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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Nice false equivalence.

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.

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Nobody is saying that you can't have healthy habits in 2018. Now they have to be a deliberate choice, because the default is driving / riding to work (as most people do). Nor is anyone saying the past was ideal. I am saying we can selectively choose certain aspects of the past as a model for how to make better choices for ourselves in the present. Some other advantages:

- 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.

I really think you have some mythical view on how people used to live.

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.

In my opinion, you're arguing against a point nobody made. Literally not one said people lived better before.

There was never a healthier option for any activity you can do today in the past.

Anything is safer today even walking.

The original post was about having easy access to nature. Yes, you can do push-ups in a prison cell. Enjoy.

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