{"id":68702,"date":"2024-12-27T01:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-12-27T06:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=68702"},"modified":"2024-12-26T10:22:35","modified_gmt":"2024-12-26T15:22:35","slug":"qotd-adapting-to-permanent-food-surpluses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/12\/27\/qotd-adapting-to-permanent-food-surpluses\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Adapting to “permanent” food surpluses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We late-20th century Westerners are the only humans, in the entire history of our species, to have achieved permanent, society-wide caloric surplus. I’m well aware that it’s not actually<\/em> permanent \u2014 it is, in fact, quite precarious, as the oddly-empty shelves at the local supermarket can confirm \u2014 but we have adapted as if it is. And I do mean adapted<\/em>, in the full evolutionary sense \u2014 evolution is copious, local, and recent. Just as it doesn’t take more than a few generations of selective breeding to create an entire new breed of dog, so the human organism is fundamentally, physically different now than it was even a century ago.<\/p>\n

More to the point, this is a testable hypothesis. I’m a history guy, obviously, not a biologist, but you don’t need to be a STEM PhD to see it. All our physical structures still look<\/em> the same in 2021 as they did in 1901, but our biochemistry is far different. Just to take two obvious \u2014 and obviously detrimental \u2014 examples, we are awash in insulin and estrogen. Time warp in a laboring man from 1901 and feed him a modern “diet” for a week; the insulinemic effects of all that corn syrup etc. would put him in a coma. Even if he didn’t, the knock-on effect of all that insulin \u2014 greatly ramped-up estrogen \u2014 would deprive him of a lot of his physical strength, not to mention radically alter his mood, etc.<\/p>\n

Severian, “The Experiment”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-09-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We late-20th century Westerners are the only humans, in the entire history of our species, to have achieved permanent, society-wide caloric surplus. I’m well aware that it’s not actually permanent \u2014 it is, in fact, quite precarious, as the oddly-empty shelves at the local supermarket can confirm \u2014 but we have adapted as if it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,74,66,7,41,13],"tags":[713,130,1462,1138],"class_list":["post-68702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-food","category-health-science","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-biology","tag-evolution","tag-severian","tag-thepastisaforeigncountry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-hS6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68702"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93152,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702\/revisions\/93152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}