[begueradj]

As a North African, I instinctively understand and firmly believe everything mentioned in this article about sleeping is true.

From my perspective, the way I see your comment is this: give me scientific evidence that walking is beneficial to my health.

We lose our identity when we disconnect from Nature. I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants": https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-t...

That's where we are.

[jawns]

> I instinctively understand and firmly believe everything mentioned in this article about sleeping is true.

Well, yes, but that's a standard quality of B.S. It's plausible, and intuitive. When you actually start trying to prove it out, though, you discover it's wrong.

True, there is a category of "no duh" scientific findings, like walking is beneficial to one's health, that do align with our intuition. But where science really shines is when the evidence points to something counterintuitive.

[GuB-42]

Even the "walking is beneficial" part is not just "duh".

I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?

And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.

[navane]

Freakonomics!

[creatonez]

> I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants"

This story is interesting, but doesn't shock me a whole lot from the perspective of losing our touch with nature, because we now have an understanding that our ancestors fluctuated between carnivory and herbivory quite a lot. If these population changes in gut bacteria can be caused in such a short span of time, it seems likely that it can also be reversed.