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Comment by firethief | Hacker News Reader

Keto diets have most definitely not been around long enough for anyone's bodies to evolve to follow them. That takes many thousands of years.

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Why would our bodies need to evolve to follow them when the mechanisms are already built-in?

Our body already contains the necessary pathways, enzymes and processes to switchover to utilizing fat as fuel. We quite literally evolved to do this...

That being said, I think this adaption was more of an energy conservation mode for when food was scarce rather than our ancestors intentionally eating in a ketogenic compatible manner.

> That being said, I think this adaption was more of an energy conservation mode for when food was scarce rather than our ancestors intentionally eating in a ketogenic compatible manner.

Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make. I am aware that humans have the capability of surviving on a ketogenic diet, but that doesn't support the argument I was replying to that following such a diet is what we evolved to do.

The diet of primitive humans was more similar to keto than to current developed country diets and it was in place for hundreds of thousands of years. The first big change was from agricultural civilizations in neolithic, less than ten thousands year ago. Current diet is at most a hundred years old. And specifically the diet that is causing so many problems is only fifty years old.

primitive humans also lived 20-30 years tops. today at 20 you can eat whatever you want and you’ll mostly be fine short term.

i’m tired of people justifying their life choices by what primitive humans were doing. we’re not primitive humans.

Life expectancy may have been that low, but overwhelmingly due to infant mortality. It's not like primitive humans were dying of old age in their 20s.

not in their 20s but definitely not in their 80s like today. if you reached 50s you were a boss. a lot of things that we consider routine to fix today would have ended your life (broken leg/hand, infections, severe diarrhea, etc). We really under-appreciate how many things we have as tools to expand our lifespan today.

Considering that soldiers in Ancient Greece could only retire after 30 years of service, I think it's fair to say there were plenty of 80 year old "primitive" humans.

I think we're talking prehistory, pre-agriculture here.

that what i also though. at least 10000 years ago if not more

From what I remember, it was more like if you made it past adolescence, making it to 50 was about normal. All kind of beside the point; you seemingly rejected the relevance of the primitive human diet based on their life expectancy. I don't think that follows.

Typical diets these days are pretty bad. But few, if any, societies of anatomically modern humans have lived under conditions where they would almost always be in ketosis, so evolutionary history doesn't provide a reason to think that we are best adapted to that being our normal state.

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