@newtboy
while i agree that shagen tends to get downright biblical in regards to psychedelics,i have never seen him suggest taking them irresponsibly or in an abusive manner.

in fact,i have seen him on multiple occasions lay out proper procedure to have a safe and enjoyable trip.

i actually agree with shagen the positive benefits psychedelics can have on a person,having experienced them myself on multiple occasions,over a span of decades.

the difference between shagen and i,is that i see trying to sway someone who has never ingested psychedelics into taking them in the very same vein as trying to sway an atheist into believing in jesus.

it is never going to happen,so why would i waste my time?

it is like trying to teach a blind man the color blue,or a woman what it is like to have a penis.

certain people have certain personality traits that may lend them to experiment with psychedelics.other people do not.one should not be judged greater or lesser than the other,because both represent personal choice.

personally i love psychedelics,for many of the reasons shagen posts.you may not,for your own reasons.totally fair in my book.
you will never see me at your door asking "having you found the joys of chemically induced hallucinations yet?"

maybe i should.....
i shall call it the "cult of acid".
let the doorknocking BEGIN!

You're right - I guess I made the mistake of assuming you would even begin to understand what the right strain (a powerful strain) of mushroom would be to ingest.

Sure lucky760, I'll do Splenda, since some varieties of Coke Zero have Splenda in them.

First off it is important to note that the majority of the anti-sweetener "science" has been done by one man: Dr. Joseph Mercola. Now, watch out here, because his name is deceptive. You see, Mercola is an osteopathic physician. Osteopathy is a form of pseudoscience that believes that all pathology can be solved by manipulation of the bones and muscles. There is little science to back up these claims because they are clearly insane and worthy of ridicule. So, much like his doctorate, the claims he makes against sweeteners are pseudoscientific. A number of his beliefs are: that AIDS is not cause by HIV but by psychological stress; that immunizations and prescription drugs shouldn't be prescribed but people should instead buy his dietary supplements; that vaccinations are bad for you and your children (a belief which is the cause of recent outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and mumps); and that microwaves are dangerous machines that irradiate their products (they do, but not with the kind of radiation he is thinking of). Since he made a movie called Sweet Mistery: A Poisoned World, he has been at the forefront of anti-sweetener rhetoric. If you watch the movie, note how hilariously bad it is at actual science; the majority of the "evidence" is people claiming side effects after having ingested something with a sweetener in it (anecdotes are worth nothing in science except perhaps as a reason for researching further). So, you have a movement against something seen as "artificial" by a man who is not a doctor, not a scientist and is clearly lacking in the basics of logic.

Now, Splenda. Created by Johnson and Johnson and a British company in the seventies, it's primary sweetener ingredient is sucralose. The rest of it is dextrose, which as I have said above, is really just d-glucose and is safe for consumption in even very large quantities. So really, we are asking about sucralose. Sucralose is vastly sweeter than sucrose (usually around ~650 times) and thus only a very small amount is needed in whatever it is you are trying to sweeten. The current amount that is considered unsafe for intake (the starting point where adverse effects are felt) is around 1.5g/kg of body weight. So for the average male of 180lbs, they would need to ingest 130g of sucralose to feel any adverse effects. This is compared to the mg of sucralose that you will actually be getting every day. The estimated daily intake of someone who actually consumes sucralose is around 1.1mg/kg, which leaves a massive gap. Similarly to aspartame, if you tried to ingest that much sucralose, you would be incapable due to the overwhelming sweetness of the stuff.

There is some evidence that sucralose may affect people in high doses, but once again, this is similar to the issues with aspartame, where the likelihood of you getting those doses is extremely unlikely.

The chemistry of sucralose is actually way too complicated to go into, but suffice it to say that unlike aspartame, sucralose is not broken down in the body at all and is simply excreted through the kidney just like any other non-reactive agent. The reason that it tastes sweet is because it has the same shape as sucrose except that some of the hydroxy groups are replaced with chlorine atoms. This allows it to fit in the neurotransmitters in the tongue and mouth that send you the sensation of sweetness without also giving you all of those calories. Once it passes into the bloodstream it is dumped out by the kidneys without passing through the liver at all.

In sum, if sweeteners were bad for you, they wouldn't be allowed in your food. Science is not against you, it is the only thing working for everyone at the same time. The reason sugar has gotten around this is because we have always had it. If you want to be healthier, don't drink pop, drink water or milk (unless you are lactose intolerant, then just drink water). Don't drink coconut milk, or gatorade, or vitamin water. Assume that when a company comes out with something like "fat free" it really reads "now loaded with sugar so it doesn't taste like fucking cardboard." Assume that when a company says something is "natural" it is no more natural than the oils you put in your car. IF you want to live and eat healthy, stay on the outside of the supermarket, avoiding the aisles. All of the processed food is in the aisles, not on the outsides and the companies know that you don't want to miss anything. Make your food, don't let someone else do it. And never, ever buy popped popcorn, anywhere, the mark-up on that shit is insane.

No. Aspartame is not bad for you. Sugar, however is absolutely bad for you. The purpose of this video is to show people how much aspartame is in Coke Zero vs the amount of sugar in Coke. Sugar, the number one cause of obesity, heart disease and other health issues, is far less sweet so you need a much larger amount to get the same level of sweetness as aspartame. The tiny amount of black stuff left over at the end of the Coke Zero pan is the aspartame. You need milligrams of aspartame compared to 30 grams of sugar.

All of the studies that have "shown" damaging effects of aspartame have given RATS not milligrams of aspartame, but GRAMS. This would be equivalent to a human being shoveling a pile of aspartame powder into their mouth, something that no one could even do because it would be too sweet to ingest.

Aspartame is a very simple chemical that when it enters the human body breaks down into three things, phenylalanine, methanol and aspartic acid. Once again, the amounts that these things break down into is smaller than you would get from eating comparable "natural products." You would get more methanol eating a few grapes or an apple. Aspartic acid is an amino acid that is good for you and you would once again find more of it in an oyster than in Coke Zero. And finally phenylalanine is the only thing that is of any danger to anyone. And even then, it is only dangerous to those who have phenylketonuria, a sensitivity to phenyl-groups that you would know if you have. Otherwise it is a hormone that only affects infants and is present in breast milk, one of the healthiest substances on earth for a human.

Sure, aspartame is one of the most complained about items by consumers at the FDA. But does that mean the science is wrong? No. It simply means that someone gets a headache and they blame it on the diet soda they just drank instead of the fact that they are dehydrated. Or someone has a dizzy spell because they got up too fast and they blame it on the diet soda they just drank. Aspartame has been investigated by every Federal Consumer Product group around the world and none of them have found a sufficient link to any health danger in order to take it off of the shelves. If you believe that this is a conspiracy, you are wrong. The bigger conspiracy is the rampant disregard for the danger of sugar in processed foods.

If you are curious about the dangers of sugar that are backed by solid nutritional and molecular biology, you should watch "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" on Youtube, or the movie Fed Up.

I think the public thing is just resignation. While traveling on the rail link from San Fran to LA (I'm from Aus), I watched what I presumed to be a crack deal go down right outside the train on a relatively clean looking platform, 2 black guys. They just don't care if they get busted or whatever because at the end of the day, it means very little to them. Nothing to lose, so why care?

Whites, on average, have a lot more to lose, so they work harder to keep their activities hidden. Doesn't hurt that you are less likely to get stopped and searched as a white drug dealer than you are as a black law abiding citizen.

; )

As an aside, look up Dr. Carl Hart's TED talk on drugs being a socio-economic problem and punishment meted out for crack (the drug of choice for poor communities) being orders of magnitude higher than the punishment for selling/buying/possession of powder cocaine (used by predominately white people...). Despite addictiveness and effect being close to equal when ingested in the same method.

Understanding why so much anecdotal evidence exists is certainly worthwhile! The following link cites many studies on double blind tests for MSG sensitivity.

http://www.businessinsider.com/msg-allergy-doesnt-exist-2013-8

Glutamatic acid (which is what MSG turns into after solubilizing in water, along with a sodium ion) is one of the 20 amino acids that is the basis for all proteins and life, since the beginning of life on earth. It is in relatively high concentration in every cell of your body. Consuming MSG would be akin to consuming 'protein' in your diet, and is commonly labeled as protein in food labeling: http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html

Consuming too much protein in your diet can cause problems, but you need to be eating it to a relatively obvious excess (a gallon of milk per day). Weightlifters who protein supplement far too much quickly experience heart problems.

The business insider link suggests that there are some people who could potentially be sensitive to Glutamate, and be activating the vagus nerve in the stomach...though it seems to be speculative in that article.

The idea that another ingredient is causing the problem is far more likely. Americanized chinese restaurants all taste the same, because all of their food comes from the same place. A group in China has monopolized the american chinese restaurant market, and provides food and resources at unbeatably low prices. To remain competitive, almost all american chinese restaurants invariably purchase from this group. Given China's track record of putting all kinds of crazy stuff in their produce, it seems entirely likely that some ingredient other than MSG is a much more likely culprit.

I know a couple of people in particular who have reacted extremely badly to chinese restaurants in america, and even went to the emergency room for it. Given the details of their story (a mystery glob of black sauce that they ate from the black sauce egg tray), I could only imagine what kind of horrible things they could have ingested other than MSG. 'Chinese restaurant syndrome' may indeed be a relatively accurate term for what people are experiencing.

Neils thoughts on the viral video

*** August 3, 2014 -- Anatomy of a GMO Commentary ****
Ten days ago, this brief clip of me was posted by somebody.

It contains my brief [2min 20sec] response to a question posed by a French journalist, after a talk I gave on the Universe. He found me at the post-talk book signing table. (Notice the half-dozen ready & willing pens.) The clip went mildly viral (rising through a half million right now) with people weighing in on whether they agree with me or not.

Some comments...

1) The journalist posted the question in French. I don't speak French, so I have no memory of how I figured out that was asking me about GMOs. Actually I do know some French words like Bordeaux, and Bourgogne, and Champagne, etc.

2) Everything I said is factual. So there's nothing to disagree with other than whether you should actually "chill out" as I requested of the viewer in my last two words of the clip.

3) Had I given a full talk on this subject, or if GMOs were the subject of a sit-down interview, then I would have raised many nuanced points, regarding labeling, patenting, agribusiness, monopolies, etc. I've noticed that almost all objections to my comments center on these other issues.

4) I offer my views on these nuanced issues here, if anybody is interested:
a- Patented Food Strains: In a free market capitalist society, which we have all "bought" into here in America, if somebody invents something that has market value, they ought to be able to make as much money as they can selling it, provided they do not infringe the rights of others. I see no reason why food should not be included in this concept.
b- Labeling: Since practically all food has been genetically altered from nature, if you wanted labeling I suppose you could demand it, but then it should be for all such foods. Perhaps there could be two different designations: GMO-Agriculture GMO-Laboratory.
c- Non-perennial Seed Strains: It's surely legal to sell someone seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, requiring that the farmer buy seed stocks every year from the supplier. But when sold to developing country -- one struggling to become self-sufficient -- the practice is surely immoral. Corporations, even when they work within the law, should not be held immune from moral judgement on these matters.
d- Monopolies are generally bad things in a free market. To the extent that the production of GMOs are a monopoly, the government should do all it can to spread the baseline of this industry. (My favorite monopoly joke ever, told by Stephen Wright: "I think it's wrong that the game Monopoly is sold by only one company")
e- Safety: Of course new foods should be tested for health risks, regardless of their origin. That's the job of the Food and Drug Administration (in the USA). Actually, humans have been testing food, even without the FDA ,since the dawn of agriculture. Whenever a berry or other ingested plant killed you, you knew not to serve it to you family.
f- Silk Worms: I partly mangled my comments on this. Put simply, commercial Silk Worms have been genetically modified by centuries of silk trade, such that they cannot survive in the wild. Silk Worms currently exist only to serve the textile industry. Just as Milk Cows are bred with the sole purpose of providing milk to humans. There are no herds of wild Milk Cows terrorizing the countryside.

5) If your objection to GMOs is the morality of selling non-prerennial seed stocks, then focus on that. If your objection to GMOs is the monopolistic conduct of agribusiness, then focus on that. But to paint the entire concept of GMO with these particular issues is to blind yourself to the underlying truth of what humans have been doing -- and will continue to do -- to nature so that it best serves our survival. That's what all organisms do when they can, or would do, if they could. Those that didn't, have gone extinct extinct.

In life, be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don't agree with.

Respectfully Submitted
-NDTyson

I love Tyson. But totally disagree with him on this...
Yes farm animals are 'engineered' but they are engineered via NATURE and NATURAL SELECTION over THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

Putting Jellyfish glow dna into mice is fucked up and would NEVER happen in NATURE.
INSERTING PESTICIDE PRODUCING GENES INTO FOOD IS SOO FUCKED UP FOR ALL OF NATURE.

Bee's anyone ?

Human's, Animals, Plants, we all share essentially the same cells.
So something that is designed to kill insects, if ingested by us, may fuck us up.

Also, WHY DO IT ? GM yields are not that astronomic.

Most of the food we grown is WASTED. Let's fix that first.

Correction: wormwood is very mildly hallucinogenic, you need ti ingest a lot more than fits into a bottle. We are talking about quantities that are present in cabbages, tomato plant, potato etc... Totally harmless.It's the high alcohol on Absinthethat made people see fairies, it's super easy to drink too much. QI made a correction in later shows.

His whole point is how GMO's could possibly save millions of lives, but she doesn't make the point that, if they're actually bad for ingestion, they could wipe us off the earth. Oh well.

Neapolitan shake seems perfectly reasonable, you're not really changing the amount of shit your ingesting, it's just 1/3rd of each flavour.

Mixing up different meats and all that is just gimmick, no one actually eats that shit other than for a laugh. My friends and I ordered a Double Triple Cheese Burger (6 patties, a lot of cheese), just to say it really. Guess what, the staff have heard everything a million times, they don't laugh with you they think you're a moron and they make you your stupid request so that you might get a heart attack sooner and not bother them any more.

P.S. It tasted terrible.

My guess would be he stuck to zero calorie drinks and avoided fries.

Had a quick on their nutritional website, a Big Mac is 520 calories, which is not great but not absurd. The issue is, you add a large fries (500) and coke (280) to that and you've added exactly 150% more calories on top.

All up being 1300 calories or about 2/3rds of your daily intake in one meal. Provided you avoided the sides though, it wouldn't be too hard to stick within the limits.

The issue is that MCD makes the minimum mandated attempt to educate customers. Australia legislates that food energy levels be published in a prominent fashion alongside the rough recommended daily energy intake of 8700kJ. They usually publish most of these on the side in small font. Having been over in France recently they didn't have them, I'm sure that's the case in most countries.

The larger issue with MCD and other fast food is the use of trans-fats and excessive sodium.

Trans-fats act as an insanely effective preservatives that keeps their produce looking like it'd been cryogenically frozen even years on. They're also have a reputation for clogging arteries causing heart attacks, strokes and the like.

Sodium which boosts blood pressure when ingested is a flavour enhancer which is probably why it's used in excessive amounts (e.g. a Big Mac has 40% of recommended daily Sodium). Even if this guy kept within calorie limits he would have easily been breaching recommended Sodium levels and in the long term would be elevating his risk of high blood pressure, stroke or various kidney diseases.

Yeah, but number-crunchers and bean-counters who work for automobile manufacturers make similar decisions when deciding whether or not to order a recall on dangerous vehicles-At the end of the day, Big Pharma companies decide which facts and figures get the most spin, eh?

Whose to say that nature is not the ultimate winner over human efforts to forestall the inevitable? It's gonna take more than eliminating all disease to get us knuckle-dragging monkeys off-planet. It may very well take humanity as we know it driven to the brink with a number of engineered attempts to preserve life.

Not as simple as everyone playing syringe-roulette kir_mokum, science is not some ultimate panacea-That said, I survived the crap-shoot and will probably never get dip, typhus, or cholera. Whew!

I did however, ingest a Preludin at the age of 18 months thanks to an irresponsible parental unit, early imprints are a MOTHERFUCKER!

Actually there's some pretty decent evidence to suggest that "juicing" is not a good idea at all.

You're essentially ruining perfectly good fruits and vegetables and ingesting more calories quicker. Plus, you don't get the same fibre content.

That said, cutting out processed food can only be good for you. The paleo diet is a good example of this.

Personally, I've stopped drinking soda and fruit juice, as they essentially just fructose in water and fructose is bad. I try not to buy any sauces or packaged foods and pretty much make as much as I can from scratch. It's better for you and there's more satisfaction from it.

And honestly I don't miss sugar at all.

But then there is my weakness, my kryptonite, my Achilles heel if you will. I do love me some ethanol.

Not that this will prove anything for years to come, like I said Science and the medical industry moves SLOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW. When everyone could just be partaking in the most extraordinary human experience that a human can possibly have.

Wiley Online Library has a medical document titled: A critical review of reports of endogenous psychedelic N, N-dimethyltryptamines in humans: 1955–2010

Conclusion: "The answer to the question, ‘Are the tryptamine psychedelic
substances DMT, HDMT and MDMT present in the human body?’
is most likely yes. We believe that the preponderance of the mass
spectral evidence proves, to a scientific certainty, that DMT and
HDMT are indeed endogenous and can be measured in human
body fluids."

Even I was apprehensive as to whether it actually is endogenous. Now I just ask, Why, why, why? Science, baby.

At least there are some in the industry that believe it ought to be known. And for anyone that has ever ingested the grand daddy of psychedelics, of neuromodulation I am sure they were bought and sold on the idea that DMT is a huge discovery:

"Data regarding their peripheral dynamics – concentrations, circadian
variation, and metabolism – as assessed by rigorous
analytic methods applied to biological samples represent the
most accessible approach to beginning to determine their
possible role in human psychophysiology and should be
pursued."

"finally provide us an answer to the question: ‘Why do humans
produce endogenous psychedelics?’ The research thus far is
limited but there are many possibilities awaiting further
inquiry."

Obviously, there simply just is not enough data to suggest how consciousness is affected by these chemicals. Not enough funding, fear of funding, not enough profits to be made. When actually, if they figure out what this stuff is and does it would probably blast open vault door and reveal the secrets of the brain.Or we can just have the status quo and look forward to the next Iphone to cram our heads full of consumer bullshit.