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NumberWangMan | 1 year ago

I don't think that the scientific consensus on nutrition as unsettled as you say. As an example, there are a lot of people making money selling various diets as well as promoting uncertainty and doubt around the issue, but there seems to be pretty definitive evidence in favor of cholesterol and fat increasing cardiovascular disease risk. People love to misrepresent studies, or cherry-pick poorly designed studies, and use them to claim that the consensus is wrong.

I'm not talking about observational studies either, but actual controlled feeding trials where they put you on a strictly controlled diet for a period of time.

Even if you look at what humans are evolved to eat -- evolution puts selective pressure on reproductive fitness. As a process, it does not put any pressure on you to live a long time, as long as you reproduce successfully (which is why insects like the mayfly can even exist). So looking at what primitive people ate does not really give us information about what is healthy if you want to live a long time (aside from avoiding things that are obviously immediately poisonous).

Even hunter gatherer tribes that eat a meat-and-dairy-heavy diet like the Maasai have been examined and have pretty significant cardiovascular disease -- but they are also so ridiculously active their blood vessels are much wider than people with a modern sedentary lifestyle, and that mostly balances out the narrowing from arterial plaque. Native people who eat a traditional diet heavy in whole grains, legumes, and tubers for calories have them beat by a mile when it comes to arterial health.

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UniverseHacker|1 year ago

I strongly disagree- I have a related academic background and have read the nutrition literature extensively myself, attend nutrition conferences, etc. and don’t agree there is convincing evidence for what you are saying. This narrative is just one of the cherry picked diet fads.

Moreover, saying the history of human diets gives us no information is just incorrect. It’s not the final word on nutrition, but it is the obvious Bayesian prior. When you raise any animal in a zoo, or culture a microbe in a lab the first thing you do is mimic its natural environment as well as you can, at least until you understand more.

Personally- I am much more interested in quality of life aka things like “reproductive success” than lifespan in my own health, but I am also skeptical that they are at odds. I am an active person and enjoy being physically strong, high energy, etc.

hombre_fatal|1 year ago

Well, the prior is that our ancestors had to survive on what was available, not live optimally healthy lives even during their reproductive years.

At the end you imply that your preferred diet (presumably high saturated fat, low carb, low fiber) makes you stronger and gives you more energy than the alternatives. But that's not the trade-off nor implication that can be drawn from our ancestors eating what was available to them for survival. We can do better in 2024 than use narratives about the past to dictate how we eat today.

You should listen to this debate between Matthew Nagra and Anthony Chaffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FFV0w55k2I -- You will find yourself making the same points as Chaffee, but go see if you are as equally stumped by the evidence that Nagra provides.