plant-animal co-evolution

Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.

gregladen | November 12, 2007

I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens. For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even modest quantity to rats, causes the rats to get cancer and die in no time. This raises concerns for humans because, well, the rats died. So the substance must be "bad for you." But this approach to nutritional science, and the reasoning that goes with it, is deeply flawed. Now, you may wish to jump in and say, "No, wait,…