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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

My favourite research is that quality nutrition is what you need, however, this means a whole food, plant based diet. What that means is no animal fats or refined animal fats as these have been blocking arteries since the 1950s, or whenever it was that Ancel Keys did his landmark studies that made saturated fats bad.

I am okay with that.

The keto diet community believe that Ancel Keys was not right and that sugar is the enemy that causes all of the problems, probably including blocked brain arteries. The whole food, plant based diet does not include refined sugar, so, hedge your bets by staying off the animal fats and added sugar. By staying off the sugar, that eliminates processed foods that invariably have refined fats and oils such as palm oil and much else that gets saturated in processing.

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Humans have been eating animal fat for millenia. Cutting excess sugar is a good plan though. We would have gotten some from fruits and berries but nothing like the quantities that are included in many foods today.

During the summer humans would have gorged on fruit while it was available, as well as ultimately learning to preserve and store it for later. Today that urge does us injustice in the form of 1200 calorie Starbucks at every corner.

Humans have been getting polio, measles and smallpox for millenia as well. That doesn't make them cures for heart disease, except in the morbid sense.

Just because people in the medieval times and before did it is no reason to presume that it was good for health.

Polio is actually an interesting case. Polio did exist for millennia, but severe outbreaks did not occur until the industrial era. Constant exposure to the virus gave most people natural immunity, and then improved sanitation meant that first exposure often occurred in later childhood or teenage years, when the virus was much more dangerous.

> Just because people in the medieval times and before did it is no reason to presume that it was good for health.

It is reasonable to assume that if your ancestors for a sufficiently large number of generations ate some diet it means that natural selection has ensured that diet is reasonably optimized for your health.

Not really. It's reasonable that it didn't kill them before they had children.

There isn't much selection against diseases that affect us after our children have grown, and what little there is (grandmother care effects, say) was likely swamped in most of human history by other causes of mortality.

Humans are social animals. The grandfather/grandmother effect is much stronger than merely "helping take care of kids", lots of living older relatives can have a dramatic influence on your social standing and therefore ability to reproduce.

Undemonstrated. You might be right but I'd like to see the science.

> It is reasonable to assume

It is reasonable to consider such hypotheses, but until you have some evidence it isn't very convincing. It's on about the same low level of intellectual rigor as assuming that "progress" is all wonderful. Neither good-old-days nor progress-is-always-good are valid modes of logical inference.

Take, for instance, the farming-based diet that our ancestors have eaten for millenia. In fact, there is evidence that it was worse than what went before. But there is also evidence that modern diets are healthier (in terms of robust development to biological potential). It isn't all one way or the other.

Here's a reference to a survey article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21507735/

Oh, absolutely there was peaks and troughs in terms of the healthiness of historic diets; the Romans noted the German diet produced a very obvious superior outcome. A more recent trough occurred in the late 1800s/early 1900s: mid-Victorians lived much longer, and grew much taller, than late Victorians in England. We've only relatively recently recovered from that (mostly - not in terms of life expectancy at age 5, but certainly on other factors like height.)

You definitely have to take a very expansive view.

I’m sure modern tribes absolutely gorging themselves on honey is just newly developed behaviour eh.

Not every day of their lives, though. There just isn't enough honey around to be a permanent honey-glutton in the wild.

Our bodies can take almost anything occasionally. But start doing it constantly, and things change.

but perhaps nearly every day when in season.

>Animal fat.

But we ate less and also metabolized it. We are now a sedentary population.

Yes, this is a huge potential source of disease. We definitely didn't evolve to sit at a desk for long periods. (Or to stand at a desk, for that matter.)

Humans have been enslaving other humans for millennia, still individuals and organizations stands and fights for freedom equality.

On the contrary, industrial farming because possible very recently thanks to antibiotics, international logistics (for food and alive livestock) and modern biocides/fertilizer to grow enough crop for feed.

This is so out of touch, having a healthy diet is obviously going to help reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease, but it is in no way the ultimate cure.

You must be new here. Hackernews has known for some time things that mainstream science has yet to fully understand: namely, that diet dominates as a cause of big-ticket diseases like cancer and dementia, and that Alzheimer's specifically is type 3 diabetes; accordingly, dietary changes, especially fasting and vegan diets, are absolutely 90% cures.

You missed your sarcasm tag

You forgot to mention the gut! As in: dude, the gut is like a second brain.

I am just saying to keep off the HFSS, in line with government policy in the UK. Stay off the saturated fats, the salt and the sugar. The arteries should look after themselves with a modest amount of exercise. And yes, the saturated fats means animal products. There is no crank science there, just no junk food.

I'm sorry no one got the joke—this website basically just consists of people with high-functioning autism so you probably need a /s on that one

Not sure why the downvotes. Clearly nobody here wants to look after their arteries.

Citation needed

https://www.forksoverknives.com/the-film/

People fall for this?

Why are you vegans always so pushy?

Not vegan. I just stay off the animal fats, processed food, sugar and salt. That is just being sensible. I believe veganism is ethics first, save the animals. I just don't want to be a vegetable.

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