An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them

Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by timr on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:34PM (#50322235)

> It also had more arginine, an amino acid that children need to grow.

My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.

Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by someothherguyy on Saturday October 31, 2026 @11:57PM (#50322570)

i don't have a PhD like you, but aren't some amino acids essential in young mammals and conditionally essential in adult mammals?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by timr on Sunday November 01, 2026 @12:29AM (#50322713)

Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this is an extremely limited claim (i.e. unborn babies / neonatal supplementation, or children with genetic defects), and not something you can even remotely generalize to "children" as a whole. The way we teach this in biochem 101 is "arginine is conditionally essential", with the "conditional" being "periods of stress or sickness".

In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by morsch on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:19AM (#50323372)

So what you are saying is they forgot the word "small" in "arginine is an amino acid small children need to grow".

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by tgv on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:22AM (#50323630)

More like: we all need arginine, but our body makes it, so we don't need to supplement it. Wikipedia writes this:

Preterm infants are unable to synthesize arginine internally, making the amino acid nutritionally essential for them. Most healthy people do not need to supplement with arginine because it is a component of all protein-containing foods and can be synthesized in the body from glutamine via citrulline.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by cma on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:21AM (#50323627)

I have no idea if he is right about what he claimed, but can small really stand in for prematurely born or carrying relevant rare genetic mutation?

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by dopa42365 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @12:34AM (#50322733)

https://www.biochemical-pathways.org/metabolic-pathways.pdf

Your body is one hell of a lab.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by eternauta3k on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:03AM (#50323074)

Hopefully it's just my lazy reading/thinking, but this part of the article feels like scientism to me. Picking out some random micronutrients this strain has more of, praising that it has less gluten. It's just using "science" to justify whatever they already wanted to do.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by unsloppable on Sunday November 01, 2026 @04:34AM (#50323947)

I was waiting for them to explain what any of the real benefits were.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by p1anecrazy on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:56AM (#50323279)

Thanks for explaining this, reading this in the article made me concerned as a parent.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by tgv on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:29AM (#50323657)

Don't worry too much. If you follow basic food recommendations, even those given out 60 years ago, your child can grow up fine. Even if you only follow it just half the time. Basically, all those articles have to be taken with a grain of salt. What kills you is: smoking, drinking, tanning, long periods of only junk food. And those seem to affect you mainly after age 25. Children are remarkably sturdy.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by adrian_b on Sunday November 01, 2026 @04:48AM (#50324028)

Arginine is a "conditionally essential" amino-acid, i.e. there are circumstances when the internal production is insufficient, so it must exist in food.

The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by timr on Sunday November 01, 2026 @04:50AM (#50324039)

The times when internal production is insufficient are basically neonatal and diseases. Humans, in general, do not need to supplement arginine.

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by hnmullany on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:56AM (#50334878)

When you first read a popular science article that garbles a subject you've developed expertise in, you begin to wonder how much of what you believe to be scientific truth is bullshit (because you learned it from a popular science article.)

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Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic a... by timr on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:26AM (#50339244)

Well, you sort of expect the pop-science press to be crap. It's when you read papers in Science and Nature and come to the same conclusion that you start to go galaxy brain.

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