Why is 'Natural' better?

[Patrick Degan]

I'm telling you people, more attention needs to be paid to new age/drug culture quackery. It's on the rise as more people lose hope in religion, and a great number of them see it as preferable to materialistic science. If a mass exodus from religion took place tomorrow, I can guarantee you that most of those fleeing religion would opt for woo-woo-isms most of the time, and unless something is done to preempt it, then most secular activism on behalf of the public understanding of science will pretty much amount to nothing.

The difference is that new agers and druggies simply tend to withdraw from the world. Religionists, on the other hand, actually work to reshape the world into a state of impoverished conformity to their faery-tale Invisible Cloud-Being —up to and including the capture of political power to enforce that conformity through police and/or military force.

I'm sure you'll agree that a culture of withdrawn slackers who think that the world owes them a living and ambition means nothing since, like, material things are fleeting carry their own perils with them.

And if there was an actual, tangible danger of such a culture displacing the present society, I might be worried about it.

[Darth Wong]

A society of 90% New Agers would be vastly preferable to a society of 90% Bible thumpers. New Age beliefs are far less intrusive onto other peoples' private lives. And with no particular Scripture to tie them together, they would never get organized into a unified political force the way the fundies have.

[Spin Echo]

Agriculture is the cause of all of this.

Um. Too simple an explanation. We had agriculture for thousands of years before achieving global overpopulation.

I'd say modern medicine practices have more to blame for the overpopulation than agriculture. Looking at the graph here of human population, the population boom doesn't begin until the last millenia, and most of it at the very end of that. Agriculture, on the other hand, began somewhere around 8000 BCE.

I am at a "natural" healing place. Thanks to my mother, who belives in this stuff fullheartedly. I do not like it, as it seems to say all machines give you cancer!0ne0ne!! They seem to sugest that a colon that is "fillled with toxins" are the source of all sickness. They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

I've noticed lately there's a belief of food getting stuck in the intestines, people saying things like: "You know, you have five pounds of undigested food stuck in your intestines". I haven't been able to find much reliable information about this (have to ask my partner's proctologist friend), but this strikes me as a load of bollocks. Where exactly is the food supposed to get stuck in the intestines? It's just a long tube of smooth muscle.

The fascination with colonics lately also strikes me as odd. There's something surreal about going to a party and having the guy's wives discussing the types of enemas they want to try.

[Broomstick]

I've noticed lately there's a belief of food getting stuck in the intestines, people saying things like: "You know, you have five pounds of undigested food stuck in your intestines". I haven't been able to find much reliable information about this (have to ask my partner's proctologist friend), but this strikes me as a load of bollocks. Where exactly is the food supposed to get stuck in the intestines? It's just a long tube of smooth muscle.

The fascination with colonics lately also strikes me as odd. There's something surreal about going to a party and having the guy's wives discussing the types of enemas they want to try.

This isn't really new - it's just become fashionable again. Under Louis XIV there was a fad in France for these sorts of things, with some undergoing daily enemas in the name of health. It's probably even older than that.

Even most constipated folks don't have 5 pounds of shit lurking in their intestines. There are a few, very rare conditions that can lead to shit not leaving the body, but they are the sorts of things that land you in the hospital and lead to things like surgery.

[Darth Servo]

I've noticed lately there's a belief of food getting stuck in the intestines, people saying things like: "You know, you have five pounds of undigested food stuck in your intestines". I haven't been able to find much reliable information about this (have to ask my partner's proctologist friend), but this strikes me as a load of bollocks.

There are nutcases out there who will make up numbers out of thin air. There probably are stray food particles in there but they'd be measured in fractions of an ounce or grams, not pounds.

Where exactly is the food supposed to get stuck in the intestines? It's just a long tube of smooth muscle.

The walls are pretty convoluted. The intestines are a masterpiece of increasing surface area.

[andrewgpaul]

I always assumed the 'five pounds of undigested meat' was simply idiots misunderstanding the fact that the intestines may well have a certain amount of material inside them at all times, but that it's constantly passing through, not that some of it lurks there forever.

[Darth Servo]

On second thought, maybe one of these "five pounds of food" idiots simply took the intestines from a cadaver and weighed it, "forgetting" that the organs themselves have mass?

[Pollux]

I honestly wouldn't put that below their stupidity.

[Junghalli]

The frustration with modern living and the failures of modern civilization is an ongoing problem with many people. I think the "natural is better" line of thinking is a complex phenomenon, a result of latent guilt, disillusionment with what civilization and science failed to accomplish, frustration at personal problems (financial, health and others) and the good-old-days mentality.
And I think it was present at any given point in the past. The ancestors always did everything better, after all.

I think you hit it right on the head. It's the old Noble Savage Myth. A common attitude among city-dwellers who desire a simpler, less challenging existence and have never experienced the downsides of the lifestyle they idolize. You saw it among the Romans and other ancient urban societies too.

[Lisa]

I've noticed lately there's a belief of food getting stuck in the intestines, people saying things like: "You know, you have five pounds of undigested food stuck in your intestines". I haven't been able to find much reliable information about this (have to ask my partner's proctologist friend), but this strikes me as a load of bollocks. Where exactly is the food supposed to get stuck in the intestines? It's just a long tube of smooth muscle.

diverticulosis and diverticulitis allows food to get stuck in the intestines. my mother in law has this problem and avoids eating seeds as they bother her..

[Broomstick]

Megacolon also allows accumulation of feces in the intestine, and it probably the only condition that would allow over 5 pounds to take up residence. I doubt diverticuli would acquire the substantial quantities claimed by the autointoxication crowd. In any case, these folks should not be self-treating but should be going to a real doctor.

But, really, these are not very common problems - the average person is not accumulating shit in their lower bowel.

[Spin Echo]

I've noticed lately there's a belief of food getting stuck in the intestines, people saying things like: "You know, you have five pounds of undigested food stuck in your intestines". I haven't been able to find much reliable information about this (have to ask my partner's proctologist friend), but this strikes me as a load of bollocks. Where exactly is the food supposed to get stuck in the intestines? It's just a long tube of smooth muscle.

diverticulosis and diverticulitis allows food to get stuck in the intestines. my mother in law has this problem and avoids eating seeds as they bother her..

My father has this as well and it caused him to get rather sick, which made me further skeptical to the claim that an ordinary, healthy person is carrying around a lot of undigested food stuck in their bowels.

[Akhlut]

I think you hit it right on the head. It's the old Noble Savage Myth. A common attitude among city-dwellers who desire a simpler, less challenging existence and have never experienced the downsides of the lifestyle they idolize. You saw it among the Romans and other ancient urban societies too.

Yeah, but it was a bit more explicable, then, as one's lifespan was, if I recall properly, a bit lower in the cities due to the fact that highly communicable diseases were more rife, obviously. Otherwise, life for a Roman day-laborer and a Roman peasant our in the hinterlands or a Gaulish tribesman probably weren't too different in amounts of life difficulty or survivability.

[PainRack]

diverticulosis and diverticulitis allows food to get stuck in the intestines. my mother in law has this problem and avoids eating seeds as they bother her..

My father has this as well and it caused him to get rather sick, which made me further skeptical to the claim that an ordinary, healthy person is carrying around a lot of undigested food stuck in their bowels.[/quote]
If I'm not mistaken, just 1kg of impacted stool is enough to cause excruiating pain.