I knew our resident doc would come to the rescue :) Thanks for clarifying as always (just for further clarity, I'm not being sarcastic)

I'm not a doctor, I did most of my under graduate work in the natural sciences, so we did cover that detail. Also, some of the neurophysiology stuff and neurochemistry. All in all quite interesting.

The sad thing is that a lot of this stuff is new, depression wasn't anywhere near as common a hundred years ago. It's hard to say what the problem now is precisely, but I think the lack of diet and tendency to eat poisonous stuff as a regular part of the diet probably plays a substantial role.

It looks interesting. I'll put it on the backlog of things to read :P.

I've heard something to that effect. I think those of European descent tend to be more well adapted to dairies, but to what degree, I don't know.

Grain, I had no idea. Obviously, you need to eat it in moderation like any carbs, because it becomes sugar and processed grains is not good at all. The presence of a defect like cilliac's disease certainly suggests that grain wasn't a staple of our diet for most of our evolution.

Overall, we aren't well adapted to the highly calorific content found in a lot of Western diets combined with a low activity knowledge-oriented lifestyle. That's for sure.

There's a propensity in my family for hypoglycemia so not eating for 16 hours is a big no no for me.

After 9+ hours of not eating, I'm a completely different person and not in a good way.

Humans tend to run out of lactase eventually. It's something that you're born with a supply of and you don't produce enough to carry you through an entire life time. Some people have more of it than other people do. But, there's definitely other problems with it, besides the usual gastric problems it can cause, it can cause all sorts of inflammation.

Wheat, isn't something that I realized was a problem until I went to China and had to do without. It's got nasty toxins in it like gluten as a way of protecting the seed from predation. And humans haven't been eating it long enough to evolve a defense to it. And unfortunately, because it doesn't interfere with our ability to procreate, it's unlikely that we will ever evolve a defense to it.

Yeah, that does sound like hypoglycemia. Your average human can go about 18 hours or so before the blood glucose levels drop. And even at 14 hours you shouldn't be feeling anything other than being hungry.

OTOH, fasting isn't something that one should be doing without support. I haven't tried it yet, but Branch Chain Amino Acids and Medium Chain Fatty Acids are supposed to be used during fasting to help stave off the break down of muscle tissue and the MCFA are easily convertable into blood glucose to help the body maintain the blood glucose levels without the insulin hit.

That being said, I'm still reading up on this and I definitely wouldn't recommend somebody with diabetes or hypoglycemia do this, as the consequences can be quite severe. Cutting most of the carbs is something that a doctor is likely to sign off on though. And anybody can cut wheat and dairy without health problems.

Gluten isn't a toxin. It's got nothing to do with preventing predation (seems rather optimistic to bank on your predator being a coeliac). It is just a mixture of a couple of different storage proteins.

Alcohol, video games, exercise and friends who are not assholes.

Friends aren't that great, I had some once and they weren't assholes, but I still spent all my time with them pretty much wishing that I could just go home and do my own stuff on my computer, without having anyone else around. In the end associating with friends just becomes an obligation, not something you do because you really want to, or that's how it is for me. I just have a distaste for having to deal with others.

As human beings only having a limited life-span, I don't think anyone should force themselves to waste time doing something they don't have to do.

It sounds like your friends were either boring people or too different from you. Whenever I had friends who were boring or too different from me, I always hated hanging out with them. But I agree that one should never do anything he or she doesn't want to do because all of us, only get 1 life to live. Not many things worse, than being minutes away from the grim reaper visiting you and realizing, you wasted your entire life for other people.

Very interesting. Thanks for the rundown, I'll have to read more about it.

It will take longer, but if it's detrimental, natural selection will take care of it.

First of all, it affects ability to find a mate either in the short term or in the long term even if it simply hinders you without killing you. The politically correct thing to say is that there is someone out there for everyone, but I don't believe that. Men face the very real likelihood of not being able to procreate at all (in that regard, women act as an agent for natural selection so for all the guys out there who have a hard time trying to score, yeah, natural selection can be a real bitch) if they are unable to bring their game up and while women will be able to procreate (either via casual sex or now, via artificial insemination), they might not be able to secure their ideal genitor for their offspring or otherwise a long term companion to help raise the offspring which will lower it's chances of survival. Not to mention that if a mother herself is not on her A game when raising it, the offspring will suffer either physically or psychologically (or both).

And of course, even if it has no effect whatsoever during the procreation years (which seem to run from late teens until early sixties for men now), if it affects grand parents, it is a factor as they can play an important role in child upbringing in our hectic society. As a kid raised by a single mother who worked ~60 hours a week, I'd spend my summers at my grand parents who were alive and healthy enough to babysit me. That made a huge difference.

Carbs are so omnipresent in the food we eat that it would definitely require some planning to manage it in our current context, but it's definitely something I'm curious about.

Ultimately, we're not ever going to be a species that thrives on dairy, grains and such agricultural products, it just doesn't affect our ability to procreate. So, we might eventually do so by random chance, but we'd be as likely to grow horns or turn green.

Actually, not as much planning as you'd think. Meat has basically no carbs in it and if you steer clear of foods that aren't meats and or vegetables, you've got that done. Add in some fruit from time to time and that's that.

Celiacs aren't the only people that can't eat wheat, there's folks with wheat allergies. And in general, the epidemiological numbers on those conditions are very low. In practice doctors don't bother to look into it until you've got serious problems like diverticulitis. Good luck getting a doctor to order the tests if you're overweight or an adult

As far as evolution goes, people are generally allergic to proteins if they're going to be allergic to something and it's hardly the only protein in wheat that humans are likely to not tolerate. What's more, there's no point in wheat evolving a protein that's tolerated well by humans, as wheat seed is to grow wheat plants, not feed humans.

Seriously, go a couple months without wheat and see how you feel. Since doctors refuse to conduct the appropriate testing until there's significant damage, it's fairly common for people to have an intolerance or allergy and not even know about it.

As previously stated, if it hinders you in any way, it will hamper your ability to procreate or your child's ability to procreate.

In the short term, small impairments might not make a difference, but in the longer term, they do.

As you add a plenitude of events, noise loses it's significance and make way to trends.

Overall, whoever can find a suitable mate, actually make children with that mate and remain the healthiest the longest (either to create a better environment for their offsprings or just produce more offsprings) will have more of an impact on the genome of the species.

In a society where dairies and bread is widely consumed, this involves an ability to process those foods properly so one of two events will happen:

1) We'll stop consuming those foods

2) We'll adapt and process those foods properly

This has already happened to an extent with European populations who digest diaries better compared to say, Eastern Asians.

In a healthy human blood sugar levels are never allowed to vary too much. It should be constantly around 5.5 mmol/L and not go below 4 nor above 6.9. In case there is a wild fluctuation, consult a doctor :/
As for food, normally humans can digest almost every crap. But not everyone tolerates everything. That's why some people are allergic to stuff like lactose or gluten etc. If you have problems try to take out stuff from your diet and see how you feel. Fruits and vegetables in general are good for you. Also lean red meat and fish are healthy, but for example vegetarians don't eat them :).

Sure, I'm not arguing that there are people who can't tolerate eating wheat, or that the general populace may end up feeling better for not eating it. I just took umbrage with your statement that gluten is a toxin that protects the seed from predation - it's not. It is just a store of nutrients that get used to grow the seed into a plant. Some people feeling slightly sub-optimal after consuming it does not seem to be sufficient selection pressure for it to have evolved as a defence mechanism...

I don't think you understand evolution.

The wheat we eat is derived from seeds. A seed's only point of existence is to grow into a plant. There's absolutely no motive there one way or another. However, evolutionary pressure does tend to push things in one of a handful of routes. Toxicity, like wheat and most grains, Being indigestible, which is your tomato seeds. And just producing a crap load of seeds, that's things like mushrooms, if we ignore that those are spores because I don't have a seed example off hand.

The point here is that, there's going to be toxic things being selected for in wheat seeds.Wheat doesn't produce enough seed to survive when it's constantly being eaten. It lacks the characteristics necessary to pass through the digestive tract the way that tomato seeds do. Consequently, it's rather unlikely that evolutionary pressure isn't going to be putting something in there to protect itself.

Making the people that eat it fat, bloated and sickly would have the affect of discouraging consumption. A lot of the "poisonous" things in nature aren't going to kill you if you eat them, they'll just make you severely ill. Or as in the case of one of the local berries, cause abortions.