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Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

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mhurron

> bad is: ... pasta, bread ...

Yep, those French and Italians are dropping like flies.

> stay away from ... rice

Ah yes, Asia, the poster child of poor dietary health in the world.

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Well, there's a reason why modern Japanese raised on a more Western diet average something like 6" taller than Japanese raised on a traditional diet.

The same holds true for medieval Europeans and their all-natural diet.

Go look at some old suits of armor some time -- those guys were tiny, and they were the biggest, strongest men of their time.

Europeans also used to be quite short. The whole world is getting taller.

Actually, the world is getting to the height of how humans were pre-agriculture, at around 6 feet. As Asia and ancient Rome has proven, high carb low protein diets do not make for great height.

There is also reason to believe that a height in great excess of 6 feet is not optimal, however. Our physiology - bones and joints - don't allow for it.

I am not advocating traditional diets, I am pointing out the silliness of demonizing pasta, bread and rice when many groups of people that basically live on these things do not have the problems that staying away from these foods supposedly solves.

> those guys were tiny

Diet was hardly their only problem.

My general sense with keto and the carbs-are-evil philosophy is that it's a handy solution for relatively quick weight loss. It really does work for that.

But it's not at all clear if shunning carbohydrates is a healthier option in the long term, compared with a more diverse diet with similar total calories. As you suggest, there's considerable evidence that grains are not evil.

You're equating bread and pasta that the food industry puts on supermarket shelves, with the bread and pasta people used to make themselves from flour they got directly from the local mill for grains they got from a local farmer. Not the same thing at all.

"Diet was hardly their only problem."

In terms of growth, it was definitely the major problem.

People did not evolve to get the majority of their calories from carbs.

Now, the "carbs are absolute evil!!!!" people do take it to an extreme, but it's just a fact that signs of nutritional deficiency (e.g., stunted growth) appear in the archeological record as soon as a group of people move from a high-protein, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a high-carb agricultural lifestyle.

If there are any exceptions to this, I'm unaware of them.

Past and bread are grain that has been processed before you eat it. Your body doesn't have to work as hard to turn it into glucose -- zoom. The more your body has to work at processing its carbs the better (but don't eat mulch).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Disease_prevent...

That's not the problem with pasta and bread. The problem is what the food industry does to flour and kernels, and that it's become a fools errand to even attempt to buy pasta or bread that's not stuff full of processed carbohydrates.

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