maybe that was the cost of healthy living all along
I can easily imagine someone with a genetic trait that malforms a single protein could end up with a heritable sensitivity to one particular yeast strain, and not all yeast, everywhere.
This diet is hard to follow because yeast cuts through a lot of foods, especially in fermented foods as you've mentioned. A non-exhaustive list of yeasty foods looks like: Non-distilled vinegars, non-distilled alcohols, dried fruits, naturally-fermented soy sauce, cheese, many savory packaged goods, most vegan meat replacements, some dried spices, bread, etc.
Fermented foods and mushrooms can be good at fighting cancer precisely because they ramp up the immune system. In fact yeast is used as an adjuvant inside of vaccines for this purpose.
What's insane is that it is both known and not known that yeast causes inflammation by science. Used as adjuvant, used to "boost" immunity, yet not understood to be a cause of general low-grade systemic inflammation when in our food supply.
Most cheese, if not all, doesn't have yeast in it. It's bacteria that ferment it.
Though I guess it will have as much wild yeast land on it as any other food in your plate but I don't think that's what the parent comment was referencing.
Source: I've been involved in small commercial cheese making for years.
Umm, yeast is a common surface flora on many cheeses (probably all natural rind cheeses), and you can in fact buy packets of Debaryomyces Hansenii and Candida Utilis from Danisco specifically for use in cheese. Source: I'm involved in cheesemaking.
So what are you proposing? Trying to avoid everything that might cause an immune system reaction? That will eventually lead to the immune system really running amok...
I'm just saying that a wheat and yeast-free diet has reversed Hidradenitis and many systemic inflammation symptoms for me. In trying to understand _why_ it became clear to me that yeast (and maybe wheat) trigger an inflammatory response in our innate immune system - by design. So it's probably not a good idea to eat yeast unless you want to up-modulate your immune system (inducing inflammation). Even if your body can down-modulate, isn't that just causing a sensitivity imbalance similar to diabetes and glucose?
For example, Dectin-1 is one of many innate cellular receptors that launch inflammatory responses when Bread yeast (and others) is detected (and possibly 1,3 beta glucans from wheat). We are in a genetic war with saccharomyces cerevisia, inside of our DNA. And not just us, all animals need to be in this war, because otherwise we'd die.
This isn’t a well understood area at all but the idea that yeast / fermented food consumption helps us regulate our immune system in a good way has also been studied.
Yep, it's kind of a double-edged sword. On one hand an over-active immune response can be great for fighting cancers and opportunistic infections possibly. But too much inflammation will wear down our bodies and trigger auto-immune responses.
