Slashdot Mirror

http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Defense_of_Childhood.html?id=hO9dPgAACAAJ
"The pressures of modern life are increasingly squeezing the adventure, the wonder, the physicality -- the juice -- out of children's lives. Virtually every arena of kids' experience is now subject to some form of outside control, and this is a serious threat to the unique spark that animates every child. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, this book is a clear and compelling plea to save childhood."

The challenge of addiction will only get worse:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Homeopathy_as_a_big_picture_example

Yes, there is a lot of nonsense in alternative medicine. But there is a lot of nonsense in mainstream medicine, too (e.g. much mainstream cancer and heart disease treatment is misguided dues to financial conflicts of interest in the providers). We need the best of both. The mind can affect health in a variety of ways -- including by moderating the immune system to reduce inflammation (and possibly destroying some cancer), providing natural internal painkillers, and by choosing to eat healthier and otherwise live a healthier lifestyle (which may even include religious-motivated things like periodic fasting that can have health benefits in some contexts). We need to make the most of those possibilities in a responsible way.

As I suggest in that essay, Randi himself probably got scammed by mainstream medicine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

"In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery."
"If you look into the nutritional medicine that Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, practices, but you can also find several others who say the same, you will find that most bypasses are unnecessary and blocked arteries can be unblocked and brought back to health in about two years of an agressive nutritional approach of a diet heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (and a little nuts, seeds, and whole grains). So, in one of the greatest decisions of your life, you were, I'd suggest, scammed by the mainstream medical community and its connection with the mainstream agri-business. In fact, people who get a bypass but don't change their eating habits tend to just have the same problem come back."

See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportuni

Xest makes some good points about reasons to be more optimistic. However, I've certainly been pessimistic about this myself in the past. Here is an excerpt from a satire I wrote about this and posted to slashdot over a decade ago in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" after sending a copy of the US Department of Justice who had asked for comments (I also sent a copy to Richard Stallman who said it made him laugh):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. ... [Inaudible shouted question] Prisons? There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now, thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public or private is a criminal terrorist. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, as those terrorists aren't technically criminals or subject to the due process of law are they? Well it's true these days you go to prison if you complain about the drug war, or the war on terrorism, or the war on infringers of copyrights and software patents -- so don't complain! [nervous audience laughter] After all, without security, what is the good of American Freedoms? Benjamin Franklin himself said it best, those who don't have security will trade in their freedoms. ..."

Sad it is all becoming a little too true, even with some progress on the drug war front.

As I've realized, the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping that often dysfunctional society -- and we've all been told that showed how bad a country they were. But the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets instead to keep people from escaping -- what does that say about the USA?

Some books related to your points:

"War is a racket" on the profit-oriented ("fascistic") military-industrial complex
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

"Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me" on cognitive dissonance
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909

In one of Freeman Dyson's books, like "Infinite in All Directions" he talks about the coming conflicts between government and individuals wanting to redefine themselves biologically, where drug use is just a first example of a more general issue.

On the accelerating problem of addiction to "supernormal stimuli", which is a much more general issue than "drugs":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

By the way, some health ideas to look into, including vitamin D deficiency and eating more vegetables and omega-3s, which can help in avoiding depression:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

When all else fails, somethign from Howard Zinn:

Great link. Speaking of "mileage", a treadmill workstation can help too, by providing some extra extraneous input and thus supporting focus on the task at hand.
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking

Consider that the original poster said her or she has no problem mowing the lawn to completion -- which entails walking.

Eating better (especially veggies and omega 3s) and getting adequate vitamin D can help improve general concentration as well. A list of key health links I put together:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Having a real window to look out from can probably help, too, since it is distracting, but it is good for the eyes and brain to look far away at naturally lit surroundings.

Humans were not adapted through evolutionary forces for apparently hundreds of thousands of years to sit all day in one place in isolation, day after day after day for years at a time, just making some small finger motions and staring straight ahead. Such humans probably tended to starve, atrophy, not reproduce, and/or get eaten. So, it's actually "natural" that it is hard for anyone to do that (let alone be healthy doing that), even with an occasional bathroom break or pizza run thrown in there now and then. See for example:
http://www.howtogeek.com/93822/sitting-is-killing-you-infographic/

And while this link is about escaping the "Pleasure Trap" of eating poorly, perhaps it applies to escaping the multi-tasking trap of thinking that makes you feel more productive long-term?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

I agree that limiting distracting notifications can make a big difference too. Every interruption costs something to recover.

Of course, these recommendations I make or agree with are from a more introverted perspective of a programmer, where introverts tend to have a lot of internally-generated stimulation. Extroverted people doing different sorts of task may thrive on lots more chaos and may benefit from a higher level of external stimulation. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion#Biological_factors
"Eysenck proposed that extraversion was caused by variability in cortical arousal. He hypothesized that introverts are characterized by higher levels of activity than extraverts and so are chronically more cortically aroused than extraverts."

So, another possibility is just that the original poster might be extroverted and better suited for some other type of work involving a lot of people-oriented interactions? Whereas the fact that you or I might seek to minimize distractions (and can do that) might reflect being more introverted overall?

For preventing most cancer: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrmans-anticancer-solution.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx

For preventing most cancer: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrmans-anticancer-solution.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx

See his book http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ However, a mistake Ray Kurzweil seems to be making is in assuming that individually isolated vitamins and such will have the same affect on the human body as the same nutrient as part of a whole food (the kind of food all humans have been eating for thousands of years -- until fairly recently). Dr. Joel Fuhrman in "Eat to Live" and his other writings shows why that assumption of individual nutrients having value is generally wrong (for example, with isolated beta carotene). And that also ignores that supplements may contain toxic by-products of the extractive process. That is why Ray is treading on fairly dangerous ground with his regime. That said, some very specific supplements like vitamin D, Omega-3s, Iodine, B-Complex, and a few others may be good to add to a diet with 90% of calories from vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and which otherwise avoids most artificial non-food supplements. See:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

And also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
" G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds ... âoeG-BOMBSâ is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet -- these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity."

I emailed Ray about this probably a couple years ago, concerned for his health, but not sure if he read it or believed it. In general, it is not clear to me that Ray understands evolution very well.

I get the feeling Ray has a cartoonish view of it (this coming from someone who studied in a PhD program in ecology and evolution). If he had studied evolution, he'd be more likely to think about how natively evolved digital piranha would be likely to chew up the runtime of uploaded minds with meat-space origins. I suggested to him about a decade ago he go talk to some academics who knew a lot about evolution, but it is not clear he has.
If he had, he might also see how quickly AI slaves might evolve away from what he designed them to be -- especially if he designs them primarily through competitive economic and military purposes rather than through love, compassion, joy, community, and wonder.

Someone put up some letters I've sent him in the past about such topics:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

A key point I make in one: "I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the first copy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting the trends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what should be done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirror effect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged current personal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The most productive response to the singularity may come from a very different perspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of most hunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days."

See, for example:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, femin

See his book http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ However, a mistake Ray Kurzweil seems to be making is in assuming that individually isolated vitamins and such will have the same affect on the human body as the same nutrient as part of a whole food (the kind of food all humans have been eating for thousands of years -- until fairly recently). Dr. Joel Fuhrman in "Eat to Live" and his other writings shows why that assumption of individual nutrients having value is generally wrong (for example, with isolated beta carotene). And that also ignores that supplements may contain toxic by-products of the extractive process. That is why Ray is treading on fairly dangerous ground with his regime. That said, some very specific supplements like vitamin D, Omega-3s, Iodine, B-Complex, and a few others may be good to add to a diet with 90% of calories from vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and which otherwise avoids most artificial non-food supplements. See:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

And also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
" G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds ... âoeG-BOMBSâ is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet -- these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity."

I emailed Ray about this probably a couple years ago, concerned for his health, but not sure if he read it or believed it. In general, it is not clear to me that Ray understands evolution very well.

I get the feeling Ray has a cartoonish view of it (this coming from someone who studied in a PhD program in ecology and evolution). If he had studied evolution, he'd be more likely to think about how natively evolved digital piranha would be likely to chew up the runtime of uploaded minds with meat-space origins. I suggested to him about a decade ago he go talk to some academics who knew a lot about evolution, but it is not clear he has.
If he had, he might also see how quickly AI slaves might evolve away from what he designed them to be -- especially if he designs them primarily through competitive economic and military purposes rather than through love, compassion, joy, community, and wonder.

Someone put up some letters I've sent him in the past about such topics:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

A key point I make in one: "I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the first copy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting the trends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what should be done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirror effect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged current personal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The most productive response to the singularity may come from a very different perspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of most hunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days."

See, for example:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, femin

Explained in detail with many refs: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ETLBook.aspx

Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, talks about the political history of how the meat and dairy industry got this information into schools in one chapter. But, here are some key points if you are probably not going to read that right away.

First, here is some general history of changing guidelines (you can see the pre-1956 guidelines we more diverse):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides
"From 1956 until 1992 the United States Department of Agriculture recommended its "Basic Four" food groups."

Those four food groups were: "Milk", "Meat", "Cereals and breads", and "Vegetables and fruits". They were usually displayed in roughly equal physically-sized portions. Beans were technically included in the "meat" group, but in practice are fairly ignorable by most people in that model (including how it was typically drawn). Because of differing calorie density (fruits and vegetables having few calories per unit volume because of fiber), this meant 90% or more of your calories when eating by the four food groups would be from animal products and (usually) refined grains in bread. As described in "Eat to Live", humans are adapted to get most of their calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (plus some nuts, seed, and whole grains). The "basic four" effectively inverts this concept, meaning your diet will have almost no essential phytonutrients.

You also need phytonutrients to grow well and for your immune system to resist cancer and other disease.
http://www.peertrainer.com/health/dr_joel_fuhrman_super_immunity_book.aspx

It is true a case can be made for some animal products in the diet (especially for omega-3 fats, and for iodine unless you eat sea vegetables, and for some other reasons). People can argue about the role of fish-eating in recent human development perhaps, even though fish today may be polluted with mercury and PCBs. I'm not saying I agree 100% with Fuhrman about every detail, but he sketches out well the big picture.

It is harder to make the case for having any refined grains and refined sugar in the diet (meaning refined flour and sugar, as opposed to whole grains). That is because refined grains and refined sugar spike insulin levels and cause inflammation (the small particles are rapidly digested). Fuhrman also suggests not eating much unrefined grains (like brown rice) although others like Dr. McDougall may disagree from a convenience perspective:
http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrition/mcdougall-vs-fuhrman-notes-for-you-from-the-great-plant-based-doctors-debate/

So, basically, the four food groups is a prescription for disease -- specially heart disease and stroke, cancer, and diabetes, which are the main "diseases of affluence" that kill most US Americans now but were very rare 100 years ago. Ideally, you should get 90% of your calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and use animal products as side dishes, flavorings, or binders in recipes. As Dr. Fuhrman says in Eat To Live, we have not yet seen what modern medicine could do to extend the lives of people who ate in a healthy way.

Note also that most of the world tend to be lactose intolerant. Thus emphasizing milk also destroys many people's health, especially that of many minority children in the USA who will then suffer from continual stomach distress and worse. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance

More on the problems of milk for most people:

See my other posts, but in short: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

"Try going 72 hours without food. You'll be amazed how *real* discomfort can focus the mind."

For some people, if you do it right:
http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1137654
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/2/288.full.pdf
http://www.fastingconnection.com/forum/General-posts-to-Index/1184-fasting-and-bipolar-disorder

See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work for how to fast correctly.
http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Eating-Health-Medical-Conquering/dp/031218719X

Although ultimately people have to eat right:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

Terrific point about separating an appraisal of the world from general moods.

And after all, some people even like tough challenges:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

As I quote here from "What Dreams May Come":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
===
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.
===

Howard Zinn also suggested there is always reason for the "optimism of uncertainty": http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm

I agree about the bringing nutrition/lifestyle stuff all together synergistically:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Also maybe of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression

And:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

While Shirky's post has some great insights, I actually disagree with a sentiment implied where he says: "Most of us won't kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. ... Madoff hasn't killed himself because he isn't the kind of person who kills himself." While perhaps true, it is misleading. I'd suggest depression and suicide could happen in almost anyone's life probabilistically, but that certain circumstances make it more or less likely. Then, if it does, the survivors tend to work backwards from "if only" proximate causes, but overall it is always a network of interacting causes and effects. Genes are one thing affecting probabilities, but so is nutrition, lifestyle, mental outlook, mental habits including gratitude, religions and spiritual upbringing or life philosophy, social networks, physical infrastructure, and many other factors (including what we think about the world) which interact with each other. Or, in other words, a life is like a tree, and whether that tree is blown over by any particular storm in life is about both how big the (perceived) storm is and how deep the tree's roots are (and roots help us grow more roots). For a person, roots are things like nutrition, family, friends, hobbies, community, music, values, habits, religion/philosophy, and so on. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

Thanks for the success story of personal growth to grow deeper roots in various ways. Good luck in continuing to grow them as best as is possible in this plane of existence filled with various dualistic tensions, with life at a Yin/Yang interface of

"Although Obama's Affordable Care Act gives better access to treatment options for mentally ill persons: ..."

Things like nutrition, positive psychology, physical infrastructure, life opportunities, community and so on can make a huge difference in mental health. But they are not generally covered as treatments by insurance. Similarly, health insurance may pay $100K for a heart operation, but it won't pay a penny towards the healthy food needed to stay physically and mentally well.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx

Worse -- junk food is heavily subsidized:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html

And for decades bad nutritional advice like "the four food groups" has been enshrined in public education by regulatory capture and clever marketing by agribusiness.

Contrast with a model like "Blue Zones":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone

Or what Dr. Andrew Weil writes about in his book "Why Our Health Matters".

"Although Obama's Affordable Care Act gives better access to treatment options for mentally ill persons: ..."

Things like nutrition, positive psychology, physical infrastructure, life opportunities, community and so on can make a huge difference in mental health. But they are not generally covered as treatments by insurance. Similarly, health insurance may pay $100K for a heart operation, but it won't pay a penny towards the healthy food needed to stay physically and mentally well.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx

Worse -- junk food is heavily subsidized:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html

And for decades bad nutritional advice like "the four food groups" has been enshrined in public education by regulatory capture and clever marketing by agribusiness.

Contrast with a model like "Blue Zones":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone

Or what Dr. Andrew Weil writes about in his book "Why Our Health Matters".

"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."

Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

See also on optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Watch out for too much vitamin A from cod liver oil...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/23/important-cod-liver-oil-update.aspx

Best to get vitamin A from vegetables like carrots or carrot juice.

See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

Related by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

By others:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

The US may be farther from 1984 than NK (debatable given what US credit card information and internet communications reveals), but the USA sure is a lot closer to "Brave New World":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the *rgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.""

BTW, "How to escape The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Overall, what you say is true and reflects what the point I am trying to make. That said, I also think most people, even in the USA, have little understanding of what most political thinking is like outside major US-Left-leaning US urban areas. GW Bush was re-selected after launching a ruinous illegal war. What does that say about the country? Of course, the UK went along with it... And even within "progressive" areas of the USA, there is another sort of totalitarianism the US Right is correct in pointing out (expanding government intervention in all areas of life). So, the deeper point is that there are similar social forces at work both in the US and NK (or most any country for that matter), they just play out differently based on history and circumstances. Egypt had "god kings" for thousands of years and did very well -- but it was on much more fertile ground than North Korea with an easier climate, and also it was not surrounded by vastly more technologically advanced countries for much of that time with radically different political forms. But no doubt thousands of years of culture in Egypt may have selected for a sort of personality receptive to the god king idea -- or cult of personality which is a lesser manifestation of it.

So much of our day-to-day reality is socially constructed base on group norms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)

See also:
"Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" by Roland Benabou
http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20paper.pdf
"This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps-Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. This general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delu

There is some truth to what you say, unquestionably. Still, what I am saying reflects actual US policy and the behavior of most US Americans, whatever adages remain around from older generations... Most people in the USA may have heard "you are what you eat", yet most people still eat a lot of empty calories from refined starches and sugars and cruelly-raised nutrient-poor meat. That disconnect seems symptomatic of a bubble to me. And it is reflected in US corporate-shaped policy:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

There is a history there of decades of efforts by the meat and dairy industry to push the "four food groups" to the detriment of most US Americans, a legacy that still continues even with the USDA food pyramid and later efforts. Better pyramids:
http://www.cellinteractive.com/ucla/center_overview/pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/

Why doesn't every US American know about "the pleasure trap" as an aspect of "you are what you eat"?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

If a lot of people in the country accept such behaviors (similar to accepting pictures of the "Great Leader" everywhere in North Korea and various paranoid and repressive NK policies), then what difference is there? No doubt a lot of North Koreans talk about how free and well-off they are... A lot of TFA is about how North Koreans probably don't know what is really going on... And those who do feel they have little power to act. How is that very different from, say, how people working at Walmart, the USA's biggest private employer, do not unionize because people there fear for their jobs if they do and have been taught that collective social action is bad etc. etc. (or at least not taught that it is good and had most independent initiative schooled out of them)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_union_opposition

Working inside a corporation is how many adults in the US spend most of their waking hours.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as F

Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Of course, like people, every country has its unique mix of characteristics that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the context... North Koreans, for example, may face less "pleasure trap" issues?
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Sad to watch this all play out as so much of the USA suffers for crazy ideological reasons (such as justifies the denial of access of health care and vegetables to a lot of the population). Even sadder to be stuck in the middle of this crazy ideological bubble while it does... Not that I have not tried to help move things to a higher level of sense (as have many others):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

So little, so late... As Bucky Fuller said, wh

http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/super_immunity_book.aspx

Things to be aware of that he would mention:
* vitamin D deficiency
* iodine deficiency
* B-complex deficiency
* omega-3s deficiency
* eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains
* avoid refined sugars and grains
* avoid food additives (artificial colors, artificial flavors, most preservatives)

Many vegans and vegetarians eat a refined starch-heavy diet with too little vegetables and so are sicker than meat-eaters who also eat a lot of veggies.

In the case of influenza, a lot of it is probably due to vitamin D deficiency in the winter, whether from the Earth's tilt relative to the sun or from cloudy weather and stay indoors in rainy season near the Equator. People probably generally eat less vegetables in winter, too.

http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/

The same may be starting in medicine and (re)realizing how important nutrition is:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Informative summary, thanks 0x7e!

Some other economic and political aspects as well:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/

The same may be starting in medicine and (re)realizing how important nutrition is:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Informative summary, thanks 0x7e!

Some other economic and political aspects as well:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

... which meat of any sort does not have: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Phytonutrients act in part as dailyanti-cancer chemotherapy for your cells, and are vital building blocks like for the pigments in your eyes, and are essential for the immune system to work well, and on and on. When you eat a lot of meat, which generally has a lot of fat these days, or eat a lot of other animal products, you crowd essential phytonutrients out of your diet. Still, it is true that animal products can concentrate other vital nutrients, like iodine, that may otherwise be hard to come by in vegetables grown on depleted soils (unless you eat sea vegetables with a lot of iodine).

Here is how to recalibrate your taste buds for healthy eating:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

That said, perhaps this in vitro meat can be engineered to have a large amount of phytonutrients as well as things like omega-3s (also originally from plants ingested by animals)?

But we don't need many animal products of any sort to be healthy or happy, as above. But we do need to learn a lot about nutrition. Starch-focused vegan diets, for example, tend to be very unhealthy, compared to vegetable-focused vegan diets.

But at least in vitro meat would be an improvement over the current situation:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/links.html

And another innovation in this area would include producing oranges without the tree, or orange juice without the orange, perhaps in indoor farms (with LED lights maybe powered by hot or cold fusion energy someday).

Even for in vitro meat, in vitro meat broth might be easier, an idea I can thank Bryan Bishop for suggesting.

... which meat of any sort does not have: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Phytonutrients act in part as dailyanti-cancer chemotherapy for your cells, and are vital building blocks like for the pigments in your eyes, and are essential for the immune system to work well, and on and on. When you eat a lot of meat, which generally has a lot of fat these days, or eat a lot of other animal products, you crowd essential phytonutrients out of your diet. Still, it is true that animal products can concentrate other vital nutrients, like iodine, that may otherwise be hard to come by in vegetables grown on depleted soils (unless you eat sea vegetables with a lot of iodine).

Here is how to recalibrate your taste buds for healthy eating:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

That said, perhaps this in vitro meat can be engineered to have a large amount of phytonutrients as well as things like omega-3s (also originally from plants ingested by animals)?

But we don't need many animal products of any sort to be healthy or happy, as above. But we do need to learn a lot about nutrition. Starch-focused vegan diets, for example, tend to be very unhealthy, compared to vegetable-focused vegan diets.

But at least in vitro meat would be an improvement over the current situation:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/links.html

And another innovation in this area would include producing oranges without the tree, or orange juice without the orange, perhaps in indoor farms (with LED lights maybe powered by hot or cold fusion energy someday).

Even for in vitro meat, in vitro meat broth might be easier, an idea I can thank Bryan Bishop for suggesting.

It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/

While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.

Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.

The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/

Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/

And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).

The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
====
Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16â"20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.

The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.
====

Thus I now joke that the USSR needed to guard its physical borders to keep people from escaping, but the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets...

Of course, different drugs affect different neurotransmitters, so crack cocaine may have different results in such a situation than opiates like morphine.

Perhaps a bigger issue affecting most people who will read this is overcoming "The Pleasure Trap" related to junk foods:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

...and more fruits and beans, and a limited amount of nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Eat a lot less of everything else. See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for the details. Or for a slightly different approach, see the book "What Color is Your Diet" by David Heber, MD, PhD, founding director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and dietitian Susan Bowerman, MS, RD. Or the book "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle and ALan Goldhamer. A great graph here:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

This is not to disagree that people vary, including in bacteria and their gut. But the basics are that leafy green vegetable have the least calories per amount of volume in the stomach, followed by fruits and beans. Fill up on those, and there is just not room for high calorie foods.

Behavior therapy makes a lot of sense. It is amazing what the brain is capable of as it growns new connections. Other approahces like addressing vitamin D deficiency, vegetable deficiency, and other things like iodine deificency and omega 3 deficiency may help too, as can removing food dyes and artifical flavors etc... Good luck. Below are some links on those other topics.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/

Especially during pregnancy, due to our indoors lifestyles. There may be other causes too, including vegetable deficiency disease, but vitamin D deficiency is a apparently a big one. Other possible causes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

With that said, most people posting here are probably total hypocrites about health. They will go on about "herd immunity" and how immoral parents are who don't vaccinate their children for whatever reasons, but these same posters will then most likely eat junk food, pull all nighters, go to work and school when sick with the flu or whatever else, and not get a vitamin D test, and sit most of the day. Thus, such posters (or their children) will likely spread far more diseases than an unvaccinated kid who eats a lot of fruits & vegetables & beans, avoids junk food, gets enough vitamin D and iodine, stays home when sick, washes their hands, sleeps well, moves around a lot during the day, was breast-fed to age two years or beyond (see WHO guidelines), works or learns mostly from home, and so on. See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ChildBookReviews.aspx

The lack of critical reasoning on this subject on slashdot is also saddening, whatever the conclusion. The typical argument here on vaccine safety seems equivalent to someone saying, because the Intel 386 CPU did not have a floating point bug in 1990 and still runs OK now (some version of some vaccine did not cause a specific problem over the years), that means any CPU produced by anyone in 2012 can never possibly have any bugs and will run forever (all vaccine lots are always safe). That's just a nonsensical argument from a quality control standpoint, given many vaccine formulations and production techniques are continually changing. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

For all we know, the next lot of flu vaccine rush out could give millions of people AIDS because it was intentionally contaminated at the factory by someone. Specific vaccine lots may or may not be "safe" or "effective" either individually or in combination (ever installed one piece of software that broke something else?), but any discussion about the vaccine issue needs to be a lot deeper than what is apparent here, including issues of systemic risks from a single point of failure and the practical impossibility of providing several human generations of testing in advance when any lot of vaccine is released (especially when it is rushed out). A vaccine is not like a software patch than can be backed out, or in the worst case, be reformatted away. See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40
"SV40 became a highly controversial subject after it was revealed that millions were exposed to the virus after receiving a contaminated polio vaccine."

Diseases are also continually evolving.

So much of modern medicine and modern science (as well as the holistic industries) is full of social problems that people on all sides of this question may want to do their own research and think more deeply on this topic. Some related quotes:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

What's sad is that there are low hanging fruits (and vegetables) that could reduce so much disease in the USA and globally such as vitamin D and eating more veggies. Things like that protect against all disease, including emerging ones. Those basics are being ignored by a

reducing stress, being thankful, and more simple things that help prevent, and sometimes cure, cancer: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Example: http://www.livestrong.com/article/251358-vitamin-d-and-brain-cancer/
"Another study found that three out of 11 patients with tumors went into complete remission after being treated with vitamin D."

See especially:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/brain-cancer/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

A combination of artificial ingredients in food, along with a lack of key nutrients like omega 3 fats, vitamin D, iodine, magnesium, plant phytonutrients, and so on, can really impair brain function. For more details, see for example:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-adhd.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-preventing-and-treating-adhd-in-children.html

See also for adjusting your taste preferences:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap !"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Good luck.

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
    Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."

I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.

Most (95%?) of the labor hours expended today in the USA tend to be about guarding, engaging in non-productive make-work, or is just destructive or competitively wasteful, or is trying to compensate for the other ills of the society from the previous problems. For example, most heart surgery is apparently worse than useless according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Most schooling is harming kids according to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Most farming (mainly for animal product production) is killing us and destroying our land:
http://www.ravediet.com/reviews.html
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Much policing related to drug laws is destroying our communities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Most of US military use is making us less safe:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/law-and-security/torture-on-tv/less-safe/
http://www.cato.org/store/books/power-problem-how-american-military-dominance-makes-us-less-safe-less-prosperous-less-free-har
Most computer software development is unneeded; for example IBM had a perfectly good in-house Forth they could have used as a command line interpreter rather than pay Bill Gated for MS-DOS which he bought from someone else. Most Wall Street computerized trading is of little-to-negative social value (just high stakes zero-sum horse racing and putting the whole unregulated derivatives system at risk of systemic collapse).
Most college degrees are not worth it either economically or educationally:
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/why-college-may-not-worth-133900551.html
I could go on... And on.. And on...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

So, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)

My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com

"That's certainly a different way of looking at it. Primitive people had it good because they were unaware of how bad they had it."

Well, aspects of that are true. A Forrest Gump or "Being There" sort of happiness?

"To them it was natural to bear four children in hopes that one might mature to adulthood - although a fifth child was unlikely, as the mother's chances of surviving that many childbirths were not high."

Since just to maintain the human population requires two children per woman on average, that statement be correct as it. But yes, its been said that hunter/gather societies have higher infant mortality, but it is still nowhere near as bad as you say; see:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/life-expectancy-hunter-gatherer/
"On average, 57%, 64%, and 67% of children make it to 15 years among "untouched" hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. ... Of folks who hit age 15, the percentage of hunter-gatherers who make it to age 45 is higher than the percentage of forager-horticulturalists who make it to age 45, but not by much -- 64% to 61%. Acculturated hunter-gatherers excel here; 79% of their 15 year-olds make it to age 45. You might even say the study's acculturated hunter-gatherers were essentially Primal, eating and moving traditionally while enjoying access to modern medicine. From age 45, the mean number of expected remaining years of life is 20.7, 19.8, and 24.6 for hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. Give or take a few years, they could all "expect" to live about two decades if they were still alive by age 45 â" a far cry from a "nasty, short, and brutish" existence."

Just because people living in 1800s era crowded cities in England full of disease and starvation died young, and things have improved since then, that does not mean if you go back 20,000 years that it just stays the same or keeps getting worse. Consider:
"Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology" by Clark Spencer Larsen
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

"People didn't die from the nasty age-related diseases like cancer or heart disease because they died much earlier due to injury, hardship, or violence"

It is true that many did die of injury, hardship and violence. But, our best science now tells us that cancer and heart disease are diet and lifestyle related (e.g. The China Study and others). Cancer and heart disease are not for the most part age-related (well, cancer a little). Kids are not getting cancer in the USA because they are old; they are getting cancer because of diet, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, and exposure to toxins. Old hunter/gathers essentially do not have these diseases (well, maybe some cancer but not like in the USA). Only people who start eating a Western diet get these diseases in appreciable numbers.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

"So no, I don't buy th

"That's certainly a different way of looking at it. Primitive people had it good because they were unaware of how bad they had it."

Well, aspects of that are true. A Forrest Gump or "Being There" sort of happiness?

"To them it was natural to bear four children in hopes that one might mature to adulthood - although a fifth child was unlikely, as the mother's chances of surviving that many childbirths were not high."

Since just to maintain the human population requires two children per woman on average, that statement be correct as it. But yes, its been said that hunter/gather societies have higher infant mortality, but it is still nowhere near as bad as you say; see:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/life-expectancy-hunter-gatherer/
"On average, 57%, 64%, and 67% of children make it to 15 years among "untouched" hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. ... Of folks who hit age 15, the percentage of hunter-gatherers who make it to age 45 is higher than the percentage of forager-horticulturalists who make it to age 45, but not by much -- 64% to 61%. Acculturated hunter-gatherers excel here; 79% of their 15 year-olds make it to age 45. You might even say the study's acculturated hunter-gatherers were essentially Primal, eating and moving traditionally while enjoying access to modern medicine. From age 45, the mean number of expected remaining years of life is 20.7, 19.8, and 24.6 for hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. Give or take a few years, they could all "expect" to live about two decades if they were still alive by age 45 â" a far cry from a "nasty, short, and brutish" existence."

Just because people living in 1800s era crowded cities in England full of disease and starvation died young, and things have improved since then, that does not mean if you go back 20,000 years that it just stays the same or keeps getting worse. Consider:
"Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology" by Clark Spencer Larsen
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

"People didn't die from the nasty age-related diseases like cancer or heart disease because they died much earlier due to injury, hardship, or violence"

It is true that many did die of injury, hardship and violence. But, our best science now tells us that cancer and heart disease are diet and lifestyle related (e.g. The China Study and others). Cancer and heart disease are not for the most part age-related (well, cancer a little). Kids are not getting cancer in the USA because they are old; they are getting cancer because of diet, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, and exposure to toxins. Old hunter/gathers essentially do not have these diseases (well, maybe some cancer but not like in the USA). Only people who start eating a Western diet get these diseases in appreciable numbers.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

"So no, I don't buy th

"If this was marketed at a consumer level one day, it could mean that diabetic patients wouldn't have to poke themselves on a daily basis anymore"

Or most Type-2 diabetics could just eat more vegetables and get enough vitamin D: :-)
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/diabetes-and-endocrine-diseases/diabetes-type-2/

And pregnant women and infants could get enought vitamin D and may prevent Type-1 cases:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/diabetes-and-endocrine-diseases/diabetes-type-1/

I agree with you about the risks of needles though (including to medical staff who work around sharps and could accidentally get stuck by one and get a disease like AIDS). However, ultrasound may have its own risks, too. Have you ever run a stream of water into a sink and had one drop bounce out of the sink from some weird interaction of waves giving some small amount of water a much higher velocity than the total stream? Waves can interact "constructively" in odd ways in relation to resonance and other concepts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_(wave_propagation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)

Whenever you inject macroscale energy into a system, whatever the form (heat, light, sound, etc.), you run the risk of resonance effects or other effects causing microscale damage. As another example, heat up the planet Earth, and you may get more hurricanes that rip the roofs off homes.

It's a question of risk vs. reward and for whom. Something does not have to be perfect to be better. The important thing is to fully understand the various tradeoffs and make informed decisions. It may well be that any risks from ultrasonic transdermal delivery of drugs may outweigh any risks relative to other options. Although, I'd still suggest eating better and having a healthier lifestyle and so on is, in general, better than taking drugs to paper cover up the symptoms of vegetable deficiency disease and sunlight deficiency disease. Like Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, a typical prescription is taken by most people as a "permission slip" to keep eating poorly or doing other problematical lifestyle things.

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

However this could be fixed in our society with a basic income (and/or other changes):
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"? :-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society:
"Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po

And:
http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/
"Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben

that may be the worst offenders: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/

This health disaster was made in part by a US RDA for vitamin D that was more than ten times too low for pregnant women, coupled with dermatologists and pediatricians frightening all parents about sun exposure for their children as creating a later in life risk for (generally easily treatable) skin cancer. Those two things together, along with an increasingly indoor lifestyle from all the fancy gadgets we have, have cause a expensive health disaster of unprecedented proportions in all industrialized countries. And it is not just autism, it is also cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and others. Diet is part of that too though, but lack of sunlight (or proper supplements) is the single worst part that is easiest to fix.

The La Leche league (pro-breastfeeding) also contributed to the disaster with saying "breast is best" while ignoring that if the mother was vitamin D deficient, she could not pass enough on to her children via breast milk. The have recently been improving on that score, but only after a vast number of children were harmed. Vitamin D was probably one of the few things infant formula got right (as bad as formula is in many other ways).

So, in that sense it was the most conscientious up-to-date parents, listening to their doctors and the government, that have been hardest hit by this disaster. The parents who did not pay attention to the dermatologists, who got sun tans themselves, who let their kids play in the sun a lot anyway like the parents did when they were young, their kids were probably better off in this sense. That is not exactly the irony you mentioned (various synthetic chemicals can indeed be bad for the health, especially as endocrine disruptors), but it is related.

See also:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

By the way, 100 years ago pretty much most of what most people ate was organic and vegetarian, so it is hard to call that kind of diet "modern" or a "fad". It is precisely because it is what humans are adapted for which is why it is healthiest to eat that way. What is modern and a fad is eating lots of fatty factory-farmed meat raised on pesticide-laden grains and eating lots of refined starches and sugars and eating stuff with artificial colors and such. In the past, only the very richest could afford that fancy stuff, and eating that way produced the diseases of kings, like heart disease, diabetes, gout, cancer, etc.. Now almost everyone in the industrialized world suffers from the diseases of kings, with most of us stuck in "the pleasure trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Thanks for the additional feedback, even as you are still discounting that this also reflects what Fuhrman and his colleagues have seen in clinical practice across a broad range of disease, and that there is essentially very-little-to-no funding to trial non-patentable medical interventions. Many medical interventions do not have "gold standard" double blind scientific support, and often as not it seems such expensive studies can't be replicated anyway -- even in the rare cases when someone can get funding just to duplicate an existing study,.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/139231/majority-of-landmark-cancer-studies-cannot-be-replicated
http://www.businessinsider.com/reproducibility-initiative-study-replication-2012-8

Or:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
        "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."

To raise the stakes a bit to a disease that affects many more people than Fibromyalgia, I'd be curious what you thought about the following cited study and Fuhrman's comments on the implications for the scientific basis of the multi-billion dollar industry of cardiac surgery vs. nutritional interventions?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner.
Trikalinos TA, Alsheikh-Ali AA, Tatsioni A, et al. Percutaneous coronary interventions for non-acute coronary artery disease: a quantitative 20-year synopsis and a network meta-analysis. Lancet 2009; 373(9667):911-918."

A link on that study:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60319-6/abstract
"Sequential innovations in the catheter-based treatment of non-acute coronary artery disease showed no evidence of an effect on death or myocardial infarction when compared with medical therapy."

I wish I had known all this over a decade ago before my father went through an invasive angioplasty and stent emplacement procedure and died some few months afterwards of a heart attack it was supposed to prevent. After reading that study, would you let an MD perform an angioplasty procedure and put a stent in you or a loved one under typical circumstances for heart disease? Or might you instead opt for aggressive nutritional intervention like Fuhrman does with his patients? Or maybe do something else?

http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-dr-joel-fuhrman.html
"Most vegans fall short in that they follow the same suboptimal and outmoded nutritional recommendations as omnivores, utilizing grains or white potatoes as the major source of calories in the diet and wind up eating a diet low in high phytochemical foods such as green vegetables and raw nuts and seeds. They do not understand that 90 calories from a pretzel or white potato does not have the nutrient richness of 90 calories from a kiwi or red kidney beans. Without the knowledge of nutrient density they are eating in the dark and not optimizing their longevity."

Many become deficient in Omega-3s, Iodine, and B12. Of course, when a meat eater dies at 65 of a heart attack, we commonly blamd the the "genes". When a Vegan dies for whatever reason, we blame the "diet". In reality, it is an interactio of diet, lifestyle, and genes. As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us "weak links", but whether they get pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle.

We need a new term for someone who eats a lot of vegetables and other high-nutrient foods and avoids junk foods. Dr. Fuhrman coined the term "Nutritarian" for that, but it is not in widespread use. And as he says, eating lots of vegetables and a little meat is much healthier than a diet that is full of refined grains and processed sugar.

Thanks for your insightful post, including the humor and insights into psychology and health. :-)

On finding balance, see stuff on "the pleasure trap", which can make balance hard to achieve sometimes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Humans were not adapted to a world full of refined sugar, refined starch, salt everywhere, easy-to-get fats, and so on. Our natural inclinations are geared to a world where such are rare and we have to work physically at a moderate level every day to get something to eat.

Yet the modern food industry profits from just giving us what our genes say we should have as much of as we can because it is historically rare. But now that is is not rare, it is literally destroying our health. And pleading for individual self-control goes against our genetically-based survival strategies to eat the richest food first. Thus in industrialized countries, we now almost all suffer from the "diseases of kings" from the past cause by such a diet -- diabetes, gout, heart disease, stroke, dementia, etc... And even autism in the case of people (especially pregnant women) who no longer need to go outdoors in the sunshine for many hours every day.

And sadly, on extremes and addiction:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. ... Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ..."

Maybe we need to find healthy addictions before the unhealthy ones find us?

...both of the library variety and the hands-on variety in his practice. He cites thousands of reference sin his book "Eat to Live" and has had thousands of patients over his career.

Researchers at Harvard University have seconded the vitamin D deficiency hypotheses as a potential cause of autism.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2009/new-harvard-paper-on-autism/

Yet your post got modded +5 insightful. Still so much mis-info on slashdot about health... But I still feel it is slowly improving. And you are reasonable to be skeptical.

You might like this article critical of Dr. Hyman:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/09/08/dr-mark-hyman-mangles-autism-science-on/

None-the-less, if you truly are a hard-working skeptic and not just a lazy skeptic-of-just-new-ideas, the entire scientific enterprise has failed in several big ways in relation to medicine, as I quote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."

So, it is hard to move beyond that. Look at what happened to the guy who suggested doctors wash their hands after dissecting corpses before they then deliver babies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
".. As a result, his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other more subtle factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.[7]:9[Note 6]
Specifically, Semmelweis's claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later, when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others.
During 1848, Semmelweis widened the scope of his washing protocol, to include all instruments coming in contact with patients in labour, and used mortality rates time series to document his success in virtually eliminating puerperal fever from the hospital ward. ...
In 1865 JÃnos Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution. ... He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, possibly caused by the beating. ..."

Cold fusion has gotten the cold shoulder too for twenty years...
http://pesn.com/2012/09/06/9602177_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_September6/

Who are the real charlatans of medicine?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who

http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

BTW, eating more veggies can help with the some of the disease you mentioned:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx

The only study (one study) quoted from that Timecubey article of yours is in

BMC Complement Altern Med 2001

I don't have access to the study (unless I brain farted and couldn't find the free access link) and the hell if I'm paying money to get a paper from a third-rate journal, but I can tell you what I can find from the abstract.

The study was conducted on 32 people; 15 were switched to a vegan diet, and 18 were kept on their preexisting omnivorous diet. The groups differed from one-another at the beginning of the study in terms of pain and urine sodium, which is a significant red flag considering that many of they tout are directly related to one or the other. There is no comparison to other diets. There is no comparison to healthier omnivorous diets. The abstract states that many of the patients in the study were overweight, implying that the preexisting diets in many cases may have been unhealthy in general and that generally improving the quality of the diets may have been more important than the fact the new diet was vegan.

And hell, that's just what I got from the abstract. At best this is one of those "more research is required" papers, it's certainly not enough to suggest that such a radical dietary switch is a reasonable treatment plan. Moreover, it's so oddly specific in switching from an omnivorous over to a raw vegan diet, and being published in an alt-med journal, that it sounds like it was intended to be (as the article you quoted did) treated as more than it is. And the alt-med crowd (pretends to) wonder why people call them pseudoscientists.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/

BTW, eating more veggies can help with the some of the disease you mentioned:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"Fibromyalgia is a disease highlighted by discomfort, pain and tenderness all over the body. The cause is unknown. Typical treatments involve pain medication and anti-depressants used to aid sleep. Better sleep has been shown to be of benefit.
    I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. Acrylamides are toxic substances produced by baking and frying carbohydrates. The diet-style I recommend for fibromylagia patients is rich in natural plant foods especially organic berries and green vegetables and restricted in animal products and baked grains. Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are encouraged. Fibromyalgia patients routinely get well, and they get well quickly.
    Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] Though the researchers do not seem to have the experience and understanding of why what they are doing works, the effects are dramatic.
    Similar to the nutritional treatment of most diseases, it is not one photochemical compound or the removal of one toxic habit that works; it is the symphonic combination of removing multiple nutritional stresses along with the addition of multiple beneficial nutritional compounds that results in consistent and sustained results. The high intake of polyphenolic compounds such as quercetin, myricetin and kaempherol, and the high intake of lignans and bioflavonoids are just a few of the hundreds of nutrients with unpronounceable names that can only be obtained in large amounts from a diet rich in natural plant foods."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/

It sounds from those two sources like many cases of autism could be prevented by higher vitamin D levels of pregnant women and better diet, but in the first few years of life after birth, some aspects of autism can be reversed with vitamin D supplements and good diet. How far and for how many kids is still an open question.

Also of general interest on eating healthier:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/food-industry_b_1559920.html
https://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
    Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

From: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

When I heard about his treatment a couple weeks ago, I tried to figure out how to contact him, but to no avail. Neil Armstrong benefited from the best of 1960s technology, but sadly did not benefit from the best of 21st century medicine (aggressive nutritional intervention). Sad. We could have had him healthy and vibrant and as a witness to the better side of human kind for another decade or two. Instead some heart surgeons can afford to make a few more payments on luxury cars and big houses.

We just lost Martin Fleischmann (just as LENR aka "cold fusion" is resurging) probably from the same kind of widespread nutirional ignorance in the medical profession.

Some attempts by me to try to help with improving human health:
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Something to keep in mind:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challengin

"Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Not having your kid eat whole mainly nutritious foods like Dr. Joel Fuhrman outlines in "Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right" and "Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body's Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free", or not breastfeeding for the first two to four years, or not getting plentiful sleep, or not getting lots of outdoor exercise in the sunlight plus supplemental vitamin D, or not getting enough iodine and omega-3s, or not homeschooling and working from home to avoid disease transmission centers like schools and workplaces, or not living in a relatively stress-free home exposes mine to potentially life-threatening disease because yours has an immune system working less than optimally. If you think that the (vanishingly small) risk of complications from living a healthy lifestyle or short-term difficulties of breaking out of the "pleasure trap" your family is stuck in ( http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx ) is more important than my (well-nourished) kid's risk of contracting a disease that has mutated inside your (poorly fed) kid.. well, you're bad at math. And, a selfish short-sighted asshole.

I've never really understood why it is that something you were going to do anyway becoming mandatory means that you should automatically resist it. You've lost nothing except the choice you weren't going to make, and society has benefited. Making eating well and getting good sleep and playing outdoors in the sunshine and so forth mandatory is not the same as Hitler storming across Europe, get a grip. If the slope were really that slippery, we would have fallen down into the abyss a long long time ago.

Obligatory car analogy: Sure, you have the right to drive around with faulty brakes. At least in this state, you do not need working brakes to pass the yearly inspection. You can argue that you're risking nobody except yourself.. except, you're not. Your passengers, and the other people on the roads that you slam into because you can't stop, would disagree.

Part of living in a civilized society is recognizing when your actions have consequences for others that have no say in the matter. Yes, you can make the choice not to feed your kid really well or to send your kid daily to a disease transmission center like a public or private school. But realize that your actions have consequences for others. (It may come as a shock to you that there are other people in the world besides you and your child.) One of the major problems we (USA) have as a society is the attitude of "I've got mine, fuck you." Take responsibility for your choice; keep your kid away from mine. If your idealism leads to my kid's death.. then it's not worth protecting. Die for your ideals if you want; it's your life to throw away."

FTFY.