It's a flaw with an agrarian diet, not intrinsic to human anatomy. Archaeological remains of hunter-gatherers show extremely few cavities. They begin in earnest once people start eating domesticated cereal grains as a primary food source.
We don't accept anthropological arguments for any more human anatomy limitations. We have contacts and glasses to correct our eyes and cars and planes to travel farther and faster then we ever could on our legs alone.
I just think compared to the other recurring hygiene tasks, teeth seem to be the most labor intensive and accumulate damage continuously while most other hygiene tasks can be technically be ignored for days/weeks (like camping with no shower).
While i doubt its the only factor, diets higher in sugar than what hunter/gathers would have eaten seems plausibly linked to there being more cavities in modern times.
Would practicing with one eye properly covered, to have low enough lux to prevent the natural feedback mechanism which causes myopia[1], seem impractical?
[1] Extended or frequent exposure to low-contrast input causes lengthening of the eye, and can be irreversible after two weeks[2]. Seems to involve eye and visual cortex, and to not occur if the eye has no connection to the visual cortex. I'm not aware of any similar mechanism to account for far-sightedness.
[2] Consequently, nightlights and other light sources which shine into a sleeping area may be counter-indicated.
This doesn't make sense. This only explains why people use reading glasses or bifocals over the age of 40.
Most people needing vision correction are near-sighted (myopia), not far-sighted (hyperopia). We have glasses because we need to be able to see things and read signs at distances greater than our arm reach.
There's something else going on causing SO many people to need vision correction.
>Cars are great for modern society
As someone who lives in a walkable city with excellent public transit, I completely disagree. Cars are a disaster and a cancer on society.
>While i doubt its the only factor, diets higher in sugar than what hunter/gathers would have eaten seems plausibly linked to there being more cavities in modern times.
I think this is a big thing, though I think it's more complicated because some people eat plenty of sugar and still don't have cavities, so I think sugar affects different peoples' bacteria differently, or different people have someone acquired or evolved different bacteria that respond differently to sugars. But yeah, sugar seems to be a central issue.
They are the sole reason children can't play ousude like they did 50 years ago and like 2nd biggest cause of climate change.
Absolutely teerible for society.
And we have toothbrushes…
I'd also expect a high fruit diet in certain tropical regions where fruit is available more constantly also shows similar effects.
I think we can maybe all move on from this awful quote.
But, no I'm specifically referring to cultures like the Efé where men gather honey full time during a season, Yao honey-hunters who work with birds to find honey, or other forest cultures where honey is gathered from especially tall trees as a show of masculinity and bravery.
There was no single diet of hunter gatherers in the past.
How long did they live before becoming remains?
Ag gives more calories per square km, so more people. But also more vulnerability to disease, periodic famine, and in some cases malnutrition from over reliance on cereal crops (e.g. Pellagra). Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families, breast feed longer (so fewer pregnancies), and could sometimes migrate when local wild animal populations were exhausted. If you have a bad crop year you can't migrate to the next valley and find a new field of wheat waiting for you.
However there were likely many millennia of societies that mixed agriculture with hunting/gathering. Eastern woodland native Americans were like that pre-contact; maize agriculture + hunting game + fish etc. Seems like a good overall strategy.
Aren't there parts of rural China still living in that mixed model today? And Africa too iirc...
Infant mortality going up is the same thing as life expectancy going down. Neither one tells you much about whether people die before or after you'd expect to start seeing problems in their teeth. After ignoring infant mortality, it's mostly afterward, but "remains" are not a representative selection.
> Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families
This conflicts with the idea that they had lower infant mortality.
> This conflicts with the idea that they had lower infant mortality.
Not necessarily. Smaller family size can be a result of other factors outside of infant mortality.
Plus the fact that in a hunter-gatherer society people choose not too have too many children for the same reason people make that choice in advanced capitalist economies. Children become a resource burden.
In an agrarian economy, your children are extra hands for farm work. In a hunter gatherer society they are mouths to feed in an environment with intrinsically limited resources.
So did the tapeworms. Or fleas
A lot of inexperienced vegetarians/vegans end up with nutrient deficiencies because they don't ensure that they are properly getting all essential vitamins or amino acids in their meatless diets. I'm not a dietician, but it's pretty safe to say that these people are not going to be the ones with reduced mortality rates. You cannot simply remove an entire food group from your diet without putting in effort into paying attention to the rest of your diet.
Some studies[1] show that pescetarian diets offer the lowest mortality rates. This diet still requires paying close attention to what you eat, but you are far less likely to have nutrient deficiencies.
This is one of the huge issues I have with diet-mortality studies. During the gluten-free trend a while back, there were many that suggested gluten-free diets provided health benefits. However, for the vast majority of people, gluten isn't really that special as far as proteins go. It turned out those "health benefits" were just the result of people with gluten intolerances actually paying attention to their diet.
Just to reiterate, I am not a dietician. Everything above is just my cynicism for studies that constantly fail to take into account that most people just don't care what they're eating. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
While that certainly happens, its not like you have to maintain constant vigilance. Most popular vegetarian diets are nutrionally complete (major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about).
Like yes, if you decide to only eat rice and nothing else it will be bad, but its not like you have to meticulously record what you eat every meal. Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
They're not remotely what we would call smart, wise nor intellectually curious....
> major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about
Add to that list iodine, omega-3, zinc, iron, calcium, and vitamin D. All of these are essential nutrients that vegetarians need to include in their diet. Sure, they're easier to get than B12, but they can still be pitfalls if you're careless.
> Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
Yes. That's basically the entire point I'm making. Most vegetarians eat 'like a sane person' because if they don't then they will have issues very quickly. Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
What I'm asking for are studies that take this into account. Studies that aren't just asking people if their diet includes something. Studies that actually take into account the fact that most people that don't care what they are eating tend to eat meat.
Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
I do think there's a certain over estimation of how hard it is to not eat meat. It's really not.
No, because they find out really quickly what they're deficient in when symptoms show up (or they revert back to their previous diet). I admit I worded that paragraph poorly though, that wasn't my intention.
> Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
So you get blood work done regularly, ensure you have certain things in your diet, and you intentionally try to make up for a common nutrient deficiency?
You may not see that as a lot of effort, but for people that don't really care about their health, every one of those things can make a significant difference in terms of lifespan.
I'm not sure why you're so invested in the idea that eating protein is hard when one doesn't eat meat. It's really not harder to eat other protein sources - eggs, rice, and beans are common foods. It's not a thing I think about, more a consequence of... eating.
Mostly in jest, let's turn this around:
Eating meat, by contrast, seems to require significant mental gymnastics to justify. The impossible cruelty of the industrial meat production system and massive environmental impacts of eating meat create a lot of cognitive dissonance, so people need to fabricate justifications for their decision to eat meat. I'm honestly not sure how you keep up your meat-eating lifestyle when you have to work so hard to create an argument not to be vegetarian, and defend your psyche from all the evidence of the moral bankruptcy of your food choices. It seems like it would create a lot of anxiety, which could be a factor in the reduced lifespan of meat eaters.
I'm not sure why you're so invested in misrepresenting my argument. You're conflating my use of the word "effort" with some specific amount of difficulty. Would it be more accurate to use the word "willpower" instead? I personally do not believe changing any part of your diet is "hard". I have done it myself multiple times, and even now the only meat I eat regularly is fish on occasion.
The point I am making though, is that health studies don't ever seem to take into account that most people who don't put any willpower at all to have a healthy diet also tend to also eat meat. And to demonstrate that point further, here's a study on some amazing health benefits of a meat-only diet[1]. Notice how the reported health benefits are oddly similar to those that are common with vegan or vegetarian diets? My argument is that this is because this study also fails to take into account the type of people who don't put any effort into having a healthy diet (granted, at least this study acknowledges those shortcomings in their methodology as part of their conclusion).
I am not making an argument to not be vegetarian. Just as I am not making an argument to not be a carnivore. And I am certainly not trying to "defend my psyche" from being "morally bankrupt" or whatever that last paragraph of yours was suppose to be about. I honestly don't even know where you pulled that from.
Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Iodine is usually from salt, Omega-3 is often vegetable oil and nuts, zinc is commonly in beans and grains, calcium and D3 is in milk (you said vegetarian not vegan), and more to the point, most people do not get vit D exclusively from diet.
These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
> Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
> Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Other than Vitamin D3, meat is objectively an excellent source of all of those nutrients. Fish is an excellent source of iodine and omega-3, and saying people do not get zinc, iron, or calcium from meat is just incorrect.
> These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
Maybe because they never started eating those to begin with? I do not know, and I can only speculate on the different reasons. Each person is different, but all we know is that it does happen[1]. Some people just don't have those in their diet.
Anecdotally, I don't think I ever ate beans until I was in my early 20s because my parents just never cooked with them. We also pretty much only had sea salt available, and most of our food was cooked with butter instead of vegetable oil. We weren't unhealthy, but if I immediately dropped meat from my diet at that time without changing anything else, I would have started to have issues.
> While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
I'm not going to argue semantics. My argument is about the statistics and how these dietary studies tend to fail to account for extremes in behavior. Vegans, vegetarians, and pescetarians are just less likely to have these extremes.
To reiterate the results from the previous study I linked[2], semi-vegetarians (people who only occasionally had meat) have a fairly worse mortality rate than vegetarians, yet strictly speaking their diet only varies by having meat once or twice a month. The only way this makes sense in my mind is either there's a huge behavior difference in these two groups (less care put into their diet), or that meat is so incredibly unhealthy that just eating it occasionally will knock years off your lifespan. Considering the standard deviation of those results are larger for both non-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians (and that pescetarians have a significantly lower mortality rate than even the vegan group), I would bet on the former.
And if you don't think there's a lot of people that are completely careless about their diets, just remember how much soda the average American drinks in a single day[3], despite half of the population not drinking soda at all. And nearly a quarter of Europeans don't get regular checkups at a doctor[4], despite their access to healthcare. It's safe to say that a lot of people that just flat out don't care if they have a balanced diet (or exercise, regular healthcare, etc), and when you don't care you tend to eat meat.
When we get health studies that don't take this into account, we end up with fad diets because those studies essentially just show that those who pay attention to their diet tend to be healthier. To demonstrate the issues with those studies, this one[5] concludes a meat-only diet has very good health benefits compared to the general population.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8746448/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/
[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/156116/nearly-half-americans-dr...
[4] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
- Dogs eat fewer carbs and don't really eat acidic foods (no soda, fruit)
- Dogs live a much shorter time and so there is much less time for damage to accumulate to enamel.