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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Three thoughts

1. As Taleb has often argued, you dont need to fully understand a problem, all the interaction effects etc., in order to understand that nature has already solved it. Eat what your ancestors ate.

2. Could it be that the people who go into food science are basically rejects from more respected disciplines?

3. People seem to widely hold beliefs about diet which are patently illogical. For instance everyone seems to talk about how people put on weight because their metabolism slows down, or because it was slow to start with. This doesn't make sense. Rate of conversion of food into energy has nothing to do with eating more than your activity level required. Could someone explain this to me?

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Our ancestors at one point in time had a diet consisting 60-80% of animal flesh. Do you think that this is what nature solved? I mean, technology has given us a way to rise above the evolution.

We do not have claws, or teeth that could pierce an elephant, lion, gazelle. It doesn't seem that nature solved anything. Or us, drinking cows milk? Did nature solve the digestion of human to consume milk of another mammal? Was this a thing in past. I do not think so.

Nature, over time, destroys what is fragile. If your ancestors have been drinking milk for millennia, then it is probably safe for your body. In similar dosages. Eat what has been field tested by nature, not the latest voodoo food.

1000 years isn't long enough for evolution.

we're not talking about evolution

Oh, so you are talking about change of the species without evolution?

We're talking about giving time for harmful effects to manifest themselves. If you are going to eat a diet which does not resemble what the human body evolved to deal with, then at least follow something that resembles what has been available to your kin for countless generations. If you start consuming brand new diets (not just in terms of the substances and nutrients they contain, but the concentration and dosage and regularity) you're much more exposed to potential harm.

But we are doing a brand new diet. About 2000-10000 years ago human diet consisted of around 80% animal flesh.

Citation?

Besides, when I said brand new I meant things which have emerged in the last 150 years, especially highly processed foods.

> 1. As Taleb has often argued, you dont need to fully understand a problem, all the interaction effects etc., in order to understand that nature has already solved it. Eat what your ancestors ate.

Alas, my ancestors ate stuff they could catch by spending the day hunting and foraging. Very few of them spent their days sitting in front of a computer.

Not sure what your point is?

For 3, there's evidence that very low carb diets will improve insulin response. Over time it seems plausible that your body will respond differently to food if your hormones stay out of balance, storing more of it as fat.

How we store energy also depends on what exercise we get and its timing. Carb back-loading supposedly doesn't have the same insulin response because the energy is used to replace sugar (can't remember exact name, too lazy to look it up, sorry) in muscles instead of storing it as fat.

The OP also links to a study that looked at several factors including microbiome. Genetically identical twins could have different response to the same foods. I'm pretty sure our microbiomes are very different than those of our ancestors, so we probably won't get the same results.

Doesn't (1) essentially boil down to a variant of low-carb diet?

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