*quality Utah Salty!

The music is right up my alley, I know shit like this very rarely sifts, but the video is fun. @siftbolt has been salty lately. *nsfw (for fun)

"Mommy, why is my vanilla yogurt salty?"

I drove right under the core of this thing going home. I could actually see a tornado being made and I checked all the weather and News outlets and there was nothing, except that NOAA decided to throw a Severe Thunderstorm Warning 10 minutes up AFTER IT PASSED...

It was so crazy to see a tornadic supercell in West Valley City (Salty Lake City, for most Sifters). It was following 2700 West for a bit and then I-215 (nearing the airport) was moving super fast to the NNE, straight to Washington Terrace and Riverdale. The winds were wild and the cloud formations were awesome, they were moving fast enough that I thought a partial nub might be visible where I was at, but I never did see it.

All that I saw was the main vortex with the amazing sight of all the cold air being sucked into the vortex at the SSW corner of the leading edge. Which was twisting more than fast enough to be a "horizontal twister". It was rotating so fast it was amazing; since you could see that sight you knew all it needed was a bit of air to push against it from underneath and stand up some of those vortices around the central core and then, walla, you'd get the tornado (I actually did believe that Ogden or Bountiful would get one since that was where it was heading).

All it needed was to get a little closer to the mountains and you'd have the right ingredients.

Thus, this is what you see happen right here in this video. North of my house, out in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, sits Antelope Island. It got hit by the raining part of this tornadic system but look at this wonderful storm video from it:

https://twitter.com/AntelopeSP/status/779078436568518656

It even had some golf ball hail in it.

Agree with lots of it. Taste is definitely to a large part habitual, you definitely dull your sense of taste if you eat lots of sugary / salty foods.

However choosing potatoes is a terrible idea for a diet. Like sugar, starches rapidly turn to glucose, release insulin and promote addiction. They admittedly have high satiety and may be less calorie dense than what he was eating before (which is what caused the weight loss) but I would not suggest swapping one addiction for another.

Also I love refuting the instinctual assumption that you can lose weight eating badly by simply offsetting it with exercise. He's correct to stress diet over exercise. Exercise does make you lose weight (and has other health benefits) but the effect of high calorie food utterly dwarfs exercise:

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/29/12051520/exercise-weight-loss-myth-burn-calories-video

Also, it's more of a subjective thing, but lean meat proteins (eggs, chicken, fish) are very filling and can make it easier to avoid the high GI carbs that absorb into your body too fast to be used effectively and end up as excess body fat. I'd argue you're making your diet considerably more difficult if you try to give up meat at the same time as losing weight.

I fully agree, but I note that plant based doesn't necessarily mean absence of salt, sugar, or fat, although I admit many people think of it that way. Removing those three things, IMO, makes far more difference than what you put them on (with obvious exceptions). Salty, sugary, fatty plant based foods can be FAR worse than healthy lean meats.
It's not a cut and dry comparison, details matter, sometimes as much as the big picture.

As a fan of cheeses of every variety: mild, rich, sharp, hot, savory, salty, stinky.. you name it. That looks delicious

But if only 3% of Earth's water is fresh water, and 70% of that is currently frozen, that's a long, slow wait for a slightly less salty ocean. I don't think your dilution theory "hold water."

I agree though, it could take decades, centuries or longer.

*whispers* big chocolate salty balls *wink*

Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?

I have to admit, as an engineer and as much as I'd like to think I'm above that sort of thing, I can't help but feeling a little bit salty when one of these videos comes along, seemingly narrated by a 14 year old girl, but that's clearly orders of magnitude more brilliant than anything I ever did as a student.

I wonder if it was salty?

Skip the beginning stuff up until the rocket ship takes off, and then stop watching after they fly into the black hole. There's also a bunch of stuff in between there that you could skip, but it's too scattershot.

Really, out of the 2 and a half hour runtime, there's about 40 good minutes, and that's just for the special effects.

I really don't see why so many people liked it. The directing was pretty good, the acting was good, but the script was awful. Mostly, I'm just salty because they were hyping it up as "hard" science fiction, but it wasn't too far removed from Star Trek, really.