There is some misconception that “old ways” were healthier and they weren’t.
Burning wood is bad bad for you not having access to clean water is bad for you etc.
The fact that it’s natural means nothing nature is a cunt.
- eating fresh foods instead of processed starches
- no factories and industrial agriculture producing greenhouse gasses
- social organization based on communal resources and personal autonomy (hunter-gatherers) instead of authoritarianism and hierarchy (settled agricultural governments)
You can walk today, and it’s likely much safer.
You can eat fresh food and the food today is overall much safer even the processed food. People in the past didn’t had fresh food this didn’t last long they ate processed food which would be preserved. Fresh food was an occasional luxury and even then it would be much less safe than it is today.
Greenhouse gases have no direct impact on health, smoke and pollution does and even London’s historic smog wasn’t nearly as bad as the average cave lung.
Social organization... how exactly does this relates to health again?
Even the worse life style today (health wise) is better than anything you could do in antiquity.
An average life style is considerably healthier.
And if you selectively choose to live the healthiest life style possible in any period nothing in the past beats today.
- default lifestyle (for economic reasons) is living in the city / suburbs where walking is often aesthetically unpleasant; humans have an aesthetic response to being in nature.
- again for economic reasons, processed food like bread is the default choice; it's hard for some to afford (in time and money) to get all their calories from fresh vegetables and meats. Again the past is a model (I'm talking about humans' natural diet in the days before food preservation / grain agriculture).
- let's shoot for no smog and no cave lung
- social stratification led directly to mass starvation and poverty (poorest segment of society experiences stress-related declines in longevity)
If we assume that every change that's ever happened is for the better in every way, it blinds us as to how to make improvements.
Regardless of how far back you go life was harsh, miserable and unforgiving and the further you go the worse it gets.
Fresh food was never a staple diet, hunting wasn’t done on a daily basis it was seasonal meat would be smoked and salted to be preserved.
Fat would be fermented and preserved.
Plants as well would be fermented or dried to be preserved for later consumption.
Famine and starvation was abound whole populations were wiped out due to famine multiple times even before we started to live in large cities.
Living in caves and huts burning wood would result in lung damage even before counting things like cavers lung. The smallest of injuries could be fatal and it often was.
There was essentially no period in which we were healthier than we are today even if you are an alcoholic coal miner who’s living only on KFC.
Anything is safer today even walking.
Natural means, what a human body has been accustomed to, over the course of its evolution. That is what is natural. Not something coming directly from nature. Often both are same since most of the things that we were exposed to during the long course of evolution came directly from nature.
Also, from your other comments, you have a skewed definition of health. You seem to consider a human being healthy even if they can only survive with the help of medicines or modern health care..which is quite stupid...
For me, that's quite distinct from the naturalistic fallacy, which is really related to the is-ought distinction (often attributed to Hume). The fallacy consists of going from a descriptive statement (this is how things are) to a normative statement (thus, this is how things should be). A (fallacious) example would be that strong animals devour weaker animals, thus it's good and proper also in our society that the strong exploit the weak. For me, that's an illicit move from "is" to "ought", and quite distinct from the "untreated water is natural and thus must be healthy", "vaccines are chemical and unnatural and thus must be bad" fallacy.
However, from the Wikipedia page it seems that some people also use "naturalistic fallacy" in the former sense ("appeal to nature").
(Note that Sam Harris and others are arguing (convincingly, in my view) that ultimately, our "oughts" must be informed and even follow from "is", from descriptive statements, rejecting the whole strict is/ought distinction.)
For me, it tends to germinate with that one fallacy.