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StorminNorman t1_j4jqyvo wrote

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

>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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