Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Adam Ragusea" channel.

  1.  @bluesonicstreak7317  Lots of hunter gatherers had carries. They just had fewer, on average, than people today. We find tooth decay in a substantial fraction of ancient teeth, over 10% I believe. I don't know who told you otherwise. That said, they did pretty well on the whole considering there was no toothpaste or other dental hygiene. There are of course exceptions. In a Moroccan cave called Grotte des Pigeons, 56 neolithic skeletons were found from ca. 12,500 B.C., nearly all of whom had extensive cavities. More than 90% had lost at least one first incisor. More than half of the teeth had carries. And these people were hunter-gatherers.
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  2. 2:37 For those wondering, there are at least three commonly-used definitions of "plant" that include or exclude various types of algae. The strictest sense of the word "plant" (Plantae sensu strictissimo  ) applies only to the land plants (Embryophyta), which are what we all normally think of as plants, even the simple plants like mosses and ferns, but none of what we would call "algae." A slightly less-strict sense of "plant" (Plantae sensu stricto ) applies not just to land plants but to all green algae (Viridiplantae), including stoneworts and a variety of (mostly single-celled) marine and freshwater algae. A broad sense of the word "plant" (Plantae sensu lato ) applies to not only green algae but also red algae and possibly glaucophytes (Archaeplastida). It's hard to find a well-known red alga, but basically, they are red in color, either single- or multicellular, alternate generations like plants, mostly live in the ocean, and generally don't form lichens with fungi. But most algae isn't plants in any sense! For instance, kelp is a brown alga from the SAR supergroup, only very distantly related to plants. And cyanobacteria are sometimes called " blue-green algae" even though they are prokaryotes. The undifferentiated plant tissue he is referring to is called a "thallus," or "thalloid tissue." Even some non-plants have thalli, like the kelp I just mentioned. But many simple plants do too, and even a a few ore complex plants like duckweeds have thalloid structure.
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  3.  @keithyinger3326  What he's saying is that if you are used to the flavor of a particular type of woodchip, you will notice the difference when you use liquid smoke made from a different wood. But if you got a brand of liquid smoke made from the same kind of wood, the difference might be smaller. It still won't taste identical in all recipes, but in a number of well-crafted recipes, it could easily be indistinguishable.
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  4.  @drpavel_  The fact is that billions of people have lactase persistence, which is proof of recent human evolution. Humans have also evolved to better metabolize grain, which as you said, didn't used to be available in quantity, which is proof of yet more recent human evolution. Those are both good examples. Over the past 10,000 years or so, humans have evolved perhaps 100 times as quickly as they did over historical time.
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  5.  @mrmicro22  Of course we have evolved over the past 10,000 years.
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  6. You can absolutely malt any cereal. All seeds produce amylase when germinating, just in different amounts. Some grains like corn have a diastatic power too low to easily ferment on their own (so you won't brew a beer purely out of corn with no adjuncts), but malted corn still exists and is still added to beers and used to make whiskey and so on. And at least according to the University of Arkansas, it is possible to malt some types of rice with a high enough diastatic power to brew beer (though most other sources list its power as 0 by convention).
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  7. The ingredients are disputed too, with some claiming the original had no added anchovies but did use Worcestershire sauce, which contains a tiny amount of anchovy.
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  8. It's a problem if your argument for why some food is gross also applies to breast milk. "Eww, why do we keep feeding babies pus and fat?" Milk is one of the few substances it's almost impossible to formulate a complete argument against, because it is far older than humans and the survival of our species depends on us drinking it. If you think we shouldn't raise cows for milk because it's cruel to the cows, then just say so; don't start blaming boobs.
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  9. It's not really true that pigs are particularly closely related to humans. Pigs are artiodactyls, like deer, sheep, cattle, goats, camels, giraffes, and whales. Humans are euarchontaglires, like rodents, rabbits, and treeshrews. The difference is that pigs have short guts like humans, which makes them good models for some disorders related to the gut, and they are simply cheaper and easier to keep as lab animals than other large livestock. But it's definitely true that they can transmit H1N1 flu (and a few other types that occasionally infect humans), which was a big deal in 2009.
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  10. When I was really young, I used to look at navy colors and swear they looked purple. I would sometimes misidentify dark navy as purple or black, and to me, even denim jeans looked kind of purple. Conversely, growing up, maroon didn't really look purple to me, more like a sort of deep red like burgundy. Oddly enough, I don't see them that way anymore. I guess I trained myself to see the difference. But perception is definitely relative in that way. I can understand the argument that blueberries are purple. They kinda are. It just depends where you draw the line. Also, you describe a "repulsive green" in your blueberries that seems totally invisible to me. What green?
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  11.  @Chrisaveri  He explained why he substituted butter for olive oil (because he likes it better), but not why he got rid of the salt and pepper. (He also didn't get into the contentious argument over whether anchovies belong in the dressing.)
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  12. "Zucchini" comes from the plural of zucchina (originally m zucchino), even though in English, we use -i for both the singular and plural. Zucchino is a diminutive form of zucca, meaning "the mature fruit of the marrow plant" (aka "marrow squash") . . . or also "pumpkin" or "squash." Zuchinni/courgettes are harvested early in the summer long before they are ripe, whereas when they are harvested in the fall, they are called "marrow." "Courgette" comes from the French, a diminutive of courge, which also means "marrow squash." Both these words (along with "gourd," "cucumber," and many others) ultimately come from Latin cucurbita meaning "gourd." So in the end, both "zucchini" and "courgette" just mean "little gourd," but they came from Latin through different languages (Italian and French, resp.), making them a linguistic doublet.
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  13. If you want to know what something sweetened just with glucose tastes like, Smarties are made almost entirely of glucose (along with some citric acid, calcium stearate, flavors, and colors). Sprees are another example (though with maltodextrin as well, which has basically no flavor). They definitely aren't as sweet as sugar cubes, but they are still very sweet.
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  14.  @toni4729  The Inuit actually have among the highest rates of diabetes in the world. This suggests they have genetic adaptations less suited to a modern diet than the average person, though we don't actually know the cause. But anyway, it is not controversial that disease has always been the biggest killer of humans. Whether farming increased disease or not (a valid question, since it increased population density), it is absolutely false that eating a "paleo" diet will make you immune to disease or anything of the sort. I dare you to find a reliable source saying that disease was NOT the leading cause of death before agriculture.
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  15.  @kevinu.k.7042  Beef insulin used to be very popular too, but it's been discontinued. It is true that porcine insulin is structurally more similar to human insulin than bovine inulin is, not sure why.
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  16. Fructose doesn't "skip a step." It actually follows basically the same path as glucose, but the enzyme fructokinase is only present in the liver, intestines, and kidneys. Nearly all fructose is phosphorylated in the liver. On the other hand, glucose is metabolized in all cells, with uptake of glucose in most body cells regulated by insulin. After a few steps in (usually) the liver, fructose is metabolized into DHAP and G3P just like glucose is. So the differences between fructose and glucose must come from what happens before fructolysis/glycolysis. In particular, they are absorbed differently in the intestines, their metabolism begins in different places, and they are regulated differently by the endocrine system.
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  17.  @toni4729  My point is that disease has been with us since the beginning and is not some modern phenomenon. People do in fact live longer today than they ever did in the past (due to modern medicine), and while it is clearly true that we don't have optimal diets these days, that doesn't mean that we can solve disease just by improving our diets. A lot of people these days make exaggerated claims about diets like you did earlier in the conversation and use those to justify bad positions that you and I probably disagree with. For instance, they often try to claim that you don't need a COVID vaccine if you follow a paleo diet. So it does matter that you make accurate statements. Eating right won't mean you never get sick or just occasionally get the sniffles or whatever, and there was never a time in human history where that was the case.
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  18.  @toni4729  And yes, I agree that a COVID (or flu) vaccine is not going to be totally effective in stopping the disease. I actually got COVID myself after my first dose of the vaccine. Still, like you said, it does help. You are somewhat less likely to contract it at all, and if you do, it will have milder symptoms for a shorter duration and you will shed fewer viral particles on average. We have to use all the tools available to us at this point, and the vaccine is the best one we have.
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  19. The timeline is also wrong. Banded iron formations are found in pre-Cambrian rock, whereas land plants didn't evolve until the Ordovician. An oxygen atmosphere already existed by then.
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  20.  @pendlera2959  The word "marrow" for the soft tissue inside bones comes from the late 14th century, before the Columbian exchange, and thus before any English-speaker had seen a squash. The word "marrow" for the vegetable comes from the early 19th century, over 400 years later. Before then, it had various names to distinguish it from other squashes. Personally, I don't see zucchini as actually looking much like bone marrow, but I guess a thick-skinned squash with soft white flesh does kind of resemble it.
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  21.  @oyuyuy  Evolutionary pressure didn't decrease. It increased. Prior to the Neolithic revolution, people had been living roughly the same way for tens of thousands of years. During and after the revolution, life changed substantially. A completely different set of traits was favored, especially with respect to digestion and immunity. Thus, a different type of person tended to survive, and the population evolved. Natural selection favors people who produce the greatest number of successful offspring. Even today, some people produce more and others less. But the type of people who produce more babies is not the same as the type of people who used to, so evolution continues.
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  22.  @toni4729  Disease was the most common cause of death prior to the rise of agriculture. In the paleolithic period, 75% of people died due to infection. Sure, they might not have gotten anthrax from their pigs, but they would still get tetanus from the soil or cholera from the water. The reason farming succeeded is because farmers displaced hunter-gatherers. That implies they were healthier, not less healthy. This is exactly the sort of grandiose claim and mythologizing of fad diets that Adam was talking about.
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  23.  @bluesonicstreak7317  K2 is not essential, since you can substitute K1. (There may be benefits to consuming K2 specifically, but these are complicated and unclear. If you don't eat any vitamin K at all, you will definitely die.) But it does seem like without some sort of animal products in the diet, humans could never get enough B12. It doesn't have to be meat, because eggs also contain K2, but I assume meat was the major source.
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  24.  @toni4729  How many animals in the wild do I see lining up at doctors? What kind of question is that? Most animals in the wild die from predation. But excluding that, disease is once again the number one killer. For animals with no natural predators, disease is always the main cause of death. This isn't a controversial claim, and you can go look it up yourself. You seem to think it is self-evident that without farms, we would all be healthy and hardly get sick, and that is categorically false. Do you have any source backing up a single claim you have made?
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  25.  @toni4729  Check out "Late Pleistocene adult mortality patterns and modern human establishment." Old age was quite rare among early humans. Or check out "A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity." Life expectancy depended on region, with about half of people dying in childhood and the remaining half living to their mid 50s on average. Or check out "Three Stages of Health Encounters Over 8000 Human Generations and How They Inform Future Public Health." 75% of ancient deaths were due to infection, particularly by diarrheal diseases. Or look at "High adult mortality among Hiwi hunter-gatherers: Implications for human evolution." Pre-contact, Hiwi hunter-gatherers had a life expectancy at birth of just 27 and a life expectancy at 15 of just a further 31 years. And disease was the number one killer in every age group, from a minimum of 27% in infancy to a maximum of 66% in old age (>40 years). I could go on. Look, it is not controversial that communicable diseases were the leading cause of death of ancient humans. Simply eating a good diet does not turn you into a superhuman who never gets sick. And indeed, not all hunter-gatherers had good diets either (malnutrition was another major cause of death). It's just a myth.
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  26.  @toni4729  You are one person. There are also racecar drivers who have never crashed, but that doesn't mean crashing isn't a serious risk for them. It's just a fact that we are all vulnerable to illness, and while farming does bring some of its own risks (due to denser populations and more frequent contact with animals), that doesn't mean if we eliminated farming we could eliminate disease.
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  27.  @toni4729  Yes. The claim that fructose specifically is harmful beyond the excess energy it provides is not supported by the research.
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  28.  @darcieclements4880  Chelicerates (arachnids and horseshoe crabs) are not crustaceans. Neither are myriapods (millipedes and centipedes). Pan-crustacea is just everything traditionally called a crustacean as well as the hexapods (insects and relatives).
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  29.  @HALLish-jl5mo  A typical resupply mission can carry hundreds of kilograms of water to the ISS. The recycling systems are not perfectly efficient, so water is gradually lost and has to be resupplied. There is no particular reason some of that water can't be supplied in the form of food, instead of sending it up separately and then having astronauts add it to the dehydrated food. That said, I think the amount of food they need to supply way exceeds the amount of water that would be put into rehydrating it, so most food will still need to be dehydrated. But not necessarily all of it.
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  30.  @oyuyuy  I didn't say that evolutionary pressure wasn't real, I said that it didn't work the way you imagined. You are correct that in the past, food shortage and bacterial infection were major sources of mortality, and now they are not. That is why the selective pressures have changed. But other things, like viral infections, allergies, and low testosterone, certainly affect fitness. Instead of starvation, we now face obesity. Since obese people are less successful, that is a new evolutionary pressure. Again, as long as some genotypes are more successful than others, we will continue to evolve. That remains the case. And as long as the environment is rapidly changing, we can expect rapid evolution. That is also the case. And for what it's worth, people do still die from disease, famine, war, etc. Maybe they don't in your country, but that isn't the whole world. Moreover, since most of my discussion has been about the past ten thousand years, all of these in fact became far greater problems over this period than they had been in the past. Epidemics barely existed before dense civilizations, war was provincial at best, and famines were more common in some areas (places which eventually stored grain) but less common in others (places where monocultures were periodically ravaged by pests).
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  31. When I have bought cheap food scales (less than about $35-40), they are horribly inaccurate with small weights. Like, if I don't calibrate it for a few weeks, suddenly I'll stick a clean nickel on there and it will tell me it weighs 5.4 g or 4.7 g or whatever. Like, really really bad. Maybe I just haven't found the good cheap ones.
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  32.  @jpotter2086  You are literally saying we should cut out carbs but not increase the calories we get from other sources. You do understand the calories have to come from somewhere, right? A diet low in carbs is necessarily high in fat. There is no third option.
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  33.  @jpotter2086  Explain to me your idea of a diet that is low in both carbs and fat.
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  34.  @ewthmatth  It's still acetic acid, but the acetic acid isn't made from fermented alcohol. Real malt vinegar is made by fermenting ale, while the "non-brewed condiment" is made by taking acetic acid and its other principle flavors and adding them separately, along with caramel color. It's an artificial malt vinegar substitute, sort of like how pure vanillin isn't real vanilla but tastes similar, because vanillin is the main flavor component of vanilla. No one cares that it isn't technically malt vinegar, because they're just pouring it on chips at a cheap shop and aren't expecting some aged fancy vinegar anyway. But legally, it can't be called vinegar. EDIT: One possible source for the acetic acid is fermentation of glucose by the anaerobic Acetobacter bacteria. Also, while I can't recall seeing this product in the US, the FDA has clarified that the law here is similar (though with Chevron overturned, who knows).
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  35. On the stock market, stocks are usually traded in "round lots" of 100 shares (or sometimes a different number like 10 or even 1 for exceptional stocks like BRK-A). Companies prefer that their investors own round lots and will sometimes offer a premium to buy out "odd-lotters" who own less than a round lot. Round lots also typically trade with lower fees on the exchange compared to odd lots. Thus, the choice of how to split or reverse split a stock, or to change the round lot size, is heavily based on this round number bias. It's sort of like recipes in that way. You are trying to make your portion sizes just right to get everything to work out in round numbers.
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  36.  @bluesonicstreak7317  Vitamin K2 deficiency is very rare in any case, so I don't think bioconversion is a real problem people have. Most K2 is produced in the gut anyway. It's not like B12 that can only be acquired by eating cobalamin directly, which is only available in animal products and in supplements.
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  37.  @toni4729  That has literally nothing to do with this discussion.
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  38.  @toni4729  What is poison? Carbs?
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  39.  @qwertyTRiG  Some European countries also measure volumes of beverages in cl instead of ml, which also surprised me. But I guess with metric, it's all sort of the same.
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  40. Oil definitely can boil, but there is not as much info about boiling points as you would expect. The normal boiling points for triolein and tripalmatin, for instance, weren't published until 2012. (They were reported as 419 ± 2 °C and 417 ± 5 °C, respectively.) Most of the research on the normal boiling point of food oils actually comes from the application to biodiesel, not food. After all, boiling oil will probably never arise in a kitchen.
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  41. It's worth mentioning that keto diets have side effects in children. While they can be highly effective in some children for reducing the frequency and severity of seizures, they are not indicated otherwise. Ketogenic diets reduce the production of both insulin and IGF-1, which inhibits growth. Thus, children on ketogenic diets have measurably higher rates of stunted growth and bone fractures. Keto diets also tend to be taxing on the kidneys and increase the risk of kidney stones in both children and adults. If it helps with your seizures, these risks are absolutely worthwhile (and probably lower than the risk of most anticonvulsants), but if you don't get seizures, this is definitely something to avoid.
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  42.  @SY-ok2dq  Yes, carrageenan is extracted from red algae. Apparently the most popular sources today are E. cottonii and E. spinosum.
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  43.  @SY-ok2dq  Wikipedia says carraig is the Irish word for "rock" and carraigín is the Irish word for what in English we call "Irish moss," species Sagina subulata. From carraigin we get the rarely-used English common name "carrageen" for Irish moss, and from that, we get "carrageenan" to mean the particular red extract of that moss. In practice though, in modern times, other red algae are usually used for carrageenan production.
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  44.  @martinbudinsky8912  Do you have any evidence of that? Or even a plausible way it could be true? Or are you just making it up as you go along?
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  45.  @Pfh3dk  I think another problem with the way this was presented is that plants, in a broad sense, already existed before they colonized land. These already had chloroplasts with chlorophyll a and b, so the evolution of chloroplasts is not really relevant to this topic. The land plants evolved directly from green algae, not blue-green algae.
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  46. That is historically untrue. Chickens may have been farmed in a different manner, but eggs still had way higher rates of Salmonella infection, as did people. This was a while after Typhoid Mary, and there were somewhat fewer human vectors comparatively, but animal vectors were still widespread in the food chain. One or two antibiotics like arsphenamine had been discovered but they were ineffective against Salmonella. Also, poultry farms were unregulated at the time. The USDA did work to regulate the food and drug markets in general by making illegal adulterated or unsafe foods and drugs and performing some inspections and investigations, but only on a limited basis. Also also, eggs were not washed or refrigerated. There is just no way raw eggs were safer 100 years ago than they are today. People simply had a greater tolerance for risk.
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  47.  @sadroses2  Except it was spelled "psych" back then.
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  48.  @justaweeb1884  Microplastics are sizable particles of solid plastic. They do not dissolve in water, so they cannot possibly be excreted in any meaningful quantity in sweat. People confuse microplastics for their monomeric components like BPA, which is not the same thing. Just like solid chunks of cellulose are not the same as some dissolved glucose, microplastics are not the same as dissolved BPA. Moreover, microplastics are present in the water supply. If you sweat, that requires you to drink more water, meaning you will actually increase the microplastic concentration using this method (at least briefly). As for metals, these are eliminated from the blood by the liver or kidneys (depending on the metal). They will be present in tiny quantities in sweat because they are slightly soluble in water, but they will also be present everywhere else in your body. You will eliminate hundreds of times more of the metals by just urinating, which is the other way that water is going to get out of your body anyway. Drinking a lot of water may slightly help remove metals, but that will be true whether you sweat or not. And of course, there are heavy metals in your water too (and no, you cannot filter those out). The one thing that is proven to reduce heavy metal concentration is to avoid exposure, i.e. don't eat or drink things high in heavy metals. No matter what "detox" plan you try to follow, it will do basically nothing compared to just avoiding it in the first place. The one plate of fish you ate this week will have far more mercury than you will sweat out in your sauna detox or whatever. And yes, this is backed up by every expert you consult. I don't mean SaunaHealthAndRealWellnessWithDrJimbo dot org, I mean actual credentialed experts. They aren't all in on a big conspiracy to keep lead in your blood or whatever, just saying what the research shows.
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  49. ​@Asd Asd There have always been people with birth defects, and they are not "degenerative people." And what, you think Europeans evolved while Africans and Americans stopped? WTF, man? That's some noble savage bullshit.
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  50.  @oyuyuy  It's not about "more" or "less" pressure. That's not how evolution works. 50,000 years ago, humans were roughly in equilibrium with their environment. There was strong stabilizing pressure, meaning that any changes to the genome were selected against. So we barely evolved. Then, our environment changed dramatically, especially with the end of the last glaciation and the rise of farming and dense settlements. Suddenly, it was no longer important to be able to digest fibrous plants and much more important to be able to digest cereal and milk. So suddenly, there was destabilizing selection, and particular changes were selected for. So evolution picked up rapidly. Evolution isn't about how hard life is. It's about whether some genotypes are more likely to reproduce than others. If everyone has similar genotypes and new mutations are selected against, then there is little evolution. If there is high genetic diversity or new mutations are selected for, then there is rapid evolution. That's true even if everyone lives to 150. It is simply a fact that some people reproduce more than others, so their genes by definition will be selected for. And if our society changes very quickly, than the genotype which is most successful will also change very quickly. This isn't my opinion man. There are multiple articles about it. I recommend the paper by Hawks, Wang, Cochran, Harpending, and Moyzis titled "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution."
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