I read a bunch of articles from John Douillard, and he likes to say hunter gatherers were really hunter diggers. They mostly dug up tubers and ate those. You had to be the luckiest caveperson alive to be able to eat ham every morning.
> John Douillard DC is an Ayurvedic Practitioner
Maybe I'm weird, but I like my authoritative positions on human evolution to come from evolutionary biologists, not woo-peddlers.
At any rate, humans can eat a very diverse range of foods. Inuits eat a primarily animal-derived diet, supplemented with a meager amount of gathered plants during a small portion of the year. Then the spectrum moves all the way over to peoples that eat mostly plant-matter with few animal products. Humans adapt wonderfully, that's why we're so prolific. There is no magic diet that happens to be "right."
Please don't. "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
The author has a doctorate from NYU and the article was published in a peer reviewed journal.
That's just a funny example, but there are tons of poorly researched peer reviewed papers which makes it exceedingly difficult for me to accept credentialis as being a useful signal. I find it's much better to have ideas stand on their own merit, rather than on the shoulders of those who are espousing them.
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but the term "woo" is a pretty widely used term in certain circles to describe fields and ideas that, shall we say, may not be self-critical and self-questioning enough in the ways you need to be in order to get to the truth. (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo)
Thus, I'm not sure if I would even classify it as "calling names". Ayurvedic practitioners might find it derogatory; I'm not sure. But it's a clear communication to a certain population of the what category joshuapants believes Ayurveda belongs to, and also a hint of what qualities of these peoples' thought processes might make joshuapants nervous when it's applied to other areas.
I totally agree! And a funny fact is that at the core of Ayurveda, the belief totally lines up too in that each individual is completely unique and must cater to their individual constitution or 'prakriti'. I agree that its a hard field to investigate rationally because so many of their concepts were recorded in sanskrit, a language built to express multiple meanings (some words have +20 meanings!).
A fun 'for instance' fact of sanskrit sometimes being 'unscientific' at first glance: a key component of health according to their science was the concept of 'agni' or digestive fire. So there were tons of passages referring to a great fire element inside our gut that cooks and refines matter. Of course we 'know' that no fire actually exists in our bellies, but it was a metaphor for what nowadays we understand as acids in our stomach, and our gut microbiome (composed of throngs of little organisms, eating, digesting, transforming, pooping so other microbes can eat that poop (yum!)). Little guys that can alter our mood, digestive capacity of vitamin absorption and a bunch of other important things that have been scientifically proven in the west.