It didn't control for enough to draw any meaningful conclusions from the study.
A shitty diet + more fruit on top will likely be worse than just a shitty diet. Fruit has sugars. If you drank 2 liters of soda every day an extra apple isn't going to help.
The fruit is the shitty diet.
Yeah, humans as unspecialized frugivores shouldn't be eating fruit. (eye roll)
It’s not that we can’t eat it, it’s that in a paleolithic setting we would not have been able to eat banana every day.
I find that hard to believe. Humans don't make their own vitamin C which is a strong case for our need to eat fruit. A banana also barely has fifteen percent of the daily requirements for vitamin C. This study [1] finds that humans 200,000 years ago consumed up to 600mg a day of vitamin C - that's a lot of fruit.
Perhaps it was not all from fruit? Early humans may have been eager to sever vegetables from their vines.
Animal meat can also contain vitamin C. There isn't much in the muscles, but other organs contain more of it. When considering whether paleolithic humans could survive with small amounts of fruits and vegetables only, we have to consider that they probably ate almost all of the animals they hunted. I.e. including organs, skin, and other less appealing parts. Nowadays, we mostly eat muscles. Thereby, we don't get the same composition of nutrients from meat than we used to.
No, it was 4 servings of fruit vs 2 servings of fruit. It was not just a diet of fruit. The rest of the diet wasn't controlled.