The "I don't want to talk about AI" thread, and the new topic is: food, and why we love it

I'm allergic to antihistamines. I could share a horror story that would make every man here clutch at himself and whimper.
I’ve never taken any recreational drugs beyond alcohol and an ill-advised puff on a joint in college (I took thirty minutes to stop coughing), but Benadryl has LSD-like effects on me.

I had bad allergies on a climbing trip and had forgotten my nasal inhaler, so took Benadryl. I thought the rock face was trying to eat me.
 
Yeah the only known side-effect of acetaminophen is ASD, as anyone with a fourth-rate brain which has also been further fried by drugs, alcohol, and age will tell you.
Wait! Is that sarcasm?!😯 Are you saying Tylenol doesn't cause ASD?🧐. Hmmmm... Maybe you need to read more unresearched guessing quasi non medical, non scientific guessing, ignorant papers before you go spreading actual information around.
 
Wait! Is that sarcasm?!😯 Are you saying Tylenol doesn't cause ASD?🧐. Hmmmm... Maybe you need to read more unresearched guessing quasi non medical, non scientific guessing, ignorant papers before you go spreading actual information around.
Yeah - and burn my M.S. in Biology.
 
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Wait! Is that sarcasm?!😯 Are you saying Tylenol doesn't cause ASD?🧐. Hmmmm... Maybe you need to read more unresearched guessing quasi non medical, non scientific guessing, ignorant papers before you go spreading actual information around.
Oddly that reminds me of a call my grandpa got from an old navy buddy a few years before he died.
 
I need an explanation here
Hmmm, well... The navy buddy told him about a study they were doing on men who had been exposed to agent green, which my grandpa was during his early navy days. But the thing is, I haven't found any information on it, outside of the stuff he told my mom and aunts and uncles, which my mom then told me. So I'm not sure how much credence it has. 🤔

But anyways, they'd found that these men had a higher than average number of autistic children, and an extremely high number of autistic and ADHD grand children. And well... A third of my grandpa's kids have autism, he has like 12 kids, and very nearly half of my cousins and siblings have been diagnosed with one or the other, with another large group being suspected of being on the spectrum. Between my brothers and I, all of our daughters are autistic, and half our sons have adhd. Soo, it seems plausible at least.

But I'm also aware that correlation does not equal causation. It might've just been that the men joining the navy at that point in time, were more likely to be autistic since they had no diagnosis for such a thing back then.
 
Hmmm, well... The navy buddy told him about a study they were doing on men who had been exposed to agent green, which my grandpa was during his early navy days. But the thing is, I haven't found any information on it, outside of the stuff he told my mom and aunts and uncles, which my mom then told me. So I'm not sure how much credence it has. 🤔

But anyways, they'd found that these men had a higher than average number of autistic children, and an extremely high number of autistic and ADHD grand children. And well... A third of my grandpa's kids have autism, he has like 12 kids, and very nearly half of my cousins and siblings have been diagnosed with one or the other, with another large group being suspected of being on the spectrum. Between my brothers and I, all of our daughters are autistic, and half our sons have adhd. Soo, it seems plausible at least.

But I'm also aware that correlation does not equal causation. It might've just been that the men joining the navy at that point in time, were more likely to be autistic since they had no diagnosis for such a thing back then.
That IS interesting. And I confess I've never heard of agent green. I don't think.
 
Hmmm, well... The navy buddy told him about a study they were doing on men who had been exposed to agent green, which my grandpa was during his early navy days. But the thing is, I haven't found any information on it, outside of the stuff he told my mom and aunts and uncles, which my mom then told me. So I'm not sure how much credence it has. 🤔

But anyways, they'd found that these men had a higher than average number of autistic children, and an extremely high number of autistic and ADHD grand children. And well... A third of my grandpa's kids have autism, he has like 12 kids, and very nearly half of my cousins and siblings have been diagnosed with one or the other, with another large group being suspected of being on the spectrum. Between my brothers and I, all of our daughters are autistic, and half our sons have adhd. Soo, it seems plausible at least.

But I'm also aware that correlation does not equal causation. It might've just been that the men joining the navy at that point in time, were more likely to be autistic since they had no diagnosis for such a thing back then.
You seem to be describing genetics.
 
If I may... Bilogy explains the ASD and Tylenol connection. Maybe that's RFK's thing.
 
That IS interesting. And I confess I've never heard of agent green. I don't think.
I hadn't either until my mom called me to tell me about my grandpa's phone call. Nor could I find anything about it online. Although I found references to agent orange from the same time period.
 
You seem to be describing genetics.
Yeah, that's why I'm not sure. I mean on the one hand, could just be the demographic that signed up for it, on the other hand, wouldn't be the first time I've heard of chemicals having effects on someones genes for generations.
 
Autism is heritable. Multiple studies have shown that the vast majority of ASD cases have a genetic basis, with environmental factors playing at most a very minor role. Note the use of ‘environmental factors’ here. What this means is NOT that any such factor has been identified, it hasn’t, but that there are a small number of case in which pure genetics (based on our current understanding of it) does not fully account for its occurnece.

Environmental factors means, we don’t fully understand the genetic basis of autism, so anything not explained by current genetics will get labeled as environmental factors.

There is no known mutation correlated to ASD. There is no known genetic syndrome associated with ASD. But one or more parents with ASD are going to have at least some children with ASD.

Though we have an exquisitely accurate understanding of genetics at the molecular level, we are very far from understanding it at the system level. It’s highly likely that - as our understanding of genetics increases - it explains an ever increasing percentage of ASD cases.

Again - saying “unknown factors” may play a role is not the same as saying “environmental factor X” plays a role.

Tylenol use by pregnant women is not correlated to increased prevalence of ASD, outside the senile ravings of snake oil salesmen.

Disclosure: I’m autistic and used to be a Biologist.
 
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We’re getting properly into cold season on these latitudes, so I’ll share my favorite flu cure:

Light a candle at the foot of the bed. Get into bed and under the covers. Drink booze of choice until you see three candles. Go to sleep, and in the morning the flu will be gone. (Or perhaps overshadowed with a hangover so bad you stop noticing the flu. Same same but different.)
 
We’re getting properly into cold season on these latitudes, so I’ll share my favorite flu cure:

Light a candle at the foot of the bed. Get into bed and under the covers. Drink booze of choice until you see three candles. Go to sleep, and in the morning the flu will be gone. (Or perhaps overshadowed with a hangover so bad you stop noticing the flu. Same same but different.)
I've just suggested this cure to my wife, but she's grumbling that it would be both illegal and immoral to try to cure our third grader with it... woke nonsense ;)
 
But I'm also aware that correlation does not equal causation. It might've just been that the men joining the navy at that point in time, were more likely to be autistic since they had no diagnosis for such a thing back then.
These kinds of patterns can emerge even when there's no actual difference in prevalence of the condition in question - especially with something like autism where a lot of people fall through the gaps and don't get diagnosed.

For instance, if veterans and their families have different patterns of health care use to non-veterans, that can end up with different rates of diagnosis just because they're seeing different practitioners who might be more likely to give an autism diagnosis.

Or, once the claim that Agent Green exposure leads to autism gets publicised, a lot of people with a history of exposure will naturally go get their family checked for autism, and that's going to push up the rates of autism diagnosis for those families while a bunch of autistic kids without that history of exposure go undiagnosed.

I could easily believe there is a causal link between parental exposure and familial autism, dioxins hang around in the human body for a long time and are known for having nervous-system and reproductive effects. It's just hard to untangle from all the other things that can lead to apparent correlations.
 
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