Ham radio operator here: basically neither will happen because both don't really mean anything.
This is an imperfect analogy, but I think it will set you thinking in the right direction: If someone is blinking a flashlight at you, and you're sitting right next to another person, do both of you see the flashlight at 100% brightness, or do your eyes wrestle for the same light waves?
What does "pick up the signal at 100%" mean? Let's say me and my buddy are talking on our car radios, no repeaters just point-to-point. If we start off in the same parking lot, we can easily hear each other. If we start driving in opposite directions, we'll still hear each other just fine, until one of two things happens: We go on either side of a hill or far enough to be beyond the horizon, and then abruptly stop hearing each other, or the signal will fade in intensity until the background noise is louder.
If we get to that point where the signal is weak but still receivable, increasing output power of the transmitter, or switching to a directional antenna might help. People tend to think antenna gain is some magic that makes the radio louder, but it's not. A high gain antenna does the same thing that cupping your hand behind your ear or around your mouth does; it puts more of the energy that would have gone in different directions in the direction you need.
Without getting too far into antenna theory, I will say that yes having two antennas near each other can cause them to interfere with each other. "Wrestle for the same radio waves" isn't the way I would describe it. Antennas resonate with radio waves, it's like a tuning fork, if you play the note the tuning fork is tuned to, the tuning fork will start to vibrate and emit its own sound. If two antennas are quite close together, this can cause destructive interference. You can use the same principle to construct a high gain antenna; look up how yagi antennas work for more details.
possibly several things but my first thought is your body is acting like a capacitor to ground. I'm guessing you've noticed this on an FM radio or rabbit ears on a TV that probably weren't grounded well.
In some cases you're tuning (or detuning) the antenna capacitively.
On other cases, like if your tv gets interference when you're standing in part the room, there may be standing waves causing interference, as the rf is bouncing around your room.
To further your point, theorically, there is a voltage potential between any two objects. That's the capacitance. Better conductor, for the same surface area, create a bigger potential.
So when you tune/detune a signal with your presence near the antenna, it is because you are close enough to the antenna that the potential between you and the antenna affects the filter of the signal.
How do you think you are changing the resonant frequency? By modifying it's capacitive impedence, i.e. creating a capacitor with yourself and the antenna.
And you know what we call the difference of electric potential between two points? Voltage.
When you say that capacitance is geometry, you are right. The distance between two objects, be it you and an antenna or two planks of wood, affect the capacitive impedance.
As the distance increase between two surfaces, the capacitance diminishes and the voltage between the two increase, so that C=QV is always true.
The resonant frequency is determined by the impedence, i.e. capacitive and inductive impedence.
You can't affect inductive impedance of the antenna because you are not a coil and do not emit EMR. But you can change the capacitance between you and the antenna by moving closer or further away.
as the distance increases the capacitance reduces. But C=Q/V doesn't mean you're not inducing any potential into the antenna... You're adding to the load... C=ε*A/d is the equation that says capacitance will decrease with distance, but that isn't going to induce any voltage in this case.
yes this is what I'm saying.
in the very near field, conductive tissue, ie a body, will have Eddy currents. Your body has an ε term as well as σ. You can definitely load an antenna. The R term will dominate but there will be some effect on inductance.
First a caveat: An object with mass can’t move at the speed of light, but it could move at speeds arbitrarily close to that.
The most successful model of gravity isGeneral Relativity, which treats gravity as a curvature of 4-dimensional space time. Gravity’s influence travels at the speed of light. There’s a classic thought experiment that sort of answers your question: what would happen if the sun was teleported away? The answer is the earth would continue to orbit around the spot the sun was for 8 minutes, and we would continue to see sunlight for that same amount of time since that’s how long it takes light to travel that distance. Then after 8 minutes the sun would disappear and the first “lack of gravity” would reach us, and things would be bad for earth :(
The fact that gravity travels at the speed of light actually leads to an interesting phenomenon: Gravitational waves If a massive object rapidly accelerates (or decelerates), for example a star sized mass moving quickly and then coming to an abrupt stop, it will emit a ripple in space time called a gravitational wave that will travel outward at the speed of light.
It was big news about a decade ago when gravitational waves were first detected by LIGO, a series of large interferometers that look for expansion/contraction in spacetime. Their first detection was the collision of 2 black holes; as the black holes spiral around each other and eventually merge, they emit oscillating waves with increasing frequency. They made a cool video showing how the frequency increases by converting it to sound.
Since then LIGO and VIRGO (similar European collaboration) have detected multiple gravitational waves from the collision of black holes and neutron stars. So not only are gravitational waves a neat validation of general relativity, they’re actually being used to do astronomy.
Thank you so much for this excellent write-up! And for providing interesting reading material, too.
It's amazing to me (an uneducated sub-layman) that things like dark matter and dark energy aren't well-understood, but we can nonetheless still do this kind of science and detect black holes colliding through ripples in spacetime 🤯 But then again, it's amazing to me that rivers never run out of water (joking... sort of...).
That LIGO sound clip is for sure going into the intro of a metal song.
Hey now. It's all about perspective. If you think about it in terms of geological history or the history of the universe, the discovery pretty much just happened.
Hah tell me about it. The 2017 neutron star merger happened while I was writing a proposal for an experiment where the physics was sort of related. So of course I completely reframed the proposal around that event, and it got funded! And that was just a few years ago, right?
Man I really need to publish the results of that project…
Depends on the charger but either effectively zero or considerably less.
People get pissy about it, but think of electricity like water. Having a longer pipe is a negligible amount of water if the faucet is still off. And the faucet can only turn on if your device completes the circuit by being plugged in (and doing the appropriate handshakes)
That said, some chargers will consume a negligible amount of electricity to actively listen for a device. Think of it like the water in your toilet. Every so often enough evaporates or leaks that you hear it run a bit to refill. But mostly it is nothing until you flush.
I use a short lightning cable to plug my phone to my car for carplay. I just leave it plugged into the usb port (without the phone) when I’m not in the car. Do you think it’s slowly draining some energy from the car battery?
The cables themselves do not use power. It is the brick.
Your radio being off would not push any power through a cable. Also your cigarette lighter being off would not push any power. Which is why plugging it in won’t do anything.
To continue the metaphor - your water is turned off. You can’t use up water that isn’t there.
The reason the brick uses power is because it is available 24/7 for you to plug something in - and when you do - it can ask that device how much power it wants - does it have fast charging? Etcetera.
Thanks. About the cigarette lighter - my dashcam plugs into it but I always unplug it before I turn the car off so never noticed if the camera turns off along with the car. If it does, does that mean I can just keep the dashcam plugged in and it won’t draw power even though the camera is connected on the other end? Or does closing the circuit mean it will start drawing power?
The water analogy is perfectly fine for many situations, but the reason these don’t draw a lot of power when nothing is plugged in isn’t because a “valve is off”. There’s a transformer, so this is like two separate water lines. If the charger is plugged in, there’s always a closed circuit on the mains side of the transformer, even if there’s an open circuit on the DC side. See the first diagram here: circuitdigest.com/…/ac-to-dc-converter-circuit-di….
The reason new chargers don’t use as much power with no device attached is because of better design. If you checked an old charger or some crappy power supply, they’ll use a fair bit of power even with nothing on the DC side. It’s not enough that one would matter, but it is enough that there was an industry wide initiative to reduce phantom load resulting in new chargers that use almost nothing when nothing is on the DC.
No. Rabies is destroying neurons, causing the symptoms. The hydrophobia is not literal fear of water (like phobias so often aren't) but a result of your brain being fried to the point where you have issues swallowing. If it were an issue of hydration, just IV fluids would be a given, and you would probably want IV access anyway.
So a few things that are missing from the current answers. I'm not a geologist, but I have had graduate level paleobotany training, and quite a bit geology coursework. I also worked in paleobotany lab. I do currently do research in biogeochemical cycling, so while I can't speak to the nature of continent or mountain building, but I can speak to how our planet has changed chemically, and that in many ways, life on earth has already fundamentally altered major components of the biogeochemical processes that result in geologic formations. This is not quite what you asked, but I think a geologist with the right training could weigh in on the back to further the conversation.
So the two processes I would speak to are the formation of bituminous coal , and the formation of limestone, both of which are biological in origin.
Coal as a type of sedimentary rock involves the conversion of dead vegetation in wetlands, when vegetation dies and is submerged in an anoxygenic environment. The basic process is that vegetation grows, dies, and is buried in a low oxygen environment, and eventually turns into coal, which has retained most of the C-C bonds that were originally present in the plant tissue (cellulose). So how important is evolution and life to the formation of coal? Well consider that 90% of coal beds were deposited during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, representing only a brief fractions of earths geological history. Why would this be the case? Well, it was during the Carboniferous that plants evolved lignin, a plant molecule that is not only very resilient to decomposition, but is a structural tissue that allows for the building of large, indeterminate plant parts. This resulted in the first "trees", which is to say, tall woody plants that could extend a significant distance above the ground because they now had a strong reinforcement polymer they could integrate with cellulose. So all of a sudden, plant life was like "Fuck yeah, trees upgrade unlocked"!
HOWEVER fungi and bacteria had not yet evolved to degrade lignin. Which meant, for around 160 million years, trees were going gangbusters, but no organism had yet evolved to significantly decompose lignin; this resulted in the wood just kind of piling up, and where you had wetland conditions suitable for coal formation, you got coal. So for around 2% of earths history, we had trees, but we didn't have wood-decomposing fungi. There are other factors at play here like the high oxygen levels from all the plants, and extremely high CO2 levels from ongoing volcanism (I believe the Kamchatka volcanics?), but if not for the evolution of lignin, we would not have coal, and if not for the evolution of wood-decomposing fungus, the formation of coal would not have been curtailed significantly.
I know much less about the formation of limestone, except that there a shit ton more of it than there is coal, but I can speak to it enough to make a few points. Limestone forms mostly in shallow marine environments. Limestone is made from coral and forminfera, basically shell bearing microorganisms. Anything with a shell that lives and then eventually dies in a marine environment can lead to the formation of limestone. Limestone makes up around 25% of the sedimentary rocks on planet earth, which is a shit ton of shells. Its been forming for a very long time.
So a few more considerations. Consider that sedimentary rocks like coal or limestone are much lighter than igneous rocks. Continental crust is like rafts of light rock floating in a sea of heavier oceanic crust. So there is a kind of geological selection process for these lighter rocks to accumulate as continental crust rather than be subducted and then stay subducted. I'm going to stop there because that's too deep into the geology for me to speculate further on. I can speak to the biogeochemical aspects, but I'm not a geologist.
So from a chemical perspective, the contents of the minerals that make up continental crust have ABSOLUTELY been altered by the trajectory of evolution on planet earth. Now if that would fundamentally alter the outlines of the continents or their movements? That's beyond what I know about earth history. What I can say is that evolution has had a direct impact on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the makeup of major rock and mineral formations that represent a significant portion of the earths crust.
I just want to add all of the organic material that makes soil different from sand. Erosion will turn rocks into small rocks which we call sand. It's plants, fungus and animals that make that into soil. They all work together to digest and excrete what makes up soil. Not to mention that it's fungi that dissolve minerals to make them bioavailable to everything else. So there's lots of ways life changed the surface but I don't know about the base continents
Adding all of that coal and limestone trapped a lot of carbon underground. If that carbon was CO2 instead, the Earth would be much hotter. Perhaps hotter than the boiling point of water and thus there would be no ocean between the continents, like Venus.
It does not. If you enforce 0/0=1, then you end up in a situation where you can prove any two numbers are equal to each other and you end up with a useless system, so we do not allow for that.
e.g. 0=0*2 -> 0/0 = (0/0)2 -> 1=12 -> 1=2
If you get into calculus though, you’ll have ways to deal with this to some extent using limits.
Once you can get a good reference for one unit ypu can start to use it to determine the others. None of these are going to be perfectly accurate, but they should be good enough for day-to-day use.
I’d start with time. We’re going to make a sundial. To do this you need to make a drawing compass and some flat ground with plenty of sun. Find a v-shaped stick, or lash a couple together so you can scribe circles in the ground. Start by making one circle around a well marked centre point, then using the same compass, draw another circle centred on the edge of the first. Draw two more circles where the second crosses the first, and two more where those cross it. You should now have a central circle with the perimeter divided into six segments (this is the same technique for drawing a hexagon inside a circle). Put another stick upright in the centre and you have a sundial with 2 hour segments. You can bisect the lines between each of the points to get 1 hour segments, and if it’s big enough, busect again to get 30 minute segments. We’ll get shorter time measurements later.
The next unit to find is the meter. A one meter pendulum completes a swing from one side to the other every second. In order to minimise the effect of air resistance, find a heavy, but not too large rock and tie it to the end of a rope. Measure out approximately out meter of rope (measured from the centre of the rock) and tie it to a solid branch. Next is the tedious bit. Set it swinging as the sundial hits one of it’s marks and count the number of swings until the sundial hits the next mark. You should get 3600 per hour. If you get too many, lengthen the rope and try again, if you get too few, shorten it. Once you have the right number you have both your meter measure and your one second.
You can get a metric tonne, and thereafter a kilogram, by building a balance weigh beam, and a cube shaped container that is exactly one metre on a side. Attach the container to obe side of the beam, and a second container exactly the same distance away from the pivot on the other side. Add rocks to the second container until it balances with the empty first containor. Now fill the first with cold water. Add more weight to the second until it balances again. The additional weight should be exactly one metric tonne. By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.
Temperature is harder to measure, but you can build a thermometer with any liquid that changes density with temperature. Even water works, although adding alcohol helps I believe. So, while you’re finding the meter, get some fruit and let it ferment. Use the resulting liquid in your thermometer. If you don’t have a glass tube, and can’t make one, use an opaque one, and float a light reed or similar on the liquid, with the end sticking out of the top. Calibrate it with boiling water for 100c, and, assuming a reasonable climate, wrap it against your body for a goid long while to get 37c. If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c. Dividing the marks you get like this would involve some careful geometric construction, but should yield a usable thermometer. Converting that to Kelvin, as the SI unit, involves adding 273.16.
The ampere and candela are probably of less use in this situation, and are going to be tricky to measure. By assuming gravity is 9.81m/s^2 and using the kilogram you can derive the Newton. From that you have the Joule, and one Joule per second is one Watt. Assuming you build a generator, you can derive the Ampere from it’s older definition relating to the force, in Newtons, between two parallel wires. From there the volt can be derived.
Beyond that, I think you should just hope for rescue!
I hadn’t even thought about getting HH:MM from a sundial, that’s brilliant! Then getting seconds and the meter from a pendulum is just straight up elegant.
By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.
I thought this was worth a callout for being a really important consideration in this thought experiment. Understanding that larger scale measurements generally reduce error, and perhaps also repetition with averaging of results, would be incredibly useful in fast tracking the redevelopment of precision.
If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c.
This one I wondered about more because of the effect of atmospheric pressure(?) on melting point, such that I wondered if it would be worth using Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine ice slurry to get ~ -17.778 ° C instead. But that’s ofc also subject to air pressure influencing melting point so I’m unsure if it’d be worthwhile.
Relatively constant 9.81 m/s² gravity is also useful for deriving force as you mention, though it reminds me of learning, to my abject horror, in undergrad physics that gravity does vary quite a bit by geolocation :'D 9.81m/s² is a better starting point than nothing though
This one I wondered about more because of the effect of atmospheric pressure(?) on melting point, such that I wondered if it would be worth using Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine ice slurry to get ~ -17.778 ° C instead. But that’s ofc also subject to air pressure influencing melting point so I’m unsure if it’d be worthwhile.
Varying air pressure is certainly a concern, but repeating the experiment, as you said, would help to reduce the error, as would being as close to sea level as possible. Interestingly, if you have your meter measure you could use that to measure atmospheric pressure by seeing how far you could raise water in a column by suction. At standard atmospheric pressure you should be able to lift fresh water 10.3m.
Relatively constant 9.81 m/s² gravity is also useful for deriving force as you mention, though it reminds me of learning, to my abject horror, in undergrad physics that gravity does vary quite a bit by geolocation :'D 9.81m/s² is a better starting point than nothing though
Gravity is altogether too unreliable and should be abolished. Failing that, You could measure the local gravity by measuring how far a rock falls in a fixed time, say one second, and calculating back from that. If the rock is heavy enough we can ignore air resistance as the effect will be smaller than our measurement error.
Interestingly, if you have your meter measure you could use that to measure atmospheric pressure by seeing how far you could raise water in a column by suction. At standard atmospheric pressure you should be able to lift fresh water 10.3m.
Oh yeah! I should have remembered that actually, since I was just rewatching an episode of Connections 2 that mentions this height limit in the context of vacuum pump history (I think it’s detailed more in season 1 but I forget which episode). So 10.3 m is another key measurement that you want at least one human to have memorized :]
Gravity is altogether too unreliable and should be abolished.
This reads like a Douglas Adams quote and I love it.
So, in one hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than us humans generate in an entire year. If we took all of the energy we generated over a year (and not just the waste heat) and converted it into heat, we wouldn't even be adding half of one percent to the system. Our direct contributions to the system are minuscule. The problem is we're pumping out green house gasses like there's no tomorrow. And those directly increase the amount of solar energy the Earth retains. And when we start keeping 1 or 2 more percent of that insane amount of solar energy, it adds up really, really fast.
Not that it changes things much, but pretty much that entire 163,000 TWh ends up as heat, not just the waste. Pretty much the only energy that doesn't is light and other transmissions that get radiated into space.
The “cure” for rabies is to treat it with a vaccine prior to symptoms appearing. The rabbies vaccine is 100% effective and you will not become symptomatic if you treat soon after the bite. The Milwaukee protocol has been tried and it’s a last ditch effort for people who didn’t get the vaccine shortly after the bite and are now showing symptoms. They don’t even know if the Milwaukee Protocol is what prevented death or if the people it worked on were somehow resistant to rabies.
Because unless you’re living and working in a high risk environment, there’s no need for a human to go get a rabies vaccine because they can just avoid mammals that are acting strangely. It’s not like it’s airborne, you have to get a penetrating bite from a symptomatic animal to get it, so when that happens you just go to the doctor. You’d still likely get the vaccine even after a bite even if you had been previously vaccinated.
Vets and people who work in animal shelters often get the rabies vaccines beforehand. But even if you have been vaccinated previously, you still have to get it again if you are bitten.
The efficacy of vaccines usually declines over time after administration. The immune system starts to “forget” how to fight a pathogen it doesn’t encounter. It doesn’t completely forget, but it puts the treatment data way back in the archives. So when it encounters the real deal, it can take quite a while to boot up production of antibodies. It also varies by the type of disease.
This is fine for some slow diseases ( which is why sometimes a single vaccination can suffice ), but can be risky if the disease progresses faster than the immune system can ramp up the defenses.
Administering the vaccine as soon as possible after suspected exposure to deadly or highly contagious diseases simply helps the immune system to get the necessary blueprints to get in the fight quicker.
Administering the vaccine before any exposure at regular, long intervals is done to decrease the baseline risk. Sometimes you don’t know you have been infected. Many diseases are not only transmitted by dramatic, obvious vectors. In those cases, it’s definitely better to have some old defense than none at all.
In addition to what Senshi said, if you have recieved the full course of vaccines (4-5 doses spread over a month), any future bites need only 1-3 doses. Also the time within which you have to take the first dose increases from 24 hours to 2-3 days, which can be quite useful to vets in remote places.
This kind of thinking is just superstition. The earth magnetic field does NOT influence in any way your sleep.
This is just magical thinking distortion.
The bed must be only in a cozy and dark environment, not too warm nor too cold. Also, your bed room must be used only to sleep or sex. Don’t do any exciting or stressful activity on your bedroom.
Do you mean to say that sex isn’t exciting. Or are we only supposed to have boring sex in our bedrooms. Or are you implying that the only exciting sex happens outside the bedroom?
Sex is for procreation only. No fun or excitement allowed. It must be silent, and exclusively in the missionary position. Deviation from these rules is unacceptable.
That’s a strong claim you’ve got there. It seems humans do possess some amount of magnetoreception, there’s even a suggested mechanism. It might be jammed by certain radiofrequencies, although I don’t know if they are still in use. Some other mammals have been shown to sense magnetism too. Personally, when I’m in a bed, especially a new one, I feel my rotation relative to my normal bed. It isn’t very precise and it’s difficult to test, so I can’t be entirely sure, but that’s how it feels. I don’t know about any studies relating magnetism and sleep. I know there historically were people who claimed it matters to them, but I think that unless you already know that it matter to you, it probably doesn’t. I’d say that much more important is darkness. Also, I heard people feel better with feet towards the door, but I don’t know if it’s proven in any way.
I wonder why I’m being downvoted. I very much welcome discussion. If you want to tell me why I’m wrong, like that cryptochromes cannot be used in sensing magnetic field upon closer look etc., I’d be excited. Disagreement without pointing out any mistakes I did brings me nothing.
If it’s just disbelief, I would’ve preferred being asked for sources. Even wikipedia mentions some of what I wrote (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception) and while I admit my source isn’t primary literature, it is a monography about senses and I would’ve made an effort to track down at least some of the original papers.
It’s toxic, but a useful reference point: tungsten hexafluoride is one of the densest known gases in existence. At a density of 13kg/m^3 at standard temperature and pressure, it is nearly two orders of magnitude shy of being dense enough to bring a human (~1000kg/m^3) to neutral buoyancy.
Compressing a gas to nearly 100x it’s natural density is going to dramatically increase it’s temperature. In simplified mechanics, you can basically think of it like all the energy that makes it the temperature it is naturally will still be there when it is 1% of it’s original size. So all that energy is “overlapping” and adding together to make it’s new temperature based on there being 100x as much energy in each place now. Even if it started at 10 degrees Kelvin, assuming a linear gain, it would be 1000 degrees Kelvin after compressing.
Of course all of that is super simplified and not the “real” math or mechanics in all their complexity. But it should help illustrate why it would not be possible or a good time.
And that is only the temperature half of it. Compressing an area to 100 atmospheres, which I’m presuming would be the level of pressure necessary to get that gas (or a safer slightly less dense one) to the needed density range, would also be pretty dangerous if not immediately fatal to the human. Again that level of pressure is assuming a linear gain, I don’t know for sure if it would be linear.
So even if you manage to find something you could breathe, you wouldn’t be able to at that level of pressure. You would need to be wearing a suit that can be pressurized and breathing from something that isn’t feeling that pressure. Which completely defeats the whole point of choosing a medium to be immersed in that doesn’t require a suit or tank like being in water does.
It is however, theoretically possible to breathe liquids. Just incredibly uncomfortable for humans. There are humans that have survived it in experiments. After an initial adjustment period where your brain is certain you are drowning for a few minutes, eventually you are able to over ride that when you don’t die. Then you can hang out for a bit not dying despite it seeming like you should be… and then when you are done breathing liquid, the terrible part starts, you have to get the remaining liquid out of your lungs so there is room to put air in them again. As much as the rest is not great, transitioning back to air was universally considered the worst part of the experiment.
You’re talking about adiabatic heating, which is where temperature changes due to change in pressure, without heat transfer. If we thermally isolate the gas as we compress it, the temperature will rise.
We don’t have to insulate it. We can allow the heat to transfer out of the gas as we compress it. Heatsinks on the pressure vessel will pass the heat from the pressurized gas into the ambient air until their temperatures equalize.
Since we can add or remove heat from the gas after it is compressed, the temperature of that gas is only relevant if it falls below the boiling or freezing curves, allowing the gas to condense into a liquid or solid.
You could likely fly using human power on Titan. It has a 50% denser atmosphere than earth as well as only 14% of the gravity. While that’s not neutrally buoyant, it is enough that if you had some big wings attached to your arms you could generate enough lift to fly by flapping. Comic by XKCD about this topic.
Of course, Titan is also insanely cold, so you’d need a pressure suit, which might throw off the calculation.
This also reminds me of a scene in Arthur C Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey, a relatively less well known sequel to 2001. In this scene there are enormous space elevator towers that house humanity, and in the upper floors where there is low gravity they have a pressurized flight room just for the fun of it.
We have pressurized areas in microgravity today (space stations), which would obviously give you neutral buoyancy. Not a whole lot of room to maneuver around though!
Metal ions can perform interesting chemical reactions that organic molecules cannot. A positively charge metal ion can also naturally bind to negatively charged proteins. So the organisms that more successfully took advantage of these chemical reactions reproduced more effectively than the organisms that didn’t.
Capitalism. Anything that isn’t bought fresh in the US is LOADED with sugar because food manufacturers figured out that sugar is extremely addictive, and they also buy a lot of politicians so that nothing can be done about it.
Don’t forget corn subsidies that make corn syrup and corn products artificially dirt cheap. Other crops get subsidies as well but you better believe fresh fruit and veg aren’t on that list. It’s the same reason meat is so cheap in the US.
Something else that I have noticed, that I believe is related to capitalism as well, is the portion size at restaurants and take out. They have conditioned us to think that a 1200 calorie meal is a normal size and if it’s smaller we are not getting a good deal. Cheesecake for example sells the skinnylicious meals that are about 550 calories, which I consider a normal dinner size, as if it’s diet food. It’s almost impossible to eat out and stay within a reasonable calorie range.
Seriously this. I lived in the US for most of my life until 2020 when I moved to Norway. If Americans paid what we pay here for the portion sizes given, they would absolutely riot. It’s so expensive to eat out here and the portion sizes are like, a third of what you’d get in any US restaurant. And that’s okay because…
I lost like 60lbs the first year we were here by simply eating a sensible portion size and not having a shitload of ready to eat mindless consumption snacks in the house. (also walked everywhere. Everywhere.)
Now I can tell who is a tourist just by size alone like 80% of the time (I live in a very touristy city). Brand new sneakers and look to be over 300lbs? Almost always walk by me speaking American English. It’s honestly quite surprising to see a very obese person here and then hear them speaking fluent Norwegian.
Sugar is only part of it. Corn and wheat based products are just as bad.
The truth has to do with food availability as well, not just what it’s made of.
Food availability has increased in the US over the past 50+ years, to where we have over 4000 calories per person a day now. Easy access to unhealthy food is a major contributor to our obesity. People don’t even understand what a healthy diet looks like and have a very poor grasp on how much to eat. We just eat until we’re stuffed and then wonder why we’re fat.
It’s especially tough as people age. I’ve been tracking my diet for 180+ days, eating under 1800 calories a day, and I still struggle with losing weight. Without a lot of effort towards eating the right amount and the right foods, people get fat.
Many herbivores have a part of the digestive tract devoted to fermentation (or other microbe based processes) to break down cellulose. This involves a community of microorganisms that live in that part of the gut, and it is those microorganisms that break down the plant matter, producing nutrition for the animal via the products of their digestion, or by the animal breaking down the microorganisms themselves. Ruminants in particular like cows with their specialized multi-compartment stomach devote a lot of space to culturing this microbe colony, but rabbits and horses are hind gut fermenters so they have cecum for that. Rabbits also are coprophagic (eat poop), they digest some of their plant matter once, then eat the poop pellet and send it through again so it can be broken down even more.
But basically, with the microbes doing the work of digestion, it is more about what they can extract, and the herbivores just host them. We have a different community of microorganisms than them, and our digestive tract wouldn’t be able to support large numbers of those species.
Fair criticism, and in regards to minerals especially, I totally failed to mention the need for herbivores to have access to literal rocks and dirt rich in different minerals that aren’t readily available in plant. In captivity, this takes the form of mineral blocks of course.
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