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BafangFan t1_j4j4uz4 wrote

Reply to comment by wallowsfan289 in There’s a strong relationship between diet in early life and food preferences in adulthood, research finds by Additional-Two-7312

Because homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years - and other species of homo for 2 or 3 million years. And during that time we evolved to have culture and tools and industrial revolution. We built cities and moved rivers.

However, in only the past 50 years we have had an explosion in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, ADHD, depression, etc.

The foods that we ate for 300,000 years did not make us sick. We figured out what we could eat, and what we couldn't.

But now, everything in the middle of a grocery store - all the industrial food - is killing us.

And as far as leafy green vegetables go, we may have eaten them from time to time (or not), but they have virtually no calories so it's not like they would have sustained us. We can't live on plain salad - so it's a wonder if 20,000 years ago we would have even bothered eating it.

Arguably, we ate a ton of meat. And after we figured out fire and cooking we probably ate some starchy roots, like casava. But raw casava is poisonous unless treated properly, so it's unlikely we ate casava or similar roots until after we had big brains.

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StorminNorman t1_j4jqyvo wrote

>However, in only the past 50 years we have had an explosion in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, ADHD, depression, etc.

Detection for most of these has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last 50yrs.

>And as far as leafy green vegetables go, we may have eaten them from time to time (or not), but they have virtually no calories so it's not like they would have sustained us. We can't live on plain salad - so it's a wonder if 20,000 years ago we would have even bothered eating it. > >Arguably, we ate a ton of meat. And after we figured out fire and cooking we probably ate some starchy roots, like casava. But raw casava is poisonous unless treated properly, so it's unlikely we ate casava or similar roots until after we had big brains.

"However, to prioritize hunting in the definition of such societies is misleading. Only in a minority of cases (for example, in the Arctic, in boreal forests, and in places where fish and sea mammals are especially abundant) do hunting, trapping, and fishing contribute more to the diet than does the gathering of plant foods."

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BafangFan t1_j4juhwo wrote

Let's remember that there used to be many more megafauna roaming the earth than today; giant sloths, woolly mammoths, tens of millions of bison across the North American Great Plains

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/did-humans-hunt-the-biggest-animals-to-extinction

Where did they go? It seems like we ate them all.

I used to go for walks in the woods on a near daily basis. Outside of some mushrooms and dandelions, I couldn't identify any plants that would be edible for us. I guess seasonally we have wild blackberries.

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BafangFan t1_j4jtwmo wrote

There is evidence of brain surgery going back thousands of years:

https://neurosurgerycnj.com/craniotomy-through-the-ages-weve-come-a-long-way/#:~:text=Neolithic%20Times,France%20as%20early%20as%201685%C2%B9.

The Ancient Egyptians were the first to document the symptoms of a heart attack (and not-coincidentally, they ate a grain-based diet).

You don't really need a lot of scientific tools to recognize a large tumor that's growing abnormally on the surface of the body.

So it's not like these things weren't diagnosable a long time ago. Before glucose tests doctors would taste the urine of a patient to see if it's sweet or not.

And if nothing else, we have pictures of people before and after industrial food. New York City in 1900 was much slimmer, on average, than in 2023. You used to have to pay a carnival an admission fee to see a really fat person. Now we don't go a single day in public without seeing a few of them.

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Stats_n_PoliSci t1_j4k1gk5 wrote

I’m amused by your assumption that the things we are 300,000 years ago didn’t make us sick.

It’s also interesting that you think our highly omnivorous teeth were primarily used to eat meat. Plants have plenty of nutrition our bodies readily use even while being low calorie. And back then, high sugar fruits were likely common in the tropical regions. They certainly thrive today in the wild areas of the tropics, if a different variety than would have existed back then.

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Cherimoose t1_j4jx7r1 wrote

It seems to depend on availability, since some hunter-gatherer tribes like the Hadza eat lots of fruit, tubers, and other plant foods in addition to meat and birds, while the San people eat dozens of different insects.

I'd agree that our hyper-diverse, overstimulating culture today contributes to the maladies you mentioned, and i'd also include divorce to the list.

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BafangFan t1_j4jxr88 wrote

I think the question should be "what would humans eat if everything was abundant?"

And it seems that answer was meat - since we ate so many large animals to extinction. Perhaps we eat more plant foods now because the availability of large animals has diminished.

This is evident in the seafood industry. We are eating fish lower on the food chain because we have already eaten almost all of the fish higher on the food chain.

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BoiledChildern t1_j4keltf wrote

So divorce and food are causing ADHD and other socal ills, this is such an odd take

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Cherimoose t1_j4megf8 wrote

I meant our high divorce and obesity rates are byproducts of a consumerist culture with endless options.

But yes, kids tend to have fewer problems when raised by their biological parents, which the US has the world's lowest rate of.

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GoddessOfTheRose t1_j4lu6bx wrote

Actually, pollution and sporadic loud noises( and constant noise without many breaks) during pregnancy, are a known reason for ADHD and autism.

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throwawaytrumper t1_j4lfxth wrote

Foods in the past absolutely made us sick. Food based illnesses prior to the industrial age were commonplace and I have no idea how you got the notion that they were not.

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BafangFan t1_j4m3cq3 wrote

Humans in the past, like humans in the present, have the ability to see, smell and taste their food. We are highly sensitive to the signs of purification of meat.

I'm sure that most of our ancestors had a higher parasitic infection rate - but that doesn't necessarily cause chronic illness like what we have today.

Dogs and pigs literally eat poop - their own and others. And they live. Cats lick their butts. We are not so fragile in that sense.

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