.. Only difference between us and them is their supply of sweets ran out pretty quick, then they had to spend a huge amount of that energy to chase down some creature that didn't want to be ate.

Which animal is made of "sweets"? You imagining running down chocolate bunnies?

And, besides the body uses fat as fuel as well; esp for running where training the body for metabolizing fat efficiently is considered a vital step for running performance.

Cravings is body's method of telling us it needs a certain type of nutrient. We have sweet cravings and cravings of oily food, sour food etc etc.

Craving for sweet is natural but modern sweets are not natural. The amount of sugar present far exceeds that is found in natural food and is not mixed in with dietary fiber like in natural sweet foods. Eating these modern foods completely disrupts our natural system and thus, the source of the problems.

The daily reference intake for sugar states that added sugar should nto exceed 25% of calories. For a 2000 Cal intake that is 500 Cal. The 7-eleven shitty "super gulps" and whatever exceed this in a single serving.

If you run/bike an hour in the morning, then the equation completely changes. Some people train in endurance sports, some have jobs that requires a constant use of the body muscles. That equation only holds for desk job people who don't exercise.

Sometimes people buy it and split it among two.

If you ask me they should just go and make a law that a single serving cannot contain more than 50% of the reference intake. That way you can sell those stupid 5 pint "drinks". You just would not be allowed to have half a pound of sugar in them.

The government reference tables are already messed up because of the daily percentage requirement on the labels.

...exploit flaws in human psychology ...

What flaw in human psychology?

Has it been verified outside laboratory conditions?

People crave sugar because it kept their ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors alive. Those who sought and consumed high energy foods when they were available stored up energy to last them through the harsh times. This continues into modern times. Humans are genetically programmed to desire foods laden with fat and sugar above all else. All that has changed is the availability - where those ancestors would have had to search for unpicked fruit or brave the bees to steal honey, modern man just guzzles down coke whenever he wants to. He always wants to.

For fuck's sake! This is why some people hate evolution.

I can make this argument using evolutionary theory: hunter gatherers didn't eat sweet stuff, they were primarily meat eaters since fruits are seasonal and not available all year round. Sugar is an artificial modern creation and modern fruits are breeds with the most sugar. We crave sugar because eating modern sweet foods messes up our system that was never designed to eat sweet stuff.

Evolutionary theory can be used to explain anything. Please don't fall into that trap of justifying your position using the theory of evolution.

people with high cholesterol have more heart attacks; lipitor reduces cholesterol

There is a tacit assumption here that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. It has been suggested that heart disease is the cause of high cholesterol - the body is circulating more cholesterol in the blood to repair heart damage. In this scenario, reducing the cholesterol with liptor does not make sense.

It's the sort of empty-headed 'gotcha' phrase that's so popular and so often used without real thought behind it.

Some researchers believe that the belief that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease is borne out of a faulty correlation-causation study. Heat disease is the largest killer in the United States and it could be that the foundation of what we believe of this disease is false. You think that's empty headed?

National policies are based on studies which are based on statistics. The national obesity epidemic is believed to be caused by policies based on studies with bad foundations.

This is one of the most serious errors that can be made in scientific studies and there are still many many studies that still make this error.

If you hear something like coffee lowers the risk of cancer/Alzheimer/diabetes/heart disease etc. they are correlation studies where the researches are speculating on the causation but the media is reporting the causation as the result of the study.

In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful? In my experience, sciences grows more expensive, less funded, more hyped, less understood, and overall less heeded.

The answer lies in the origins of the phrase "paradigm shift" by Kuhn.

The advancement of science does not work the way you say it does completely as investigated by Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". When a new field is introduced, it grows more expensive, complicated etc with time but real scientific advancements come from "breakthroughs" that create a new field. What Kuhn coined "paradigm shift" (but now has been kinda bastardized by business speak).

To put it another way: correlation is an *observed* behaviour, causation is a *tested* behaviour.

The problem with this is what "tested" means. There many infinite variables that have to be fixed and a finite set varied on each test (making the testing time infinite).

Most researchers assume something does not affect something and ignore it as a variable. There are many results that have false causation because an ignored variable was hiding there.

Liking fast food is essentially chemistry. Science (yay, science!) has basically figured out what tastes good on the human taste bud. Fast food supplies this. Sure, you gourmands out there will choke and puke at the thought of fast food, but that is purely social conditioning (the kind that intelligent people insist they're too smart to fall for). Take someone with no preconceptions, say a barbarian from a pre-modern society, and serve them two meals: one of a Big Mac and the other Thai-Burmese-Argentinian fusion or whatever is considered haute cuisine these days, and the barbie will pick the Big Mac every time.

Fast food, at least in the USA, is just not about hacking the human taste but doing so at the cheapest possible price point. Cooking oil is used longer than it should be and sourced from lower qualities. There is an indelible taste of cheap ingredients and methods in fast food.

As long as the cuisine is not restricted to be being low in fat or low in sugar, it will easily blow away fast food. Just using genuine butter and quality cheese to a burger will make it better. Easy to make better fries and drinks by using sugar for sweetening and for fries good quality oils, animal fat or butter for frying. Use crispier vegetables, use flavorings better than ketchup etc. Then, there is numerous ways to make the meat taste better and add flavorings to the bun.

I think fast food is addictive because of the convenience and low cost. In the taste department, it's allright but you could make fast food yourself in minutes that's about the same quality if you set up your kitchen. A place to quickly grill meat and those small frying machines will get your fast food fix at similar quality in 5-10 minutes. If you're generous with the cheese, dressing and fats, it will even taste better.

I don't really share your adulation for fast food.

You will be no more valuable, economically, than a dishwasher, a fry cook or a gardener. What will you do then? Sorry, I had to ask.

You also say that breakthroughs in computer visions combined with robotics will make the job of a dishwasher, fry cook and gardener obsolete.

The key point is that those breakthroughs that would make that happen hasn't occurred yet. Breakthroughs don't happen on a time table so soon might turn to be a long long time.

I wonder how that will work out? Seriously, since at least a century, we often had the best and brightest immigrants and I wonder how much that is skewing results? Something that MAY NOT continue. Especially if our fortunes go down, or our IP laws appear too restrictive.

Most of the immigrants are college level and beyond. I doubt they are doing scientific reasoning testing on college and graduate students. So, I don't think that factor plays into it. Or, did you mean that the kids of the best and brightest immigrants do better on the scientific reasoning test? Or maybe they do test it on college students? It doesn't say from the article.

Perhaps it's too early to measure China, or they suffer from too rigid a school system, or like Japan, their language is cumbersome it takes up a significant portion of schooling to just learn it, or as the one Ted Talks suggest - normal schools built on the factory model kill creativity, and so the asian ones must be doing that to an even greater degree.

I'm sick and tired of all the pet theories people have about China. Seems like everyone has a handful of these now.

But at least, like the fast food model, they ensure a minimum standard coming out. But that is public school's entire downfall. One size fits all. The person who wants to become the next doctor or scientific researcher is forced to do the same basic schooling as the person who just wants to fix cars until a ridiculously high grade.

Suburb public schools are miles better than downtown city public schools. Then, there are private schools and prep schools. Public schooling has a whole spectrum of quality.

I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are. But that's 6th grade and still 3-4 more years are wasted on keeping everyone more or less the same. I'm pretty sure gymnastic teams or iceskating coaches need that long to spot who will be the talent and who will be the also ran.

This where the college you go to comes in. MIT, Caltech like schools choose the top students in engineering, others in athletics and so on.

But this is more than spotting stars in order to nurture them. Not everyone who does bad in school does bad in life. But the answer for them isn't always perpetually more years of school. We bought into the hype that formal education is the answer to everything that HR departments are requiring degrees for every little job and totally ignoring education outside the classroom that may be much better suited for training towards the work at hand. (I.e. the German model of apprenticeships).

Most jobs are given through word of mouth and not through HR departments. HR departments are there to find out what's wrong with you and not what's right with you.

The US is littered with policies and regulations built up on shaky statistical evidence. As an example, the policy of student confidence correlation with academic achievement. The idea was that since they are correlated if we increase student confidence we will increase academic achievement. We rank freakishly highest in student confidence but academic achievement isn't increasing.

The nation of the top scientific reasoners are satisfied with such statistical garbage is beyond belief. Does any of these statistical measures mean anything? How much is theories POTA (pulled out of the azule) and how much is statistically tested with all the factors accounted for. Even respectable papers do a bit of factor hiding. There was a paper that found that overweight patients in hospitals survive more from illness than normal weight patients - completely hiding the age factor in the statistical analysis. Normal weight patients who are admitted for illness were much much older than overweight patients!

Then the reaction of these news stories is always the same patterns: people with preconceived world view trying to fix the news to their views. Ooh, it doesn't say what happens 10 years into the future, ooh it shows public school policy X is bad etc etc.

My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.

Why do people keep saying this?

One of the major reasons for the effectiveness of the military is to be able to kill as thoughtlessly as possible. Before, it used to be a big problem that draftees or volunteers would not fire their weapons at enemies during battle. They implemented training routines to teach to shoot other human beings without thought to eliminate that problem.

You can see this everywhere in the military. For example, the military uses sanitized words for the process of killing. It's not enemies, it's hostiles. It's not killed, it's neutralized and so on.

What you describes still makes it a correlation study, just a well organized correlation study.

Taking your own quotes,

At any rate, what they don't know is what other chemical is causing this

blood caffeine levels, and found that those who drink a lot of coffee had the SAME identifiable immune response as the mice did, and that this immune response is also strongly correlated with protecting from further mental decline in humans.

It is still correlation.

Assuming there is causation, correlation is two way but causation might not be. Just because blood caffeine levels correlates with reduction of mental decline doesn't mean drinking more coffee will reduce mental decline. It could very well be that the reduced mental decline leads to the immune system pattern (or blood caffeine level).

Anyway, what you describe up there is not in the original article so you must know the research work from beyond the article I read.

And then you crash and you are fatigued, depressed, irritated, ravenous, edgy and anxious until you ride the caffeine train again.