Sucralose and aspartame are both reliable migraine triggers for me, and have been at least since my early 20s. Stevia and monkfruit are fine. The only other even semi-consistent migraine trigger for me is alcohol.
I've successfully avoided migraines for years by carefully avoiding sucralose and aspartame (and drinking little to no alcohol), but even a small serving of something "sugar-free" and within a few hours I'll get a crippling migraine. In college, I spent a while testing, and the link between both sucralose and aspartame and my migraines was perfectly reliable.
Alcohol in general has been harder to nail down. A single beer won't normally trigger a migraine, while sometimes a single glass of wine or small cocktail will. If I drank to excess it was hard to tell the difference between a hangover and a migraine; I wasn't that invested in social alcohol consumption, so I've mostly just been a teetotaler since college. Absinthe uniquely reliably gives me an acephalgic migraine with aura around 12 hours after drinking.
Edited to add: I've just stayed away from ace-K and sugar-alcohols as a precaution. I'm past the point in my life where I have any real interest in risking crippling migraines for the sake of personal curiosity.
I think I've read somewhere that drop in blood glucose can cause headaches. Maybe sweetners trick your body into releasing a lot of insuline to deal with "sugar" but there's no new sugar in your blood so glucose level drops giving you a headache?
Just a theory but you could test it by monitoring glucose after ingesting something with sweetner.
According to this theory ingesting sweetner together with sugar should cause you less or no discomfort.
Maybe you could try doing something like drinking normal Coke after accidentally ingesting sweetner to see if it helps?
Alcohol might be a different issue. After all it's just a straight up poison that metabolizes into another poison.
My anecdotal experience is that this is true. I can often (but not always) subvert a looming headache by eating something sweet. Yogurt in particularly is remarkably effective.
Generally speaking, the more sugary the drink the worse the hangover. You seem to be unlucky enough to get the migraine before drinking enough for a hangover, but the mechanism may be the same?
I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.
Quantum Mechanics is why atoms and molecules exist and form bonds. QM is the physics of chemistry. Without QM, chemistry does not happen. The universe would just be a big churning mess of particles and you would never get little lego pieces that snap together according to repeatable rules that, when repeated, form macroscopic substances of innumerable description up to and including life itself.
So QM is no doubt involved, but on this scale it is either a trivial fact or an indication that someone tried to lean on a classical approximation, it broke, and they had to revise it (which arguably says more about the approximation than it says about the underlying behavior).
Apologies for the nitpick. It's a pet peeve of mine that discussions of QM tend to focus so hard on the strange behavior that they forget to mention where QM fits into the bigger picture and leave people with the impression that it only matters under special circumstances when in fact it matters so much that you can hardly have "matter" without it.
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Re: anesthetic, a large fraction of simple halocarbon compounds have intense neural effects, so anyone doing halocarbon chemistry would quickly be put on the "scent" even if they weren't tasting everything in the Sigma Aldrich catalog.
I would say everyone understands that "quantum effects" refers to situations in which classical approximations break down.
Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. "Disk corruption" doesn't necessarily mean anything is physically wrong with the disk, only that its contents have become inconsistent with the filesystem abstraction it normally supports, etc.
As a non-physicist and non-chemist who keeps running into quantum mechanics only through headlines, extra thanks for pointing this out. It's quite obvious in retrospect to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the physics of chemistry, and I don't know why I didn't see that before. It certainly helps to view a lot of things in a new light.
Unfortunately I'm not finding anything related to anesthesia except for hand-wavy pieces about "quantum consciousness" (anyone, please do correct me with a link or two if I'm wrong). I blame Sir Roger Penrose, if only because him talking speculatively about it (even in a sophisticated, informed way) seems to give so many others leeway to speak far more casually about the same topic, with far less coherence. This is why we can't have our cake and eat it too I guess
Only if you can stand the format. Even when (maybe especially when) they cover a topic that I'm interested in, I find it infuriating to listen to.
It's filled with endless repetition and rephrasing of the same thing over and over again. For example here's a snippet from a transcript:
JENN: ... to see if he can find anything in the interstitium that's happening that could explain this. And he finds ...
QIUSHENG CHEN: Telocytes.
INTERPRETER: Telocytes?
QIUSHENG CHEN: Telocytes.
INTERPRETER: Telocytes.
JENN: ... these cells ...
JENN: Oh, telocytes.
QIUSHENG CHEN: Yeah.
JENN: Telocytes, yes.
JENN: ... called telocytes, which are a newly-discovered cell ...
The whole thing is like that, where they take something that could have been a single sentence and stretch it out over 3, 5, even 10 minutes of repetition and unnecessary detail and throughout all of it they randomly insert stock audio and sound effects of things that don't matter to the content at all. Like someone will say they went into work and the audio abruptly cuts to 15-30 seconds of nothing but the ambient sounds of an office environment.
The transcript might be easier for some to tolerate. The anesthesia episode doesn't seem to be too bad in terms of the number of sentence fragments, repetitions, and pointless interjections as some episodes. Even as transcripts some are extremely frustrating to extract information from.
I belive methoxetamine could be considered an anesthetic and it was invented expressly for the purpose of mimicing the effects of ketamine at a lower dosage threshold to avoid the ketamine associated bladder damage.
I believe the chemist was an amputee as a result of a terrorist attack and spent his life wirking to develop an analgesic as effective as ketamine for nerve pain without the side affects.
mxe was a very beloved "researcg chemical" (read:designer drug) prior to like 2016 when supply dried up.
I don't think they measure if plants/bacterium are anesthetized, but in exposing them to things that cause anesthesia in humans, other potentially unrelated effects are noticed.
Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different biologies for completely different things. They're essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a lot of variance in effect even among different instances of human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and profound.
It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead" (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male lizards)
or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a completely different function for it in the brain and regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother"
or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant, maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and handle all the new effects rather than overloading the existing semaphore".
Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy. Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.
Considering how we all seem to be the product of millions of years of hit-or-miss natural selection, it feels almost natural that our advancements have also had a great deal of luck/improbability.
Some homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic.
But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.
To give some more context, Fleming's job was an antibacterial researcher, and also molds were also previously known to have these properties. In some ways, the lucky part was others finding his work and developing it. I found this video on the development of Penicillin a pretty interesting watch:
Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.
I mean history suggests that’s the case. Took centuries for Copernicus to exist.
AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.
Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.
On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.
Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.
Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then analysis by Kepler. Objections to heliocentrism were on scientific grounds which were resolved by the discovery of inertia, Airy disks, and stellar aberration.
I think it feels serendipitous only if you think of "sweet" taste (or for that matter any taste) as occurring in this giant continuum of tastes where hitting a specific spot on that continuum is probabilistically impossible.
Ultimately, we experience tastes thanks to chemical receptors on the tongue, and as long as a substance triggers those receptors we experience a certain taste.
Now of course if triggering needs a very very specific combination of atoms, then it is not very probable, but we know especially from drug research that you can use similarities in molecular structure or sometimes in say the electron cloud of the molecule to perform this triggering. Caffeine for eg is a selective adenosine antagonist that fools the body and binds to adenosine receptors. Now of course int the case of caffeine the structures are somewhat similar, but you could imagine similar stuff happening with other molecules too
If you think of it as that sort of problem, it's not that surprising that many different types of molecules might achieve the same effect.
That artificial sweetener they mention halfway through, the one that gorillas are evolving not to taste, man that amused me when I first heard about it a few years ago. Chalk one up for hominidae.
One interesting thing in this context is that you can taste the difference between water and heavy water, even though they look the same as ball-and-sticks. Also heavy water is said to taste sweet
> Molecular structures of sucrose and aspartame, looking very different
I can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”.
They don’t taste the same. Aspartame has a very nasty aftertaste as compared to sucrose.
Re stevia, apparently how you taste it is determined by how sensitive your bitter taste receptors happen to be. It’s somehow also related to why some people can’t stand cilantro, for example.
For me, stevia is simply sweet with no aftertaste so I guess I’m lucky in this regard.
I wonder if people have different genetic predispositions that influences how sugar taste to them. Like I have with cilantro (a bit, a tiny tiny bit is okayish but more than that and it's.. ugh... it's not even soap it's.. bleh..).
I'm left curious as to why our taste receptors are so attuned to sweetness if high sugar foods weren't historically correlated with being high in energy.
Perhaps because the high sugar foods that occur in nature contain nutrients we don't get elsewhere and help us fight disease. These sugars are also naturally packaged in a way that makes them behave quite unlike added sugars, they don't lead to the same insulin spikes or high blood pressure, and consuming fruits like berries alongside more processed, artificially sweetened foods can even reduce the insulin spikes of those foods.
I have thoughts about that, but IANAN (nutritionalist). Not all energy is the same, as in fructose (in sucrose, which we sense as sweeter) versus glucose (what composes carbs, and also in sucrose), two simple sugars. Glucose goes more directly into the bloodsteam during digestion. Fructose does not go straight to the bloodstream but is processed by the liver. Although it gets into the bloodstream slower, it gets stored by the liver faster, and we use this as an energey resevoir when we are not getting energy directly thorugh digestion. So maybe we crave this somtimes when we need to rebuild our energy stores. Or at least it seems that way for me. I crave sugar/fruit sometimes, particularly after exercising. I don't generally even eat sweets/desserts, so my body apparently isn't fooled into always wanting sugar. I would guess from my experience sugar plays a specific role and I want it at a certain time and not others.
Incidently, I get a headache when I eat processed sugar, but not fruit. (However, fruit will also give me a headache if I carmelize it, cooking it at a high temperature for a long time.) Anyway that is one reason I avoid sweetened foods and maybe why I don't get sucked into eating sugar all the time. And people think I am trying to be super healthy...
The references he gives in that section suggest that it boils down to a convenient way to try to gauge poison by contrasting sugars to bitterer phytochemicals. Plants with sugar may be less nutritious on average, but that's just counting calories/macronutrients, not taking into account poisonous substances.
1) Its still very, very high in energy. We're built to use it.
2) Fruits contain all sorts of good vitamins and minerals along with sugar. Two birds with one stone.
3) I don't know if we are any less "attuned" to it than fat or protein. Most people would eat a good steak over a bag of candy.
If nothing else: It's certainly useful that mother's milk tastes good to babies. Imagine what an evolutionary disadvantage it would be if it tasted bitter.
To make it explicit for those who haven't tasted it, mother's milk tastes distinctly sweet (literally), in a way cow milk does not.
So yeah, there's a probable purpose for sweet receptors. An interesting question is whether seeking sweet foods in modern adult life, which would probably not have been available in our evolution, guides us to a healthy diet.
This poses the opposite question: What might we have missed? Maybe there are some reverse-accidents, some significant random discoveries that, due to their randomness, didn't happen.
There was an SF story I read years ago where the core concept was that humanity had somehow "missed" an obvious power-source/FTL drive, which meant that the "solution" to the Drake Equation is that the galaxy is full of intelligent, star-spanning empires that are effectively stuck at a late-1800s tech level (with starships), because getting to there was easy, and doing all the complex 20th century stuff humanity has done is really hard. Hijinks and hilarity ensues when they reach earth.
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I've successfully avoided migraines for years by carefully avoiding sucralose and aspartame (and drinking little to no alcohol), but even a small serving of something "sugar-free" and within a few hours I'll get a crippling migraine. In college, I spent a while testing, and the link between both sucralose and aspartame and my migraines was perfectly reliable.
Alcohol in general has been harder to nail down. A single beer won't normally trigger a migraine, while sometimes a single glass of wine or small cocktail will. If I drank to excess it was hard to tell the difference between a hangover and a migraine; I wasn't that invested in social alcohol consumption, so I've mostly just been a teetotaler since college. Absinthe uniquely reliably gives me an acephalgic migraine with aura around 12 hours after drinking.
Edited to add: I've just stayed away from ace-K and sugar-alcohols as a precaution. I'm past the point in my life where I have any real interest in risking crippling migraines for the sake of personal curiosity.
Just a theory but you could test it by monitoring glucose after ingesting something with sweetner.
According to this theory ingesting sweetner together with sugar should cause you less or no discomfort.
Maybe you could try doing something like drinking normal Coke after accidentally ingesting sweetner to see if it helps?
Alcohol might be a different issue. After all it's just a straight up poison that metabolizes into another poison.
My anecdotal experience is that this is true. I can often (but not always) subvert a looming headache by eating something sweet. Yogurt in particularly is remarkably effective.
Quantum Mechanics is why atoms and molecules exist and form bonds. QM is the physics of chemistry. Without QM, chemistry does not happen. The universe would just be a big churning mess of particles and you would never get little lego pieces that snap together according to repeatable rules that, when repeated, form macroscopic substances of innumerable description up to and including life itself.
So QM is no doubt involved, but on this scale it is either a trivial fact or an indication that someone tried to lean on a classical approximation, it broke, and they had to revise it (which arguably says more about the approximation than it says about the underlying behavior).
Apologies for the nitpick. It's a pet peeve of mine that discussions of QM tend to focus so hard on the strange behavior that they forget to mention where QM fits into the bigger picture and leave people with the impression that it only matters under special circumstances when in fact it matters so much that you can hardly have "matter" without it.
------------
Re: anesthetic, a large fraction of simple halocarbon compounds have intense neural effects, so anyone doing halocarbon chemistry would quickly be put on the "scent" even if they weren't tasting everything in the Sigma Aldrich catalog.
Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. "Disk corruption" doesn't necessarily mean anything is physically wrong with the disk, only that its contents have become inconsistent with the filesystem abstraction it normally supports, etc.
"Electron spin changes during general anesthesia in Drosophila" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25114249/
I learned about this from Nick Lane's book "Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death"
To contrast with an example of where quantum mechanics is relevant at the level of biology--this is one I'm familiar with:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-fragility-may-he...
Unfortunately I'm not finding anything related to anesthesia except for hand-wavy pieces about "quantum consciousness" (anyone, please do correct me with a link or two if I'm wrong). I blame Sir Roger Penrose, if only because him talking speculatively about it (even in a sophisticated, informed way) seems to give so many others leeway to speak far more casually about the same topic, with far less coherence. This is why we can't have our cake and eat it too I guess
Deleted Comment
It's filled with endless repetition and rephrasing of the same thing over and over again. For example here's a snippet from a transcript:
The whole thing is like that, where they take something that could have been a single sentence and stretch it out over 3, 5, even 10 minutes of repetition and unnecessary detail and throughout all of it they randomly insert stock audio and sound effects of things that don't matter to the content at all. Like someone will say they went into work and the audio abruptly cuts to 15-30 seconds of nothing but the ambient sounds of an office environment.The transcript might be easier for some to tolerate. The anesthesia episode doesn't seem to be too bad in terms of the number of sentence fragments, repetitions, and pointless interjections as some episodes. Even as transcripts some are extremely frustrating to extract information from.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia/transcript
I believe the chemist was an amputee as a result of a terrorist attack and spent his life wirking to develop an analgesic as effective as ketamine for nerve pain without the side affects.
mxe was a very beloved "researcg chemical" (read:designer drug) prior to like 2016 when supply dried up.
Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different biologies for completely different things. They're essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a lot of variance in effect even among different instances of human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and profound.
It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead" (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male lizards)
or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a completely different function for it in the brain and regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother"
or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant, maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and handle all the new effects rather than overloading the existing semaphore".
Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy. Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-work...
Deleted Comment
I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance?
Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?
But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXmkDapHWg
Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it. Willow bark tea is a whole process.
Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.
Hey, all the bugs that are eating that plant are dying. Let's see what happens if we smoke it.
AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.
Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.
On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.
Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.
Dead Comment
Ultimately, we experience tastes thanks to chemical receptors on the tongue, and as long as a substance triggers those receptors we experience a certain taste.
Now of course if triggering needs a very very specific combination of atoms, then it is not very probable, but we know especially from drug research that you can use similarities in molecular structure or sometimes in say the electron cloud of the molecule to perform this triggering. Caffeine for eg is a selective adenosine antagonist that fools the body and binds to adenosine receptors. Now of course int the case of caffeine the structures are somewhat similar, but you could imagine similar stuff happening with other molecules too
If you think of it as that sort of problem, it's not that surprising that many different types of molecules might achieve the same effect.
But the point of the post is that only five molecules found by dumb luck have had a useful sweetening effect.
> Molecular structures of sucrose and aspartame, looking very different I can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”.
They don’t taste the same. Aspartame has a very nasty aftertaste as compared to sucrose.
For me, stevia is simply sweet with no aftertaste so I guess I’m lucky in this regard.
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-all-the-sugar-in-...
Incidently, I get a headache when I eat processed sugar, but not fruit. (However, fruit will also give me a headache if I carmelize it, cooking it at a high temperature for a long time.) Anyway that is one reason I avoid sweetened foods and maybe why I don't get sucked into eating sugar all the time. And people think I am trying to be super healthy...
So yeah, there's a probable purpose for sweet receptors. An interesting question is whether seeking sweet foods in modern adult life, which would probably not have been available in our evolution, guides us to a healthy diet.