[extropy-chat] Failure of low-fat diet

[Damien Sullivan]

On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 01:43:16AM -0500, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> Clearly, the likelihood of surviving an infectious illness depends on
> the level of stress you are under, and I mean something else than
> purely psychological stress. Under natural conditions most humans have
> to cope with substantial burdens of parasite infestations, coupled

> I would expect that there is a nonlinear survival response to
> reduction of single infectious risk factors: if you vaccinate only

Axelrod speculated that pathogens might have a couple of infection modes.  If
they're the only ones around, or if the host seems healthy, it makes sense to
play nice and go for modest scattering into the environment over time, not
hurting the host too much.  If the host seems to be getting weaker, this can
be seen as foreseeing the end of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game, and the
pathogen might explode in a frenzy of rapid reproduction, weakening the host
even more.  So at some point in improving nutrition, decreasing stress, or
decreasing overall pathogen load, there might have been a switch in how we
were being infected.

-xx- Damien X-)