He was this highly intelligent dude that lived 500 years ago. I was looking at his painting and thinking wow dude, I'm sure you were smart, but five-year hundred years ago, people had all kinds of crazy ideas. For starters, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Then, they had all these alchemists (including no less Isaac Newton) trying to make gold out of everything and poisoning everybody with mercury in the process. And doctors? Well lets just say that I'm sure you wouldn't want to be under the care of any physician or surgeon back then.
After a little San Pedro Mescal, I commenced myself to a wee bit of thinking, to wit: what would people 500 years from now think about our ideas and beliefs? We hardly know the first thing about the complex interplay of the human body. Scientist are just now starting to study the gut microbiome which may be one of the primary players in health even though for centuries we have been clobbering it with anti-biotics, vitamins, and lord knows what not. Similarly, there is a whole unexplored world of fungi in the soil that we have been similarly altering without really knowing what we are doing with new fangled crop sciences, herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.
Nature has been evolving for millions of years. It is perhaps naive to think that the recent scientific "advancements" in crop science in the past century or so would not be without repercussions when they have altered what has been going on for eons. What would you rather eat? Something from McDonald's or a diet from Japan or one of those islands off the coast of Italy where 50% of the population live to be over 100? It is probably not an accident that the longest living people on this planet eat a diet similar to what their great great great great great grandparents were eating and not the recent fad diet coming from a "nutritionist" in the U.S.
I envision a future where there are all sorts of sophisticated monitors in our body to maximize our own potential by recommending that we eat the right foods in the right amount at the right time-- then, of course, the inevitable sip of a bit of wine and all the programming goes out the window. Its the old maxim: "whats the point of having a rule if you can't break it?"
Nature has been evolving for millions of years. It is perhaps naive to think that the recent scientific "advancements" in crop science in the past century or so would not be without repercussions when they have altered what has been going on for eons. What would you rather eat? Something from McDonald's or a diet from Japan or one of those islands off the coast of Italy where 50% of the population live to be over 100? It is probably not an accident that the longest living people on this planet eat a diet similar to what their great great great great great grandparents were eating and not the recent fad diet coming from a "nutritionist" in the U.S.
I envision a future where there are all sorts of sophisticated monitors in our body to maximize our own potential by recommending that we eat the right foods in the right amount at the right time-- then, of course, the inevitable sip of a bit of wine and all the programming goes out the window. Its the old maxim: "whats the point of having a rule if you can't break it?"
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