I don't think concentration improves the situation much. It's about getting them away from people.
If you have some uranium and you give half to your neighbor the harm done will be the same just spread accross two people. (There is no "safe" amount of radiation since each alpha particle can cause a an irreversible mutation, other things don't work like this bevause most damage can be repaired).
Uranium exists naturally in dirt and is a weak alpha emitter. Radon exists as a gas in small quantities, can come up through your floor and trap in your house, and is a much stronger alpha emitter. This has been happening since life began. If it is not about the concentration, then why aren't we all dead?
Damage to your DNA is almost always repaired, and when that doesn't happen the cell almost always commits apoptosis (suicide). And when that doesn't happen the immune system almost always kills the abberant cell. And when that doesn't happen you get cancer. There has to be a lot of alpha particles before there is any appreciable chance that you will be harmed. If you dilute radioisotopes well enough, there just won't be enough alpha particles. Sure, every one is a lottery ticket, but everything in life is like that. Every second you get sunshine on your skin you draw a lottery ticket for skin cancer... but I wouldn't dream of NOT getting sunshine on my skin.
This is spot on. 💯. Regarding cancer and modern times prevalence consider blood sugar and autophagy. Fasting for 48-72 hours once a month will make it more likely your body seeks out damaged cells and consumes them as well as make it more difficult for cancer to grow for lack of available blood borne fuel.
Fasting also comes with innumerable desteuctive effects the worst of which is an increase in cortisol.
Do not do this if you want to live a long and healthy life.
Sorry, but that is patently incorrect. You have a spike in cortisol literally every morning to wake up! Just how obese are you? 😏
sunlight in the eyes at sunrise for at least 15 minutes to start the juju rolling right
Morning spike in cortisol is tiny compared to what happens during fasting. Also not great, you can reduce it by having a warm glass of milk before bed.
Just trying to help. No need to call someone you'll never meet in person obese. Typical high stress hormone behavior.
Careful out there kids, if you fast you could end up this way too.
It wasn’t an accusation as much as a warning. Every human who doesn’t moderate blood sugar will eventually suffer metabolic syndrome, obesity and insulin resistance is the unavoidable result. To say cortisol is destructive is to say hormones of any kind are destructive. I’m not advocating constant fasting, this plays into the same stance you have taken in the background radiation conversation, perceiving the environment as extreme dichotomies. Moderation is the key. Too much of anything will likely cause damage, easily as much as a deficiency. You didn’t answer the question though. Do you struggle with your weight?
I agree with you, but I struggle with my weight myself. I don't think "personal results" should be used to adjudicate an argument.
A really good heuristic to determine what is and is not true about health is to ask: "What were the conditions during which our finely tuned biological mechanisms adapted? Whatever those conditions were, our bodies attuned themselves to those conditions, so reproducing those conditions maximizes the match with how our bodies are tuned." It might be that there is a magic new thing better for us in some way than our historic environment, but if you don't know what to believe, bet against such ideas.
Based on that, fasting cant be bad.
Based on the fact that surviving relgions all have fasting as part of them, again, probably the non-fasters died off.
I think the idea that outlying poorly understood factors should characterize the machine the human body is, and justify certain personal results is in the large majority of cases justification to continue behaviors that perpetuate the condition. I have a rubric that will with no doubt help you mitigate the struggle with your weight if you wish, offered for no personal gain whatsoever. I have no problem with people who have an alternate living style, but I think it should be acknowledged as a choice, not a biological destiny. It is truly amazing how little energy it takes to maintain the sedentary human form, and how many foods translate to blood glucose directly. Let’s just admit that eating is amazing! At any given time I am 20 to 40 pounds over my optimal weight due to choices I make and enjoy thoroughly. I have no guilt about these choices, and can change my selection at any time.
Very sympathetic to evolutionary arguments.
But in this case it's non-sensical.
Humans evolved with all kinds of intestinal worms and fungal parasites, should we then infect ourselves with worms to be healthy? No.
What you have to remember is that although evolution can (sometimes after millions of years) turn a formerly toxic substance into a benign one (or even a beneficial one, see oxygen). It is not omnipotent. A lot of the environment we evolved with is just harmful and evolution has not had enough time to make it not so.
Well, regarding parasites, there is a strong argument that the emergence of allergic reactions has something to do with the symbiotic relationships we have historically fostered with parasites. Evolution is defined by the spaces of unrealized resources between and among toxic monoliths.
Worms tho
You can believe that living naturally is good without going to thw extremes of irradiating yourself with natural uranium, starving yourself, then infecting yourself with worms.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills over here
I’m just saying that our associations with the natural world are storied and complex. It’s a lifetime of study to comprehend even the fundamentals. Benefits are unrelentingly balanced by compromise. Radiation, toxic chemicals and the cancer patient?
You don't need a lifetime of study, read my most recent reply to mike with a reasonable metric for sorting good nature from bad nature
Actually parasitic worms help cure autoimmune diseases. That is well established now. Our immune systems were attuned to them, without them we get out of calibration and start attacking the self.
But your point is in general correct. Look carefully at my prior argument, esp the sentence starting with "It might be".
You're missing the point.
I didn't call your previous argument non-sensical because you didn't leave room for exceptions but because you lumped everything in our evolutionary past into the probably good category whereas I would argue that it's very obvious which things were good and which weren't.
If you want an evolutionary argument it's better to think about pur evolved preferences.
For example, we evolved the preference to be repulsed by rot and excrament. This would not be possible had we not been exposed to these things for our entire evolutionary history. Yet your argument would say that rotting things are good because they've always been part pf my environment where I would tell you that, quite obviously, they are not.
The same can be said for worms or starvation.
Well, we can agree to disagree. Just as bitter indicates poison, the revulsion to what is unwholesome is the product of the preferences of those who survived to procreate.
I didn't say rotting things were good (let's put aside the question of fermented foods for a bit). Our ancestors were repulsed by things, that indicates strongly that they are bad.
But I think you are missing my point. I am saying that we are all dumb as rocks. We barely evolved any intelligence at all, and far too often we think we know things and we act on that supposed knowledge to our detriment. And so when someone says "It's very obvious which things were good and which weren't" my point is that it absolutely is not obvious:
* It was obvious that the sun caused skin cancer and we should lather up. It was not obvious that the sun's vitamin D production cut heart disease risk so far that sunscreen wearing caused more deaths.
* It was obvious that saturated fat caused heart disease, and so margarine would be healthier. It was not obvious that trans fats cause huge problems to human bodies that did not evolve to handle huge loads of trans fats.
* It was obvious that intestinal worms were bad (duh!) until we learned that our bodies expect them. I have personal experience on this one.
Nothing is obvious. We live in a hyper-complex system.
And so we have to trust that we evolved to work against a certain kind of environment and we should mimic that environment as much as possible to avoid risk, because any sort of changes to that environment are very likely to be in the bad direction (some could be good, but always bet the other way) even if they seem obviously in the good direction.
I am constantly amazed at how fine tuned life is towards it's environment, and how even small changes in the environment cause species extinctions. And yet us humans are tweaking our own environment in massive ways, and then suprised that we develop allergies, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome. The causes are obvious. The solutions are hard to put into practice, but we know what they are. Tribal people don't have diabetes, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome, allergies, etc.
Saying "fasting also comes with innumerable desteuctive [sic] effects the worst of which is an increase in cortisol" presumes we know far more than we actually know about fasting, about cortisol, about why your body is producing it, etc. I can point you to many studies showing how fasting is very healthy, despite the alleged spike in cortisol, but that's not the argument I'm trying to make here. The argument I'm trying to make is that humanity is a lot dumber than we pretend to be, to the extent that simple heuristics like "do what your ancestors did" do better than trusting the current science does.
It turns out our ancetors didn't have fruit all year round... we probably shoudn't either. It turns out they sometimes went days without eating, because they couldn't find any more food. Turns out that is good for us too. Our ancestors almost all ate meat - we should too. Our ancestors didn't use fluoride in their water or toothpaste - we shouldn't either. Fluoride hardens teeth with calcium, why shoudln't it then also harden arteries with calcium? that seems obvious to me but it is the opposite of what we are told. Flouride occurs naturally in some water supplies, but if your ancestors didn't come from there, you aren't attuned to it. Our ancestors didn't live indoors. Our ancestors sat around fires at night. Our ancestors squatted, they didn't sit in chairs. Lots of things to mimic that, if you try it, you will find you start to feel a lot healthier.
Evolutionary biology and game theory -- it is an entire way of thinking. It changes everything.
This is totally incoherent, you should have some warm milk with honey or something else pleasant and easy to digest, you'll feel better.
I don't use a spell checker so sorry for the typos I guess. Though, I suspect you understood me perfectly, just wanted to brag about something or lash out.
Just because our ancestors starved, often didn't get enough sleep, fought violently and did all kinds other bad things, it does not mean they'll "turn out" to be good.
Our evolved preferences are a simple heuristic for the parts of our environment that are good for us and the parts that are bad. We prefer to have food often, to sleep a lot, to feel safe and not engage in violence. Even though very few of our ancestors had these things, they are obviously good.
Preference emerged out of necessity, and the consequences of these preferences would not have manifested until after the age of procreation. What we are talking about here is wellness into echelons of age never before seen in human populations. It is a new frontier, and we’re all just making educated guesses about what might serve us best.
just a heuristic Jac
but you should take note that if most of your ideas about health lead you to things that healthy humans don't naturally prefer, then you're probably on the wrong track
exceptions are to be expected obviously
Ditto. I guess we will see. I’m pretty old already though, so far, so good.
Evolved preferences are a good guide too. But sometimes we can see where the preference wasn't attainable, so the actual environment might give better clues.
I'm going to go have some warm milk and honey now. I was astounded to find out what percentage of our paleolithic diet came from honey (15-30% or more)
💯
On second thought, I should have a snack too and feel better.
Sorry for the hostility dawg, you're on the right track as far as I'm concerned and closer to the truth than most.
gn
I think your assumptions start with a fallacy:
Didn’t get enough sleep? Who said it?
Fought violently? Again… who said it?
All kind of other bad things? Which exactly?
You start assuming the we are evolved and the people in the past were savages.. which again is just a false statement, or at least really hard to tell
nostr:npub1fl7pr0azlpgk469u034lsgn46dvwguz9g339p03dpetp9cs5pq5qxzeknp you were saying something along similar lines.
I agree, the common logic or “obvious answers” are all wrong. Engineered that way.
Take that “obvious logic” and reverse it - you are more likely to have the actual answer.
What about the gut parasites? Is their absence related to a modern illness? Genuinely curious.
There is definitely some strong evidence suggesting ties between the way gut parasites change the function of our immune system and autoimmune disorders. Autoimmune responses are responsible for a vast array of debilitating conditions ranging from allergic reactions to IBS to Crohn’s disease, even the cytokine storms that are often the cause of death in viral infections. Cultures who have parasites as part of their environment typically are aware of plant remedies that control the parasite loads as well, as uncontrolled parasite load can result in health consequences including mortality. Like so many other things, balance and management are key concepts. Several people affected with debilitating and life threatening allergies have documented their recovery through intentional infection with hookworm parasites. An interesting rabbit warren for sure.
Intentional hookworm infection sounds interesting 🤔
Besides the research finding a coorelation between a lack of gut parasites and autoimmune dysfunction, and finding that gut parasites lead to a reduction in autoimmune dysfunction, I have a personal story. Ever since I was 7 or 8 years old I used to get excruciatingly painful IBS (I'll leave the gross details out for now). When I was 42 I moved onto a farm. The IBS resolved, not completely, but got much better. This is not science, it might be completely unrelated, but I have been drinking rain water collected from the roof that is not entirely clean, has leaf litter, is collected into a water tank. Instead of getting sick from "non-potable" water, I got well. I actually went for about 8 years without getting sick at all (except for minor sniffles).
I’m not surprised at this. I have always worked in the dirt one way or another, had pets and farm animals, my kids played in the dirt as children and we’re all healthy as can be and have been for our whole lives. The tonsils, that reside in the back of your throat where the nasal passages and mouth cavity meet are full of mast cells. Everything you breathe or eat is sampled by your immune system there, and preparations are made at that point just in case one organism or another reaches pathogenic proportions later on. Without constant exposure and preparation your body gets blindsided when exposure does occur. I see the tonsils as explicitly non-vestigial. #touchgrass
I don't even know where to start. You have a very mistaken world view if you can't even admit that radiation from nuclear decay is not exclusively harmful.
No wonder you've been tricked into believing that increasing your cortisol by fasting can be good for you and that a healthy body doesn't know how to regulate the amount of sugar in the blood. Or that everyone that doesn't agree with you is obese.
That's adrenal stress, it's a phase usually you should adapt your body to it gradually, for more details check the following:
I think it's best to just avoid it.
Evolution designed us to dislike starvation for a reason. Listen to the hundreds of millions of wisdom encoded in your genes and avoid fasting when possible.
This makes no sense at all. Plentiful resources have existed for first world cultures for less than 100 years. This is a literal blink in evolutionary chronology.
Still missing the point
Evolved preferences are a clue to what parts of our reality are good for us and what parts are not
Just because our ancestors starved (reality), it does not mean that starving is good us.
You can tell the difference because we evolved to prefer not starving.
Starving is probably the wrong description, it invokes images of keto acidosis, a pre-death condition that is exceedingly damaging to the body. Scarcity provokes the desire to be well fed, and my argument is that modern beings don’t manage plentiful resources in a healthy way. This is much like the child raised in financial poverty never being able to accumulate enough wealth to mitigate the mindset of poverty.
Well, yeah that's a good point. Maybe as a way to prevent over eating, fasting may have a place
I'd still recommend to eat whenever you want and try to workout the emotional (or other) reasons for over eating some other way than fasting
These conversations between people are the source of goodness. Thank you for the dialogue. I recommend you try a short fast and see how you feel. I’m genuinely interested in the outcome. I don’t know for sure you know? ❤️
I have come to the same conclusion. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day ... to skip! A longer fasting period has a lot of good effects, including being strongly protective against diabetes.
Your cells accumulate a lot of junk, and that junk presents as hazard, and it only gets cleaned up (autophagy) when your body needs it for fuel. After you have burned your blood glucose, liver glycogen (muscle glycogen cannot re-enter the bloodstream), oxaloacetate, now you have to ramp up gluconeogenesis from some other substrate, and this forces your body to scavenge. You clean up this junk generally before muscle wasting occurs. And the stages are not strongly delineated, they overlap.
Exactly. 💯. Look at our evolutionary legacy for corroborating evidence. Plentiful food has been around for a few centuries, prior to that, foraging, hunting, feast and famine. Our bodies are adapted to store plentiful energy in adipose tissue and utilize that fat as energy most of the time. Metabolic syndrome is the consequence of eating nearly every moment a person is awake for decades.
Even the natural radioactive elements in the environment are associated with reduced quality of life.
This is one reason people at high altitudes live longer and healthier lives than people at low altitudes.
Your point about DNA repair etc. is irrelevant. The reality is that every alpha particle you are exposed to increases your chances of death by cancer or (much worse) passing on a defective gene to your kids. If you had zero radiation exposure all of these probabilites would be reduced.
Sorry but I know about this stuff. Trust me, you are better off getting as far away from radioactivity as you can manage.
This just isn't true.
Alpha particles can't penetrate skin, for starters. If you knew that, you wouldn't have used it as an example.
And the linear no-threshold model of harm you are citing (even if you don't know its name) is about as well-supported as astrology.
They don't have to penetrate the skin to cause extreme harm. The problem is that radioactive material becomes diffuse in the environment and is ingested with food or breathed in.
I don't know who told you that radioactive substances were safe but they lied to you bro
LOL
At first I thought you might be an incurious highschool teacher or general practitioner parroting from an induction briefing.
Now I realise, you got nothin'!
If a large number of atoms of radioactive material are ingested (which can present as a single speck, which adheres together and travels together to some resting place in bodily tissues), then the repeated decays from adjacent atoms (as well as further decays from the decay chain) can overwhelm the recovery mechanisms of the tissue right there which keeps getting hit over and over by ionizing alpha particles. This is totally true, and this is why nuclear fallout is so dangerous for about 2 weeks after a nuclear explosion.
But:
1) If you dilute material properly, there will not be clumps of radioactive atoms. The atoms will be mixed with non-radioactive atoms. So my argument is that if you properly dilute radioactive waste, there is no appreciable danger anymore.
2) Fallout after a nuclear explosion, after about 2 weeks, isn't going to kill you anymore. Even though the nuclear material may be clumpy, the hot stuff has decayed far enough.
The #1 risk of being near a nuclear explosion is the thermal flash, which kills at the greatest radius. But you should also avoid fallout for two weeks. Two weeks is approximate, there is a 7-10 rule that says for every 7-fold increase in time there is a 10-fold decrease in radiation.
Obviously, you are the once citing things.
I'm just explaining how nuclear radiation works. Anyone who reads this can plainluly see that.
Also sun light has many beneficial effects with imo completely outweigh the mutagenic effects.
Radioactive decay has zero beneficial effects.
Your first paragraph is quite correct, solar fusion radiation is on balance beneficial, depending on environment, latitude and your melanin level.
Terrestrial fission radiation has different tradeoffs, but the once widely studied phenomenon of radiation hormesis suggests it is not so different as your second paragraph asserts.
I am familiar with that research. Like most scientific research it was funded by the USG and large military contractors, so that's not a mark against it. What is a mark against it is that almost all of it was done during the era of widespread nuclear weapons testing. They did not know how bad the effects of all the nuclear material they were releasing into thw environment would be and were very motivated to paint a picture that "maybe it would turn out to be good"
But there is a reason no one uses radium water coolers or radiation enhanved skin care anymore: the resear was wildily wrong at best and fradulent at worst.
True.
The flip side of that same argument is that the frequently-cited anti-nuclear research was done in the same period, and for just as politicised reasons.
The linear no-threshold dose model was proven not to fit the evidence as far back as the 70s, but it is still cited as gospel today.
We have decades of population epidemiology statistics now, and many natural experiments show high background radiation levels do not lead to lower life expectancy in local populations (after controlling for SES, income, availability of medical care etc etc. as always)
Changes in environmental radiation / acute exposures do, but even then there are some paradoxical results under particular conditions.
This is nonsense.
You don't need anti-nuclear research to show that the effects of nuclear radiation are extremely destructive.
I'm not talking about any models here, just the fact of high energy particles literally destroying the molecules that make up your cells on contact.
Studies cannot change this simple fact.
That's silly - your DNA is constantly being damaged by chemical means, mostly oxygen free radicals produced in your own cells.
All DNA-based life has elaborate checking and repair mechanisms, that can be upregulated in response to an increase in the threat.
That's why Chernobyl is a beautiful wilderness with the highest level of biodiversity in Europe (but the first few weeks were very destructive).
And why residents in Guarapari have a longer life expectancy than other Brazilians, despite regularly exceeding the maximum radiation exposure the USA permits for nuclear plant workers. (Their rates of neoplasms inc solid cancers are 8% higher, but cardiovascular disease notably lower.)
Humans and other eukaryotes can and do adapt to levels of background radiation much greater than anywhere on Earth's surface in the present day. Radiation doses below this adapted threshold are negligible in their potential for net harm.
Sudden, acute exposure to ionising radiation IS harmful and DOES increase risk of cancer. It is unclear if this increase in risk is linear, but probably not.
Obviously the body is designed to repair damage, that does not mean damage is good for you.
Your argument is empty.
Google "homeostasis" and start from there.
The body is evolved to deal with particular challenges, and can actually suffer fatal malfunctions without them.
Only someone with very low self-esteem would assume another person doesn't know the term homeostasis.
I'm sorry for whatever made your life so difficult anon. Still love you. Try to stay away from radioactive material though.
You googled it! Bravo!
I won't be staying away from radioactive material, from oxygen free radicals, or from exercise-induced micro fractures in my bones.
And neither will you.
You have a very mass-media set of beliefs about health that are not supported by evidence. Read more science.
