Comments
Cherimoose t1_j4jsy95 wrote
It says they crave more sugar as adults if they had lots of variety as babies. Mice, at least. This may have implications for obesity in humans.
katarh t1_j4lf3zf wrote
Speaking to modern day humans: Canned baby food is very bland - little salt or pepper - but baby formula is often full of a ton of sugar. I once heard it referred to as a "baby milkshake" by a professor complaining about how much sugar is in standard formula. Human breast milk has milk sugars in it too, but the calories are also coming from fats and proteins.
wallowsfan289 t1_j4hx1a8 wrote
This is random, but I know stuff like baby or pet food is packed with nutrients. It’s well-rounded enough to be the cornerstone of a diet. I wonder why us humans tend to stop doing that as we age. Like yeah we have more choices, but as we all know with the current state of humans, that doesn’t always equate to better choices being made. I’m surprised it’s not more popular to eat like powders you can mix with something or something like that to get all of your nutrients in one meal. Sure it might not taste the best, but there’s gotta be some way to make it taste tolerable.
JoHaSa t1_j4i5bq7 wrote
Those nutritient drinks are awful for long term consumption for multiple reasons and here are only some of the reasons:
- Humans thrive with variety. We are adapted to adapting.
- Getting enough nutritients is not enough. We need volume. Otherwise we are hungry and have bad cravings. Just like if we eat highly calorie dense food, our system does not realize it has enough energy.
- Humans get bored. See 1.
- Teeth and mouth. Our teeth and muscles need to work. So chewing is essential.
- We need stuff that we do not know about yet. For example it is not so many years ago we knew next to nothing about gut bacteria and its huge importance. That bacteria needs stuff industrial nutritive products probably no not have.
- Fibre. Different kinds of fibre in sufficient amounts.
- And so on and on and on.
narrill t1_j4ip80j wrote
Many meal-shake type products are made with whole foods, have sufficient volume to be filling, and have tons of fibre. There are even some companies (e.g. Huel) that sell what are essentially dehydrated, fortified meals, which provide some variety and also involve chewing.
In the context of nutrition and physiological wellbeing there's not really anything wrong with these products, and most are going to be better than a typical diet in many parts of the world. The issue, I would guess, is that the good ones aren't cheap.
wallowsfan289 t1_j4ilm0a wrote
Fair. It being the bulk of our diet sounds like a bad idea, but I feel like it could help fill some gaps with people who maybe don’t have great access to healthy variety. We’re good at adapting but also creatures of habits. I feel like some of these generalizations change widely between person to person.
flaminate_strutching t1_j4irhsr wrote
Yep, that definitely exists. There are a variety of reasons why people can’t eat and live their entire lives on tube feeding formulas.
george-its-james t1_j4hy5u4 wrote
There's a bunch of companies doing exactly that, Huel probably being the most popular. I actually frequently mix a shake (not Huel) in the morning to take to the office for a quick complete breakfast.
_BlueFire_ t1_j4j3odz wrote
Idk, I get my nutrients from veggies that I cook. That seems not enjoyable...
BafangFan t1_j4igsk9 wrote
An animals natural diet will have all it needs to survive.
Mammals, after they ween off breast milk, eat the same damn food every day (with some variance of this plant or that plant, or which animal they can catch for the day). But it's basically meat, or leaves.
This whole "varied diet" thing is a modern-day consumer-based construct.
If you were living on a Polynesian island 100 years ago your diet would have been fish, shell fish, coconuts, and whatever edible leafs, berries and roots you could find.
wallowsfan289 t1_j4ik0mv wrote
Yes, but we know that while that diet isn't the worst for surviving, we have information that tells us what nutrients help us thrive. It's not all a consumer-based construct, you're flipping to the other end of the extreme. We don't live on a Polynesian Island anymore. In modern society we prioritize mental clarity and maximum energy to be productive, therefore the foods we eat match. If I had access to this range of nutrients in the past, I would eat them. Cause why not.
BafangFan t1_j4j4uz4 wrote
Because homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years - and other species of homo for 2 or 3 million years. And during that time we evolved to have culture and tools and industrial revolution. We built cities and moved rivers.
However, in only the past 50 years we have had an explosion in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, ADHD, depression, etc.
The foods that we ate for 300,000 years did not make us sick. We figured out what we could eat, and what we couldn't.
But now, everything in the middle of a grocery store - all the industrial food - is killing us.
And as far as leafy green vegetables go, we may have eaten them from time to time (or not), but they have virtually no calories so it's not like they would have sustained us. We can't live on plain salad - so it's a wonder if 20,000 years ago we would have even bothered eating it.
Arguably, we ate a ton of meat. And after we figured out fire and cooking we probably ate some starchy roots, like casava. But raw casava is poisonous unless treated properly, so it's unlikely we ate casava or similar roots until after we had big brains.
StorminNorman t1_j4jqyvo wrote
>However, in only the past 50 years we have had an explosion in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, ADHD, depression, etc.
Detection for most of these has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last 50yrs.
>And as far as leafy green vegetables go, we may have eaten them from time to time (or not), but they have virtually no calories so it's not like they would have sustained us. We can't live on plain salad - so it's a wonder if 20,000 years ago we would have even bothered eating it. > >Arguably, we ate a ton of meat. And after we figured out fire and cooking we probably ate some starchy roots, like casava. But raw casava is poisonous unless treated properly, so it's unlikely we ate casava or similar roots until after we had big brains.
BafangFan t1_j4juhwo wrote
Let's remember that there used to be many more megafauna roaming the earth than today; giant sloths, woolly mammoths, tens of millions of bison across the North American Great Plains
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/did-humans-hunt-the-biggest-animals-to-extinction
Where did they go? It seems like we ate them all.
I used to go for walks in the woods on a near daily basis. Outside of some mushrooms and dandelions, I couldn't identify any plants that would be edible for us. I guess seasonally we have wild blackberries.
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BafangFan t1_j4jtwmo wrote
There is evidence of brain surgery going back thousands of years:
The Ancient Egyptians were the first to document the symptoms of a heart attack (and not-coincidentally, they ate a grain-based diet).
You don't really need a lot of scientific tools to recognize a large tumor that's growing abnormally on the surface of the body.
So it's not like these things weren't diagnosable a long time ago. Before glucose tests doctors would taste the urine of a patient to see if it's sweet or not.
And if nothing else, we have pictures of people before and after industrial food. New York City in 1900 was much slimmer, on average, than in 2023. You used to have to pay a carnival an admission fee to see a really fat person. Now we don't go a single day in public without seeing a few of them.
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Stats_n_PoliSci t1_j4k1gk5 wrote
I’m amused by your assumption that the things we are 300,000 years ago didn’t make us sick.
It’s also interesting that you think our highly omnivorous teeth were primarily used to eat meat. Plants have plenty of nutrition our bodies readily use even while being low calorie. And back then, high sugar fruits were likely common in the tropical regions. They certainly thrive today in the wild areas of the tropics, if a different variety than would have existed back then.
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Cherimoose t1_j4jx7r1 wrote
It seems to depend on availability, since some hunter-gatherer tribes like the Hadza eat lots of fruit, tubers, and other plant foods in addition to meat and birds, while the San people eat dozens of different insects.
I'd agree that our hyper-diverse, overstimulating culture today contributes to the maladies you mentioned, and i'd also include divorce to the list.
BafangFan t1_j4jxr88 wrote
I think the question should be "what would humans eat if everything was abundant?"
And it seems that answer was meat - since we ate so many large animals to extinction. Perhaps we eat more plant foods now because the availability of large animals has diminished.
This is evident in the seafood industry. We are eating fish lower on the food chain because we have already eaten almost all of the fish higher on the food chain.
BoiledChildern t1_j4keltf wrote
So divorce and food are causing ADHD and other socal ills, this is such an odd take
Cherimoose t1_j4megf8 wrote
I meant our high divorce and obesity rates are byproducts of a consumerist culture with endless options.
But yes, kids tend to have fewer problems when raised by their biological parents, which the US has the world's lowest rate of.
GoddessOfTheRose t1_j4lu6bx wrote
Actually, pollution and sporadic loud noises( and constant noise without many breaks) during pregnancy, are a known reason for ADHD and autism.
throwawaytrumper t1_j4lfxth wrote
Foods in the past absolutely made us sick. Food based illnesses prior to the industrial age were commonplace and I have no idea how you got the notion that they were not.
BafangFan t1_j4m3cq3 wrote
Humans in the past, like humans in the present, have the ability to see, smell and taste their food. We are highly sensitive to the signs of purification of meat.
I'm sure that most of our ancestors had a higher parasitic infection rate - but that doesn't necessarily cause chronic illness like what we have today.
Dogs and pigs literally eat poop - their own and others. And they live. Cats lick their butts. We are not so fragile in that sense.
_BlueFire_ t1_j4j46m1 wrote
I can assure you from personal experience that varied diet is as much a social construct as mental health is
vester71 t1_j4lh8ai wrote
Not related but kind of related, is that regardless of what you prefer and regardless of why you prefer it, you can adjust eating behaviors to whatever you want, and your body (over time) will prefer those foods. I used to eat so much crap - and I loved it all and was way heavier, high cholesterol and high BP.
Cutting it out those types of food brought all my levels back into range and now my body craves lean meats, fish, healthy fats, veggies, nuts/seeds, legumes, etc. Eating super processed, fried foods, sugary stuff makes me feel sick.
It's not easy at first, especially if you eat a lot of processed fried, sugary, etc. types of food (and who doesn't love that stuff, regardless of what you ate as a kid) - but over time if your body will not want them and will feel awful if you go back to them.
dragonard t1_j4j8hi0 wrote
Yeah—I never want to eat pot roasts or spaghetti again
mountain_man30 t1_j4luzh3 wrote
This seems like a fairly obvious thing to me. Fortunately I did not check the science before just giving my babies a variety of foods before they were 3. Now they crave good fresh food and tend to shy away from processed foods.
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murderedbyaname t1_j4ht8lk wrote
Pretty sure mice aren't being feed a variety of Gerber's jarred food. Commercially made baby food is extremely varied, and mothers will try it all to see what their babies will eat. So they're developing a tolerant palette.
StorminNorman t1_j4jrdgn wrote
It's like you didn't even read the article given they cover the fact they gave the rats a variety of different tasting foods early in the article.
katarh t1_j4hiox2 wrote
The TL;DR and ELI5 takeaway seems to be that if you give babies a variety of food, they're more likely to enjoy flavors as an adult If you give babies only bland food with no flavor, they will be less flavor motivated as an adult.