Comment by nightski
9 years ago
100 years back life expectancy was significantly worse. There are countless things in nature that can out right kill you. Your approach seems pretty ridiculous. (I did not down vote you however).
9 years ago
100 years back life expectancy was significantly worse. There are countless things in nature that can out right kill you. Your approach seems pretty ridiculous. (I did not down vote you however).
Little of that life expectancy had to do specifically with worse nutritional quality of food. Access to food, nutritional understanding, and food spoilage, yes.
Much had to do with a lack of awareness of germ theory, with waste disposal -- both human and trash -- with pollution of water supplies, and with poor or limited public health measures against community-propogating infectious disease.
The highest mortality rates were among infants and children, which did a great deal to reduce total life expectency at birth, but had compartively far less an effect on adolescent and adult life expectency.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
At birth, in 1850, white male life expectency was 38.3 (additional years of life), but 48.0 at age 10, and 40.1 at age 20.
In 2011, the comparable values are 76.3, 66.9, and 57.2.
The increase was initially rapid -- by 1929-31, rates had reached 59.12, 54.96, and 46.02, respectively.
While there's been some improvement in later years of life, it's been far less. If you survived to age 50 in 1850, you had a life expectency less than 10 years shorter than in 2011.
I already knew all of this, yet it doesn't really affect my opinion. It provides no evidence whatsoever that going out into nature and picking random naturally occurring foods is more healthy than our food system today.
It addresses the specific criticism you'd offered of eating older rather than newer cultivars: there's little evidence your specific criticism has merits.
Neither of us have addressed the underlying question of whether or not present cultivars and crops are themselves intrinsically healthier or less healthy than older ones. There are some theoretical bases for beliving either way. The arguments against many specifically processed foods are rather stronger.