I remember when the government and scientific consensus informed me that margarine was good for me. For decades.
Who knows what damage that has done to my internals.
Who knows what damage that has done to my internals.
- it plastic no food
- it’s vegetable good
- it’s cholesterol bad
- it’s trans fat bad, butter no trans good
- cholesterol ain’t real, margarine good
I don’t care :p
- Accepted fact 2: eating trans fat is bad. A diet high in trans fats can contribute to obesity, high blood pressure, and higher risk for heart disease, because intake of dietary trans fat disrupts the body's ability to metabolize essential fatty acids. Trans fat is also implicated in Type 2 diabetes.
Historically margarine was low in saturated fat but high in trans fat due to partial hydrogenation - hence the questionable "health benefits" of it vs butter.
Currently in most of the developed world vegetable spreads are not allowed to contain significant amounts of partially hydrogenated oils, and thus margarine should be healthier - but there is a powerful dairy lobby so the bad reputation will last for a long while...
Several studies suggest that eating diets high in saturated fat do not raise the risk of heart disease, with one report analyzing the findings of 21 studies that followed 350,000 people for up to 23 years.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
Life expectancy made huge gains throughout the century before antibiotics.
You can't really see the invention of antibiotics clearly in the curves.
The way I think of it is that of course penicillin increased life spans, but the discovery and industrialization of it was highly correlated with rising GDP.
I share the feeling that better nutrition is probably not as much of a significant factor in developed countries. For what it's worth, we are more obese than our ancestors.
Our World in Data has this nice chart of life expectance by age in England and Wales [1]. I have this pet hypothesis that a good chunk of the increase in the life expectancy of the younger people in that chart is due to vaccination and better hygiene. And, for older ages, the a good chunk of increase is due to advances in surgery.
The effect of antibiotics is probably more uniform across the ages. It is note-worthy that penicillin was discovered in 1928, so the increase in life expectancy before then can't be due to antibiotics.
I have no expertise in this area, so you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. The Our World in Data chart is really cool though. That steep fall and rebounce due to the Spanish flu, and the contrast with COVID-19 with respect to affect on different age-groups is also interesting. [2]
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-ab...
[2]: I think comparing the naming of the diseases also tells us something about how society has changed.
Also, low life-expectancy in the past was in large part because of child/infant mortality, not croaking at 50.
You should make sure you understand what outliers are. The fact that you can name people from outside modern times that lived a long time is meaningless to the discussion.
They weren't outliers. I simply looked up famous Indians because I remembered one had lived to a startlingly old age, and skipped those who got killed by other people. If their diet caused health problems, you wouldn't have all these folks living to a decent age. All the Indian leaders would have bene these young guys who died off at 45 from eating too much venison.
Sorry I know this sounds a little woo-woo fruity, but that’s Humanity’s godlike power to transcend the limitations of our bodies’ material dimension where energy can’t be created or destroyed.
Collectively we’re like a blockchain holding a mirror-image dimension of all the best ideas just by virtue of the other nodes not making it, growing over time as our new embodiments get to start at what from their point of view is “zero” despite being unknowably old and full of patches and bug fixes. Storage and retrieval are the same operation!
I'm not a primitivist by any means (I'm using a pc right now as it so happens) but we continue to have a lot to learn from modern hunter gatherer societies both in terms of social organisation and food consumption.