I feel that the experimentation part makes it rather sciencey.
And actually, I even started out with a hypothesis I was attempting to disprove. Enough people had asked me if gluten might be a trigger for my problem that I decided I needed to rule it out even though I was sure it wasn’t. Long story short, it was.
So I’ve got hypothesis, experimental results with repeatability, and thus theory. <pinkman>Science, bitches!!!</pinkman>
you do realise there’s other shit in gluten-ful produce that could be causing problems? there’s been research into FODMAPs for example.
anyway, like I already said, I wasn’t just talking about you and I accepted that there was evidence for some forms of gluten intolerance as well, just that the majority of it was faddish nonsense, which it is.
Imagine if early humans had felt that way… agriculture and settlements would never have happened, many types of plants would never have had the selection pressures that turned them into the modern foods they now are…
There’s a solid place for caution in new foods, but how do you even get a thousand years of data on something as a food if you treating it as unsafe until you have that? And what happens when you discover a new food-related medical issue that no one has previously been gathering data for - do you completely reset the clock for all foods and gather another thousand years of data?
There’s a lot of foods that people thought had a thousand years of safe data on, until we discovered some of the ways cancer can get started.
Yeah, I don’t want to throw caution to the wind, but I am personally fine with a couple years of testing or analysis. It is a balance, and those five nines of accuracy are expensive.
BTW, it amuses me greatly that usernames @Phrenological and @medievalist are here. I am not implying anything mean, just picturing period dramas.
Yes, yes, no, no. BT doesn’t really work any more though, I’ve stopped using it. It only kills desirable organisms these days, the pests have evolved past it. In my area, anyway.
It took at least a thousand years to develop a meaningful scale of toxicity for lead. I seem to recall that Cato the Elder was writing about the illnesses of slaves working lead mines about eleven hundred years before Midgeley and Kettering swindled us into pumping it into our atmosphere.
@OtherMichael, my friend, writing is over seven thousand years old. I own copies of Asian and Graeco-Roman texts that deal with diet and health that are far, far older than “a couple hundred years”. (And I’ve read them, too.)
Archeologists study the human diet (sometimes, through the study of feces) even further back than that. We know something about Ötzi’s health and diet - so we know that 5,000 years ago at least one man was lactose-intolerant and ate processed carbohydrates.
Anyway, I know it’s safe to eat horsemeat because people genetically similar to me have eaten it for something over 30,000 years. And I know that people genetically similar to me have eaten goat and cow for much more than a thousand years - there are written records. I can extrapolate a bit and figure that similar red meats such as deer and bison are probably safe for me, even though the evidence of humans eating these animals 10,000 years ago is from folk who are genetically distinct from me. Similarly, I know that bread is harmful to my teeth - there are so few examples of tooth decay in pre-agricultural societies that the existence of dental caries is a nearly infallible indicator that an ancient skull came from a bread-eater. I could go on for literally hours in this vein. The data does exist, you just have to find it.
Keep in mind that I have the economic means to feed my family with considerably less risk than most humans, and that if everyone was as conservative as me, there’d be no progress. The rest of you are my guinea pigs - as are your children.
How I would loooove to get my dirty mits on those. The oldest I have is mid 1800s.
Ahem, (clears throat), capybara!!
Anecdote, no matter how old, is not data. Data is lots and lots of numbers that people can pore over. We’ve got numbers, in some places. But nothing has solid numbers dating back a thousand years. Well, maybe a census or two somewhere, I’m not sure. And maybe that temple construction company in Japan that finally closed its doors after 1000 years of business. They probably had records.
I love studying archaic badscience nearly as much as I loathe present-day practitioners of it.
We’ll have to disagree on that one. Anything I did not see with my own eyes and measure with my own tools is anecdote. And I agree with the late great Raymond Wolfinger, who said “the plural of anecdote is data”.
I highly recommend “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” as an example of a book that provides solid numbers dating back tens of thousands of years. I have to warn you that it is a tough read if you don’t regularly read scientific textbooks about archeology, anthropology and linguistics; but if you like it, you’ll find there’s a lot more gold in that mine! Lots and lots of numbers, more than you can imagine. (And “angels dancing on the heads of pins” type arguments about incredibly minute differences in potsherd decorations and pigments.)
@japhroaig, the Penguin Classics is the place to start for ancient texts. They are English translations in affordable but good quality paperback form, easily obtained used. You can get Aristotle, Pausanius (atomic theory in the deep BC! Mad shoutz to Democritus and that other guy), Xenophon, Polybius, and more from the west, and Mencius and the Gita from the East. And lately the ancient Hindu and Jain writings are becoming available in many different treatments (including English-language comics). When you read them, you’ll constantly stumble across references to foods and cooking practices, as well as the (often quite odd) beliefs people had about the causes of ill health. Unfortunately some ancient authors are effectively out of reach unless you are extremely wealthy, but if you’re in Britain or American you can get access to stuff like “the collected fragments of Posidonius” and big stuff like Strabo, Lieh Tzu and Chuang Tzu through college libraries and inter-library loan programs.
Ah ha! I assumed you meant originals :D. Yeah, the wife and I collect (and read) old books, and I have more Dover pieces than I wish to mention.
You had me at ‘minute differences’
It’s from an Ancient Roman, therefore it’s true.
It is a significant indicator that something with symptoms much like the common cold was known before Vesuvius’ eruption, yes. I call that data. Are you claiming that this proves something different? I sure didn’t.
Oh, carp, re-reading I see how I did kind of say that. I meant “copies of” as in, copies of the originals, translated into my milk tongue with varying degrees of accuracy. I didn’t mean “copies of” as in, the British Museum has original copies of Roman cookbooks. Sorry.
I told you guys I can’t write well! Don’t be fooled by my mighty wortschatz.
PS: I love “Horse Wheel and Language” but the last three or four people who tried to read it based on my recommendation haven’t forgiven me yet. It’s awesome, but of limited appeal.
I was gonna say, have you been hitting that antique book store at the Venetian in las Vegas a bit too hard?
My favorite new tome is English Bread and Yeast Cookery.
I’ll grab a copy. It can’t be harder than Nature, the Sillmarillion, or TCP/IP illustrated, can it? (Funny thing about Illustrated, it has no pictures)
Well, it also indicates kissing a mule’s muzzle will cure a cold. I thought that was pretty self explanatory.
Have you tried it?
