Avoid milk and cereal, avoid foods with corn syrup, eat more meats and fish (with water), avoid manufactured (versus baked) goods like PopTarts, avoid microwaved foods, and replace those fluids by drinking water from the faucet instead of the soda and coffee (remember, your tap water meets higher standards than bottled water does), and eat small meals 4 times per day or more, and you will be alert and not need prescription drugs.
There are so many good things that will happen by doing the above, as well as by avoiding certain foods, that when you put it all together, you will feel great. Removing caffeine will stop the withdrawal symptoms and addiction after you're done with the initial withdrawal. Removing corn-syrup will make you feel much better and food without it tastes much cleaner. Avoiding manufactured foods will point you to baked goods, which are much, much healthier. Water is incredibly necessary and will help clean you out, as well as help flush any excess protein away from your kidneys after you eat the meat, as well as flouridate your teeth. Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.
| Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.
Complete bullshit. Penn and Teller killed this one pretty convincingly.
Basically, if you eat a 'normal' diet (which most people don't, ironically) including enough veggies and fruits, there's no real need for outside water sources.
For most people, enough water that you don't feel thirsty is sufficient. There's no need to force yourself to drink water. And hungry very, very rarely means thirsty.
Thanks for the reply. First of all, I would not take dietary advice from Penn and Teller, just by using common sense and looking at Penn. But, on top of that, you went out of your way to call what I said "bullshit", basing your belief on what a magician said in a TV show by the same name, without ever quoting what the magician actually said.
Also, you claim that people very, very rarely feel hungry when they want water.
It's easy to show you're just guessing. Have you ever eaten a solid meal without drinking fluids? Then how can you be sure that the hunger you felt was just for food, and liquids only to wash it down, instead of hunger for water as well? You can't. It could very well be correlation, and not causation, that when you eat, you want to drink water as well, which means that you were hungry for water all along.
If it's even 1% hunger for water, that proves you are wrong.
I'm not citing Penn, per se. He interviewed several doctors and nutritionists, they were the ones who stated that additional water in the diet is largely unneeded, and that rumors of chronic dehydration in the general populace are wrong.
The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness. Same goes for genetic engineering, I remember the story about the memory gene for mice - if all it takes for a better memory is to flip one gene, surely evolution would have managed to do that a long time ago.
Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us).
"The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness."
You are forgetting the other side to evolutionary fitness: the environment. Human evolution has been progressively stagnated by the invention of adaptive technology. Being hard of hearing or nearly blind is no longer a deadly condition, hence it no longer prevents procreation, hence evolution doesn't factor anymore.
The human genetic structure is largely the same as it was hundreds if not thousands of years ago precisely because we can use tools to adapt to situations much faster than any evolutionary fitness can proof out and spread through the population.
As for the memory gene of mice, that would only have been important if a better memory made mice more successful at what they do. Evidently in the environments mice adapted to this was not the case.
"Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us)."
Evolution doesn't have ideas. It does not use reason. It does not think. It exists purely as a pattern of change in species over time. There is no need to give it more credit than that, it is quite powerful enough without the addition of sentience.
The body doesn't produce certain drugs because they have nothing to with our survival. Even if we don't need them, certain drugs can give you a decided competitive advantage over your peers. Of course, you have to be willing to put something in your brain that alters it in a way that no one truly understands. I'm sure it is prudent to err on the side of caution when it comes to messing with your body, but I'm very comfortable with risk.
Evolution is pretty random (or is it chaotic?). There are so many permutations that we have a DNA sequence that is very, very good for surviving in our world. It could be better though, and at this point in our civilization natural selection will not get us there.
Genetic engineering is inevitable. It will happen. In 10 or 20 or 100 years when it becomes practical there will be "conservatives" who are against it and "liberals" who are for it. They will fight for a while but in the end science will win, because science always wins in the long run.
I am not against genetic engineering, it is just that when something seems too easy I get suspicious. Obviously medicine is helping in a lot of ways, the body is not able to fix every problem by itself.
Perhaps I am missing out big time by not using drugs. Some famous works of art are probably the result of drug use (how much of it, I don't know). I also remember a recent anecdote about a rock musician meeting Tony Blair and asking him how he manages his workload. Answer: "Certainly using different drugs than you" - of course it could just be "enthusiasm" being the drug, I don't know.
If you could become a world famous artist in exchange for living 10 years less, would you do it? Or whatever is your ambition (invent the Google killer, whatever).
My ambition is to develop or help develop a serious medical breakthrough, like curing HIV. So yes, I would take 10 years, 50 years, maybe even instant death for making such a profound positive impact on humanity.
I'd also like to take over Equatorial Guinea, but the current regime may fall before I get the chance.
The body also produces some drugs that are outright bizarre. DMT occurs naturally in the brain and is one of the most potent naturally occurring psychedelics. I would be extremely interested when and why the brains of humans or our predecessors started producing DMT.
Drugs work because your body has the ability to react to them.
If your body can react to drugs is, usually, because there are internal receptors that can bind to them.
But of course naturally occurring concentrations of 'drug'-like components are much lower and extended over time than a pill, and the components themselves are milder than their drugstore counterparts (except counted instances such as norepinephrines). Besides the fact that generating them requires (usually) exercise (for example, for endorphines and melatonin/cortisol/tyroxine fine-tunning), and/or yoga-style body control.
A report from your friendly biomedical biologists.
There are so many good things that will happen by doing the above, as well as by avoiding certain foods, that when you put it all together, you will feel great. Removing caffeine will stop the withdrawal symptoms and addiction after you're done with the initial withdrawal. Removing corn-syrup will make you feel much better and food without it tastes much cleaner. Avoiding manufactured foods will point you to baked goods, which are much, much healthier. Water is incredibly necessary and will help clean you out, as well as help flush any excess protein away from your kidneys after you eat the meat, as well as flouridate your teeth. Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.