Diet

My uncle asked me why I am not a god (oops, "good") vegetarian anymore. I asked him if he remembers people in his village having cavaties and bad teeth. He said yes, even though it was before Coca-cola and the rest. In hunter-gatherer societies, cavities are almost unheard of. As for pastuerizing and homogenizing (P and H) milk...have you heard of the experiments? I haven't been able to locate the original papers, but basically the cats fed (only) P and H milk had more birth defects and spontaneous abortions, and their kittens were weaker and less curious than cats fed un- P and H milk. I haven't been able to find replications of these high-school level science experiments. Someday I will have my own lab.

"Just think how much people agonize over a diet. All the effort that goes into ingredient charts for foods, solving the riddles of metabolism, and we're not through with it yet! One of my biologist friends is currently exercising his wits on a topic that could appear childishly simple. He is endeavouring to assay the calorie content of fructose, a widespread sugar akin to glucose, whose metabolic properties remain unexplained. All his trials require highly sophisticated calorimeters of which there are only two or three in the world. That explains why the work has been in the doldrums, right up until now. He has already worked, for several years, locking volunteers up in this equipment.

The public has no idea of the effort required to master a single nugget of information; in this case, describing a single molecule. And our physiology is bulging out of jillions of parameters! Knowledge branches out into subdivisions whose numbers are always increasing and ever more specialized. Researchers themselves don't get to communicate; they no longer have the time to read the countless journals that come out daily on topics that are, in fact, closely related. Nobody can have an overall picture that is penetrating enough to drill through to the processes that lie hidden within our bodies and within our cells. After a century of painstaking labour, dietitians, when asked what one should eat to be healthy, always come up with the same old story: a balanced diet." -Anopsology

What Shape the Umwelt?

"But what exactly is the structure of the
perceptual worlds proposed by von Uexküll? Can we draw
them on paper in the form of maps, allowing us to visualize
a particular animal’s subjective view of the world? Will such
maps allow us to predict the similarity of two stimuli (e.g., two
colors or two scents) by inspecting the distance between the
loci they produce in a perceptual space? Does understanding
the metrics of such maps help us predict how stimulus
mixtures will be perceived?"