I guess Marlon Byrd's ties with BALCO/Conte weren't as clean

[Cubbie Swagger]

I'm into heavy weight lifting myself... so I know very well how prevalent steroids are at the gym. I've never used them myself, and I never will. The whole "no side effects" thing is pretty much a flawed argument. Just because you don't notice something visibly wrong with yourself doesn't mean that everything is okay. Western medicine and pharmaceuticals in general are a big evil scam and there's no reason why a human body should be consuming synthetic chemicals unless it's absolutely medically necessary.

 

Almost ALL of the health problems that people get are caused by the food that we eat and other environmental toxins. It's funny that people act like it's totally normal to get all these medical conditions in your 40's and 50's. It's a result of all the stuff you did to your body when you were young and you went around saying "well I don't notice any side effects".

 

it's totally normal because people didn't start making it to 40 with regularity until very recently, thanks in part to synthetics.

You are correct that synthetics have played a role in lengthening the human lifespan, but not as big of a role as people like to think. Mostly just eliminating mass diseases/plagues. In general, antibiotics are WAY over-prescribed and also very harmful. Really, the reason that we live longer today is because of our infrastructure. Food is widely available and regulated. We don't have to go around hunting and eating/drinking whatever we happen to find that day (risking all sorts of diseases, etc). Also, we don't get eaten by bears and lions and stuff as much anymore.

 

The bottom line is that people get things like cancer, Alzheimers, diabetes, autism, food allergies, etc at astronomically higher rates today than ever before. It's because of all the toxins we put into our bodies. Boy... now I'm really off topic.

 

people have been mass farming for 10,000 years and food has been widely available since. the very existence of farms implies that they have cities to feed. people living on top of each other in cities is a far better way of spreading disease than people hunting and fishing for food in small reclusive communities. after withstanding plague after plague, we finally figured out a few tricks to improve our chances at survival, antiseptics (thank you, Donnie Darko) and antibiotics.

 

what you're bemoaning isn't pharmaceuticals, but the necessity of pharmaceuticals. but the only way we can live without them now is to trade the plow for the spear, which isn't going to happen. you'll have to live with it.

 

the older our population gets, the sicker it will get.

 

To be fair, there is an over "dependence" (more like over-usage of) pharmaceuticals (particularly psychotropic drugs, which Americans consume at a prodigious rate). And antibiotics are over-prescribed. But your overall point stands. Improved healthcare tools like vaccinations and antibiotics, along with the basic understanding of medical pathology that led to them, are more responsible for our increased longevity than any other factor, by far. They're not remotely perfect, but their role can't be understated.

 

The far more grievous threats currently posed to general health are overprocessed, chemicalized food and environmental pollution, as well as communicable disease. Cubbie swagger says food is well regulated, but this really isn't true. Compared to Europe and many other developed areas, our food regulation is an absolute joke (less of a joke if you buy organic). Of course this is also a symptom of larger populations. It's hard to properly source and make affordable good foods for some many people.

 

You also say the older people get, the sicker it gets. This is obvious. But there is increased incidence/diagnosis of diseases like cancers in younger people, which is a result of two things: improved diagnostic procedures/tools, and increased environmental hazards.

 

There is a tradeoff when you talk about moving from hunter/gather societies to centralized urban/argrarian societies, but not all of the negative effects we see are present as a matter of cause or necessity.

I pretty much agree with all of this, including the part about food regulation. I didn't mean that our food was WELL regulated, because it's certainly not. Just to clarify.

 

You make good points about cancer. People are getting all sorts of cancers at younger and younger ages... and it's not normal. It's nice that we're able to diagnose cancer much more easily these days. The sad part is our approach to "curing cancer". The cure to cancer is to eat healthy and keep toxins out of your body. The last thing I'm going to do is pay for chemotherapy so I can live like a vegetable for a few more years and then die anyway.

 

The fact that most people don't have access to good food is what's really unfortunate. I just recently left Illinois and moved to Eugene, Oregon. One of the main reasons is because local organic food is readily available here, and it's part of the culture. Not to mention, it's reasonable priced. There's health food stores and organic restaurants on every corner. Go Ducks!

[Sammy Sofa]

Farms and farmers suck; vive la city.

 

Serious point: aren't you potentially kind of contradicting yourself when you bemoan people getting "more" cancer and getting it younger by then immediately pointing out how we can detect it better and earlier than ever before? I mean, I could easily be completely wrong and there are numbers that show that statistically speaking we are getting cancer at increasing rates and also with the ages getting younger, but it seems almost completely self-fulfilling that it's going to seem like there's more cancer BECAUSE we're able to better diagnose it and diagnose it sooner.

[XZero771679666304]

Farms and farmers suck; vive la city.

 

Serious point: aren't you potentially kind of contradicting yourself when you bemoan people getting "more" cancer and getting it younger by then immediately pointing out how we can detect it better and earlier than ever before? I mean, I could easily be completely wrong and there are numbers that show that statistically speaking we are getting cancer at increasing rates and also with the ages getting younger, but it seems almost completely self-fulfilling that it's going to seem like there's more cancer BECAUSE we're able to better diagnose it and diagnose it sooner.

 

It's both, really. It makes empirical sense: we can detect cancer better (i.e. a lot of cancer deaths that were previously unexplained and/or attributed to something else are now seen for what they are) and we have increasing incidence of cancer because of the massive increase in environmental carcinogens over the past couple centuries.

[Sammy Sofa]

Well, if we're including "over the centuries" then it seems to faulty to try and pin this down to a simplistic "booo, cities are killing us" theory since a major city like Chicago isn't the polluted cesspool it was before. Cities can evolve and change for the better environmentally and health-wise.

[XZero771679666304]

Well, if we're including "over the centuries" then it seems to faulty to try and pin this down to a simplistic "booo, cities are killing us" theory since a major city like Chicago isn't the polluted cesspool it was before. Cities can evolve and change for the better environmentally and health-wise.

 

I'm not the one ranting against cities here, just stating the obvious.

 

The said, people in cities are subject to many environmental factors that people in more rural settings aren't. Despite improvements in pollution levels in cities, there's no getting around that. Of course the reverse is also true, but to a lesser extent.

 

But I do think the day is coming where urban pollutants can be reduced to a level that makes them almost a non-factor. Not in our lifetimes, but before too long.

 

I personally find the direction the food industry is moving in of greater concern.

[Sammy Sofa]

What, "engineered" foods? Why? It's [expletive] awesome and future-y.

[Cubbie Swagger]

There's nothing wrong with cities. I'm not one of those tree-huggers who is against building stuff or expanding the infrastructure or anything. Although... obviously that needs to be limited somewhat. We need some amount of natural beauty to be preserved.

 

Oh... and there's nothing "futurey" about eating. I might not know exactly what's going on in this dimension we're stuck in... but I do know that it all works by itself without us intervening. We shouldn't be eating anything that isn't already here for us.

[Sammy Sofa]

Why not? That makes it sound like anything artificial is bad for us.

 

Me, I'd love it if we could get to a Jetsons era of just eating food pills.

[Guest]

Why not? That makes it sound like anything artificial is bad for us.

 

Me, I'd love it if we could get to a Jetsons era of just eating food pills.

 

This and this.

[Cubbie Swagger]

Honestly, that mentality is the reason I moved to the west coast. I got tired of fundamentally disagreeing with everyone.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

http://www.gonemovies.com/www/Drama/Drama/StrangeloveRipper1.jpg

 

Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

[jersey cubs fan]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

[SouthSideRyan]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

 

Yeah, I like the taste of food.

[Guest]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

 

Yeah, I like the taste of food.

 

What if the pills tricked us into tasting like amazing tasting food while at the same time being really healthy?

[Hairyducked Idiot]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

 

Yeah, I like the taste of food.

 

What if the pills tricked us into tasting like amazing tasting food while at the same time being really healthy?

 

At that point I just want to stay in bed all day and have an IV drip that makes me ecstatically happy at all times.

[Tracer Bullet]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

 

Yeah, I like the taste of food.

 

What if the pills tricked us into tasting like amazing tasting food while at the same time being really healthy?

 

you all are going to turn into huge blueberries

[Guest]

just eating food pills.

 

that would be awful

 

Yeah, I like the taste of food.

 

What if the pills tricked us into tasting like amazing tasting food while at the same time being really healthy?

 

you all are going to turn into huge blueberries

 

ROFL. Yea, it's early.

[Sammy Sofa]

Honestly, that mentality is the reason I moved to the west coast. I got tired of fundamentally disagreeing with everyone.

 

I get that you prefer natural food, but it's faulty to deem anything not natural as being automatically bad for people.

[Cubbie Swagger]

Honestly, that mentality is the reason I moved to the west coast. I got tired of fundamentally disagreeing with everyone.

 

I get that you prefer natural food, but it's faulty to deem anything not natural as being automatically bad for people.

It really depends on what your definition of "bad" is. Obviously there are plenty of natural substances out there that will make you drop dead instantly if you consume them. Synthetic substances do have their uses in medicine, where you're usually talking about a "lesser of two evils" situation. Like... if you have a medical problem that is worse than the potential side effects of the pharm drugs... then I'm not going to criticize you for taking them.

 

Synthetics do NOT have any place in food.

[mul21]

Honestly, that mentality is the reason I moved to the west coast. I got tired of fundamentally disagreeing with everyone.

 

I get that you prefer natural food, but it's faulty to deem anything not natural as being automatically bad for people.

 

It's not that they're all that bad, they've just become so prevalent in everything we eat that it's becoming a huge issue. All of the preservatives, not to mention high fructose corn syrup being in all kinds of crap it has no business being in, just can't possibly be okay to consume in the quantities most Americans do. It's why there's so many fat people out there (okay, one of the many reasons). And don't even get me started on how awful I think (based on some reading) genetically modified food is for us. I wish I had the time, energy, and space to have a huge garden full of stuff I knew exactly where it was coming from and how it was grown.

[Sammy Sofa]

Seems like everyone here is dealing with extremes and ignoring the huge, creamy, delicious middle.

[Illini Iceman]

Seems like everyone here is dealing with extremes and ignoring the huge, creamy, delicious middle.

 

Is there any high fructose corn syrup in that huge, creamy, delicious middle?

[Sammy Sofa]

Lord, I hope not.

 

But HFCS is a perfect example of what I'm talking about; I despise the stuff, but I'd be foolish to say that HFCS is some kind of condemnation of all manufactured foodstuffs.

[abuck1220]

when are we getting sex robots? i mean, seriously, they can't be far away, right?

[ConstableRabbit]

Can this be moved to social? I keep clicking hoping to read more about Byrd.