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Comment by omosubi | Hacker News Reader

The best diet is the one eaten for 1000s of years by your ancestors

You mean the one for people whose life expectancy was less than half the modern day? Who lived completely different lives?

Pro or con the diet, the difference in life expectancy is mostly antibiotics.

Antibiotics rock, and I think penicillin is rightly praised as being as closed to a Panacea as it gets. However, we shouldn't underestimate the positive effect of better hygiene, vaccination, and advances in surgery techniques.

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.

> the difference in life expectancy is mostly antibiotics

Life expectancy made huge gains throughout the century before antibiotics.

If you look at life expectancy graphs, they mostly correlate with GDP per person.

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.

Clean water was the single most important advancement in human health of all time. Next was hygiene, especially during birth. Next is antibiotics. Next is anesthesia.

This argument pretends that diet is the only cause of death.

No, it doesn't. It acknowledges that a diet for hunter-gatherers that rarely lived to 50 might not be best diet for a people who expend less energy and live far longer.

I don't buy the paleo stuff, but you're not disproving it. We don't live longer lives purely because of our diet.

Also, low life-expectancy in the past was in large part because of child/infant mortality, not croaking at 50.

I have been thinking a lot about this exact point lately. Very interesting but hard to answer.

Powhatan lived to 70, Opechancanough lived to 92 (when he was murdered), Massasoit lived to 80, Canonicus was 82.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier

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.

As if I don't understand what outliers are.

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.

I definitely don't think modern diets are better than what I imagine Native Americans ate hundreds of years ago. Venison sounds like a very healthy staple in a diet.

If your ancestors have a line that was able to create you, clearly they were doing something right

Overall life expectancy was low due to massive childhood mortality. If you survived to adulthood your life expectancy was much higher.

Do we know what they ate in detail?

They certainly didn't eat margarine. Or refined sugars. Or simple carbs outside fruit. Etc.

Because they all lived long healthy lives I'm sure /s

Sarcasm nonwithstanding, it took over 12000 years of technological advances for agricultural societies to catch up to their palaeolithic bretheran in terms of average life expectancy and even metrics like height.

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.

Of course some of us did a better job than others, but enough lived that Humanity (collectively singular) is still here, and to me it seems the only way for anyone to learn anything is via the negative image formed by all the ideas that didn’t work.

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!

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