Comments on: Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Fri, 09 May 2014 01:24:25 +0000

Yeah, the spambots that talk about how to get rid of spambots are one of my favorite subspecies.

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By: Ialdabaoth

Ialdabaoth — Thu, 08 May 2014 17:10:47 +0000

How… meta.

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By: Thecarbnitesolutionreviewed.Tumblr.Com

Thecarbnitesolutionreviewed.Tumblr.Com — Thu, 08 May 2014 16:36:48 +0000

With regard to the blog page operator, may I question how do you handle spam?
We are very happy to pay up just for information on how to handle
it!

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By: Duncan Wilson

Duncan Wilson — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 19:16:53 +0000

Thank you so much for posting this! Exactly the right amount of information.

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By: Konkvistador

Konkvistador — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 06:27:08 +0000

Thank you for writing this! It is useful and I’d trust more of the stuff you’d put out on food, but I’ve learned a deep pessimism about figuring out what to eat.

Why does feeding humans well seems to be genuinely hard thing to figure out? Biology is messy, yes. Food is sacred, which means researchers develop mini-religions about food all the time, yes. Food company incentives don’t always align with healthy food, yes. Medicine, generally does not seem to work very well, yes. But still after all these yeses… I used to think institutional insanity and general civilizational inadequacy explained this.

Now I think it really is a hard problem. Probably harder than say developing atomic weapons.

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By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:02:00 +0000

So far as birth control is concerned, a friend of mine found out that birth control can cause zinc deficiency which can cause depression, and zinc supplements solved that.

I hadn’t thought about different kinds of irritability, but physical stimulus irritability and verbal stimulus irritability might be different things.

To be more specific about hot flashes, when they started, they were always infuriating. And why not? I hate being overheated.

After some years, I started getting no irritability hot flashes, and I realized that the emotional part had a physical piece that wasn’t just about the temperature.

Instead of stewing about the possible lack of research about irritability, I decided to check: Behold!. There seems to be rather a lot more about effects of irritability and drugs for irritability than about the physiology of irritability, but I only looked at three pages of results.

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By: St. Rev

St. Rev — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 13:05:43 +0000

@Nancy Lebovitz: ADHD meds feel totally incredibly awesome. Which is a problem in itself.

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By: mareofnight

mareofnight — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:36:12 +0000

I don’t know of any research on irritability, but I haven’t looked all that far. That’s interesting, though.

This sounds a little like something that happens to both me and the relative I mentioned when we drink too much milk. She says she just gets irritable. I also get irritable (at its worst, I was feeling really, really angry about things like clutter being in my way and the wind blowing on me), but also depressed. It only got really, really bad if I was taking birth control at the same time, and it’s hard to say whether the hormones or the inactive ingredients in the pill (which included something with a chemical name similar to lactose) were causing the problem.

I’ll ask her if wheat made her feel irritable too; I can’t remember what all changed when she stopped eating it.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 03:16:16 +0000

You may be interested in Scott’s take on that paper.

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By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:34:09 +0000

A lifestyle with lots of exercise, which is most pre-industrial ones and most early-industrial ones, seems to make up for, in health terms, whatever crap you eat, provided you eat enough of it that you don’t starve. See, for example, How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died

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