> The microbiome you want (or rather I want) is the one my ancestor's had
Why? Do you think your ancestors were especially healthy?
Do you think they all had the same microbiome?
Why? Do you think your ancestors were especially healthy?
Do you think they all had the same microbiome?
It's the null hypothesis. For me personally, it's more a bet against the modern microbiome than it is a bet for the ancestral one.
See also paleo vs margarine, no fat, no cholesterol, no carbs, enough poly-saturated fat, enough omega 3. Really paleo vs any nutrition advice that's more than 10 years old (so the science had a chance to check the claims)
IMO we don't currently know enough about nutrition or the microbiome to make a better choice than "whatever our great-great-great grandparents did"
> Do you think they all had the same microbiome?
They didn't, but they had way more diversity and significantly different strains than moderns do. Check out my above link to the american gut project's founder or http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Maybe it's not "optimal" but considering that obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc rates have all been climbing like crazy for the last 50 years and the diet has changed a lot in the last 50 years, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the change in diet is causative towards these outcomes rather than simply correlated.
And considering how long it's going to take to sort it out definitively, you might have to go most of your life making decisions based on a hunch rather than with proven science. It sucks, but that's life.
Also the lifespan was much shorted at that time, so people had less changes to get these illnesses.
That makes a lot more sense than a lot of the nutrition bullshit that gets posted to HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8827382
Yes, the absolute number of cancer cases experienced by an individual over the course of life will increase if the individual lives longer by surviving other causes of death, as cancer is mostly a disease that takes a long time to develop. But at a given age, individuals in the developed world are at less risk than ever before to have a case of cancer, and cancer cases are less likely to have fatal outcomes than ever before.
Remember that whenever you hear a curious claim like "But back then, 40 was considered elderly!" Never was.
Oh, I see, you downvote people other than the hivemind comments so that they never reach the levels to downvote themselves. I get it. Kinda sad and pathetic, but whatever, Internet numbers don't mean quite that much to me. It's additonally sad that I don't have any discreditation to my comment. You know you are wrong, but you downvote me anyway.
Of course as cities were built, the life expectancy went right back down to the 35-40 years it had been previously.
You're right of course that living longer gives us the chance to get "old people's" diseases. But the majority of the gains were made from 1900 to the 1940s, the climb is much, much slower after that.
The statement you make here is a commonly made statement here on Hacker News, and I believe you are making it honestly based on the latest information you heard. Nevertheless, the statement is incorrect in large part. You are correct that rates of obesity are going up. But age-adjusted rates of heart disease, cancer, and several other diseases are steadily going down and have been going down for my whole lifetime (more than fifty years).[1] That's why the greatest increase in life expectancy in recent years in developed countries is actually coming from reduced death rates at OLD ages--the infant mortality rates in developed countries have already been very low for most of my lifetime. See an article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] for more background information.
[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...