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Comment by JustSomeNobody | Hacker News Reader

Then maybe the RDA is just wrong. If we can't eat enough healthy food to sustain us without becoming obese, then the numbers are wrong. I mean, how could we have possibly made it as long as we have as a species if we are only now realizing that we can't eat enough good foods to be healthy???

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>how could we have possibly made it as long as we have as a species if we are only now realizing that we can't eat enough good foods to be healthy?

Partly due to agricultural soil depletion of certain elements like magnesium, zinc, iodine.

Btw our prehistoric ancestors weren't especially healthy either:

https://imgur.com/gallery/2G0BDwx

> Partly due to agricultural soil depletion of certain elements like magnesium, zinc, iodine.

Well, maybe yes or maybe no

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751...

It wasn't poor health killing people at 30. The leading cause of death at that age was hunting accidents. Besides that and the high infant mortality, people otherwise lived to ~70.

In addition to trukterious' point, which I agree with, I would echo that the idea that the RDA is just wrong is also a distinct possibility. Take a look at this: http://blogs.creighton.edu/heaney/2015/02/13/the-iom-miscalc... Ponder what it implies about the other RDA values. And look at the date. It wasn't that long ago.

I just pulled a fairly recent bottle of CostCo Vitamin D out here, and it's still using a value of 800IU as the RDA.

This seems like an example of the naturalistic fallacy.

Why assume that food with the optimally healthy composition of nutrients exists in nature? People can survive just fine without being maximally healthy.

I didn't say "maximally healthy". It is, however, rather obvious that we were healthy and able to last this long and THUS the foods we had to consume gave us what we needed without having to take supplements.

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