The Original 7 Wonders Of The World: The Food Pyramid

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"Psychologists have tried to give their own definitions to words like idiot, imbecile, moron, and genius, but they have just been refining the clichés of the culture, in which “dummy” is one of the first words that kids in the U.S. learn. Many psychologists have tried to create “culture-free” tests of intelligence, making it clear that they believe in something like innate animal intelligence, though they usually call it “genetic” intelligence. Other psychometrists have transcended not only biology but even rationality, and have catalogued the preferences of people that they define as intelligent, and designed “I.Q. tests” based on the selection of things that were preferred by “intelligent people.” This behavior is remarkably similar to the “psychometry” of the general culture, in which “smart” people are those who do things the “right” way."
-Ray Peat

 

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"When questions are answered, curiosity is rewarded, and the person is enlivened. In school, when following instructions and conforming to a routine is the main business, many questions must go unanswered, and curiosity is punished by the dulling emptiness of the routine"
-Ray Peat

 

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"But apart from ideologically institutionalized stupidity, there are real variations in the ability to learn, to remember and to apply knowledge, and to solve problems. These variations are generally metabolic differences, and so will change according to circumstances that affect metabolism. Everyday social experiences affect metabolism, stimulating and supporting some kinds of brain activity, suppressing and punishing others. All of the activities in the child's environment are educational, in one way or another." -Ray Peat

 

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"Even sophisticated people can fall into stereotyped thinking when they write about issues of intelligence. For example, no one considers it a sign of genius when a slum kid is fluent in both Spanish and English, but when some of history's brightest people are discussed, the fact that they learned classical Greek at an early age is always mentioned. No one mentions whether they were competent in idiomatic Spanish." -Ray Peat

 

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"Some of the famous prodigies of history illustrate the importance of ideology in the development of intellect. Family ideology, passing on the philosophical orientations of parents and their friends, shapes the way the children are educated." -Ray Peat

 

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"Some schools are worse than others. For example, slum children were given I.Q. tests when they started school, and each subsequent year, and their I.Q.s dropped with each year of school. In a stimulating environment, the reverse can happen, the I.Q. can rise each year. Since the tests aren't “culture free,” their scores reflected the material that they were being taught, but they undoubtedly also reflected the increasing boredom and despair of the children in a bad school, or the increasing liveliness of the children in the stimulating environment." -Ray Peat

 

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"In schools like Summerhill, which was founded in 1921 by A. S. Neill, students aren't required to attend classes when they would rather do something else, but at graduation they usually do better on their standardized national examinations than students who have dutifully attended classes for years. For students, as for rats, freedom and variety are good for the brain, and tedious conformity is harmful. When a school is very good, it can spread a contagion of playfulness along with an interest in learning." -Ray Peat

 

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"Nutrition is one of the most important sciences, and should certainly be as prestigious and well financed as astrophysics and nuclear physics, but while people say “it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out,” no one says “it doesn’t take a nutritionist to understand that.” Partly, that’s because medicine treated scientific nutrition as an illegitimate step-child, and refused throughout the 20th century to recognize that it is a central part of scientific health care. In the 1970s, physicians and dietitians were still ridiculing the idea that vitamin E could prevent or cure diseases of the circulatory system, and babies as well as older people were given “total intravenous nutrition” which lacked nutrients that are essential to life, growth, immunity, and healing. Medicine and science are powerfully institutionalized, but no institution or profession has existed for the purpose of encouraging people to act reasonably." -Ray Peat

 

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"Nutrition is one of the most important sciences, and should certainly be as prestigious and well financed as astrophysics and nuclear physics, but while people say “it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out,” no one says “it doesn’t take a nutritionist to understand that.” Partly, that’s because medicine treated scientific nutrition as an illegitimate step-child, and refused throughout the 20th century to recognize that it is a central part of scientific health care. In the 1970s, physicians and dietitians were still ridiculing the idea that vitamin E could prevent or cure diseases of the circulatory system, and babies as well as older people were given “total intravenous nutrition” which lacked nutrients that are essential to life, growth, immunity, and healing. Medicine and science are powerfully institutionalized, but no institution or profession has existed for the purpose of encouraging people to act reasonably." -Ray Peat

 

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"In this environment, most people have felt that subtleties of definition, logic and evidence weren’t important for nutrition, and a great amount of energy has gone into deciding whether there were “four food groups” or “seven food groups” or a “nutritional pyramid.” -Ray Peat

 

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Jan 14, 2016 from Bumberleybee

Dear Ray,

Do you still teach people at any colleges or universities? I live in the UK, it is a shame your books are not yet available here. You are always very kind to answer my questions and your articles are really useful. Just hungry for more information!

Ray Peat said:

"I just do occasional seminars. The current culture of colleges and universities in the US favors a career-centered conformism, nothing that I would fit into." -Ray Peat

 

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"The motives behind governmental and quasi-governmental nutrition policies usually represent something besides a simple scientific concern for good health, as when health care institutions say that Mexican babies should begin eating beans when they reach the age of six months, or that non-whites don’t need milk after they are weaned. In a culture that discourages prolonged breast feeding, the effects of these doctrines can be serious." -Ray Peat

 

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"After a century of scientific nutrition, public nutritional policies are doing approximately as much harm as good, and they are getting worse faster than they are getting better" -Ray Peat

 

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"Definitions have rarely distinguished clearly between nutrients and drugs, and new commercial motives are helping to further blur the distinctions." -Ray Peat

 

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"Rogers showed that a sense of solidarity must exist between therapist and client for the therapy to be helpful. A similar solidarity has to exist between teacher and student, for education to be successful. If ordinary family and social contacts could occur within such an atmosphere of mutual respect, psychopathology (including learning difficulties) would be much less common." -Ray Peat

 

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"I.Q. testing originated in a historical setting in which its purpose was often to establish a claim of racial superiority, or to justify sterilization or “euthanasia,” or to exclude immigrants. More recently, the tests have been used to assign students to certain career paths. Because of their use by people in power to control others, the I.Q. tests have helped to create misunderstanding of the nature of intelligence. A person's “I.Q.” now has very strong associations with the ideology of schooling as a road to financial success, rather than to enrichment of a shared mental life." Ray Peat

 

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"Decreasing tryptophan or decreasing serotonin improves learning and alertness, while increased serotonin impairs learning." -Ray Peat

 

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"My parents had an old copy of one of Darwin's books, and I was impressed by the fact that in his introduction, Darwin was careful to point out that his ideas were already being misrepresented, and that he did not hold "natural selection" to be the only mechanism of evolution, but that several factors were important, including sexual selection and the inheritance of acquired traits. I suppose those remarks might have been motivated partly by knowing that Butler didn't approve of the way he was behaving, but they didn't seem to have much influence on the way history has characterized Darwin's work. All of my biology professors would have been happier if Darwin had never made those remarks. I suspect that Darwin's problem was that any theory of evolution was under such heavy attack that he couldn't devote much time to the relatively minor issue of how evolution works." -Ray Peat

 

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"When we ask a question and find an answer, we are changed. Thinking with learning is a developmental process. But many people learn at an early age not to question. This changes the nature of subsequent learning and brain development." -Ray Peat