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Comment by roadnottaken | Hacker News Reader

"What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health."

I hate this sort of blind naturalism. We evolved to be susceptible to polio, tuberculosis, and plague and to live to ~30. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's optimal -- science and technology can, when judiciously applied, add a lot to the quality (and length) of life.

Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity.

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It's called a framework for making an educated decision. Perhaps I should have said 'on your way to optimal health' as one of the largest and most controllable things in our lives is what we eat.

As for 'modernism', I fail to see how knowing exactly what our body is adapted and designed to process is not useful information. Knowing this, which is the basis for knowing exactly what is optimal, you can then make a decision if that whey protein powder is good or bad for you...if creatine powder is good or bad for you...if sugar is good or bad for you...

Also, I don't think ANYONE would argue that diet is the only thing that plays into health issues. Modern medicine is fantastic and has done wonderful things for our lives, but it has failed in the past 20 or so years to provide us the optimal food paradigm.

Just an FYI, I eat this way, my family eats this way...my wife is a doctor..I have gotten PRP (platelet rich plasma) on my achilles (modern medicine...actually, pretty bleeding edge medicine) and we used modern methods for child birth (decreased mortality rate in child birth). Eating as we are intended to eat, and more importantly, knowing what we are intended to eat, in no way eschews modern medicine...please don't create a false dichotomy.

> […] and to live to ~30.

People used to die younger because of injuries, illnesses and poor nutrition, not because the body is only "supposed" to live for 30 years.

> Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc).

That's absolutely not true. It seems likely that older people have played an important role in society throughout, helping take care of children while the more able work, sources of wisdom &c. While evolution hasn't eliminated all diseases of the old age (because it doesn't work actively like that) longer-lived genes have provided some survival advantage.

I'm willing to bet that 10,000 years ago you wouldn't have been able to find a homo sapien on this planet that was older than 50. The vast, vast majority of evolutionary pressure occurred well before then.

You've got a point, but you're going way overboard. Blind naturalism is a good first approximation for health advice, though it's obviously not an end point.

Men can conceive children into their 70s, so evolution does favor long life in some cases. We still have "modern afflictions" because evolution isn't perfect, and it isn't finished, and because there are tradeoffs in the biological design. For example, resistance to malaria comes with a propensity for sickle-cell disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease)

"Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity."

But there is evidence (in Taubes' GCBC to begin with) that modern foods cause the "diseases of civilization".

Before agriculture, as hunter-gatherers, many people did live into what we would consider old age (if they didn't die from injuries, etc, which is not relevant to diet).

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