How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs | Hacker News Reader

How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs

nature.com

88 pointssohkamyung79 comments

All: I realize that stories like this evoke a "wow you like beer and carbs too no way we should hang out" reaction, or equivalents, but please don't let that carry you into HN comments. Mechanical reactions lead to predictable and tedious threads. If you don't have anything substantive to say, not commenting is a fine choice.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is exactly the reason I come here rather than Reddit. Honestly HN feels like one of the last corners of the internet where it's possible to have a rational discussion, disagree with strangers and still be civil.

Its gotten so bad, I would pay to use HN.

I would say that compared to a news paper subscription for example, the mental stimulus provided by HN is far greater.

Quite honestly, that could work. Maybe a dollar a month simply to keep the riff-raff out and to keep the servers on.

Same here.

I think what you've said here is great, and clearly this conversation is controversial.

My own opinions on this and many other topics are almost all controversial.

That said, the flagging here seems to have killed the conversion entirely. I was kinda excited to discuss the topic. Maybe it will rekindle. Idk...

Thank you very much Dang! I appreciate you guys are taking a stance against that. For your information, I created an ASK HN about this, a while back and got some feedback; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287700

As a long time reader, I highly value the quality of discussions here. Your work is much appreciated, thank you.

When diet & nutrient comes in to discussion even level-headed people seems to get very heated and emotional. I hypothesize that it is because:

1. there seems to not be any hard scientific consensus

2. diet is very integrated to culture, and therefore saying "diet X is good/bad" is often taken as a personal/tribal attack.

3. There's always special-interest groups that *heavily* benefit from any preferential diet. (Farmer, stores, marketing group you name it) And they often do have strong influence to actually push through an agenda (see any overarching farmer subsidies/regulation in any country)

The first two being a reason it get heated, and the last one being the one adding the fuel.

Prefacing any dietary statement with "for me, X works..." with a story might be better than anecdata "I've heard it works.."

While I agree with the larger sentiment, there is a rather substantial amount of diet and nutrition science with the core being quite an agreed upon set of foundational principles.

If I were to summarize:

1. We derive energy from three major macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates)

2. Our body has certain macronutrients it cannot synthesize and NEEDS for healthy functioning (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids)

3. Our bodies are largely energy efficient (by which I mean the processes to produce energy are readily actionable with average hormone levels of insulin/ghrelin/leptin etc.) when consuming carbohydrates, but can turn to other nutrient sources when they are not to be found.

4. Our body composition can be manipulated by manipulating our energy expenditure either via manipulating the caloric content of food or via the preferential production of body tissue from horomonal influence (this is why muscle mass increases when using testosterone even if caloric intake is kept constant but above a certain macronutrient threshold).

5.There are a certain set of micronutrients we need on a continuous basis (the exact amounts of which are up for debate but the ranges seem to be reasonably agreed upon).

6. Our diet influences our gut fauna and this further influences how much nutritional value we get from our diet, it is quite a symbiotic cycle.

7. Barring certain specific horomonal imbalance diseases, everyone's body largely abides by the above principles, (i.e as special as everyone thinks they are, they're probably more average than not when it comes their metabolism).

On 3. note that carbohydrates are the only of the three macronutient we don't need to eat at all (see eskimo).

Also we're very very good at fasting (using our fat store):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast

382 days without eating and no issue at all.

> On 3. note that carbohydrates are the only of the three macronutient we don't need to eat at all (see eskimo).

This isn't true. Although the Intuit people were largely carnivorous, they did not have a "keto" diet. They ate a lot of meat, but the animals they ate have extremely high amounts of natural glycogen. They also did not eat as much fat as expected, because animal fat was their source of heat and light for long winter nights.

> ...When is abundant, the average daily diet of the adult Eskimo consists approximately of 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrate (which includes glycogen), 250 to 300 grams of protein, and about 150 grams of fat (FA/G=1.2). These amounts of meat are apparently not heroic, for it has been alleged that the Yakuts, on the Low Steppe, east of the Lena, eat as much as 25 and 30 pounds of meat a day.” —I.M. Rabinowitch (1936)

If you are curious, this is an accessible review of the available materials.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201112035644/https://www.freet...

They also ate berries and even some of partially digested plants from the stomachs of some of the land animals they ate.

In case anyone else is wondering how this is possible, he did consume vitamins, electrolytes and yeast (for essential amino acids).

(According to the linked Wikipedia article.)

Milk contains carbohydrates and even Eskimo children need it.

We thrive, as babies, on mother's milk for much more than carbohydrates though.

Okay, but in the grand scheme of things that's like 'Well, we know the earth is round.'

One thing that should be agreed upon, but isn't, is that carbohydrates are not necessary in the same way alcohol is not.

While carbohydrates are an easily available source of energy, one can be perfectly healthy eating a diet with purely incidental carbohydrate intake.

I think when walking on the street of place like US (or UK, Australia etc.) its pretty damn obvious that many folks didn't accept that 'earth is round' in nutrition world, based on their weight and self-inflicted diseases stemming from it.

I'd say globally we can add on average 10 years of good quality life to every single person if they understood the points above and acted accordingly.

This and some form of healthy regular exercise and one is basically maximizing his lifespan in best currently available way. Increased happiness level is just a nice by-product.

Regarding 1, it is also worth noting that we may not ever achieve truth here, at least not in our lifetimes. "What should I eat so I have less risk of vascular disease and cancer, delay decrepitude as long as possible, and have good to excellent ongoing physical and mental function?" This question is almost impossible to answer. The basic problem is to experiment on oneself, you need to use surrogate markers of ill health, and you never know if you are on the right track for what matters. A recent example are drugs which improve the measured HDL value (good cholesterol), but fail to reduce cardiovascular events. Randomised trials on the other hand give us average effects in certain populations, but how this relates to the individual is always unclear. This is why people are still arguing what some randomised trials mean 20 years later (like the Lyon diet study, which is uninterpretable anyway due to woeful dropout). RCTs with diet are terribly difficult, prolonged and expensive to conduct.

Considering all this, my approach is to just try and eat less, hence mitigating the downside of dietary induced problems. A good way to eat less is to eat more non-starchy vegetables, which are mostly micronutrients embedded in paper.

There are also a few surrogate markers with strong evidence it is worth measuring in a serial fashion and trying to improve eg LDL, glucose tolerance, CRP. Coronary calcium scoring with CT is also worth doing if you are 40+ and have been eating like shit most of your life or have bad genetics for heart disease.

I think we do have the answers to all three of your points. It’s the Mediterranean diet. I don’t live in the Mediterranean, and I don’t eat their diet. But I’m pretty sure any honest person that knows much of anything at all would admit that it’s the best in the world based on outcomes. I certainly would like to switch and I am a guy and the midwestern US.

You'd think, but there has been some criticism:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/13/6196193...

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.118.31334...

> When diet & nutrient comes in to discussion even level-headed people seems to get very heated and emotional.

I mean, the title of the article, even on HN, is "How ancient people fell in love with [carbs]". Like they were going to the supermarket and choosing the food they "love".

For me, when it comes to deciding what diet is right, I just look at my relatives who lived for a long time. In all cases they ate "standard"/traditional foods as regular meals. There is a distinct lack of "diets", supplements and other fads. They didn't eat so much that they got fat, but they also didn't strictly limit their intake to maintain a ripped physique or whatever. It's quite simple really.

Ancient people fell in love with food that lasted for long periods of time because there was no refrigeration (unless you were Inuit).

Drying, smoking, fermenting, salting, pickling, etc. And, adding honey (for sugar).

Anecdotally: all the Inuit people I've talked about food storage with will dry (often fish) or smoke (most land-based mammals) their meats.

Honey is antibacterial (it impedes their growth).

Unrelated, but I wanted to explore an idea from the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" [0]:

Humans have evolved for a very long time as hunter and gatherers, and we have evolved to eat diet consistent with how we evolved, namely low carbohydrate diets. The reason why grain prevailed was because grain could support more humans per acre of land. Humans did not choose grain for long term health benefits, but rather for efficiency reasons.

It seems that many health problems stem from high carbohydrate diets. Are there reasons why we shouldn't switch to a low carbohydrate diet?

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scien...

I'm currently having a love affair with a loaf of bread. Once I discovered that pan grilled fresh bread was superior to toast (because the moisture content is retained), my entire life changed. Try it, you'll never toast again.

Interesting, but I'm not sure what "pan grilled fresh bread" means. I take a slice of bread, put it in a frying pan, and then what? Put it on the stove top, put it on a gas grill, put it under a broiler? Can you elaborate?

Instead of using a toaster, place two pieces of bread in a hot skillet over medium heat for a few minutes for each side, brown to your liking. Add your choice of butter or oil to either the bread or the pan. This is the same process as you would use to make grilled cheese, except I'm using it to make toast. When you're done, you don't get the dry, crispy, crunchy toast result; you now have a mild toast-like browning on the outside and soft moist bread on the inside.

If only ancient people knew about the paleo diet.

You're being funny, right? -Ancient people, pfft.

And modern people fell in love with sugar.

“ Taken together, these discoveries shred the long-standing idea that early people subsisted mainly on meat”

No, they don’t. First of all, as is pointed out in the article, people were eating massive amounts of fat and meat right up till the Neolithic because without crops, there just wasn’t enough starchy stuff to sustain a population of people, not outside weird settlements like this one. And even if these people were eating starches 100,000 years ago, that’s a drop in the bucket. We have been eating meat and fat for millions of years, and the evidence is absolutely clear that a ketogenic carnivore diet is the healthiest diet. It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it.

I was mostly with you up until:

> the evidence is absolutely clear that a ketogenic carnivore diet is the healthiest diet

There is no single blanket "healthiest diet". Dietary requirements vary, sometimes dramatically, across the gamut of humanity; and then:

> It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it.

That is a super misleading statement. A diet is not a miracle cure and should never be presented as one, because like all snake-oil health claims it sells false hope to the desperate. A low-GI diet may improve insulin resistance; a low calorie diet may improve obesity. Neither of these are certain outcomes, neither of them are cures for disease, and neither strategy even particularly requires a ketogenic carnivore diet.

Yikes...this sounds almost religious. The truth is much more mundane and boring: we really don't know much about diet, aside from a handful of obvious things: don't eat too much sugar, don't eat trans fats, and try to get folic acid if you're pregnant. The final sentence really seals the deal on how little the OP understands diets. You can't look at anecdotes of someone "curing" themselves using a diet. That's how you get "miracle cures" using all sorts of random substances/fads. You have to do an actual randomized-controlled trial. Under controlled environments, the benefits of ketogenic diet are either nonexistent or moderate at best.

Significant anthropological evidence exists that gathering not hunting provided the primary food source in primitive cultures. Outside of the Arctic circle there is simply an abundance of edible wild plants relative to the density of game animals. Further those plants don’t run away, foraging was simply the more dependable food source.

As someone aproaching middle age and suddenly concious of health, I find claims like below...

> It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it.

... very enticing.

Then I wonder, if this were true, why isn't this backed by hard science? Even bad motives and bad statistics cannot hide miracles!

I also wonder, if meat and fat based diet was the best for us, and yet humans AS A society (not as a person) evolved to eat card based diet obviously there has to be some advantage. What it is, I do not know, and I wish this would not change the subject, but the only thing that comes to mind is that eating carbs is the only sustainable way for our species.

While these questions are unresolved, I eat meat once a week, and am otherwise vegatarian. Feeling healthy btw.

The problem is that any time we study populational positive effects of diet on health outcomes it always turns out that the secret ingredient was universal health care. Or at least the diet filters by “rich enough to have good insurance and access”

We seem to have a hard time finding populations following any specific good diet with measurably good or better health outcomes than average that don’t have the compounding variable of access to health care:

We have universal health care in Austria, and many people are still obese (less than in the US, ok), get cancer etc.

Yes but they survive and don’t go bankrupt.

USA is the only developed country with a falling life expectancy.

Cancer treatment often doesn’t work. Treatment is often in reality just management.

Nutritional science is far from a solved case and doesn't have a lot to lean on yet. Not only is there a lot of misinformation, money, and lying involved but the science itself is pretty poor as well. Most nutritional studies are based on p values in uncontrolled environments with self reporting. While the few more rigorous studies do control for confounding variables and attempt to control the environment more - they tend to be smaller.

It's not like you can lock thousands of humans (let alone one) in a controlled environment for 50 years and study long term effects of diets which even then wouldn't be perfect.

I'm not saying it's impossible, and science is the only way forward. I'm just that it is a mess and we know less than we think.

FWIW I have been on a keto-genic diet for coming up on a decade now and feel fantastic as well. But like I said before, that's not worth much. I do it for the "brain" high I get on the diet and also it totally gets rid of my acid reflux issues.

A mainly meat-based keto diet is only made possible by privilege and resource exhaustion. There is no way such a diet were sustainable for all humans on earth. Now, if we switched to insect flour, maybe that would work. Still, AFAIK, switching to a mostly plant based diet is the biggest contribution one can make towards a smaller environmental impact.

When it comes to evidence, water fasting for multiple days improves insulin resistance and lipid profile, and lowering blood pressure. There are probably even more benefits (through autophagy, though that can be a mixed bag because some viruses seem to hijack that). Some of this also applies to intermittent fasting.

We are lucky enough that the scientific community has bothered to elevate fasting from quackery to mainstream — despite the fact that it’s benefits have been obvious for literally thousands of years and a simple interventional study could have been carried out literally as early as science existed as a concept, but they couldn’t be fucked to do until 2016 or whatever. I think if you look deeply into any area of science you will somehow always end up being upset…

The chemicals in meat, fat and organs can be synthesized chemically or made in labs where relevant tissues are grown directly instead of the traditional way. And only a fraction of the population has health problems that would necessitate the diet anyway.

Further, mono-cropping isn't that great for the earth either. It's easiest to scale, but destroying our soil health.

It's only so prevalent as the US subsidizes low quality corn, soy, and wheat.

Regenerative grazing can be done in a way that brings health back to the soil.

https://untappedgrowth.com/decentralizedgrazing/

Further, eggs are probably one of the healthiest foods one can consume, and people even in urban settings (obviously not all) can have a couple chickens.

Plus, the bugs are much more delicious if turned into eggs. I personally don't want to eat the bugs or live in ze pod.

Totally agree. Need B12? Take it directly, as animal meat has to be enriched to contain it, anyway. Need more glycine because you‘re pregnant? Vegan glycine has got you covered. Need sulfur? Guess what, brokkoli is the best source and sulforaphane even fights cancer (while red meat causes it).

I am overwhelmed with negative responses. The truth is that these things can hide in plain sight. Take for example scurvy. The cure for scurvy was known for a very long time before it was proven to be citrus fruits in the famous experiment, the very first clinical trial. This isn’t well known, but it’s true. Native tribes knew about scurvy and demonstrated the cure to many Europeans long before Europeans rediscovered the cure. European doctors simply ignored it, and didn’t bother looking into the matter. It’s pretty unbelievable. But you haven’t seen anything yet… after the famous clinical trial of citrus fruits, scurvy was finally defeated, right? Wrong! The results of this clinical trial, which was held onboard a ship and witnessed by many people, written about and so on, were ignored by doctors! For an incredible amount of time, the cure was not only known about but scientifically proven and yet the medical establishment ignored it and people went right on dying of scurvy just as they always had. An artifact of the times, right? That could simply never happen today. We are too virtuous.

Now take for example the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. It’s absolutely riddled with holes. And there is more than enough evidence to topple it over. But the story repeats itself. And there are many things that are ignored. Many, many people are lucky enough to never be concerned with it. There are an unlucky few, though, who’s stories intersect with this unfortunate little oversight.

Anyway, our bodies need carbs. If you don’t eat them your body just makes them. They are required for explosive effort and other things. But we were never intended to eat mostly carbs, despite what people say. For millions of years people mostly ate animals. The modern human eats almost nothing but carbs and it results in a lot of problems that aren’t classified as diseases now but will be later. Cheers.

No, we haven't evolved to eat carb based diet, which happened somewhere in the past 10,000 years, which is a nothing in the evolution scale.

We added carbs into out diet, by our own choice. We are at all effect genetically identical to our pre-agriculture ancestors.

So, they were hunters and gatherers but they were only hunters. Who would've thought of a magic food tree?

Can you expand a bit on the benefits of this diet? Aren't fruits and veggies essential for your health?

Turns out you only need vitamin C and fiber if you're eating fructose or other sugars. There was a study in the early 1900s where two guys ate meat only for (I think) one year. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Found it. Pdf warning

http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf

Downvote all you want, but it's true. Manny people do it today, and I've done it myself for a period.

That said I'm not saying there aren't benefits to fruits and veg, just that you can be perfectly healthy without them.

This is extremely misleading, because you need a constant supply of vitamin C regardless of how much sugar you consume, and because you can get both vitamin C and fiber from meat. I’ve read that polar bear livers have so much vitamin C in them that you can actually poison yourself with them if you eat too many (personally I regard it as a rather remote circumstance).

You're mixing up vitamins. Meat doesn't contain any vitamin C; it's one of the few vitamins we need that you can't get from meat. And you can eat all the vitamin C you want. It's vitamin A that you have to be careful to avoid overdosing on, particularly from the livers of omnivores and carnivores.

Half right. He is mixing up vitamin A toxicity from some animal livers with vitamin C, but vitamin C is also found in liver, fish roe, and in small amounts in muscle.

Adequate amounts? All I can tell you is that I know a small handful of people who have eaten an exclusively carnivore diet for years on end without suffering from scurvy.

TIL. Seems that this was studied extensively in Inuit and other Alaskan populations that have a particularly meat-heavy diet.

It looks like I was mixing up the toxicity; thanks for the correction!

We have never found a cave painting of a loaf of bread. It was all hunting animals for meat. This is absolutely delusional.

Putting on my early neolithic archaeologist hat, there are a lot of things that don't show up in art. The trend in the past decade has been that better methods and new inquiries are turning up even more evidence for early broad-spectrum plant use everywhere we look.

e.g.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14723-0

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.014

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351402155_Diet_of_t...

1) Cave paintings may be related to religion. Hunting is fickle, you need to pray to the gods -- show them pictures of what you're after -- to get their help. Bread, baked from seeds gathered from plants, is more reliable; plants don't run away. So you don't need to paint any entreaties to the gods on how to help you get it.

2) Hunting, cave paintings and religion may have been related to one group of people, seed-gathering and baking to another. It may just not have occurred to the painters to include the activities and products of the gatherer side of the hunter-gatherer economy in their paintings.

Why would anyone want to eat like Ancient people they didn’t live very long and died of horrible diseases.

Infection doesn’t much care about your diet.

Cultures with excellent hygiene practices tended to do well.

Regardless of this new evidence people have been eating carbs for at least 10000+ years. The obesity epidemic has only really started the past 30-50 years. Whatever has caused people to get super-fat, it wasn't carbs.

Continuously consuming refined sugar and highly processed carbs is relatively new.

The resulting insulin production inhibits fat oxidation and increases fat storage.

I like Dr Jason Fung videos about this topic

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fung+obesity+ep...

I'd suggest being very cautious of that information you enjoy.

https://www.biolayne.com/articles/research/its-not-calories-...

Basic things like bread are getting worse. I can eat a decent amount of home baked wheat based food but store bought wheat bread is just awful to my digestion. Just two slices is enough to regret it. It's clearly not the gluten. I've read articles that store bought bread has more FODMAPs. They clearly changed something in the baking process in the name of mass production but there is no way I can figure it out myself.

Whatever is available in the stores is not the same thing we ate 100 (random number) years ago.

I heard a similar story from friends, and I bet you get high quality (organic and whatnot) ingredients for your home baking, while store-bought food is mostly full of pesticides, GMO, highly treated wheat which might explain why one makes you feel like crap and the other doesn't.

And that's not limited to wheat, but I reckon most commercially available fruits and vegetables are much worse than their counterparts grown organically in one's own garden. They certainly taste much worse.

Carnivore is much maligned still, but I bet the reason it works so well is that you avoid eating an unknown amount of chemicals that are routinely sprayed on unripe plant matter, which has to count for something.

I suspect it's more recent ingredient changes, but there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

Easy carbs and abundance of it. Before it was hard to find too much food for a common person.

Well it's not like we don't know that eating excessive amounts of food, is going to cause health problems related to obesity or otherwise.

The problem is that we have no handle on what "excessive amounts" really is.

A slice of cake is, in fact, an "excessive amount" - it's more food than a pound of cheese.

Eating a pound of cheese does, indeed, feel "excessive", while a slice of cake (or two) is just a chaser after a full meal for most people.

Not sure what cake we're talking about here but a pound of cheddar has roughly 1800 calories. A slice of cake is worth about 4 or 5 thick slices of cheese if you're trying to compare calorically.

Comparing calories is not the correct approach.

Diesel fuel has a huge amount of calories, but your body obviously can't process it properly.

Surely you don't mean to suggest that humans can't make use of the energy in cheese?

It's not a binary dichotomy of can vs can't make use.

In the book “Burn” Herman Pontzer mentioned that modern hunter-gatherers in Africa gets over 50% of their calories from starchy vegetables and honey, not from hunted animals.

Plus mono diets like eating only rice or potato are effective at loosing weight.

What processed food brought is very unnatural combination of a lot of refined carbohydrates and a lot of fat especially in the form of polyunsaturated seed oils. Seed oil consumption in substantial quantities is relatively new thing (like 100 years). And even olive oil (with its rather low polyunsaturated fat content) was never staple food. In Ancient Greek literature, for example, there are more references to its usage as cosmetic or for lighting than for eating.

I don't know about that. Carbs combined with sedentary lifestyles, processed foods etc is probably closer to the truth

Or the simplest explanation:some people just like to eat too much and it shows. Commence downvotes...

Well, sure. But the point is that it's not new. Gluttony is mentioned in bronze age texts. You don't make something one of the "seven deadly sins" because people aren't doing it.

But it's a significantly bigger problem today, so people are trying to point out things that have changed after the invention of writing.

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