Comment by basilgohar
1 day ago
There are other significant factors beyond the ones you mentioned, such as inflammation due to processed foods, certain oils, and more that are common in industrialized medicine.
Plenty of anecdata of people who stopped eating certain categories of food and certain conditions they had for a long time went away. In my son's case, a severe case of eczema that persisted for years went away in a matter of weeks after we significantly reduced the amount of hydrogenated oil products available to him to eat.
Sure enough, when we would visit my mom's place which had it, and he'd indulge, the symptoms came back. Same thing when we would buy it at home and he's splurge, he'd have the same problems recur. Cutting it out of the diet is the only thing that correlated highly with the absence of the condition. This happened even after a move from one state to another.
One case, not proof, but definitely repeatable in our circumstances. I have heard a LOT of similar stories. Is it proof? No, but it's an amazingly easy thing to try. It's takes an adjustment, but it intuitively makes sense. Processed food of today is something our ancestors wouldn't even recognize as food. It's just not what our bodies were designed to handle. Some can handle it better than others, but such a processed food and artificial sugar-heavy diet can't be called natural or even healthy.
A lot of this largely is not true. People think that paleothic humans ate a lot of meat - they did not. They ate very little meat, we eat the most meat we’ve ever eaten now.
And the meat they did eat was lean game meat. It was high in unsaturated fats - like our modern day oils. Not like a steak. A steak is a product of farming. It’s a new invention, <10,000 years. Prior, humans ate almost exclusively nuts, fruits and foliage.
Yes oils are “refined”, but humans have been eating unsaturated oils predominantly for almost all of our existence. The proliferation of animal fats is very, very new. Really, it’s past 100 years. Before that meat was rare, it was a delicacy, very expensive for people.
Now, high sugar is a different story. But the oil thing is complex, it’s not as a simple as oil bad animal fat good and natural. No, it’s very unnatural.
No idea where you're getting this from. The paleolithic was during an ice age full of big fatty game like sloths, mammoths, and so on. Some believe we hunted these animals to the point of extinction with a tiny population, which would imply a very high level, arguably unbelievably high, of consumption of meat. Even if we didn't hunt them to extinction we certainly did engage in relatively large scale hunting and consumption of vast quantities of them, which already largely falsifies your concept.
Meat only became more of a luxury in the agricultural age where we started squeezing more and more people into smaller and smaller regions which meant there was no longer enough to go around. So plebs got the carbs, and royalty got the protein. FWIW you can also see this in the groups that have ancient traditions dating back far into the past, like the various tribal groups in Russia, Mongolian nomads, etc. Meat, and many highly creative ways of preserving it [1], remain the majority of their diet. They probably don't date back to the paleo, but at least far back enough to falsify the claim that animal fats are even remotely novel.
[1] - https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/334150-dish-kill-kopalk...
This is just not true.
In reality we have little to no idea what the proportion of meat to non meat humans ate at the time.
More realistically, different groups of humans ate different ratios of such foods.
There were almost certainly a pretty large group of humans, for example, who were basically frugivores.
You can simply look up Wikipedia and find all the references about our limited knowledge and the high likelihood that there was no single paleo diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic
Ultimately, humans have been opportunistic omnivores capable of eating and surviving on whatever was most easily available, which is part of why they spread so successfully across the globe.
Trying to look at our history is a silly way to determine what is a good diet for humans today when we can scientifically examine humans today and identify what foods are healthier than others for them.
It’s like instead of noticing that drinking purified water has better outcomes for human beings today, insisting that we shouldn’t live drink untreated water straight out of streams and lakes because that’s what our Paleolithic ancestors did.
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If you got out of my comment that oils and fats are bad, then you didn't understand my point. I was emphasizing on the negative effects of processed foods.
People in certain regions always ate a lot of meat. For example, the Inuit don't really have anything else to eat. Nothing edible grows that far North. And they are neither obese nor suffer from classical diseases of civilization, until they start eating highly processed modern food.
The Maasai are also known to eat a lot of meat and dairy.
I'm sure you can eat a diet fairly high in meat and dairy and be healthy, IF you are lean enough and exercise enough. However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans. And, the meat they did eat was not the same because it was wild, not farmed.
But, humans have been eating unsaturated fat from nuts, seeds, and meat for millennia. Unsaturated fat is not the devil. We have very strong evidence that a diet high in meat, particularly farmed red meat, is both carcinogenic and causes heart disease. When you look at high processed diets across the globe today, you'll notice they have similarities:
1. Extreme consumption of fatty, farmed meats
2. Very little fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other foods high in fiber
3. Processed shelf-stable goods
4. Extreme portion sizes
When people look at the Mediterranean diet, it's not just that they eat much more food high in unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat. They also eat less and move much more.
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