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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

I think it's bananas that you're advocating for historical eating and getting downvoted. The only reason we're here at all is that it worked well enough to keep people alive.

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.

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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

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_...

>heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc rates have all been climbing like crazy for the last 50 years I'm not sure about that, in the past the diagnosis were really different from now so you can't really compare them.

Also the lifespan was much shorted at that time, so people had less changes to get these illnesses.

I read somewhere (I can't find it after googling extensively) that the first couple of generations of Europeans to settle in the US had a pretty long life expectancy mostly because the escaped crowded cities. Sanitation hadn't been figured out yet, but the population was so sparse the drinking water hadn't been contaminated to a considerable degree, etc.

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.

http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html

So are you arguing that obesity in children is happening because we are living longer?

It's not controversial to say that cancer is a disease of old age, and that rates of cancer are higher now because people are living longer.

That makes a lot more sense than a lot of the nutrition bullshit that gets posted to HN.

Dan, I know you like to check your facts. Age-adjusted rates of cancer have been going steadily down throughout our lifetimes. That information has been posted to Hacker News before.

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.

I agree with that, but if one of those things are right (the cancer part, maybe) but diabetes sure isn't one of those.

I'm kind of baffled at the downvotes here, is this not a legitimate question or method of debate? I'm not spewing tropes or memes like on reddit. I thought here it's discouraged to downvote because you disagree as well as reddit, but it seems the intellectual levels are even lower than reddit.

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.

We're not really living much longer. More people are reaching old age, pushing average life expectancy up.

Remember that whenever you hear a curious claim like "But back then, 40 was considered elderly!" Never was.

Children are obese because they aren't chasing chickens around the yard.

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