Humans are incredibly intelligent, however intelligence doesn't mean we should forget our ancestral roots. We are meant to move; sitting in offices and eating junk food while getting information blasted into our brains from glowing rectangles is a recipe for disaster.
I'm optimistic that we will transition to a more human-centric way of living/working.
I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.
I'm not so sure. Some ancient societies had a pretty advanced idea of what makes a good diet. And people in any time period can tell that "if I eat this way, I feel better and if I eat that way, I feel worse".
One thing I find interesting with that is how tightly coupled mongol armies were to an animal based diet, and how they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies.
You'll often find many people not willing to wade into discussing food and exercise anymore because peiple treat it almost religiously. It makes discussion hard in the space because now food is so tightly coupled with society and culture.
We know the ancient greeks and romans exercised. Warriors of successful societies prioritized being fit of body. To have a discussion we'd have to get to common definitions of what exercise is.
I think a really solid case can be made that agriculture was the biggest mistake humans have made.
1. Cattle grazing when all was good (migration = transhumant)
2. Fishing when possible, but more work and hard to synch with migrations of cattle
3. Farming only when really necessary
See: E. E. Evans-Pritchard classics
Most traditional cuisines have their fair share of nonsense medicines and performative poisons. They had more time to test, so I’d absolutely pick it over our processed food. But it’s far from panacea.
> A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
The Greeks and Romans intentionally exercised outside daily toils.
Yes.
> Do we know anything about the exercise habits of the poor (other than the dude in the bathtub) or the slaves?
This is a notorious blind spot in our knowledge of our antiquity. It’s partly why the ruins at Pompeii were so interesting.
Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo.
Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him.
Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?
That's the main difference between western and TCM. Western medicine we quite often know something works (because of double blind studies) but we don't always have an explanation. TCM is fundamentally untrustyworthy in the 21st century.
And you can get placebos anywhere.