I'm posting here to hold myself publicly accountable for taking on this challenge (starting yesterday), when I generated 80 bugs (many of these are likely to be broken down into more smaller bugs, so I'm inclined to be satisfied despite not reaching the magic total of 100). In fact, posting this comment is the last bug I'm tackling today to complete today's Yoda Timer exercise to kick off my being a more active member of this community.
Truly a joy to read! Thank you.
To what extent can we identify subsets of the system corresponding to "that which is being optimized" and "that which is doing the optimization"?
The information theoretic measure of individuality attempts to answer exactly this type of question.
From this view, a set of components (the system) is decomposed into two subsets (subsystem + environment). The proposed subsystem is assigned a degree of individuality by measuring the amount of information it shares with its future state, optionally conditioned on its environment. This leads to 2 types of individuality. The first type says that a proposed subsystem is individualistic to the degree that the subsystem is predictive of its future state after accounting for the information in the environment. The second type captures the notion of inseparability by assigning a high degree of individuality to subsystems that are strongly coupled with their environment in such a way that neither the subsystem nor environment alone are predictive of the next state of the subsystem.
For example, considering the set of atoms making up the space containing the robot-optimizer and vase, the set of robot-atoms retains the desired properties of an optimizer, and is also highly individualistic in the first sense since knowing the state of the robot atoms tells you a lot about their next state, but knowing about the set of non-robot atoms tells you very little about the state of the robot. On the other hand, considering the set of atoms making up the tree, the system as a whole is an optimizing system, but no individual subset of atoms accomplishes the target of the larger optimizing system.
I owe my current health good to one especially shady anti-seed oil theorist on twitter.
Tl;dr: For me, one key problem with seed oils is their likelihood of being contaminated with glyphosate, commonly known as the weedkiller Round-Up and increasingly used as a pre-harvest dessicant (also widely recognized as a microbiome disruptor).
As an n=1 case study, I don't claim that glyphosate is the cause of Western disease, only that glyphosate and other microbiome-disruptors seem more likely to be a primary causes of western disease than any other reason discussed in this article and that I have compelling evidence that glyphosate was almost surely the direct cause of my problems.
What follows is my own experience attempting to troubleshoot my health problems.
- After moving to the UK, I adapted my diet based on local availability. I mostly cook my own food, sticking better than most people around me to the principles of healthy eating listed towards the end of this article. I had no history of gut issues, no problems eating out.
- I started getting an acid reflux feeling after meals.
- Over about 6 months, this increased in severity and neither readily google-able tips nor advice from my NHS doctor helped. During this time, the severity of post-meal symptoms drastically increased - very bad acid reflux, brain fog, sluggishness, a weird tingling in my shoulders.
- At this point, literally anything I ate or drank, except water, would trigger these symptoms. The only way I could still hold my life together and be productive for some part of the day was to eat a small breakfast, be zonked for a ~2 hours, skip all food until eating one big dinner and accept being zonked for ~4 hours.
- I tried an multi-week elimination diet several times with several permutations, with no luck.
- I was prescribed a PPI for a month, which resolved my symtoms for a month, after stopping the PPI, my symptoms gradually returned to the same severity over the following month.
- During a covid-lockdown twitter doomscroll, I came across a shady anti-seed oil campaigner. Despite trusting exactly none of the words he had written, I realized I had never tried eliminating seed oils. The timing even kinda lined up, since I had switched to using rapeseed oil (aka canola oil, for the US audience) about 6 months before.
- So, I tried cutting out rapeseed oil and, voila, not even 2 days later I was 80% better. A week later and I was back to near normal.
- This could easily have been the end of the story, but now that the main source was removed, I began to notice sporadic instances of a milder version of my previous symptoms returning (I called this "pre-flux").
- I started a list of foods that reliably brought on the pre-flux symptoms. There was initially no rhyme or reason to this list, for every candidate food I could find a near-equivalent that caused no problems (oatmeal A but not oatmeal B, bread C but not bread D, olive oil E but not olive oil F, the list goes on...). Most restaurant meals caused pre-flux, and one week when family visited I ate out most days and symptoms escalated to proper acid reflux and the other accompanying symptoms. I also visited the US once for a week and had a similar experience while eating out most of the time. The only frustratingly vague trend I got out of this was that foods that were branded to have healthier "vibes" were somewhat more likely to be fine.
- Then one day, someone told me that glyphosate is used as a dessicant and commonly contaminates crops. That evening I cross-checked my list and, lo and behold, this explanation cleanly and exactly separated my list.
Based on this experience, I'm confident that I'm now intolerant to both glyphosate and to rapeseed oil. These are separate things. My glyphosate intolerance seems to be aggravated proportional to consumption. On the other hand, I react to the tinest amount of rapeseed oil - I can't count the number of times I had a pre-flux feeling, reviewed what I'd eaten recently, and found rapeseed oil buried in the ingredients list. I suspect that I had too much rapeseed oil and my body somehow connected two and two and made me specifically allergic to this. This strong response made me fairly sure that most cheap olive oils in both the US and the UK are (probably illegally) cut with rapeseed oil. It's been ~2 years now since I pinpointed the issue and the longer I avoid these, the fewer issues I come across when I accidentally eat either glyphosate or rapeseed oil. There are at least two plausible mechanisms I'm aware of for this - one, my microbiome is changing in response to the new selection pressures I'm applying (glyphosate is a known microbiome disruptor) and two, the immune system is in some sense forgetting or relaxing it's response as a result of not being further provoked.
As a result of this, I have new rules of thumb for healthy eating:
- If it can be harvested dry, opt for organic (almost every grain and seed)
- For olive oil, prefer single origin or just buy the "nicest looking" one that is not a major brand.
For those more research inclined, the search terms "glyphosate as a dessicant" will turn up charts produced by farmers for farmers advising on the use of glyphosate sprayed on crops immediately before harvest in order to dry crops faster and also boost yields. It should also turn up charts of glyphosate use over time. I don't think chemical would explain stuff much older than the 1970s, but I think it's a reasonable contender for the acceleration of the trend around this time.