I'm reminded of the whole dietary cholesterol fiasco. After that, I'm inclined to assume most things are metabolized. And foo molecule food in <=/=> foo molecule in blood.
If our ancestors got our meet from hunting, surely those animals for full of cortisol, unless a lifetime of chronic stress in a disgustingly cramped creates more stress hormones.
That's my sort of assumption as well, but the article seems to indicate otherwise.
> A recent study of piglets published in the Journal of Animal Science by Purdue University scientist Elizabeth Petrosus found that when pigs are fed stress hormones such as cortisol or norepinephrine, their blood levels of these hormones spike, body temperatures rise and gut biomes shift.
I'm not saying I believe it, but that's the argument they are making. Now does that mean that eating stressed plants cause similar results for our stress levels? I doubt it.
Yeah, the whole article is based around that one study of piglets. It seems like a lot of conclusions to draw from one data point in general, especially since there are often differences in animal/human studies that can lead to incorrect conclusions.
> In plants, the predominant stress hormone is ethylene.
Wikipedia: "During the life of the plant, ethylene production is induced during certain stages of growth such as germination, ripening of fruits, abscission of leaves, and senescence of flowers." Ethylene the main way to ripen fruits, on the vine or after-the-fact.
> ethylene, a plant stress hormone known to trigger stress responses in microbiomes, including in species such as proteobacteria that are present in human gut biomes
The italics section is linked[0] in the article, but the link has no mention of the word "ethylene". I don't see anywhere they say that the human gut microbiome is "stressed" by ethylene.
As for the animal meat stress:
> The same pig study found that, due to negative feedback loops, the pigs eventually exhibited abnormally low blood levels of cortisol and norepinephrine due to overcorrection by the body.
This sounds like eating stress hormones produces less stress in the body, not more. They then use this as further evidence of their position, somehow.
Wait... doesn't low blood levels of cortisol also indicates that the body doesn't react to stress like it should ? Like in the Selye model, when the body just gives up and doesn't react anymore (but still suffers the consequences: high blood pressure, muscular stress, etc.).
Stress causes cortisol to increase, but long-term chronic stress can result in low cortisol, and this happens in PTSD, burnout, CFS and other conditions. Factors include time since onset, nature of the threat, emotions elicted by the stressor, controllability of the stressor, and the psychiatric characteristics of the person.
I never cease to wonder if articles like this are incredibly cleverly put together, or incredibly stupid.
I feel like it would take me so much effort to string together these unrelated things and try to present them in a faux-scientific manner, with such succinct certainty, in the way this article does.
Like how they smartly concede that they're waiting for answers, ... and then they quickly breeze through making a bunch of connections, with references that don't back up what they're saying, as if these are all just 'known' things. It's kinda clever, and I would expect a lot of people to be fooled.
I'd say it's something more like fortune telling. Based on scant clues, string together a story which seems meaningful. There's a skill in taking advantage of human intuition to grab attention, with a spectrum of how aware you are if what you're actually doing.
If the pigs‘ bodies turned down their own cortisol production, I would assume that their endocrine system considered the level as too high, or it wouldn’t compensate. Cortisol has its place, but it‘s timed (usually with a spike at around 6AM, and after exercise) and excess can lead to bad sleep quality and worse. Low cortisol also does not at all mean that stress is low within cells. If you put a strain on e.g energy production within mitochondria, you will get a lot of cellular stress (accumulating nitric oxide) that is not directly related to cortisol. Cytokines would be another factor - stress leads to inflammation. There might be enough cortisol around in those pigs to suppress inflammation, but it doesn’t mean they are low on stress.
The consumption of hormones which cause a major adjustment in our endrocine functions in whatever direction is definitely harmful though. Just because it may cause lower cortisol baselines in some manner is 'not good' at very least, and there surely will be other side effects.
This definitely fits the organic / free-range narrative (ie happy cows make better milk/meat). So regardless of veracity, it will likely be a popular idea.
Apparently, my initial response below was too terse and insensitive - though it may be how I really feel after reading that.
It seems unscientific to me, its an opinion piece pitched as common sense. And its coming from someone that is looking to 'transform the way you think'. The approach strikes me as offensive.
I don't know how this would make sense from an evolutionary perspective - once you kill and eat something you want to rest and recover, not assimilate the stress and give yourself anxiety so that you don't recover after the meal.
Evolution is really only concerned with procreation and not much else beyond that. It definitely doesn't care if you feel stressed or suffer some inflammation after a meal.
Some meals induce quite a bit more inflammation than others. Not including an autoimmune response, eg soy is a common cause of inflammation, inflammation is caused when what you eat falls behind the mucous layer in the stomach lining. So, if your diet provides the nutrients to have a healthy mucous layer or you have good genetics, you're far less likely to have an inflammation response when you eat. I believe eating mushrooms or yams has the nutrients that help the most.
Are we supposed to believe that the wild animals our ancestors hunted were not consistently under stress? I think living in the food chain pretty much ensures experiences of stress. Both of hunger and the threat of being food for something else.
Do some people think nature before modern human agriculture was a happy go lucky place where the creatures experienced little or no adversity? Hope not!
I'm sure being a wild animal means some level of stress. I'm also sure it is nothing compared to the deplorable conditions in which factory farm animals are raised.
Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"
I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to. There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild. (I'm not defending the "article" or its findings, just saying that we as a society do terrible things to animals we plan to eat).
> Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"
Wouldn't the animals in nature be more like soldiers with PTSD and livestock be more like humans?
> I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to.
Are they any better than the animals in nature being eaten while alive?
> There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild.
Then you don't know what it is like in the wild. Ever wonder why you don't live out in the wild but rather live in human factory farms instead?
The vast majority of livestock don't live like the few cherrypicked photos/videos pushed by "activists/propagandists". Just like the vast majority of animals in the wild don't live wonderful lives.
Pigs in particular have it pretty bad, in factory farms in general. Ever heard of a gestation crate? Imagine being stuck in a box on a concrete floor forced to look straight ahead for months on end. That's the life of the average pig in today's world.
Animals living in nature are typically well adjusted to the stresses they experience. Their stress levels return back to normal quickly after a dangerous situation.
I'm not sure I got your point. They were under severe stress for sure. So what? Even if that was very damaging somehow, our ancestors anyway died very young and in not very sophisticated ways.
Based on what I read in anthropology classes, yeah, there actually wasn’t that much stress or food insecurity in small scale societies. Cooking was time-consuming but there wasn’t much else to do but hang out with your friends and mash yams anyway.
No, animals in the wild are not under constant stress, because that would completely nullify the effect of stress in the first place. Stress is a bodies' response to an 'unusual' situation, in which you have to act in an 'unusual' way. But the baseline that defines 'usual' and 'unusual' is the environment in which the animal evolved over thousands of years. In this environment their stress response is natural, e.g. spikes in case of danger or exceptional threat, otherwise normal.
If you now bring those in a completely new environment (factory farming), their stress levels go wild.
This would have interesting implications for folklore common in some East Asian countries, particularly China, where meat flavor is "enhanced" by animal suffering at time of death. I must say the practices are abhorrent - particularly regarding the slaughter of intelligent, sensitive animals like dogs and pigs.
The article make mention of flavour, and I don't think you need to try to scientifically rationalize what can be sufficiently explained by human cruelty. In fact, based upon these findings I'd expect eating tortured meat to be less enjoyable than that relaxed kind.
Funny how we want to take an incredibly complex system and boil it down to 1+1=2. We think we're really advanced when we throw in 3rd or 4th step into the math equation. But not surprisingly this sort of reductionism leads to people being equally certain of exactly opposite conclusions. To the point they'll belittle the other person's simplistic understanding while completely missing the simplicity of their own model.
34 comments
[ 1844 ms ] story [ 1450 ms ] threadIf our ancestors got our meet from hunting, surely those animals for full of cortisol, unless a lifetime of chronic stress in a disgustingly cramped creates more stress hormones.
> A recent study of piglets published in the Journal of Animal Science by Purdue University scientist Elizabeth Petrosus found that when pigs are fed stress hormones such as cortisol or norepinephrine, their blood levels of these hormones spike, body temperatures rise and gut biomes shift.
I'm not saying I believe it, but that's the argument they are making. Now does that mean that eating stressed plants cause similar results for our stress levels? I doubt it.
Wikipedia: "During the life of the plant, ethylene production is induced during certain stages of growth such as germination, ripening of fruits, abscission of leaves, and senescence of flowers." Ethylene the main way to ripen fruits, on the vine or after-the-fact.
> ethylene, a plant stress hormone known to trigger stress responses in microbiomes, including in species such as proteobacteria that are present in human gut biomes
The italics section is linked[0] in the article, but the link has no mention of the word "ethylene". I don't see anywhere they say that the human gut microbiome is "stressed" by ethylene.
As for the animal meat stress:
> The same pig study found that, due to negative feedback loops, the pigs eventually exhibited abnormally low blood levels of cortisol and norepinephrine due to overcorrection by the body.
This sounds like eating stress hormones produces less stress in the body, not more. They then use this as further evidence of their position, somehow.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000989811...
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/0/...
I feel like it would take me so much effort to string together these unrelated things and try to present them in a faux-scientific manner, with such succinct certainty, in the way this article does.
Like how they smartly concede that they're waiting for answers, ... and then they quickly breeze through making a bunch of connections, with references that don't back up what they're saying, as if these are all just 'known' things. It's kinda clever, and I would expect a lot of people to be fooled.
It seems unscientific to me, its an opinion piece pitched as common sense. And its coming from someone that is looking to 'transform the way you think'. The approach strikes me as offensive.
_________________________________________________________
Hocus Pocus, I said its true!
"Changing lives by transforming the way people think." -Yun Foundation
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? Note these ones:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Do some people think nature before modern human agriculture was a happy go lucky place where the creatures experienced little or no adversity? Hope not!
Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"
I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to. There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild. (I'm not defending the "article" or its findings, just saying that we as a society do terrible things to animals we plan to eat).
Wouldn't the animals in nature be more like soldiers with PTSD and livestock be more like humans?
> I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to.
Are they any better than the animals in nature being eaten while alive?
> There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild.
Then you don't know what it is like in the wild. Ever wonder why you don't live out in the wild but rather live in human factory farms instead?
The vast majority of livestock don't live like the few cherrypicked photos/videos pushed by "activists/propagandists". Just like the vast majority of animals in the wild don't live wonderful lives.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788324/
If you now bring those in a completely new environment (factory farming), their stress levels go wild.
As for avoiding pork, that's a given. That industry is one massive toxic waste dump.