When I hired a car and traveled along the North Korean border circa 2005 the driver told me about how the NK villagers would, in recent memory, go up in to caves on the adjacent mountains in winter and basically lie there starving and dying in a group because their clothing and houses were so poor (no windows, no insulation) and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death. The ones who survived were seen lying in the sun near the river in the spring awaiting the return of energy. I understand the first edible crops in the area are immature fern fronds which poke through the snow. According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive. It is likely these people have the same bone deformities.
How do you tell fact from fiction/propaganda in cases such as these? North Korea is so closed that almost everything that reaches us comes from its enemies or defectors. We want to believe the strangest things about that country. And sure, some of it must be real, but how can you tell? Did your driver personally witness this, or did someone tell him and he was simply spreading a rumor?
That the country exists is not a controversial proposition.
But when you hear bizarre claims, backed by no evidence but tenuous hearsay and no means of independent confirmation... I mean, surely some of it is true, but each single bizarre assertion must be considered with your skeptic hat firmly on.
If he heard it from someone who lives there that’s not part of the state, that’s a way more reliable account than you’ll get from anywhere in the west.
He said it was a driver that took him along the North Korean border, not inside North Korea. I took this to mean the driver was South Korean. A North Korean driver with unsupervised access to a foreigner seems unlikely, doesn't it?
North Korea also has a border with China (and a short one with Russia), and both some elements of the post, and facts on the ground, strongly suggest that this is the border being discussed. I would guess that the driver was Chinese rather than a North Korean defector, but living close enough to the border to either have observed some of the specific things mentioned, or to be in a community where these observations were commonplace.
You're right! I hadn't considered that this was the Chinese border and the driver was Chinese. Makes more sense.
That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.
Examining it critically, we see (in addition to it clearly referring to the northern border) a couple of claims that suggest actual observation: people "lying in the sun near the river in the spring awaiting the return of energy", and "women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive." The river might be the Yalu or Tumen, and if the latter occurred, the women could quite plausibly be sources of additional information.
So yes, it is anecdotal evidence, but not, IMHO, entirely implausible at that.
> Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border...
Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round (or flat, according to what you believe it to be?)
> Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round
I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims, particularly in ideologically charged contexts. Or try to be, anyway -- I'm not a robot and I'm of course subject to bias, like all humans.
For example, I dislike Trump but if I read something truly outrageous about him I tend to be skeptical about it. In Spanish we call it "avoid buying rotten fish", i.e. do not believe any stories about your hated enemy, just because they sound like something he would do, until you can have at least some degree of verification. Because sometimes those stories are planted maliciously or are plain wrong.
In the case of North Korea there is the problem that the country is so secretive -- unlike the US with Trump -- that it's truly hard to get confirmation of just about anything, so the rumors fly easily. If something sounds true about North Korea, then it must be true!
That the Earth is round is non-controversial. I don't see how it's wrong to double or triple check sociopolitical claims though.
I do believe North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship and that their people suffer, in case you were wondering. This doesn't mean I will automatically believe any claim about that country.
> I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims.
You have not presented a case for this particular claim to be regarded as outrageous. Unless you do, then your attitude to such claims is beside the point here.
I believe that "people in border villages go up in mountain caves during the winter, and basically lie down there, starving and dying" to be a horror story, with some of the markings of an exaggeration.
Does it make it automatically untrue? No. Do I believe many North Koreans live in really harsh conditions? Yes.
But this particular tale does seem too horrific to believe without some sort of confirmation beyond hearsay. All it lacks is some cannibalism to make it the perfect horror story about North Korea.
If you could have resisted the temptation to embellish, you would have made a quite reasonable point - though seeking collective shelter in caves in a harsh winter does not seem too far-fetched to me. It's not like humanity has no history of doing this! While famine is thankfully no longer a part of many peoples' experience, it has been for most of humanity's existence and still is for some.
As for ideological motivation, this anecdote is being presented in the context of an anthropological claim about early human behavior, not about North Korea or communism. I tend to trust OP's judgment as to whether he was being strung along by the driver for ideological reasons.
"Some people living under an oppressive regime starving and dying during the winter" is hardly outrageous. It's been true pretty much as long as human civilizations have been a thing. For some, even the winter part has been optional.
So I'm confused about the part you don't believe, is it that they went up to the mountains to do it?
Also the part where they keep lying there starving and dying, but by springtime the survivors can be observed lying in the sun. And the story makes it sound like a yearly occurrence.
Either the starvation wasn't quite as deadly, or new people kept moving to that strip of land, only to end up dying in winter.
But it's the whole story and its trappings what matters. Basically what yorwba said: that this is a cyclic, almost ritual yearly dying that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie, with the villagers resignedly going up the mountain to a cave to lie down and die, but that somehow there are enough survivors when winter ends, seen "lying in the sun". I didn't think it was necessary to spell everything out, but the whole story seems like a horror story.
Needless to say, there's nothing unusual or unbelievable about people dying of starvation.
Now you are depending on an absurdly literal reading of the tale to exaggerate its implausibility.
It is a well-established fact that North Korea suffered several years of famine in the mid 90s, with at least 1/4 million fatalities and probably much higher, arising from a combination of the loss of economic support from the former USSR, El Niño and a kleptocratic bureaucracy. In such circumstances, it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.
As for lying in the sun: if you are cold, famished, and have exhausted all the new-grown food that the spring has produced so far, then perhaps it is the best you can do.
> it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.
Sure, that would be very plausible. Stocking up a cave with food, keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available, eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer...
> Not quite the same as the original story, though.
You are doing the same as the_af here: nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story in order to avoid realistically evaluating its credibility. Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.
Furhermore:
> Stocking up a cave with food...
According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive.
>... keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available...
and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death.
>...eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer.
Well, yes - that was apparently the point of relating this anecdote. As we can see, the story as presented is close to what you consider plausible, especially as we know there actually was a severe multi-year famine in North Korea not so long ago.
> Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.
The author posted it in a comment on an article about Neanderthals who might have had the ability, never before observed in humans, to slow their base metabolic rate to withstand extreme cold. And they suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same.
In my modified version, their body temperature stays within the normal range and they're conserving energy by limiting movement, but their base metabolism stays the same and they still have to eat regularly, i.e. they're not hibernating.
Maybe that's just "nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story", but it's also the only way in which the story is relevant to TFA.
Whether the story, which you have as good as accepted as plausible [1], does closely parallel the proposed Neanderthal case, is a separate issue (in that regard, note that all OP says about that is "it is likely these people have the same bone deformities.")
>And [OP] suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same. [my emphasis of the weasel word]
So it seems you will read the anecdote literally when doing so allows you to attack its credibility, and you will find an unstated assumption in it if doing so allows you to attack its relevance.
As noted above, the OP merely seems to be suggesting something that other posters have also mentioned: the physical evidence mentioned in the article might have been the result of winter famine, and not definitive evidence of hibernation; furthermore, there may be people alive today, or recently deceased, in whom this physiological damage might be found. I can't say for sure, but OP may be suggesting that they might help with the further studies of this hypothesis.
The border between China and NK is not hermetical closed. It's the easiest place to penetrate the border if you want to flee the county. Also China is NK's largest trading partner and the largest employer of NK labour outside of NK (buyer of slave labour might be more precise).
So it's really not so far-fetched that people living on the Chinese side of the border meet north koreans and hear their stories.
Why would defector accounts be biased? They have little to gain by exaggerating their plight. ... and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another.
Additionally, the number of NKers defectors in China is high - they aren't rare.
Experience with defectors from other countries, such as the former Soviet Union, shows they sometimes tell the truth, they sometimes tell false or exaggerated stories, and they sometimes tell half-truths. I don't know why North Korean defectors would be different.
> and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another.
This specific claim is about people going to die in droves to caves, not just about harsh authoritarianism or extreme poverty. That's why it must be considered skeptically -- because it seems just like the kind of thing we're prone to believing about North Korea given other news, but this is not enough to make it true. And once it gets repeated uncritically, it becomes the "common sense truth".
Except going into caves is a valid survival strategy because caves are naturally warm. If you had no heat at the surface, going subterranean would make sense to sell warmth.
They weren't going into caves to die, quite the contrary, they were going into the caves to survive.
> They have little to gain by exaggerating their plight. ... and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another.
Defectors won't know any of this. It's expected that some would exaggerate unverifiable details, to ensure their safety. That wouldn't diminish what they actually went through.
Look at Shin Dong-hyuk's story. I read his book "Escape from Camp 14" several years ago and then afterwards came to find out that a lot of it was misrepresented.
People love shocking stories, so there can be real financial benefit on making up the wildest things up and then selling your story to media or publisher.
Humans are not so logical. They are also known to be much worse than they think at reporting their own experiences[1], and prone to shared delusions, especially under stress[2]. There are always wild rumors under circumstances where reliable information is scarce[3].
Same reason why employees leave bad reviews on Glassdoor for former employers.
Also to fit into their new environments. Everyone loves to hate on the enemy country. You might see that in the US with some Chinese Americans online, easier to fit in. Want upvotes, just go to Reddit, say "i'm chinese and eff china". Plug in North Korea and get more sympathy.
Some people have this trait, when they see nothing is being done to help with their issue, they exaggerate or even lie to make someone in power to change things do something. Always take such stories with a grain of salt and try to verify with as many sources as possible.
One of the incentives is that they make money, or gain a visa, through such testimonies.
Back in the days when China was poor, many Chinese defectors or political refugees were actually economical refugees. They made up exaggerated stories in order to get a visa on the grounds of political asylum.
And it would have been just as valid to question. The reason we all now know the Holocaust was real isn’t because we just decided to believe 2nd hand personal accounts, but because we have massive amounts of physical evidence.
If the Allies had accepted the first-hand intelligence reports they received during the war rather than dismissing them because they seemed outrageous and improbable, they could have saved lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report
And if the international community had been more critical of the US claims on the alleged weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein, 2 decades of war and the deaths of millions could likely have been avoided.
It's not as black and white as that, and I believe some measure of restraint is valuable when making decisions that can have unbounded consequences. Sometimes making the right decision eventually is better than making the wrong decision immediately.
But there was evidence afterwards of both atrocities, from multiple sources.
And some things about the Holocaust turned out to be myths, for example that the Nazis regularly made soap out of the body fat of their Jewish victims, and similarly regularly made lampshades out of their skin. It sounds plausible, because the Nazis engaged in so many horrific acts that why not this, but this alone doesn't make it true (and it turns out, historians today don't think this was true -- not a regular practice, anyway).
In order to criticize a dictatorship you don't need to uncritically believe everything bad said about them. Some of it will be false. Always be wary of particularly outrageous claims.
> Refugee testimonies were not be dismissed, Chomsky argued, but nor were they to be trusted. “Refugees,” he wrote, “are frightened and defenceless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear.”4
> Many other Western intellectuals summarily dismissed Barron and Paul’s conclusion of a “monstrous dark age that has engulfed the people of Cambodia.” The aforementioned Gareth Porter called refugee testimony the “least reliable kind of documentation,” and derided the refugees themselves as merely the wealthy elite of Cambodian society who had lost out in the collectivisation process. When Porter testified before U.S Congress he stated, “I cannot accept the premise … that one million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people.”5
Believe me, when I say that you sound like a Cambodian genocide denier, it's because you sound a lot like a Cambodian genocide denier.
Well, what can I say? I'm neither a Cambodian genocide denier nor a Holocaust denier. I'm sorry that you believe I sound like one just because I asked about a specific story about North Korea. I believe North Korea is a harsh dictatorship and I certainly wouldn't want to live there, by the way.
Reputable sources have widely reported that North Korean men on average measure several inches shorter than South Koreans, and many defectors come across the border with signs of malnutrition and intestinal parasites.
Sorry I was asleep (in China). Fair question. Well, the guy grew up on the border: he was talking to us in Chinese ... this was not a major touristy area, it was between the Japanese railway that comes down from Tonghua to Ji'an (Chinese side) and Manpo/만포시 (NK side) at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.1369/126.1751 and the town of Changbaishan at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4239/128.1771. In this area you can literally look across in to North Korean villages and pillboxes, and in Changbaishan you can look across in to what I have read is allegedly the biggest NK town on the border. Along the way there is a failed attempt at building a train and the hills are denuded. Poverty is immediately evident. People are fishing with crap equipment because there is nothing else to do and they are hungry. Nobody has adequate clothing. I did not see glass. All the roads are dirt on the NK side. And so on.
That is almost like the decription from "The Three Body Problem" how the aliens in the three star system handled winter. I wonder if there is an asian folk tale that might be the basis for both.
I have no recollection of the source, but I read in what I recall as a reasonable source the following: Many French peasants in the mid-late 1700's would mostly sleep through winters, arising to eat (IIRC). I don't recall a mention with this of frequent death, but it could have gone without mention.
In a sense this is contemporary, compared to "early" humans, and possible to verify in the record.
people in sibiria used to do a similar thing called "lotska" although they wouldnt sleep completely through it because a fire was maintained afaik and once per day food and water was consumed. I always wondered what that does to your dreams and sense of reality, i know mine gets scewed easily.
Interesting, "lotska" is used in the source from the British Medical Journal from 1900 as linked in another comment, probably a translation from "liozhka". Sadly "A Practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government" seems to be all we have as of now for validation
I remember reading something like russian poor farmers that didn't have enough food for the winter to do this, it was called Lotska, which reported in scientific papers over 100 years ago - http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2010/03/curious-case-o...
"At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight."
But I don't find many reliable source about it. Does anyone if this is really true? It sounds hard to believe.
While I doubt they did this for more than a few days at a time, I can totally see them doing this to help get through winters.
I've had a couple of periods where I was flat broke and had food staples and a roof over my head but not much else in Canadian winter or two. That's essentially how I would pass a few days here and there to save money on food and expenses.
I would sleep as much as possible, fast until around 8pm, and eat a cheap meal (e.g. bulk pasta and tomato sauce I made from marked down cans of tomato and froze), then back to bed. A lot of the time, if I couldn't sleep, I would read. This was pre internet and I didn't have a phone or tv.
Days go by pretty fast like that (it was very, very cold out each time I did this and I had inadequate clothing for the weather so even a walk was not happening).
Eventually, the next thing I had to do would come up and I'd get back to normal. For context, I worked in kitchens so work meant "free" food (my jobs paid very little) or a couple times I was in a cabin in the middle of nowhere waiting for the weather to clear so I could dig out and get my car in the road. Nice to do this when you have a good supply of stove wood and a good book.
I've found this to be the case with COVID isolation and WFH. Not having any set work hours and nobody really even aware of whether I'm working or not, I'm sleeping a lot more (like 12 hrs/day) and not being very productive the rest of the time. This year has just vanished in a haze of sleeping and not doing much, a week can feel like a day sometimes.
This sounds a lot like the symptoms of depression. I have depression, and the isolation of the pandemic has really worn me down. I went back on my antidepressants about six months ago and I'm still struggling. Totally up to you, but you might want to try talking to a therapist or psychiatrist. It's one of the best choices I've ever made. Making that first call was hard because I felt like I was admitting defeat, but looking back I was actually choosing to fight.
Do you think the risks of taking antidepressants are worth the benefits? I suffer from depression, but I’m afraid I might do some serious damage if I go on meds.
I've also suffered from depression, and am now on meds. I can honestly say they have changed my life for the better, with no side effects (other than an initial 3 days of tiredness, which wore off).
However, there are a few caveats:
I am convinced that the placebo effect is so powerful, that if you believe the meds will harm you, they actually could. I can't back this up with science, but I think the only reason meds worked for me is because I was able to lose the negative preconceptions I had about them (same for therapy). Unfortunately, negative perception of antidepressants is so prevalent that this is very difficult (but doable).
Antidepressants shouldn't make you feel numb. Neither are they "happy pills". The goal of them is, in theory, to stop you feeling depressed _over nothing_. What they will hopefully do is bring you back to a stable normality, encompassing the entire range of normal human emotions.
Curing your depression will not automatically make you happy (but it will certainly help you on your way) – Only living a happy and fulfilling life, full of people you care about and things you enjoy, can do that.
You also need to give your body the best chance, by making sure no basic aspect of your life is severely lacking - sleep, food/drink, exercise, family/friends/social, hobbies that give you a feeling of accomplishment etc.
I'm taking sertraline (zoloft) now, and the only negatives I'm experiencing are slightly reduced libido and jaw clenching/grinding. I've started occasionally wearing a night guard while sleeping, and not really minding the decreased libido since dating during a global pandemic is outside of my acceptable risk tolerance.
I've also taken Lexapro and had good results with that, too.
The benefits are I was able to actually feel pleasure and enjoy things again. At my worst I was suffering from severe anhedonia -- literally finding no pleasure in any activity. Nothing I previously enjoyed brought any modicum of happiness: not food, not sex, not exercise, not work or side projects. It's a dangerous state to be in because when literally nothing in life brings joy you can slip into destructive choices.
The benefits of feeling better vastly outweighed any minor side effects of antidepressants.
There are some people, especially teenagers, who can become suicidal when taking antidepressants. But it's very rare and your psychiatrist will help you find a drug that doesn't cause those feelings.
Interesting. There must be some research detailing how much energy a human body minimally needs to sustain the rest state. Every activity needs some energy, beating the heart, breathing, metabolizing nutrients, fats. Turning from side to side (no avoid the bed sores).
This would yield the required the degree of preparations before embarking on such a long stretch of lockdown. Gaining enough fat, stocking wood/coal/water/bread, well, farming what's needed through the rest of the year.
I think this may be a survival stretch for some bad years, not a sustainable practice.
Some people might find this video interesting. Family that fled into the siberian taiga for 70 years to avoid religious persecution. One thing that stands out in my memory is how they said their main form of entertainment was sharing and analyzing their dreams.
There is no such word "lotska" in Russian. They could have meant "lyozhka", translating to something like "lie-down", an archaic word no one uses nowadays. Anyway, the story is unbelievable and has poor sources.
I really doubt there is any truth to that. I'm pretty sure they would have sustained themselves on Buckwheat, Boar, other game, cabbage, and over the last few hundred years, Potato.
They may have all slept together in one room around a fire and spent more time indoors during the winter but there is no way they hibernated. If that were the case millions in Ukraine would have survived Stalin's intentional famine (Holodomor). Families could have simply just rode it out sleeping and eating a piece of bread.
If i get a feeling i gained too much fat, i like to use fasting to get rid of it fast.
Kinda surprised after 3~4 days of not eating i could still function perfectly most wouldn't even see a difference.
Strength did take a bit of a hit tho like could only operate on like 90% of max.
Never really went longer then 5 days, but I heard stories of people going complete 30 days without food consuming only water with some minerals and salt.
Some people on the /r/fasting subreddit go on for 40+ days. I settled into intermittent fasting routine and stopped thinking about extended fasts. I might give it a try. 5 days is quite extreme too, for me anyway.
Intermittent fasting is my go to regime to keep my weight stable, do it also because its just easy for me. I don't have to spend time or money to prepare or buy lunch or breakfast.
FWIW the official world record is 382 days as far as I can see.
From Wikipedia:
Angus Barbieri's fast. Starting in June 1965, Scottish man Angus Barbieri (1939 – 7 September 1990) fasted for 382 days. He lived on tea, coffee, soda water and vitamins, living at home in Tayport, Scotland, and frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation.
Yes, Barbieri actually managed to stay reasonably slim for the rest of his life, which is not typical in patients who lost a lot of weight without surgery.
But AFAIK the Guinness book no longer collects fasting records, because they do not want to promote anorexia.
Congrats your five day fast as a step towards better health!
I've water-only fasted a few times, working my way up from a few days to about thirty-one days twice (with the long fasts a few years apart, most recently last year). I would have gone longer except for work and family obligations.
Related recent books include "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle, Ph.D and Alan Goldhamer, D.C. (of the TrueNorth Health Center) and "Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor's Program for Conquering Disease" by Joel Fuhrman, MD. There are much older books on this though, including by Herbert Shelton.
Fasting may help improve memory function by stimulating the production of a brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which helps with learning, memory, and making new nerve cells in the hippocampus. Fasting also helps the body clean up dysfunctional cells (including potentially cancerous ones).
So, there is probably a good health reason why every major religion has fasting as part of its rituals. Also, it makes a lot of sense why agrarian civilizations might fast in late winter or early spring when food was running short, but to suggest pregnant women and young children should be exempt (so, making a virtue out of a necessity). For example, Christian Lent in 2020 went from February 26th to April 9, which would historically have been a time of low food supplies in the Northern hemisphere.
While not exactly hibernating, I definitely had lower physical energy. So, walking the dog a mile or two each day or two was harder. In general, I've seen knowledgeable recommendations not to do much exercise at all when fasting, although others disagree to some extent.
For people who want to do a medically-supervised fast, consider the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA (although I did not go there myself) who wrote the first book I referenced. https://www.healthpromoting.com/
I feel the USA would be a much healthier place (with much lower health care costs) if there were such fasting-oriented/nutritionally-oriented health centers available in every community -- with a month or two spent there covered by health insurance and some sort of new medical leave act. It's ironic that most US health insurance will pay $100,000 for weeks of hospitalization and other treatments related to a heart bypass operation (which does nothing about all the other clogged arteries in the body) -- but "health" insurance generally won't pay $10,000 (or whatever) for someone to take a few weeks away from work (the biggest part of the cost) and go to a place like TrueNorth and begin the process of unclogging all their arteries (including in their brain). I have no connection to TrueNorth; I'm just a fan and believe their book helped me on a path towards better health. Perhaps there might be a YC investment idea in there for somebody?
There are also several YouTube videos of people documenting their long water-only fasts done in various locations.
In general, you can probably get at least some of the benefits by just shortening your eating window during the day to six to eight hours or less (e.g. only eat between 10am and 6pm or such). That gives your pancreas and cells a chance to rest and recover from producing and using insulin. That's one form of "Intermittent Fasting" most people could do every day without impacting their social life or work life very much -- just skip either breakfast or dinner and don't do late night snacking.
Vegetable juice fasting is also another thing consider, like in the inspirational and funny movie by Joe Cross called "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" and its sequel. But such juice-fasting is not much of a true fast. It mainly just supercharges your nutrition (which is a good thing).
One of the most important things about a long fast is to break it gently. Peop...
I have long had the hunch that depression (and especially SAD) make sense from an evolutionary perspective as a sort of hibernation strategy. Common symptoms like lowered appetite and psychomotor retardation, coupled with the episodic nature of most depressive disorders, seems like a good fit for hibernating behaviour.
Fascinating research. Would be very interesting if the conclusions could be supported by other dig sites.
> I have long had the hunch that depression (and especially SAD) make sense from an evolutionary perspective as a sort of hibernation strategy.
Interesting, I've long had the hunch that an evolutionary purpose of depression could be to strengthen a tribe by weeding out individuals that are a burden to said tribe, as self-perceived burden seems to be closely linked to the disorder.
That doesn't float. Natural selection can never select for suicide to benefit the group, unless the group is genetically identical - such a trait simply isn't adaptive.
Natural selection of whole group does make sense if they are genetically related (and you consider the fact that in addition to individual dying off, it is possible for whole groups to die off (over longer time scales))
I think you might be combining Darwinism with Dawkinsism here.
Natural selection isn't necessarily preservational of individual genes (nor of genotypes). It just argues that the survivors are more genetically fit for survival. This aligns with GP's comment.
The Selfish Gene theory argues that behaviours among the group tend toward preservation of the genotype. Family over strangers, generally.
I do take issue with GP's "evolutionary purpose" -- these two words cannot be combined in a meaningful way. But, interpreted as "evolutionary contribution", it could make sense.
All that said, I also don't think that GP's idea floats, nor does it hold water. Genetic predisposition to depression is very poorly understood, but seems (to me) to be just ordinary phenotypical noise in the signal. Quasi-random variation which is to be expected in any sufficiently complicated system.
You're looking at it from a very individualist perspective. In reality, genes don't belong to the individual, or a tribe or species for that matter. Genes belong to the ecosystem i.e. genes favor behavior which is good for the fitness of the ecosystem, even at the expense of the individual itself or other lower level organisms or super-organisms.
It will be clear if you look at it from a different perspective. White blood cells kill bodies own cells all the time. If you think the reason might be to protect the larger organism, it makes more sense. But there's more.
Think of the "freeze" response that, say, deer have when they get caught by a leopard. It would be best for the deer (and its family i.e. those with similar genes) if it didn't have a freeze response. It would be much better for them if they had a "fight till death" response. That way, every time a leopard caught a deer, it would get most likely get injured and leopards would be able to hunt fewer deer.
The deer has a freeze response because it has nothing to do with what's good for the deer and everything to do with what is good for the ecosystem. It's best if it outruns the leopard... but if it gets caught, it's best if it freezes while the leopard kills it.
P.S. The mainstream explanation of the freeze response is that "it helps the deer deal with the pain". However, they fail to explain what the evolutionary benefit to not feeling pain as one is being eaten is.
You're looking at it from a very individualist perspective. In reality, genes don't belong to the individual, or a tribe or species for that matter. Genes belong to the ecosystem i.e. genes favor behavior which is good for the fitness of the ecosystem (you could say it's because of the other way around, but you get the idea), even at the expense of the individual itself or other lower level organisms or super-organisms.
It will be clear if you look at it from a different perspective. White blood cells kill bodies own cells all the time. If you think the reason might be to protect the larger organism, it makes more sense. But there's more.
Think of the "freeze" response that, say, deer have when they get caught by a leopard. It would be best for the deer (and its family i.e. those with similar genes) if it didn't have a freeze response. It would be much better for them if they had a "fight till death" response. That way, every time a leopard caught a deer, it would get most likely get injured and leopards would be able to hunt fewer deer.
The deer has a freeze response because it has nothing to do with what's good for the deer and everything to do with what is good for the ecosystem. It's best if it outruns the leopard... but if it gets caught, it's best if it freezes while the leopard kills it.
P.S. The mainstream explanation of the freeze response is that "it helps the deer deal with the pain". However, they fail to explain what the evolutionary benefit to not feeling pain as one is being eaten is.
Depression != suicide. Depressed people don't usually kill themselves, even under modern circumstances where suicide rates are elevated because means of easy suicide are widespread[1].
I'd call that significant, particularly considering the pace of evolution and how recently mankind started treating depression.
That being said, a (self-perceived) burden can free the tribe from their own weight without suicide: social withdrawal and isolation are fairly common in depression.
But as I said, that's just something I've occasionally pondered about. I might be wrong about it, as other users have already pointed out.
That view is too teleological, as if there's a "better". I could see both being advantageous, depending on conditions. The "hibernators" would have a caloric or metabolic advantage should there be harsh conditions and little need to go out and face said conditions when finding food would essentially be fruitless. But given modern conditions that's not quite as advantageous now though could be in the future should we have caloric restraints and one's presupposed to "hibernating" the metabolism to some extent.
There have been isolated cases of modern humans surviving by hibernation, but almost always in association with some kind of serious injury that seems to trigger some deeply buried metabolic mechanisms. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/21/japan.topstori...
There was some work around a decade ago into using precise concentrations of hydrogen sulfide to induce it deliberately.
This article is about evidence of neanderthals and their ancestors. However if nothing suggests that humans have lost such ability then its plausible that this technically still applies to humans as there isn't much evolutionary history between neanderthals and humans considering the implications.
This is an interesting hypothesis, even though on first blush it seems obviously wrong. I'm glad the article was more nuanced than the headline.
This reminded me of an interesting tidbit from Graham Robb's book 'The Discovery of France'. He mentions the pre-industrial peasantry (in some extremely rural areas) living in a similar manner. During the winter when there were stretches of time where it was too harsh to do any productive work, the peasants just stayed inside. Food/calories were scarce enough even in the best of times so activity was limited to wake up, eat a bit, sleep, repeat.
" Gylfi asks what Auðumbla ate, and High says that she licked salty rime stones for sustenance. He recounts that Auðumbla once licked salts for three days, revealing Búri: The first day she licked free his hair, the second day his head, and the third day his entire body."
That's 327g per day so a modern human need about 59kg of added fat to survive 6 monthes without eating or hibernating , while being fully able and functionnal in case some additional food can be found during the time.
As an anecdote my longest fast was 8 days, and I recorded between 300 and 400g of weight loss per day. I was walking a few hours per day without any trouble, so no loss of physical energy.
> For 382 days ending on 11 July 1966, he consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, and zero-calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water, although he occasionally consumed small amounts of milk and/or sugar with the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.
That's an apples to oranges comparison with hibernation. Your body needs some vitamins to process body fat into energy.
Wow a man lost 276 pounds by eating nothing for a year. It's amazing what the human body can do. He's also living proof that you really can't go wrong with dieting, if you're obese. Eating nothing is theoretically the worst diet possible (aside from maybe eating poison) so it's like it's like whatever crazy thing works for you, just do it.
If that’s the case it makes it more likely that hibernation for long duration space flight may be more achievable. The ability might not be too far outside our standard biological envelope.
There are many long, slow, but low energy orbital trajectories between bodies in the solar system that take advantage of multiple gravity assists, etc. We currently use those for probes but plans to send humans places always aim for high energy fast trajectories for obvious reasons. This limits their payload and increases the cost. Hibernation would make these slow efficient paths viable.
There are down to earth uses too, like sleeping while waiting for a critical donor organ to become available or for the time it takes to culture one from your stem cells.
However, I am not aware of any confirmation that sleeping so long is possible, and does not harm health.
If there was indeed possibility to enter torpor in a controlled manner, that may be up to 88% energy saving, so only ~7kg of body fat would need to be used.
I don't think that this method is practical. You need to eat a lot of food to get 59 kg of body fat. It's easier to conserve that food and just eat it at winter. Food conservation was practically a solved problem for a long time, you just have to get that food in the first place. Those who die because of starvation usually did not have enough food to begin with (because of bad harvest, for example).
Wouldn't it be more likely that such hibernation (if real) was during the 8-10 coldest weeks of the year (Dec-Jan depending on location)? That would make it on the order of ~23kg which is a much more reasonable amount of fat to store. Six months seems like a very long time for anywhere south of the Arctic Circle.
Ever since the last post on HN about insulating our bodies I got into researching hypothermia a bit. Princeton has a wonderful page on it containing many things I did not know[1]. One thing that struck me on this page as bizarre was this line: "at 90 degrees the body tries to move into hibernation" Surely that can't be right, we would have figured out practical use for this or at least observed it working in modern humans. Well, seems we have at least one case [2].
A bit off the main topic, but I've always wondered when we'll develop some sort of anesthesia/hibernation hybrid where when a person catches a disease that makes life uncomfortable or miserable, they would be put in suspension, similar to hibernation or general anesthesia, and reamin in that state until he or she is cured. For example, going through chemotherapy and radiotherapy, while unconscious, or even just dreaming, makes it way more appealing to me. I can think many, many other instances where this would be desirable.
Well, induced coma has all sorts of problems and some potentially very dangerous or serious side effects. It would be something like that, but fully safe and with no negatives.
I suspect bipolarity is a feature, not a bug. It probably helped humans survive hard winters north of the equator by keeping us "depressed" and indoors during the harsh winter months and hyperactive during the more temperate months to harvest resources. Same with SADS and post-partum depression: keeps you indoors to care for a baby and avoid contracting new diseases or falling pregnant shortly after.
I read an analysis of French peasant life in the late 19th and early 20th century that said that this was how the winters were passed. Not literal hibernation on the physiological sense that bears undergo it, but packing into a hut and spending only a handful of hours a day awake, not talking.
Since many of these poor households were still wealthy enough to have had animals I was always a bit dubious.
When Napoleon was Empire he ordered a "mini-Doomsday" book audit. It was reported that French farmers during winter did not work and eat very little. This was about 1810.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadBut when you hear bizarre claims, backed by no evidence but tenuous hearsay and no means of independent confirmation... I mean, surely some of it is true, but each single bizarre assertion must be considered with your skeptic hat firmly on.
It's hardly a bizarre claim if you've ever read an account of what life was like during the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor.
That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.
So yes, it is anecdotal evidence, but not, IMHO, entirely implausible at that.
> Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border...
Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round (or flat, according to what you believe it to be?)
I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims, particularly in ideologically charged contexts. Or try to be, anyway -- I'm not a robot and I'm of course subject to bias, like all humans.
For example, I dislike Trump but if I read something truly outrageous about him I tend to be skeptical about it. In Spanish we call it "avoid buying rotten fish", i.e. do not believe any stories about your hated enemy, just because they sound like something he would do, until you can have at least some degree of verification. Because sometimes those stories are planted maliciously or are plain wrong.
In the case of North Korea there is the problem that the country is so secretive -- unlike the US with Trump -- that it's truly hard to get confirmation of just about anything, so the rumors fly easily. If something sounds true about North Korea, then it must be true!
That the Earth is round is non-controversial. I don't see how it's wrong to double or triple check sociopolitical claims though.
I do believe North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship and that their people suffer, in case you were wondering. This doesn't mean I will automatically believe any claim about that country.
You have not presented a case for this particular claim to be regarded as outrageous. Unless you do, then your attitude to such claims is beside the point here.
Does it make it automatically untrue? No. Do I believe many North Koreans live in really harsh conditions? Yes.
But this particular tale does seem too horrific to believe without some sort of confirmation beyond hearsay. All it lacks is some cannibalism to make it the perfect horror story about North Korea.
If you could have resisted the temptation to embellish, you would have made a quite reasonable point - though seeking collective shelter in caves in a harsh winter does not seem too far-fetched to me. It's not like humanity has no history of doing this! While famine is thankfully no longer a part of many peoples' experience, it has been for most of humanity's existence and still is for some.
As for ideological motivation, this anecdote is being presented in the context of an anthropological claim about early human behavior, not about North Korea or communism. I tend to trust OP's judgment as to whether he was being strung along by the driver for ideological reasons.
So I'm confused about the part you don't believe, is it that they went up to the mountains to do it?
Either the starvation wasn't quite as deadly, or new people kept moving to that strip of land, only to end up dying in winter.
> "people in border villages go up in mountain caves during the winter, and basically lie down there, starving and dying" to be a horror story
It didn't include all the other things you mentioned. Only the part in quotes seemed to be enough for GP to deem it as a suspect horror story.
Needless to say, there's nothing unusual or unbelievable about people dying of starvation.
Now you are depending on an absurdly literal reading of the tale to exaggerate its implausibility.
It is a well-established fact that North Korea suffered several years of famine in the mid 90s, with at least 1/4 million fatalities and probably much higher, arising from a combination of the loss of economic support from the former USSR, El Niño and a kleptocratic bureaucracy. In such circumstances, it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.
As for lying in the sun: if you are cold, famished, and have exhausted all the new-grown food that the spring has produced so far, then perhaps it is the best you can do.
Sure, that would be very plausible. Stocking up a cave with food, keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available, eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer...
Not quite the same as the original story, though.
You are doing the same as the_af here: nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story in order to avoid realistically evaluating its credibility. Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.
Furhermore:
> Stocking up a cave with food...
According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive.
>... keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available...
and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death.
>...eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer.
Well, yes - that was apparently the point of relating this anecdote. As we can see, the story as presented is close to what you consider plausible, especially as we know there actually was a severe multi-year famine in North Korea not so long ago.
The author posted it in a comment on an article about Neanderthals who might have had the ability, never before observed in humans, to slow their base metabolic rate to withstand extreme cold. And they suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same.
In my modified version, their body temperature stays within the normal range and they're conserving energy by limiting movement, but their base metabolism stays the same and they still have to eat regularly, i.e. they're not hibernating.
Maybe that's just "nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story", but it's also the only way in which the story is relevant to TFA.
>And [OP] suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same. [my emphasis of the weasel word]
So it seems you will read the anecdote literally when doing so allows you to attack its credibility, and you will find an unstated assumption in it if doing so allows you to attack its relevance.
As noted above, the OP merely seems to be suggesting something that other posters have also mentioned: the physical evidence mentioned in the article might have been the result of winter famine, and not definitive evidence of hibernation; furthermore, there may be people alive today, or recently deceased, in whom this physiological damage might be found. I can't say for sure, but OP may be suggesting that they might help with the further studies of this hypothesis.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25490193
So it's really not so far-fetched that people living on the Chinese side of the border meet north koreans and hear their stories.
Additionally, the number of NKers defectors in China is high - they aren't rare.
Experience with defectors from other countries, such as the former Soviet Union, shows they sometimes tell the truth, they sometimes tell false or exaggerated stories, and they sometimes tell half-truths. I don't know why North Korean defectors would be different.
> and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another.
This specific claim is about people going to die in droves to caves, not just about harsh authoritarianism or extreme poverty. That's why it must be considered skeptically -- because it seems just like the kind of thing we're prone to believing about North Korea given other news, but this is not enough to make it true. And once it gets repeated uncritically, it becomes the "common sense truth".
They weren't going into caves to die, quite the contrary, they were going into the caves to survive.
Defectors won't know any of this. It's expected that some would exaggerate unverifiable details, to ensure their safety. That wouldn't diminish what they actually went through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk
People love shocking stories, so there can be real financial benefit on making up the wildest things up and then selling your story to media or publisher.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-... 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness#In_... 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom
Also to fit into their new environments. Everyone loves to hate on the enemy country. You might see that in the US with some Chinese Americans online, easier to fit in. Want upvotes, just go to Reddit, say "i'm chinese and eff china". Plug in North Korea and get more sympathy.
Defector accounts are actually often inaccurate or exaggerated. North Korean testimonies often fall apart: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...
One of the incentives is that they make money, or gain a visa, through such testimonies.
Back in the days when China was poor, many Chinese defectors or political refugees were actually economical refugees. They made up exaggerated stories in order to get a visa on the grounds of political asylum.
It's not as black and white as that, and I believe some measure of restraint is valuable when making decisions that can have unbounded consequences. Sometimes making the right decision eventually is better than making the wrong decision immediately.
And some things about the Holocaust turned out to be myths, for example that the Nazis regularly made soap out of the body fat of their Jewish victims, and similarly regularly made lampshades out of their skin. It sounds plausible, because the Nazis engaged in so many horrific acts that why not this, but this alone doesn't make it true (and it turns out, historians today don't think this was true -- not a regular practice, anyway).
In order to criticize a dictatorship you don't need to uncritically believe everything bad said about them. Some of it will be false. Always be wary of particularly outrageous claims.
There is almost no detail of the Holocaust that couldn't be described as an "outrageous claim", and yet these things actually happened.
What is far more pernicious is for people to engage in ideologically motivated skepticism and denial towards these atrocities, which I think Cambodia provides a much better example of: https://quillette.com/2018/07/15/devastation-and-denial-camb...
> Refugee testimonies were not be dismissed, Chomsky argued, but nor were they to be trusted. “Refugees,” he wrote, “are frightened and defenceless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear.”4
> Many other Western intellectuals summarily dismissed Barron and Paul’s conclusion of a “monstrous dark age that has engulfed the people of Cambodia.” The aforementioned Gareth Porter called refugee testimony the “least reliable kind of documentation,” and derided the refugees themselves as merely the wealthy elite of Cambodian society who had lost out in the collectivisation process. When Porter testified before U.S Congress he stated, “I cannot accept the premise … that one million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people.”5
Believe me, when I say that you sound like a Cambodian genocide denier, it's because you sound a lot like a Cambodian genocide denier.
I share your disgust for genocide deniers.
Like you mentioned, there is outside confirmation of these facts.
In a sense this is contemporary, compared to "early" humans, and possible to verify in the record.
*scare quotes because I've only seen one reference
"At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight."
But I don't find many reliable source about it. Does anyone if this is really true? It sounds hard to believe.
I've had a couple of periods where I was flat broke and had food staples and a roof over my head but not much else in Canadian winter or two. That's essentially how I would pass a few days here and there to save money on food and expenses.
I would sleep as much as possible, fast until around 8pm, and eat a cheap meal (e.g. bulk pasta and tomato sauce I made from marked down cans of tomato and froze), then back to bed. A lot of the time, if I couldn't sleep, I would read. This was pre internet and I didn't have a phone or tv.
Days go by pretty fast like that (it was very, very cold out each time I did this and I had inadequate clothing for the weather so even a walk was not happening).
Eventually, the next thing I had to do would come up and I'd get back to normal. For context, I worked in kitchens so work meant "free" food (my jobs paid very little) or a couple times I was in a cabin in the middle of nowhere waiting for the weather to clear so I could dig out and get my car in the road. Nice to do this when you have a good supply of stove wood and a good book.
I've found this to be the case with COVID isolation and WFH. Not having any set work hours and nobody really even aware of whether I'm working or not, I'm sleeping a lot more (like 12 hrs/day) and not being very productive the rest of the time. This year has just vanished in a haze of sleeping and not doing much, a week can feel like a day sometimes.
However, there are a few caveats:
I am convinced that the placebo effect is so powerful, that if you believe the meds will harm you, they actually could. I can't back this up with science, but I think the only reason meds worked for me is because I was able to lose the negative preconceptions I had about them (same for therapy). Unfortunately, negative perception of antidepressants is so prevalent that this is very difficult (but doable).
Antidepressants shouldn't make you feel numb. Neither are they "happy pills". The goal of them is, in theory, to stop you feeling depressed _over nothing_. What they will hopefully do is bring you back to a stable normality, encompassing the entire range of normal human emotions.
Curing your depression will not automatically make you happy (but it will certainly help you on your way) – Only living a happy and fulfilling life, full of people you care about and things you enjoy, can do that.
You also need to give your body the best chance, by making sure no basic aspect of your life is severely lacking - sleep, food/drink, exercise, family/friends/social, hobbies that give you a feeling of accomplishment etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
I'm taking sertraline (zoloft) now, and the only negatives I'm experiencing are slightly reduced libido and jaw clenching/grinding. I've started occasionally wearing a night guard while sleeping, and not really minding the decreased libido since dating during a global pandemic is outside of my acceptable risk tolerance.
I've also taken Lexapro and had good results with that, too.
The benefits are I was able to actually feel pleasure and enjoy things again. At my worst I was suffering from severe anhedonia -- literally finding no pleasure in any activity. Nothing I previously enjoyed brought any modicum of happiness: not food, not sex, not exercise, not work or side projects. It's a dangerous state to be in because when literally nothing in life brings joy you can slip into destructive choices.
The benefits of feeling better vastly outweighed any minor side effects of antidepressants.
There are some people, especially teenagers, who can become suicidal when taking antidepressants. But it's very rare and your psychiatrist will help you find a drug that doesn't cause those feelings.
This would yield the required the degree of preparations before embarking on such a long stretch of lockdown. Gaining enough fat, stocking wood/coal/water/bread, well, farming what's needed through the rest of the year.
I think this may be a survival stretch for some bad years, not a sustainable practice.
https://www.angloinfo.com/blogs/france/midi-pyrenees/pot-pou...
Will update if I can find the one from the French Revolution.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder-sa...
Yeah it's not that palatable, but we're talking about a survival strategy. It's biscuit or death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
They may have all slept together in one room around a fire and spent more time indoors during the winter but there is no way they hibernated. If that were the case millions in Ukraine would have survived Stalin's intentional famine (Holodomor). Families could have simply just rode it out sleeping and eating a piece of bread.
Never really went longer then 5 days, but I heard stories of people going complete 30 days without food consuming only water with some minerals and salt.
From Wikipedia:
Angus Barbieri's fast. Starting in June 1965, Scottish man Angus Barbieri (1939 – 7 September 1990) fasted for 382 days. He lived on tea, coffee, soda water and vitamins, living at home in Tayport, Scotland, and frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation.
But AFAIK the Guinness book no longer collects fasting records, because they do not want to promote anorexia.
I've water-only fasted a few times, working my way up from a few days to about thirty-one days twice (with the long fasts a few years apart, most recently last year). I would have gone longer except for work and family obligations.
Related recent books include "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle, Ph.D and Alan Goldhamer, D.C. (of the TrueNorth Health Center) and "Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor's Program for Conquering Disease" by Joel Fuhrman, MD. There are much older books on this though, including by Herbert Shelton.
Fasting may help improve memory function by stimulating the production of a brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which helps with learning, memory, and making new nerve cells in the hippocampus. Fasting also helps the body clean up dysfunctional cells (including potentially cancerous ones).
So, there is probably a good health reason why every major religion has fasting as part of its rituals. Also, it makes a lot of sense why agrarian civilizations might fast in late winter or early spring when food was running short, but to suggest pregnant women and young children should be exempt (so, making a virtue out of a necessity). For example, Christian Lent in 2020 went from February 26th to April 9, which would historically have been a time of low food supplies in the Northern hemisphere.
While not exactly hibernating, I definitely had lower physical energy. So, walking the dog a mile or two each day or two was harder. In general, I've seen knowledgeable recommendations not to do much exercise at all when fasting, although others disagree to some extent.
For people who want to do a medically-supervised fast, consider the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA (although I did not go there myself) who wrote the first book I referenced. https://www.healthpromoting.com/
I feel the USA would be a much healthier place (with much lower health care costs) if there were such fasting-oriented/nutritionally-oriented health centers available in every community -- with a month or two spent there covered by health insurance and some sort of new medical leave act. It's ironic that most US health insurance will pay $100,000 for weeks of hospitalization and other treatments related to a heart bypass operation (which does nothing about all the other clogged arteries in the body) -- but "health" insurance generally won't pay $10,000 (or whatever) for someone to take a few weeks away from work (the biggest part of the cost) and go to a place like TrueNorth and begin the process of unclogging all their arteries (including in their brain). I have no connection to TrueNorth; I'm just a fan and believe their book helped me on a path towards better health. Perhaps there might be a YC investment idea in there for somebody?
There are also several YouTube videos of people documenting their long water-only fasts done in various locations.
In general, you can probably get at least some of the benefits by just shortening your eating window during the day to six to eight hours or less (e.g. only eat between 10am and 6pm or such). That gives your pancreas and cells a chance to rest and recover from producing and using insulin. That's one form of "Intermittent Fasting" most people could do every day without impacting their social life or work life very much -- just skip either breakfast or dinner and don't do late night snacking.
Vegetable juice fasting is also another thing consider, like in the inspirational and funny movie by Joe Cross called "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" and its sequel. But such juice-fasting is not much of a true fast. It mainly just supercharges your nutrition (which is a good thing).
One of the most important things about a long fast is to break it gently. Peop...
Fascinating research. Would be very interesting if the conclusions could be supported by other dig sites.
Interesting, I've long had the hunch that an evolutionary purpose of depression could be to strengthen a tribe by weeding out individuals that are a burden to said tribe, as self-perceived burden seems to be closely linked to the disorder.
I have no idea if it applies to depression. I don’t really buy the simple story from GP.
Natural selection isn't necessarily preservational of individual genes (nor of genotypes). It just argues that the survivors are more genetically fit for survival. This aligns with GP's comment.
The Selfish Gene theory argues that behaviours among the group tend toward preservation of the genotype. Family over strangers, generally.
I do take issue with GP's "evolutionary purpose" -- these two words cannot be combined in a meaningful way. But, interpreted as "evolutionary contribution", it could make sense.
All that said, I also don't think that GP's idea floats, nor does it hold water. Genetic predisposition to depression is very poorly understood, but seems (to me) to be just ordinary phenotypical noise in the signal. Quasi-random variation which is to be expected in any sufficiently complicated system.
It will be clear if you look at it from a different perspective. White blood cells kill bodies own cells all the time. If you think the reason might be to protect the larger organism, it makes more sense. But there's more.
Think of the "freeze" response that, say, deer have when they get caught by a leopard. It would be best for the deer (and its family i.e. those with similar genes) if it didn't have a freeze response. It would be much better for them if they had a "fight till death" response. That way, every time a leopard caught a deer, it would get most likely get injured and leopards would be able to hunt fewer deer.
The deer has a freeze response because it has nothing to do with what's good for the deer and everything to do with what is good for the ecosystem. It's best if it outruns the leopard... but if it gets caught, it's best if it freezes while the leopard kills it.
P.S. The mainstream explanation of the freeze response is that "it helps the deer deal with the pain". However, they fail to explain what the evolutionary benefit to not feeling pain as one is being eaten is.
Think of the "freeze" response that, say, deer have when they get caught by a leopard. It would be best for the deer (and its family i.e. those with similar genes) if it didn't have a freeze response. It would be much better for them if they had a "fight till death" response. That way, every time a leopard caught a deer, it would get most likely get injured and leopards would be able to hunt fewer deer.
The deer has a freeze response because it has nothing to do with what's good for the deer and everything to do with what is good for the ecosystem. It's best if it outruns the leopard... but if it gets caught, it's best if it freezes while the leopard kills it.
P.S. The mainstream explanation of the freeze response is that "it helps the deer deal with the pain". However, they fail to explain what the evolutionary benefit to not feeling pain as one is being eaten is.
No, they don't. That's simply wrong. They favor their own survival.
And you really didn't need to post this twice.
1: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-owner...
https://www.dbsalliance.org/education/depression/statistics/
I'd call that significant, particularly considering the pace of evolution and how recently mankind started treating depression.
That being said, a (self-perceived) burden can free the tribe from their own weight without suicide: social withdrawal and isolation are fairly common in depression.
But as I said, that's just something I've occasionally pondered about. I might be wrong about it, as other users have already pointed out.
There was some work around a decade ago into using precise concentrations of hydrogen sulfide to induce it deliberately.
This reminded me of an interesting tidbit from Graham Robb's book 'The Discovery of France'. He mentions the pre-industrial peasantry (in some extremely rural areas) living in a similar manner. During the winter when there were stretches of time where it was too harsh to do any productive work, the peasants just stayed inside. Food/calories were scarce enough even in the best of times so activity was limited to wake up, eat a bit, sleep, repeat.
" Gylfi asks what Auðumbla ate, and High says that she licked salty rime stones for sustenance. He recounts that Auðumbla once licked salts for three days, revealing Búri: The first day she licked free his hair, the second day his head, and the third day his entire body."
Some pictures:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Ym... "The primordial being Ymir suckles at the udder of Auðumbla as she licks Búri out of the ice in a painting by Nicolai Abildgaard, 1790"
https://imgur.com/a/x8AHWWv
https://www.svetlanas-galerie.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/...
https://yellowstonebearworld.com/how-long-do-bears-hibernate
"Grizzly bears typically hibernate between five to seven months"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast "Scottish man Angus Barbieri (1939 – 7 September 1990) fasted for 382 days (...) 207 kg to 82 kg"
That's 327g per day so a modern human need about 59kg of added fat to survive 6 monthes without eating or hibernating , while being fully able and functionnal in case some additional food can be found during the time.
As an anecdote my longest fast was 8 days, and I recorded between 300 and 400g of weight loss per day. I was walking a few hours per day without any trouble, so no loss of physical energy.
That's an apples to oranges comparison with hibernation. Your body needs some vitamins to process body fat into energy.
https://pmj.bmj.com/content/postgradmedj/49/569/203.full.pdf
It looks like supplements were not given continuously.
I'm not an expert but some doctors on youtube point to studies which show stable levels of many things during extended fasting:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9374844/
https://thefastingmethod.com/vitamins-and-calcium/
Fat, liver, kidney store lots of useful things.
Some things like salt are easy to find all year anyway, they don't run away :).
Survivor bias, anectdata, etc. You can give yourself heart problems, gallstones, etc. from rapid weight loss.
There are many long, slow, but low energy orbital trajectories between bodies in the solar system that take advantage of multiple gravity assists, etc. We currently use those for probes but plans to send humans places always aim for high energy fast trajectories for obvious reasons. This limits their payload and increases the cost. Hibernation would make these slow efficient paths viable.
There are down to earth uses too, like sleeping while waiting for a critical donor organ to become available or for the time it takes to culture one from your stem cells.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
However, I am not aware of any confirmation that sleeping so long is possible, and does not harm health. If there was indeed possibility to enter torpor in a controlled manner, that may be up to 88% energy saving, so only ~7kg of body fat would need to be used.
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~oa/safety/hypocold.shtml
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/21/japan.topstori...
Not exactly what you are asking for, but: https://www.marijuanamoment.net/canada-will-let-terminally-i...
Since many of these poor households were still wealthy enough to have had animals I was always a bit dubious.
Can't we all just finally out that myth to rest?