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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

According to the WHO class 2 is "probably carcinogenic" and what was effectively a meta (or meta-meta) analysis showed that the increased risk was 18%.

Do we know how bad vegetable oils are for people yet? Is there any reason to think that they're 100% A-OK?

Humans have been eating meat for 10s or 100s of thousands if not millions of years. Humans have been eating highly refined vegetable and seed oils for what, a couple of hundred?

One of these food sources helped turn apes into humans. The other didn't even exist until humans invented a LOT of technology.

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>>Humans have been eating meat for 10s or 100s of thousands if not millions of years.

Technically that may be true but humans only ate meat when the hunt was successful. Most of the time , they had a plant based diet. Meat has always been unaffordable luxury for most peole. The farm grown , tax subsidixzed, growth hormone loaded meat industry is a rather new phenomenon.

Humans might have been eating a lot more meat in the past when they were hunter-gatherers: it's just that their entire existence was centered around getting that food. Look at Inuits and how little plant based food they consumed.

Inuits are often used as a gotcha in support of meat-based diets but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. For one thing they're so often brought up because they're the exception, not the rule for human diets, their diet is a consequence of the very dire living conditions in the Arctics that makes agriculture impractical. For an other, their diet is not similar to your average meat lover in modern Europe or USA: a lot of fat, not a lot of carbs, meat is eaten raw (which changes its nutritional content), they eat organs and skin (not just the flesh):

>Vitamins and minerals which are typically derived from plant sources are nonetheless present in most Inuit diets. Vitamins A and D are present in the oils and livers of cold-water fishes and mammals. Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, muktuk, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine#Nutrition

Also from the same article:

"However, actual evidence has shown that Inuit have a similar prevalence of coronary artery disease as non-Inuit populations and they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, with twice the risk to that of the North American population."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine#Nutrition

Until recently, the hunt was broadly successful (maybe not every single day, but certainly every week).

Hunter-gatherers are the only type of group for which there are no anthropologically/historically documented cases of starvation. In contrast to pastoralists and agriculturalists, which have suffered starvation regularly.

Hunter-gatherers across nearly all of the globe always had a diet of meat and plants. It is absolutely false that it was plant-based "most of the time". Eating meat has absolutely not always been an unaffordable luxury -- that's a complete myth. Meat as a "luxury" was a totally new phenomenon that arose only with agriculture.

For the vast majority of human history, meat (or fish) has been plentiful and broadly consumed.

> Humans have been eating meat for 10s or 100s of thousands if not millions of years.

This argument glosses over the crux of current scientific knowledge: We do not know exactly why the type of meat the (average) human eats today is net-negative for health _even though_ humans have been eating meat for ages.

Particularly, is it due to the change in nutritional makeup due to domestication, mass farming, processing etc. or is meat inherently (slightly) carcinogenic?

If somebody knows of recent studies, would love to learn more.

Our life expectancy has also grown drastically in the last 100 years - for a variety of reasons, so this is a bit of a blunt instrument

I think a few hundred years is long enough that if there's any sort of clear signal that they cause cancer, it's going to be visible.

One wonders why cancer rates continue to climb

Easy: People are getting older. Older people have a higher risk of getting cancer.

We’re getting older and much better at detecting cancer, most likely.

Or, the amount of industrial chemicals that os entering our food supply is... toxic.

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