Re:Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes ...
by mschuster91 on Thursday February 24, 2022 @02:34PM
(#30459161)
> 1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.
We do not experience torpor naturally. That does not exclude that you can blast a human body with the right amount of hormones or substances that act like ones and artificially induce torpor in humans. NASA has been researching ways to do that for years now [1], given that even a small amount of saved resources per human on a months-long space trip saves a lot of resources in total, not to mention the potential of a reduced metabolic rate also protecting the traveling humans from cosmic radiation-induced damage.
As for "how to induce torpor", well, we don't even know what exactly causes it in animals. We are just guessing - and we are at the same time also noticing that wide swaths of the population show up with a lot of health issues that used to be either rare or mostly spread on older people. Auto-immune diseases (allergies, diabetes, neurodermitis), precocious puberty, cancers of all kinds, obesity in young people, circulatory issues, Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, just to point out the most obvious and most-researched. And since there are only three major things that changed over the last hundred years from the previous default - our food, the introduction of heavy industry, plastics and pollution, and our way of living under modern capitalism (your ordinary medieval farmer did not work 40 hour weeks for the entire year for his whole life) - it is not surprising that correlations appear there. The key thing is to find out if the correlation also has a corresponding causation!
We do not experience torpor naturally. That does not exclude that you can blast a human body with the right amount of hormones or substances that act like ones and artificially induce torpor in humans. NASA has been researching ways to do that for years now [1], given that even a small amount of saved resources per human on a months-long space trip saves a lot of resources in total, not to mention the potential of a reduced metabolic rate also protecting the traveling humans from cosmic radiation-induced damage.
As for "how to induce torpor", well, we don't even know what exactly causes it in animals. We are just guessing - and we are at the same time also noticing that wide swaths of the population show up with a lot of health issues that used to be either rare or mostly spread on older people. Auto-immune diseases (allergies, diabetes, neurodermitis), precocious puberty, cancers of all kinds, obesity in young people, circulatory issues, Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, just to point out the most obvious and most-researched. And since there are only three major things that changed over the last hundred years from the previous default - our food, the introduction of heavy industry, plastics and pollution, and our way of living under modern capitalism (your ordinary medieval farmer did not work 40 hour weeks for the entire year for his whole life) - it is not surprising that correlations appear there. The key thing is to find out if the correlation also has a corresponding causation!
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita...