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Comment by zkhalique | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but what in the article actually makes a solid body of evidence in support of its thesis?

Agreed. The key point in the article is that mid-Victorians had a similar life-expectancy to our own. From there it just assumes that dietary changes are what caused life expectancy to decline, starting in the late-Victorian era. That's an awful lot of assuming.

The interesting thing to me was not the dietary claims, but the claims about life expectancy. If those are correct, then it does rather strongly suggest that the mid-Victorians were doing something right that we have now got wrong. Or perhaps just that modern medicine has not done as much to advance life expectancy as is generally thought.

I'd want to check references on the life expectancy. Quick web searching shows that it was about 40 years, but I don't know whether that's life expectancy from birth or not. (Very bad child mortality will artificially lower the average life expectancy.)

I have found some mentions that adult life expectancy from age 5 was as good as it is now... all of which appear to be by the article authors.

Given that a lot of Victorian children over the age of 5 were working, and frequently at dangerous jobs, I'd be very hesitant about accepting that figure.

It may be worth pointing out that this is an article intended for a broad audience, not a scholarly work on PubMed.

But I do agree that providing some links to actual data, at the end, would have been useful.

The start of paragraph six provides three links to related studies.

The actual diet, or at least some examples of dishes, something I think is very interesting for a broad audience, and the reason I clicked the link, is only mentioned in the comments.

And those examples would not had made the article something for PubMed.

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