Is Dark Chocolate Net Positive? (Heavy Metals)

[integral]

3 hours ago, Michael569 said:

Has someone hurt you @integral? What's up with all of your content lately? 

lmao I think it’s pseudoscience, if it has theobromine then chocolate is a performance enhancer that has fatigue consequence.

Strategically take it when you need to perform, but not every day.

Looking at chocolate like tasty/nourishing food is the wrong mindset, it’s a powerful stimulant for mood and wakefulness/coherence.

Edited July 2, 2024 by integral

[Michael569]

9 minutes ago, integral said:

I think

That's not good enough of an epistemic evaluation . 

10 minutes ago, integral said:

it’s pseudoscience

pseudoscience is not synonym for bullshit. Pseudoscience means there isn't enough science yet which leaves a lot of room for uneducated interpretation, this has been happening all the time throughout the history of humanity.  It can also mean that there is actually so much science that the public is left overwhelmed and people just sort of make up their own pseudoscientific conclusions based on hearsay, feeling, marketing and guessing. Pseudoscience can also be a source of future science for example an accumulation of personal anecdotes can be a stage of of clinical trial design eventually.

Personal anecodes become collected as Case Studies -> those are being collected by doctors as case series -> sufficient amount of case series may trigger first experimental case control studies or cross sectional studies -> with enough data and time and money, these may progress into retrospective cohort studies and later on with more funding and data into prospective studies -> eventually RCTs and if we get enough of everything, the data will be systematically reviewed and meta-analysed.

At that stage because so much has been collected, we can have faith that what the science shows is probably more reliable than hunches and guesses although it does not mean it has 100% correct answers, just makes it more likely that the true effect has probably been captured relatively precisely....with more time it will either be narrowed down further or actually the direction may start changing. 

12 minutes ago, integral said:

, if it has theobromin

Who says all health benefits are coming down to theobromin, I think its just one of many compounds that are responsible for the effects. Kinda like green tea. There are probably hundreds of polyphenols in cocoa that we have no knowldge on. 

29 minutes ago, integral said:

Looking at chocolate like tasty/nourishing food is the wrong mindset, it’s a powerful stimulant for mood and wakefulness/coherence.

To me , DC falls into a category of processed foods that are beneficial and their benefits outweight the cost until they start tipping you over your caloric limit, causing weight gain and at that point they become more harmful than beneficial. Some other examples of such category would be: seed oils, nut butters, plant butters, plant-based meat replacements, wholegrain bakery, starchy foods etc/. 

[Yimpa]

2 hours ago, Michael569 said:

@Leo Gura if you don't stop dispensing free samples of your home made Gator-Rade to the members of this forum I'm reporting the forum to big Don when he wins the next election.👮🏻

 

[Michael569]

@Yimpa that must have been the worst porn add I've ever (not) seen 

[Thought Art]

It seems dark chocolate has many potential health benefits like heart health, etc but who knows

[Yimpa]

I eat dark chocolate in moderation. It’s expensive, so that helps me not over consume it. I can probably save money on the powder, but that shit tastes nasty.

[integral]

On 7/2/2024 at 8:47 AM, Michael569 said:

pseudoscience is not synonym for bullshit. Pseudoscience means there isn't enough science yet which leaves a lot of room for uneducated interpretation, this has been happening all the time throughout the history of humanity.  It can also mean that there is actually so much science that the public is left overwhelmed and people just sort of make up their own pseudoscientific conclusions based on hearsay, feeling, marketing and guessing. Pseudoscience can also be a source of future science for example an accumulation of personal anecdotes can be a stage of of clinical trial design eventually.

Personal anecodes become collected as Case Studies -> those are being collected by doctors as case series -> sufficient amount of case series may trigger first experimental case control studies or cross sectional studies -> with enough data and time and money, these may progress into retrospective cohort studies and later on with more funding and data into prospective studies -> eventually RCTs and if we get enough of everything, the data will be systematically reviewed and meta-analysed.

At that stage because so much has been collected, we can have faith that what the science shows is probably more reliable than hunches and guesses although it does not mean it has 100% correct answers, just makes it more likely that the true effect has probably been captured relatively precisely....with more time it will either be narrowed down further or actually the direction may start changing. 

It's perfectly fine that polyphenols have been shown to protect your DNA, all that's good and fine. Theobromin will upregulate all of your adenosine receptors, how that will function within the whole system is now you're introducing something in there that will cause the system to use more energy. All of these studies focus on one facet, do I think dark chocolate is some kind of healthy beverage that you should take every day no especially if you have any impairment in your sleep because your adenosine receptors are going to be overly stimulated and out of balance with poor sleep schedule or whatever else you're doing. Bryan Johnson can take dark chocolate in probably a healthy way because none of his adenosine receptors matter if they're being stimulated or not because his sleep is perfect. For the average person dark chocolate will not benefit them. Each individual's system is completely different and dark chocolate is an obvious performance enhancer so it's completely unnecessary to introduce polyphenols in the form of dark chocolate just use a different substance. 

If you have any kind of mental issue where how you relate to your body on a daily basis create excessive cortisol then coffee and dark chocolate will exasperate that and cause excessive stress excessive deterioration and catabolism within your system. For the majority of people they don't need these stimulates in their system. Even saying all that there's these clear exception of people who literally just drink coffee smoke cigarettes and live to 120, because not eating is apparently 10 times more effective than anything else.

Fruitarians are stacked with flavonoids and polyphenols and their hair turns gray faster than anyone else. We can't use the studies to predict the effects in larger systems without thinking about the whole like it just doesn't make any sense. 

Science focuses on narrow single facets within a system. So then you need to mix and match every study all together to then pick the correct food and we decide that olive oil is probably it, except if you can't digest fats properly forget about that, which is half the population.

If we really think about the whole picture it doesn't matter at all what you eat it matters more when you eat how often you eat and your overall strategy for health. What you eat is the least important factor.

You're better off determining what is true completely indirectly then using these ridiculous studies to figure out the perfect thing to to mix and match together to eat. If you look at your sleep Behavior and you eat foods that maximize your sleep then you're probably better off figuring out what foods are healthier than other Foods. Looking at food through a microscope is not how you figure out if food is healthy or not.

Edited July 10, 2024 by integral

[Michael569]

17 hours ago, integral said:

Theobromin will upregulate all of your adenosine receptors, how that will function within the whole system is now you're introducing something in there that will cause the system to use more energy. All of these studies focus on one facet, do I think dark chocolate is some kind of healthy beverage that you should take every day no especially if you have any impairment in your sleep because your adenosine receptors are going to be overly stimulated and out of balance with poor sleep schedule or whatever else you're doing. Bryan Johnson can take dark chocolate in probably a healthy way because none of his adenosine receptors matter if they're being stimulated or not because his sleep is perfect. For the average person dark chocolate will not benefit them. Each individual's system is completely different and dark chocolate is an obvious performance enhancer so it's completely unnecessary to introduce polyphenols in the form of dark chocolate just use a different substance. 

For someone trying to escape the mechanistic way of thinking you seem to be falling into it over and over  

I only brought up the polyphenol topic because you hinted at that direction with speculating about mechanisms as to why chocolate is bad/good. I don't think discussing mechanisms (e.g. theobromin does this and that that to adenosin receptors) is a healthy way to talk about nutrition, in fact I think it is one of the worst ways to tackle the topic because people end up making stuff up to confirm their biases or assert a disagreement. Just look at whole Ray Pete forum for example, its like a rollercoaster for the owner's ego with almost no relevance to real life. 

Mechanistic debates about nutrition are complete garbage because we don't understand nutrition at such stage at all. We have no idea what these things really do. So it comes down to who can remember or google more cool things that have nothing to do with reality. 

Take seed oils as an example. Ray Pete would tell you they are bad because Linoleic Acid oxidises in vitro when you mix it with copper and he would say "look at this linolenic acid, it is killing you because oxidation has been linked to cancer in rats". Then you take a meta analysis of HUMAN studies and show "look, people who have more circulating linolenic acid in their blood actually do better and they are healthier". And you would present this to Pete and his acolytes and you know know what would happen? You'd get banned from his forum... because that's not how they play. 

17 hours ago, integral said:

ruitarians are stacked with flavonoids and polyphenols and their hair turns gray faster than anyone else.

Lol, I think you and I both know that consequences of fruitarian diet have nothing to do with polyphenols and everything with malnutrition, protein deprivation and multinutrient deficiencies. If you starve yourself a cocktail of polyphenols is not going to do anything for you. That's a cheap argument that you yourself don't even believe in 

 

17 hours ago, integral said:

you have any kind of mental issue where how you relate to your body on a daily basis create excessive cortisol then coffee and dark chocolate will exasperate that and cause excessive stress excessive deterioration and catabolism within your system. For the majority of people they don't need these stimulates in their system.

more mechanistic speculation.

But ok, let's entertain the idea that eating more dark chocolate leads to higher cortisol levels. What is the argument? That dark chocolate leads to....anxiety? bipolar disorder? schizophrenia? major depression? All of those conditions are associated with chronically elevated corstisol. 

Or let's make the same argument for coffee...that it is associated with, more anxiety and depression? 

It is interesting because we see the opposite. You feed 100 people cocoa powder in randomized trial where they don't know what they are getting and the group being fed cocoa feels better, has less anxiety and even their salivary cortisol gets better. You could say that science looks at a narrow area of life and you would be right yet if introducing just one thing works in one group and doesn't work in the other while, in general most other things remain the same, isn't that an indication of a positive effect.

It is certainly more persuasive to me than saying "you shouldn't eat dark chocolate because in vitro theobromine have been shown to increase cortisol when dripped on a sample of cells from adrenal cortex" 

EDIT 

I hit submit a bit earlier than I wanted but I also wanted to address this: 

"If we really think about the whole picture it doesn't matter at all what you eat it matters more when you eat how often you eat and your overall strategy for health. What you eat is the least important factor."

I agree with this argument to some extend. You overall lifestyle matters more than sum of its parts yet I don't agree that it doesn't mater what you eat at all. Every process in your body is dependant on building blocks and those are found only in your food. If you think about it, from the moment of conception, when you were one zygote cell that divided into 2 and then 4 through mitosis and then 8 and 16 and so on...everything has been dependant on receiving energy, nutrients and macronutrients. 

I agree that in most cases where nutrition is okay, it doesn't matter initially as long as you're eating enough. The nuances become apparent later in life or in cases of people with either genetic defects (for example a mutation of a gene that codes for certain enzyme could lead to issues if some particular molecule in diet is in excess - e.g. Coeliac disease or MTHFR mutation). 

Another way to look at it is that you could, during life be eating normally yet you always had a tendency to eat, for example a lot of high fat dairy because if was cultural and in your 58 you develop a prostate cancer while being otherwise healthy because you've been stimulating a certain pathway unnecessarily and maybe with more nuanced adaptation it could have been avoided. 

Or you lived in a culture where meat tends to be grilled a lot because it is hot outside and people tend to do more grilling and barbecuing and because of that you get diagnosed with colorectal adenoma in your 50s and maybe if you were paying a bit more attention to it, it could have been prevented. 

It is subtleties like this that show us that what you eat matters but the consequences do not always get apparent immediately and often when they do, they might be irreversible. 

It is also true that some people seem to be able to get away with anything. Personally I don't know many such folks because those who claimed, when they were younger, that they could do anything without consequences, usually end up with shit health. My partner's dad is one such example, my grandfather is another and I know personally a few others...anecdotes, I know but I always struggle to back these arguments up with real life stories. I think a lot of these cultural hearsays are completely made up. Go to a n oncology clinic for respiratory or hepatic diseases and ask "how many of you thought smoking / drinking would never catch up with you when you were young" 

Some people are incredibly gifted with genetics, they were blessed with powerful immune system, with strong livers, powerful detoxification capacities. Some people are naturally born with a pool of antioxidant that's twice or 3 times the potency of the average person in their region. Folks get born with ApoE mutations or cholesterol reabsorbtion mutations that make them practically immune to heart attacks. All these things matter. 

On the other side, some people are born with things that make them 10 times likely to experience first heart attack before 45, 13 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's, less likely to be able to absorb vitamin D, more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune condition, more likely to form blood cloths in deep veins - and when these people follow a health advice of some quack on the internet they end up with terrible health problems. 

Nuances matter

 

Edited July 11, 2024 by Michael569

[Schizophonia]

It’s a lot of concerns for not so much virtual results.

[cjoseph90]

I love Hu, mmmm

[Yimpa]

@cjoseph90 darn, my favorite chocolate brand  didn’t make it to the show (Ghirardelli)