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Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems?
Hugh Pickens writes "Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There's been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. 'Human beings are not really individuals; they're communities of organisms,' says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. 'This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.' Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon's lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria's far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. 'We've all been trained to think of ourselves as human,' says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears 'we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn't thought about.'"
Both, of course. Why can't we be an eco system that is also a self-contained individual? Arguably, we could say the same thing about Earth itself (guess who's cancer?)
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While the study of our relationship with the bacteria and other microbes that live inside us is interesting and valid its kinda dumb to talk about ourselves as ecosystems. We are another life form, that has a symbiotic relationship with those microbes in a larger ecosystem.
We don't need words like symbiotic if we are going to think of ourselves as an ecosystem. Also just about any animal or plant made of more than a few cells is going to be an ecosystem under this implied definition. I am not sure how exactly we want to define ecosystem but something a little more complex than "any thing which something lives inside" seems appropriate.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I'm not an obesity apologist (or at least, I don't think I am), but I think it's important to recognize that not everyone who is obese just eats cheeseburgers all day. In fact, my diet is pretty piss poor, but I'm thin. Similarly, I know obese vegetarians.
It's how much energy you consume vs how much you use which decide if you get fatter, stay the same or thinner.
Not the quality of the food.
10000 kcals of spinach and you will most likely get more fat.
500 kcals from chocolate and you'd lose weight.
Also, while I'm vegan, not all vegetarian food is good food, even less the best food. Omnivores can eat everything so they have a wider selection and can get all the benefits from vegetarian food AND other food.
Quite a lot of (teen) vegetarians eat bad.
Given a few years after installation, carpets are an entire ecosystem, themselves!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
1% of the population has a medtial condition that causes them to be overweight.
I wish I had that condition. The obesity is a downside, but the fabulous good luck it brings is more than enough compensation. Just look at concentration and refugee camps or famines in Africa: nobody with this disease is ever caught up in the suffering.
Demons, bacteria, what's the real diffrence. Both are things that you can't observe with the naked eye that you have to take a shaman's word for existing. You can sometimes see the effects of them, like milk going sour, or meat rotting, but you can't directly observe either without mystical tools.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Alternative medicine has been aware of this fact (that the microorganisms that live in our bodies are a normal part of our physiology) for ages.
First, modern medicine has been "aware" that they were there and had beneficial effects for decades also. There are two things you're missing:
1. The discovery is not that they help digest food and nutrients, but they might help determine how your body uses it
2. The difference between "aware of this fact" and actually doing a reproducible study to help determine whether this "fact" is true.
My only real problem with alternative medicine is that it doesn't care what is true, just what we believe to be true.
Your post is rich. Yes, your body is so unique that it does the opposite of what everyone else does. And of course your body is much more efficient. I love the excuses as to why you're overweight.
Let me hit you with a clue stick; yes, certain things such as timing does matter. However, at the end of the day, if your intake greatly outstripes your expendature, you WILL gain weight. You can space your meals all you want (and really should be), but it won't make up for the intake problem.
Here's my take on your post. Either you are eating 1500 calories a day, which means your lean body weight should be about 136 (really small for the average male), or, as I suspect... your lean body weight is higher, and you're putting your body into starvation mode. So it stores as much as possible. The other alternative is you really have no idea how much you're eating, and are consuming much much more. So... do you know your % of body fat, and are you actually measuring out your food (and being honest?) Right now, I'm leaning toward the latter... why? Well, lets move on..
The likely reason your BPM goes up after eating is that you're eating crap. Lots of simple carbs; white pasta, white bread, white potatoes, some kind of caffinated drink. The simple sugars give you a rush... but also a crash later (unless you follow up with more junk).
As for exercising goes... yes, eating before you exercise puts energy into your blood. That's why when I body build I get complex carbs and protein at least 30 minutes before a workout. That is the point of eating, after all, is to get energy to keep living. It'd be suprising if you ate and got more and more run down. I wouldn't advise eating less than 30 minutes before though.. your heart rate nonsense aside, if you are digesting your blood vessels around your gut dialate to pick up nutrients and remove waste (and provide energy for digestion), which means blood vessels around your muscles must constrict. So you're not going to get as much from your workout.
In all seriousness though... you're not unique, and I bet if you talked to a personal trainer and HONESTLY measured and tracked what you're eating, you'd be able to change (if that's what you want).
Right. Frankly, I'm tired of people clinging to the old wives tale that it's a simple equation of [number of calories in food eaten] - [number of calories expended in exercise] = [number of calories stored as fat]. It sounds nice, and gives you all the reason you want to hate on the fatties, but it flies in the face of lots of good science.
Just to stay really basic, we know that some food takes more work to digest than others. But even ignoring that, it's been shown pretty conclusively (and you'll notice if you just look around) that two different people on the same diet and exercise regiment can have different body mass indexes. Two people can just process food differently. Given a diet of X calories, one person's body might naturally produce more muscle, while another produces fat, and a third person might seem to just shed those calories completely. There has been some research that suggests that it's possible for your body to basically choose not to hold on to excess calories.
It's even pretty clear that the same person's body can react differently to essentially the same diet and exercise. High stress levels and sleep deprivation can cause your body to respond differently to the same intake. Hormone levels can make a big difference. And yes, I've read about a few different studies that suggest that the bacteria in your gut that helps you digest the food can have an impact.
Of course having a good diet and exercising regularly has an impact on your weight and overall health. However, there's a lot more involved.
Newton's laws of gravity are not really right either. They didn't know about relativity back then. But Newton's laws are are good enough approximations for things ordinary people are doing in their day.
Same thing goes for how to lose weight or avoid being fat. Eating fewer calories and burning more calories by exercising isn't the complete picture. Some folks have genetic predispositions for either high or low metabolisms. Some build muscle easier than others. And now we find out that some folks have different microbial components that can influence this.
But none of that changes the basic advice you should give people, which is if you want to be fit (or at least not fat), then eat right and exercise regularly.
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy. It's in nobody's interest to make fat people feel like being fat is just their lot in life, rather than an obstacle they could overcome with hard work and persistence.
It is true that body weight is a very complex issue an different people will face different challenges. None of that, including the fact that one person may extract more usable calories from the same food intake as another person, negates the fact that if your total intake is X calories and you burn X+1 calories then you will lose weight.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
No, the equation does simplify to:
calories in - calories out = net calories
Fat doesn't spontaneously come in to existence, it comes from what you eat. Similarly, exercise requires energy which also doesn't spontaneously come in to existence, it comes from what you eat.
Now, it is true that people metabolise things differently, which is why two people with the same diet and exercise can have different BMI. That, however, does not allow the human body to defy the basic laws of energy. If a person eats fewer calories than expend, they WILL lose weight.
This is a great book about how free-living organisms (like ourselves) have evolved alongside parasitic organisms (like bacteria). I found it interesting that the scientists that the author interviewed all look at free-living organisms not as individuals, but as miniature eco-systems for parasites. Several scientists said "I don't see a mouse (or frog, or fish) anymore, I see a bag of parasites." A little gruesome, but true. http://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatures/dp/074320011X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239818586&sr=8-1
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