Yes. You just eat beans a lot. After a few months it stops making you gassy until you eat a type of bean you have never eaten before and then you are back to square one.
An article on this did the rounds a few months ago and suddenly everyone quotes it as gospel truth.
Unfortunately, it's not. What will happen is that you'll get somewhat better at digesting lactose as your gut bacteria learn to partially compensate for your lack of ability to produce lactase enzyme.
If you're only slightly lactose intolerant that might be sufficient. But for many people it would just make a bad health issue into a slightly less bad healthy issue.
Not great when there's a clear and obvious full cure available: don't eat dairy if you can't digest it.
Or maybe lactase enzyme pills. I've tested them for an occasional slice of cheese cake and they seem to work if I get the timing right.
Your body produces lactase, an enzyme that breaks down lactose. People who are lactose intolerant are unable to produce lactase and therefore, unable to break down lactose. Gut bacteria can break down lactose and perhaps if you drink milk all the time, those bacteria proliferate but loactose intolerance is no fun. It's better to just skip milk altogether.
I didn't know I was lactose intolerant for a long time and thought it was some other issue so I kept having dairy daily for well over a year. It never went away.
I'm nitty picking now, but for most people you can't cure lactose intolerance because it's not a disease. It's more like the default state that adult mammals have. You might be able to rebuild some tolerance, but it's much easier to just take the artificial lactase and manage intake. One could argue that, biologically speaking, lactose tolerance is the off state and just so happens because we keep consuming breast milk well into adulthood (just not our own mother's).
Hmm, I’ve been intolerant my whole life, but I also used to drink milk daily during childhood, resulting in, for reasons I now know why, in a subpar youth ..
having discovered the lactase supplement has finally given me some peace of mind :)
Yeah - humans have adapted to be able to use milk(s) from other sources than parents for the high sugar and fats present and required to survive in harsher climates (cold) that we're not native to.
Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.
Maybe? What follows is just my own dumb anecdotes.
For a long time, I sometimes had issues. I'd keep anti-diarrhea pills in stock at home. I kept some in the car. I even had some in blister packs my wallet (they'd get smashed up over time, but they still worked in powdered form and the desperation was very real).
I didn't know why that was a problem, but I definitely knew it was a real problem and that it could erupt at any time, so I treated the symptoms when that was useful to me. Sometimes, those shitty days on the toilet were intense. They'd wreck me, physically and mentally, for far longer than I want to think about.
Eventually, after decades, I noticed a pattern: Milk. Days when I drank milk or ate ice cream were much more likely to be problematic than days when I did not.
But then, I noticed that some other milk products like cheese were usually just fine. And that made sense and fit the pattern well, because the fermentation of cheesemaking reduces lactose very significantly.
And I like milk. So, experimentally, I started buying lactose-free milk. This worked well, but it was expensive and it tastes different. That helped to further define the pattern.
I started buying cheap lactase tablets instead, in bulk. That saved a fair bit of money, tasted good, and it also worked fine. This also reinforced the observed pattern.
Somewhere along the line, I became interested in kefir, so I bought some completely non-mystical mass-produced kefir from the grocery store and drank some.
Kefir treated me fine (yay fermentation). I found that adding a bit of kefir to a glass of milk also worked: That was never problematic at all, even without lactase tablets. (And it let me stretch that delicious, to me, kefir flavor out over a larger volume -- which also saved some money.)
I found that these observations strongly suggested to me that I was lactose-intolerant.
This went on for a long time; several years. Lactase or kefir, with milk, in various amounts -- whenever I felt like it. I thought I was proactively managing my apparent lactose intolerance very effectively. And by observation, I was indeed doing so. Keeping active stock of anti-diarrhea pills always nearby was reduced to kind of a fuzzy memory.
---
And then one day, I wanted a nice big ice-cold glass of milk, so I poured myself one. I went to the cabinet in the kitchen, but the lactase bottle was empty. I went to the fridge, and the kefir was gone.
So there I am, with a big glass of milk and nothing to help me digest it.
My health-and-sanitation spidey-sense refuses to let me pour stuff back into containers, and my dread for waste refused to let me pour it down the drain.
So I drank that milk. It was every bit as delicious as I expected.
And I expected (anticipated) the worst, but nothing bad happened. Everything was fine.
One sample isn't a trend, so I had more later. That was fine, too.
Weeks went by, then months. Now years. No issues: Milk goes in, and everything comes out properly.
I can have milk without assistance whenever I want, and that's fine. The previous and clearly-evident pattern that suggested lactose intolerance has become broken.
---
So now I don't have lactase tablets in stock anymore. I still drink the least-fancy milk I can get at the grocery store whenever it suits me.
I do enjoy some kefir from time to time (I love the taste of it), but I haven't had any of that for several months now either.
And I'm still fine. I'm doing really well in that area, really.
I'll leave it to the microbiologists to explain the hows and the whys; that's not my field of study. All I know is that this aspect of my life is way, waaaaaaay better than it was.
I'm very deliberately not providing causation or theories here. This is just my story, and I'm sticking to it.
---
(Now, someone reading this probably has some questions that are shaped like "Holy hell. Decades? Why didn't you at least go to the doctor or something?"
And that has a simple, dumb-as-bricks, one-word answer: 'Murica.)
If Dave Arnold says he really doubts it, it's a pretty safe bet he's read like a dozen papers related to the prediction and is basing it on something. He's like the Bunnie Huang of cooking.
In the article the only explanation he gives is that it doesn't make sense to him, doesn't mention any papers or anything at all. But I'm pretty certain that he's wrong and it works. The difference in gas if I've been eating beans recently vs if I haven't eaten them in a couple of months is not just "I feel like maybe I get a little bit less gassy maybe" it's going from "two dozen farts at least, guaranteed" vs "one or two, if any at all" it's a night and day difference and if there even was a paper that says the contrary rather than change my mind I'd just assume that there must be something wrong with how the study was made. Of course, I'm just a sample of one and I haven't done any study either, so I don't mean to imply that there might not be other factors or that it may not work to the same degree for everybody, only that I'm pretty sure that dismissing it is wrong because I know at least one counter example.
More anecdata here. For various health reasons, about six months ago I started eating beans every day for lunch. At first it was… intense. But within a few weeks, the gas entirely disappeared. I now have no issues whatsoever.
FWIW, some beans are easier on my system than others. Kidney beans (sadly), my favorite, can be murder if you don’t cook them thoroughly enough. Lentils, on the other hand, seem to be pretty gentle. They also soak up whatever flavor they are cooked in so they are a great “starter bean” if you want to eat a more vegetarian diet.
well if your solution is to eat beans with 3/4 meals and I STILL need to social distance for a few months while I acclimate then that's not really the best solution now is it?
What causes this? Gut microbiome adapting? Doesn't that imply there should be some probiotic-type supplement you can take to seed these bacteria and keep them alive even when not eating beans?
Yeah. Heather Cox Richardson was arguing about this today, saying that historically the job of the government was to decide that cheaper but gutting a local economy, or cheaper but taking enough market share to be able to heavily raise prices in the future was bad. But due to Bork that capacity of the government to actually help drive good outcomes for the bulk of the population has been gutted.
local small business should offer local specialty, if it's doing the exact same thing as the big business but with higher overhead, then why not find something much more productive for the folks there?
small local economies that are stagnating already for decades are not great for anyone. people who live there are struggling, no upward mobility, anyone a bit more successful leaves, the usual urban rural polarization intensifies, yadda yadda.
obviously one of the big drivers of this is the completely fucked up housing policy. (which itself is driven by public safety and public transit issues.)
education is a close second. then the return to office mandates. the all the discontinuities and disincentives of the braindead wrong implementation of welfare (and other social support/payments).
the real economy deadweight loss is easily 2-3% of GDP (per year of course)
Luckily, Lina Khan has just announced The Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which is going to be training the next generation of antitrust lawyers for the US. If we are lucky, she will also be working on much bigger things than that at the same time. If we are doubly lucky, she will be training hundreds of new lawyers as good as she is.
I'm like technically the exact demographic they should be chasing. Plant based eater who loves the taste of meat and just stopped eating it for ethical reasons. But like, I'm not gonna eat a heavily processed food often for the reasons stated above, and also it's just not great nutritionally compared to Seitan, which also actually just tasted better when prepared right. And it also doesn't stack up compared to high protein / extra firm tofu, which is incredible for cooking when frozen and then defrosted and cooked. And also made of soybeans, one of the cheapest food commodities in the world. So why would I pay 2x or 3x the amount of money for a drastically inferior product? Just when I want an exact burger replica, and once you are plant based for 3 or more years, you just don't really crave that anymore except as maybe a guilty pleasure once or twice a year.
So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.
I haven’t done a comparison of Beyond vs seitan for their nutritional value, but as someone who used to eat a lot more seitan I gleefully moved over to Beyond/Impossible. Seitan is packed full of gluten, which is much harder to digest. Seitan makes me uncomfortably bloated whereas Beyond/Impossible do not. And no, I don’t have a gluten “intolerance” or Celiac.
Seitan has 3x-5x the protein of beyond meat by weight. It sucks that your body processes it less. For me it’s usually a treat, and I’ve never noticed any digestive issues despite having issues with more whole wheat things (beer, more natural whole wheat breads).
I’m glad you like the beyond meat though. Good for them to have actual consistent customers for the 2x / year I end up eating it!
Yeah one of my friends is bashing her head against the wall about this. She’s a small farmer up on the Olympic peninsula where there are no approved slaughterhouses for small farmers to use to process meat, so them selling the meat locally to people around them is illegal. So she is trying to build one for the surrounding area, except all the regulations that exist are for insanely scaled operations and make no sense for a small scale… so she has to keep petitioning the county about different things.
No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.
Orion was never aiming for anywhere. It was always meant to be a flexible module that could be used for whatever some future plan would come up with. It was developed as part of the Crewed Expeditionary Vehicle program explicitly as a flexible platform. Orion block 1 was originally supposed to be a shuttle replacement for transit to the ISS. The constellation program under which Orion started to be built ostensibly had ambitions beyond just going to the moon, including missions to both Mars and Near Earth Asteroids, but those follow on targets were never really fleshed out. The SLS was created after constellation was cancelled with no clear mission defined; its intent to keep supplier contracts going was clearly stated at the time. Artemis was a program created to give the SLS destinations to go to, none of which are Mars.
Tell us about the flammable tape and the heat shield and the ECLSS and the power hiccup, about how while Orion has been in development SpaceX has built and deployed Cargo and Crew Dragon 2 and flown 20 crews into orbit, or how it costs six times more than Crew Drahon, so far. Or about the side hatch not opening easily under pressure (Apollo I anyone?). Or the status of the docking system for Artemis II.
Just as the comment above says. This discussion is a lot of armchair software engineers who don't understand the processes arguing about things they don't have any actual insight into. Just normal HN pedantry and certainty in subjects they have no expertise in. Also loads and loads of either astroturfers, or true believers in SpaceX. Mixed with a lot of hate for NASA, which having spent many 80+ hour weeks with working with many of their engineers, I find extremely sad (but maybe fitting for these political times).
But nothing you just said is enlightening, it's just shit-talking people who would probably admit at the drop of a hat that they aren't not aeronautical engineers.
Do you want to provide your specific insights into the announcement in the post?
Agreed, and he’s already behind in humanoid robots, so the hype there won’t last long. The problem is that China is obliterating him at every turn because they actually build things that work instead of just hyping things and saying fake numbers of how much money it could be if every human on the planet bought 20.
Alito is one of the original proponents of the unitary executive theory (way before he was a Supreme Court justice). Everything he does should be looked at as an attempt to impose said theory and destroy America.
its truly bizarre that anyone with this view could get approved by congress. its so antithetical to the entire american political system. just blows my mind how spineless congress as an institution has been for decades.
Repealing the 17th amendment will once again incentivize the Senate to choose Supreme Court justices who seek to strengthen federalism & decentralize power
Source: vegan who eats beans with 75+% of meals
reply