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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time believing they would have a greater variety than a reasonable modern day person.

Reflecting on today, I’ve had four different species of fruit, three different vegetables, and two different subspecies of Cheerio. Not to forget the different meats, nuts, and dairy.

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From everything I've come across, hunter-gatherer people are substantially deficient in their Cheerio intake. Modern diets have multiple subspecies to choose from that would likely be unavailable to hunter-gatherers.

Indeed, hunter gatherers are severely lacking in this aspect. They can’t take their Che-vitamins. Look, I’m not even mentioning that they’re burdened with intense physical activities like foraging and hunting for food in the forest instead of enjoying the privileges of modern life, for example sitting in front of a computer all day long to earn green papers to then go to the supermarket and buy processed delicious-corn-syrup foods to eat with those green papers, all without even burdening your leg muscles! It must totally suck to be a hunter gatherer indeed.

Just because you had several different items doesn't mean they are all that diverse

Having a Cavendish banana, Fuji apple and hothouse tomatoes isn't "diversity" as all have basically the same nutrient content [1] which is dwindling rapidly. None of which have manganese for example, because we stripped it from our topsoil long ago.

So yes, eating a handful of legumes and some honey along with a healthy slab of wild meat (which contains everything that the meat ate) could be way more nutritionally diverse than a standard western meat + veg + grain combo. That is effectively the Hadza diet.

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...

Typical fruits people eat are probably the ones that were the easiest to domesticate and have the most sugar, not necessarily representative of more variety in nutrition. And what you might consider a variety of vegetables is in fact just the same couple species but different cultivars. And modern people certainly eat more meat but for the most part have totally abandoned eating organs and other tissue. Probably not as much difference in chicken breast vs turkey breast as chicken breast vs chicken gizzards. I ate mutton and liver as a kid, I've known other people that ate chicken feet as kids. So in some ways you don't even see the variety today you did a generation ago, but things like avocados are more common I guess.

There's a difference between having a greater variety available and eating a greater variety of food. Most people eat what they're comfortable eating, and many eat everything already cooked to death.

Yes, and hunter-gatherers are forced by their circumstance to eat a wide range of foods: individual food species are in limited supply, and the supply of them changes throughout the year (and over the years, too).

Today in the United States, food is so plentiful there is enough to provide a person with the same food every day if that's what they want.

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