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Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

There is an "undernutrition" hypothesis.

Back in the day when we were all doing enough work (men, women, children) to need over twice our base-metabolic-rate number of calories per day, and eating whole foods, particularly red and white offal and leafy greens like collard and beet greens, steamed and roasted, we got enough of these mesonutrients and micronutrients.

Twice your BMR is about 5000 Cal/day for an adult male. You need to do eight hours' physical work (shoveling, threshing, chopping, sawing, lifting, doing the laundry by hand, etc.) to burn off the extra.

Now, the hypothesis says, we are deficient in many of these nutrients because we simply do not eat enough food, only 2500 Cal/day and a lot of that is from vegetable oils and low-nutrient animal fats.

I have no investment in the hypothesis. Just reporting it.

Edit: Vegemite and Marmite are high in vitamin B1. Possibly Bovril also. Spread it thinly on your toast and grill it.

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That is an interesting point. What we also know is that soils are being depleted of minerals, and farmers are selecting for crops with higher shelf life over higher nutrition.

e.g. tomatoes have lost most flavor and nutrition over past few decades, some efforts are underway to hybridize them with older variants to get the best of both worlds.

> e.g. tomatoes have lost most flavor and nutrition over past few decades

can't speak for nutrition (nor do you provide support for that claim) but as to flavour, you clearly haven't been round long! Old fashioned tomatoes were shite I can testify (at least those available in the UK).

My grandmother said the ones from the 20s in the us tasted way better, but they didn't keep any time at all, which was fine because they grew or raised all their own food.

same story here. she also said that it was commonplace for people to have plants that originated from seeds from 'the old world' and brought over; maybe they were at that point closer to some genetic cousin.

I grow heirloom tomatoes in the United States, and they are spectacular. The tomatoes available in the grocery store pale in comparison to anything grown in your own garden.

This probably has more to do with the fact that supermarket tomatoes are picked before they fully ripen on the vine (often green). I also enjoy growing my own (Brandywine is a favorite), and letting it ripen on-vine to the point where it's probably hours away from falling off or starting to rot results in a much better tasting tomato than jumping the gun.

Thanks for that, very interesting. There used to be some fruitarian who said his bloodwork was all perfect eating primarily some ridiculous number of bananas each day. And his conclusion everyone should just eat fruit. Well he was burning over 10000 calories a day bicycling, I think he was a delivery rider and it was his hobby. That diet doesn't scale down to 2000 calories for the reasons you mention. I also wonder about all that potassium...

Do you have a source for the amount of calories we used to consume historically? Twice the calories means twice the food which means twice the bulk, twice the time to eat etc. My perception is that we were actually quite underfed historically.

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