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Comment by gorilla_fight | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this list. This may be useful for those interested in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dietary practice to "only eat that which our ancestors ate 1000 years ago", aka the antifragile diet.

Among the oldest, no surprises to paleo/ancestral/traditional:

American bison---8,000BC

pigs, goats & sheep---7,000BC

lard---7,000BC

cattle domestication---6,500BC

milk & yogurt, & sour cream---5000BC

...but at the other end, these foods were older than I had expected, still over a thousand years ago (!):

loquats & flower waters---10th century

cod & nutmeg---9th century

spinach & sago---7th Century

eggplant---6th Century

pretzels---5th Century

lemons ---3rd Century

costmary & blood as food---1st Century

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Isn't the idea behind supposed paleo/ancestral diets to limit your food to ones that resemble what one could forage or hunt for? If age in the range of 1000+ years is the criteria, wheat and other cultivated grains should be fine, but they're usually excluded.

> Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dietary practice to "only eat that which our ancestors ate 1000 years ago", aka the antifragile diet.

I’m not sure why anyone (except Taleb and then only as hollow brand marketing) would describe that as “antifragile”, or even merely sensible.

I suppose if you are adopting the diet typical of a particular set of people 1,000+ years ago, along with other aspects of their lifestyle, because you are targeting similar outcomes, then it makes sense (the goal doesn't but the action does given the goal). Otherwise, its just a silly game with no rational foundation.

> because you are targeting similar outcomes

Targeting most of my children dying in childhood, disease, and the rest (including me) likely not living past about 30-40?

> Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dietary practice to "only eat that which our ancestors ate 1000 years ago"

So: wheat, barley, rye, and oats filled with rat droppings, small stones, weevils, weed seeds, and funguses like mildew and ergot?

That is a distraction. People have always cleaned their food before cooking and eating it, we just do that better now.

The idea is that the longer a food is around the more likely it is that any problems with it can be understood and countered. For example, we now understand how and why to prevent pellagra by treating corn with alkali before consumption. The most obvious target of this methodology are recently introduced industrial foods such as white cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, and hydrogenated fats. Meat and root vegetables are in turn older and more reliable than the grains you mention.

> People have always cleaned their food before cooking and eating it, we just do that better now.

Is that true? What I've read of sanitation doesn't seem to suggest that. Even so, it's not a minor matter of degree. We understand germs and sanitation.

> The idea is that the longer a food is around the more likely it is that any problems with it can be understood and countered. For example, we now understand how and why to prevent pellagra by treating corn with alkali before consumption. The most obvious target of this methodology are recently introduced industrial foods such as white cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, and hydrogenated fats. Meat and root vegetables are in turn older and more reliable than the grains you mention.

We don't need to go back 1,000 years for that. Just eat whole (i.e., unprocessed or less-processed) foods. We didn't learn about e coli and pellagra in 900 CE, but in probably in the last century or so.

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