New Christopher Walker Documentary On Serotonin

[mrchibbs]

Is Serotonin the Happy Hormone? Think Again

Props where props is due. Very well produced and informative documentary, and there is a quote from Ray! He covers learned helplessness, and a lot of really interesting angles.

Here is a summary:

Modern marketing for antidepressant drugs has been so effective at co-opting not just the medical community, but also the alternative health circles (calling it the “happy hormone” even though it’s not a hormone at all), regulating bodies, and the popular media, that most people now believe that they’re serotonin deficient. This could not be further from the truth, in fact most evidence points to population-wide excess of serotonin, and this serotonin overload is responsible for myriad devastating physical and psychological dysfunctions. The easy shorthand narrative about serotonin deficiency causing depression is not just lazy, it is fraudulent: completely inaccurate. Excess serotonin leads to overproduction of stress hormones such as estrogen, cortisol, and prolactin and conditions the human body & mind to “learned helplessness,” a phenomenon that has been demonstrated in animal research to trigger disturbingly acute behaviors. You don’t need more serotonin, you need less!

 

[wavelength123]

I like Walker's work. I think serotonin is "great" for the following reason:

Why cereals rapidly and extensively replaced traditional foods even though they were less nutritious and required more labor has been widely regarded as a puzzle. Also, cultivation of cereals continued even when the abundance of more easily processed foodstuffs—such as meat, tubers, and fruit—rendered it unnecessary (see Murphy, 2007). A clue could be the fact that all major civilizations, in every inhabited continent, arose in groups that practiced cereal agriculture and not in groups that only cultivated tubers and vegetables or had no agriculture at all. According to Wadley and Martin’s rather audacious hypothesis, daily opioid self-administration could have increased people’s tolerance of crowded sedentary conditions, of regular work, of subjugation by rulers. If so, cereals might have ultimately helped the development of civilization.

Bread and Other Edible Agents of Mental Disease

If you want to be a working zombie ant that does not question anything, have some of that starch and poultry. It's that good good. How else can you tolerate sitting down all week facing screens anyway, surrounded by PC peeps or SJWs.

 

[Bogdar]

Damn wavelength, that's a question I couldn't answer. I have to say it makes sense... Omg is there any studies that truly measured the opioid effect, how addictive it was etc??

 

[wavelength123]

It’s probably in that article. It’s a good read, I suggest you take an hour and go through it.