There are also some interesting bits on breathwork and the scientific aspects of it. I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
What's your normal resting heart rate? Mine hovers around 39-40, so getting to 45 isn't really an issue.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
It's hard to believe that we gained an overbite over a few thousand years. Evolution doesn't generally happen that fast, nor will it happen worldwide at the same time. And the idea that someone born today will develop an overbite vs edge-to-edge bite based on diet is generally not accepted by scientists, correct?
And trying to prove how ancient peoples pronounced words seems virtually impossible. It's one thing to find a change in writing, but it's another thing to assume you know how the given consonants were actually pronounced. Even today, there can be gigantic variation in pronunciation between dialects of the same language, including consonants.
So this finding seems extremely hypothetical at best, unless I'm missing something?
And while the exact cause may be debatable, as is the impact on language, the fact that this change happened over the last few thousand years is established fact, easily visible in human skeletons.
I.e. an edge-to-edge bite?
I understand this is the idea behind "mewing", but I thought there was no actual evidence for that, and that it is not the consensus scientific position? Or has something changed?
The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now.
Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
*Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-p...
Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis.
Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it.
"Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.
We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_change_%22f_%E2%86%92...
Needless to say I've always found this hypothesis doesn't really hold water...
why would we need an explanation for a historical change from /f/ to /h/?
So yeah, the hypothesis is most likely bunk.
I'm also skeptical of the only piece of data presented in the article, that it's 29% easier to pronounce these sounds with an overbite. Is that a stable measurement? How much does that speed childhood acquisition of the capacity for these sounds? Percentage of the population that cannot make the sounds at all?
Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Just buy some meat and nuts? What exactly is different?
-Bad conditions for eyes leads to growing amounts of glasses wearers, glasses make an active healthy lifestyle harder, early health development seems really important (playing physically as a kid) putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal.
-The types of food we eat, and our bad breathing habits (maybe from posture or air pollution), maybe even our tongue posture, leave us with poor jawlines, poor facial structure.
-Our disconnect from the natural world leaves us unwhole.
-The extreme of either sedentary lifestyles (office worker) or too repetitively physical (warehouse worker) breaks people down.
Its really sad, most people I see today seem really unhealthy. Fat or flabby, aching body, bad posture, stressed out. I fell into the trap too, had to loose 50 pounds recently. Cleaned up diet, working on posture, flexibility, strength, proper muscle activation, knowing ones body. And that is hard to do, maybe only possible because a WFH job lends towards healthy living. Most are not so fortunate. Also having no family or responsibility beside myself really helps. But neglecting such things are not sustainable for society.
We need a society where being healthy is easier, and better rewarded.
I am sorry if this rant is not acceptable to Hacker News, but I wish as a society our focus was "what makes us healthy". Literally that should be a primary principle in guiding our politics. Compared to the rest of history, we are living in a special time, at least in developed countries. We have the means to be creating healthy, beautiful, smart, well rounded, well adjusted individuals. But I feel the opposite is happening, and it seems like the majority of people don't care
I know this because I suffer from it
I'm not following on this one - is it because this may make them less physically active?
You should be asking what kind of vision problems they may have, that got them the glasses in the first place. For example, I have astigmatism, have crossed eyes without glasses, and +8 power correction. I had to have surgery when I was 3 years old just to be able to get glasses in the future. Not having glasses is a great way to make me miserable and unable to see or read anything.
Like, do you really think your tongue position is affecting your facial and jaw structure? I'm guessing you believe in "mewing", and every before/after image I have seen has just been a joke.
What? When were foods processed thousands of years ago? Also Carrots and fruit are not "soft"
"Processed" doesn't just mean Doritos.
In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet.
In New Guinea they still harvest sago palms. They chop up the insides, extract the starch through several washing cycles, and make a sort of pancake out of it. The palm itself is inedible. Harvesting a palm takes several people all day. In the end they have a portable, storable, easily digestible food.
Around the Pacific, taro has to be cooked and mashed before eating. It's toxic if you don't cook it and discard the water. A lot of greens need to be cooked too due to calcium oxalate.
Wheat grains (without husks) or any other cereal grains, can be eaten easily just by adding an appropriate amount of water (e.g. 4 times their weight) and boiling them, exactly like one would make cooked rice from rice grains.
Making flour and bread (initially unleavened, then leavened) has required considerably more work, not less work, but it has become the preferred way to eat wheat because it was considered much more tasty than boiled grains or porridge.
The varieties of wheat that were available before domestication had seeds from which it was difficult to remove the hulls, so milling them into coarse floor and boiling that into a porridge was actually easier than removing just the husks and boiling the whole grains.
Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
And while cultivated fruits and veggies are not pap-soft, they are significantly less fibrous than seeds, stalks, husks etc that you would get from foraged, unprocessed food. Especially our farmed leaves are much softer than grass, leaves etc, that animals eat.
If you don't do it, you may still find them eating around the crusts, for instance if you cut a sandwich in half, or even gnawing through a single point on the sandwich's crust and then leaving behind a crust-rind when they're done.
As a parent, you're then left with no other choice than to eat all of the grilled cheese rinds yourself, so you don't tend to push too hard on the childish habit.
But that's because it was gross industrial bread to begin with, and the crust was just drier and unpleasant.
But I also remember eating sourdough with its chewy crust and loving that.
Cutting off crusts is very specific to bread that is bad to begin with, I think.
I am definitely interested in this.
The first I ever heard of this topic was from reading the book "The Evolution of the Human Head" (2011) by Daniel E. Lieberman. It's an academic book, and parts are not exactly light reading targeted for the general public. I had read it when it first came out, seemingly well before it because such of point of discussion.
The problem with this topic is, if you try to look anything up on line you can quickly find yourself in the "manosphere" with its associated toxicity.
I guess one could also include chewy / starchy food; my Asian side family had similar saying but more towards chewing thing properly. (chew 100 times per food in mouth)
So things like crispbread, (raw) carrots, dried fruits/vegetables/meat/squid, etc
Even things like crackers may count, but generally hard foods include raw vegetables and certain fruit like apples and nuts.
