I've recently been delving deeper into our food ecosystem and have realized that the notion of consuming "natural" food, in its strictest definition, seems quite untenable. It's fascinating to note that all meat - be it chicken, beef, or pork - are all outcomes of intensive human-driven breeding and domestication processes.
A similar scenario extends to the realm of fruits, vegetables and even grains, where the majority of what we consume today are far-removed variants of their wild counterparts, owing to selective breeding over centuries. Essentially, the food items that constitute our regular diets wouldn't exist in a truly untouched, natural environment.
Edit: I'm not saying that this is bad, just that it's interesting.
Sure, but this is also the nirvana fallacy; just because the food available to you isn't 100% perfectly "natural" doesn't mean that it's bad/wrong or that you shouldn't strive to eat as natural as possible anyways.
> Sure, but this is also the nirvana fallacy; just because the food available to you isn't 100% perfectly "natural" doesn't mean that it's bad/wrong or that you shouldn't strive to eat as natural as possible anyways.
I think the point is that our conception of which foods are the most "natural" isn't really coherent in the first place.
But why? Your body doesn't care if the nutrients it gets are from naturally grown animals and plants or from a lab or factory, provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities. It all gets broken down to its constituent components anyway.
> provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities
But isn’t that the tricky part: how do you figure out what is “right”? If you eat synthesized sugar and vitamin C in place of an orange, is it really the same thing? Perhaps the fiber or some other minerals in the orange affect how your body processes and digests the nutrients.
Nutrition is pretty complex and until we know what “right” is, I’d think it’s generally a safer bet to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years, rather than recently devised nutritive cocktails.
Actually there is reason to not prefer foods that we have evolved with because we may have evolved short term trade offs for reproduction that happen to be bad for us long term.
Classic example being how evolving with meat doesn’t make saturated fat good for us in the long term. And, further, replacing it with modern unsaturated fats (like canola oil) improves health outcomes. Your heuristic of "we've eaten it for a long time so it must be better" doesn't capture that.
Frankly, it seems inevitable that the optimal diet (one that maximizes health through all stages of life) will be a modern artificial one since it seems at its root just a technological problem. But we certainly aren't there yet where we can replace an orange with a synthetic orange pill. That is an interesting world to ponder though.
I'd take a few hundred over a few. My concern, as another commenter suggested, is mostly around radical changes without any longevity in testing or understanding. Even though a lot of our "natural" foods were created via artificial selection, it's a process that happened over many generations. When it comes to food and nutrition, my gut tells me to generally prefer slow over fast.
Personally I also think there is a big difference between selective breeding, and distilling foods into constituent parts in order to recombine in various ways. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but I don't fully trust humans to understand and play that part of nature just yet.
Absolutely. But it's important to note that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to consume naturally occurring foods. Now, as we've started to create and consume foods with characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history, such as highly processed foods, it's evident that this can indeed cause problems.
> Absolutely. But it's important to note that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to consume naturally occurring foods. Now, as we've started to create and consume foods with characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history, such as highly processed foods, it's evident that this can indeed cause problems.
I think the original point is that virtually everything we eat has "characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history" because the animals and plants we eat have been bred for various characteristics so extensively, so simply avoiding "highly processed foods" doesn't meant that we're eating the types or quantities of foods that humans would have for almost our entire existence
Did your ancestors really eat sourdough for thousands of years in ancient Egypt, or were they hunters or fishermen until more recent times? Agriculture was common but there are societies that don't depend on agriculture, even today.
I think that's debatable! Sure, some foods with a lot of additives are problematic, but so is lots of red meat. Plus there's loads of other ways in which we've digressed from what we've evolved to be used to. Like sleeping on mattresses. Its reasonable to use "natural" as a weak guiding factor, but not for it to override current scientific understanding.
> the notion of consuming "natural" food, in its strictest definition, seems quite untenable.
If not strictly natural foods, then what? I can't stand supernatural foods - the ectoplasm really doesn't agree with me. I'd like to try preternatural foods, but I've never been able to find a genuinely miraculous grower or farm to get them from.
This is correct. If you wanted only food unaffected by humans you'd need to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle which could probably only support something like 1% of the world's current population.
But on the other hand, why consider domestic/bred species as "unnatural"? We exist in a symbiotic relationship with them, and there are symbiotic relationships all over nature.
Well, yes. We domesticated everything and moved it around the world to optimal growing locations. Thus enabling is to have such a large number of humans. "Back to" movements have a tendency towards accidental mass famine.
this is why I try to practice pescetarianism. re gp's beef, chicken, pork: compare these animals to those they likely devolved from - dairy cattle from gazelles, antelope; poultry from cassowaries, ostriches; farm pigs from wild boar.. there is barely any resemblance left between these animals, having traded through inbreeding agility, physique, diet and genetic diversity for meat per kg per sqft per feed and docility. fish are the only remaining palatable animals most unfucked by humans
incorrect. humans tamed the aurochs around 10,000 years ago and the most common dairy cattle breed today, the Holstein, was bred around 2,000 years ago
>Hate to break it to you, but a non-insignificant portion of store bought fish was cultivated / farmed.
you're not really breaking anything. this is a completely different sense of "farming". their genetics and physiology have not been altered to the same extent as dairy cattle, nor do we interfere with their evolution by selectively breeding. "farmed" fish are not fat and docile. so any fish you eat today is likely to be the same fish you would have eaten 300,000 years ago
> their genetics and physiology have not been altered to the same extent as dairy cattle, nor do we interfere with their evolution by selectively breeding.
Does it matter to your body if you eat meat from a water buffalo, or from a frog, or from a whale?
Not that much. You can eat almost any animal. You can even eat insects.
So why would it matter that a modern chicjen is different that it's ancestor? Assuming it has space to run around and is not factory farmed, it wouldn't matter.
Yeah, fuck the planet! “31% of the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be overfished, 58% fully exploited” and we fish for huge amounts of non-edible fish as a feedstock for aquaculture. Discl: I do eat fish.
as opposed to "31% of the world's grain is used to feed livestock, 58% of humans are underfed", deforestation in favour of establishing farmland, methane buildup..
I imagine aqua feedstock is comprised of castoffs from the fishing industry, similar to cat/dog food
global landings of forage fish have trended downward (Extended Data Fig. 2), reflecting full to overexploitation, and harvest restrictions (for example, in Peru) to prevent fishing above maximum sustainable yield levels.
the annual catch of forage fish used to make fishmeal and fish oil decreased from 23 Mt to 16 Mt (refs. 47,48) (Extended Data Fig. 3). Global production of fishmeal from capture fisheries and trimmings decreased over the same period from 6.6 to 4.8 Mt (ref. 17). The production of fish oil declined from around 1.5 to 1.0 Mt and has been stable around 1.0 Mt during the past decade.
So fish meal is ~3/4 made up of non-edible fish (forage fisheries) and at most 1/4 trimmings (in 2017).
Figures do seem to show that most ocean fishing is for human consumption, but 16Mt of forage fishing is still more than a single digit percentage of total ocean fishing.
About 75% of fish meal is used for farm fisheries (aquaculture), the other 25% for animal farming on land.
Thank you - it is always good to be induced to double-check my assumptions! I don’t really know much about the topic except from some shallow googling (but that still makes me more knowledgeable than most).
I totally agree land farming is mostly very damaging, but it is visible and an individual can potentially control their impact on land. The damage by ocean fisheries and aquaculture is largely invisible, and it is very difficult to control an individual’s impact when eating fish: and unobviously the impact is very heavy.
>It's fascinating to note that all meat - be it chicken, beef, or pork - are all outcomes of intensive human-driven breeding and domestication processes
there's still animals in the wild though, that get hunted and eaten
A related idea is that, the existence of certain species is purely because of human consumption. They wouldn't exist in the current form if we stopped eating them completely.
Not to drive into offtopic here, but it always baffled me how can humans look at results of hybrids, like a mule, a lemon, or at breeding and still claim evolution is not real.
A similar scenario extends to the realm of fruits, vegetables and even grains, where the majority of what we consume today are far-removed variants of their wild counterparts, owing to selective breeding over centuries. Essentially, the food items that constitute our regular diets wouldn't exist in a truly untouched, natural environment.
Edit: I'm not saying that this is bad, just that it's interesting.