I should have worded it differently. The idea comes not from some known interaction between the different mechanisms, but the unknowns.
For example, until fairly recently, typical medical advice included recommendations such as : eating a lower fat, lower cholestrol diet, staying out of the sun and using sun screen, etc. This advice was based on sound specific knowledge at the time.
Compare that advice to general paleolithic diet/lifestyle advice and we now know of a large number of specific failings in that older advice. They all stem essentially from a fundemental rationality error in over-estimating our knowledge of health, and underestimating our ignorance.
So I didn’t mean to imply the full benefit was from some known set of interactions, but rather the full benefit comes from all the unknowns—there is still great deals of uncertainty about many of the interactions between sunlight, vitamin D, weight, metabolism, cancer, etc etc.
In the face of all this uncertainty, the general evolutionary principle has proven to have a timeless advantage in expected outcome. However, this doesn’t mean that strong specific evidence for benefits from specifc un-paleolithic behaviours shouldn’t be considered. For example, it’s pretty clear that brushing your teeth and flossing is good for health, even if it’s strictly speaking, unpaleolithic.
Perhaps the web-connection I was referring to is just as simple as summer vs winter behaviour, and our lack of sunlight and vitamin D is causing a perpetual metabolic winter (with associated weight gain and metabolic syndrome and a host of other weak disease associations). Perhaps so, but we don’t really know yet.
What I asked for (demonstrate the benefit of each suggestion in turn, against some baseline of none/some/all of the other paleo suggestions) in no way requires that the interactions be known.
The hypothesis “don’t expect to see great benefits except when you follow a plurality of these paleo-story inspired advices, because of UNKNOWN interactions between them” sounds crazy. Where’s the evidence? Isn’t it more likely that some of the program is definitely helping a lot, and other parts aren’t, and you aren’t sure which parts are working, so the lay person may want to maintain them all rather than experiment?
From my point of view, it looks like some paleo-lovers choose to believe the improvements are super-additive just because it excites them. I’ll assume the improvements are independently additive (not sub- or super-), and that some of them are great, and others not. I welcome evidence about what works, even if it’s just “the whole package taken together is effective in this study.”
I don’t find that they are “super-additive”, and my position is actually very close to yours. There may be some unknown interactions, but it’s more we don’t know which specific parts have which benefits, and overall it’s safer to follow most of it.
For example, getting natural sunlight (while avoiding burning), is probably better than taking vitamin D supplements. I don’t know this for sure, but I’d bet that way at least slightly. I suspect that there are some interaction effects as well, but that’s not the main reason I was saying you get the most benefit from enacting everything.
Your starting point for “let’s try this set of practices as a bundle” is somewhat reasonable: we should expect to be optimally calibrated for the ancestral evolutionary environment—except for things like genes allowing for efficient digestion of dairy and wheat have spreading dramatically over the last 10k years. So, to the extent that it’s really true that we’re optimally calibrated for exactly the AEE and the daydreamed bundle of practices really gets us something like it (in all the right ratios), then you should pattern your life exactly after it.
Also: not everything needs to be “just right” because we have some self-regulatory or alternative-synthesis mechanisms that allow us to live in quite different environments and through lean times.
And of course, I assume that life expectancy was significantly less in the AEE—but obviously you hope to suggest only the positive practices. I guess my point is: since we don’t know exactly what parts of the AEE we’re tuned (with low tolerance) for, and we don’t know exactly how to most effectively live by some modern analog of the AEE, it’s best to try and find by science the optimal level of each practice (while holding all other aspects in the best-known-so-far range).
And, as always in such things, you can do what makes you feel happier in the near term by haphazard personal experimentation, while hoping that research will warn in time of any hidden long term damage you’re doing.
it’s best to try and find by science the optimal level of each practice (while holding all other aspects in the best-known-so-far range).
Yes. This is the underlying guiding principle. But it begs the question,
What is the best-known-so-far? Clearly the standard American diet is far from it. Clearly less modern diets have benefits over modern ones (and vis a versa!). There are many traditional diets known to have very low levels of diabetes, stroke, and heart disease (the predominant diseases of western civilizations), and which fly in the face of modern nutrition. Why aren’t these diets considered the best-known-so-far?
No one is arguing that a paleo mantra should replace science. People are arguing that the currently accepted theories are grossly wrong, and are offering a new hypothesis.
I should have worded it differently. The idea comes not from some known interaction between the different mechanisms, but the unknowns.
For example, until fairly recently, typical medical advice included recommendations such as : eating a lower fat, lower cholestrol diet, staying out of the sun and using sun screen, etc. This advice was based on sound specific knowledge at the time.
Compare that advice to general paleolithic diet/lifestyle advice and we now know of a large number of specific failings in that older advice. They all stem essentially from a fundemental rationality error in over-estimating our knowledge of health, and underestimating our ignorance.
So I didn’t mean to imply the full benefit was from some known set of interactions, but rather the full benefit comes from all the unknowns—there is still great deals of uncertainty about many of the interactions between sunlight, vitamin D, weight, metabolism, cancer, etc etc.
In the face of all this uncertainty, the general evolutionary principle has proven to have a timeless advantage in expected outcome. However, this doesn’t mean that strong specific evidence for benefits from specifc un-paleolithic behaviours shouldn’t be considered. For example, it’s pretty clear that brushing your teeth and flossing is good for health, even if it’s strictly speaking, unpaleolithic.
Perhaps the web-connection I was referring to is just as simple as summer vs winter behaviour, and our lack of sunlight and vitamin D is causing a perpetual metabolic winter (with associated weight gain and metabolic syndrome and a host of other weak disease associations). Perhaps so, but we don’t really know yet.
What I asked for (demonstrate the benefit of each suggestion in turn, against some baseline of none/some/all of the other paleo suggestions) in no way requires that the interactions be known.
The hypothesis “don’t expect to see great benefits except when you follow a plurality of these paleo-story inspired advices, because of UNKNOWN interactions between them” sounds crazy. Where’s the evidence? Isn’t it more likely that some of the program is definitely helping a lot, and other parts aren’t, and you aren’t sure which parts are working, so the lay person may want to maintain them all rather than experiment?
From my point of view, it looks like some paleo-lovers choose to believe the improvements are super-additive just because it excites them. I’ll assume the improvements are independently additive (not sub- or super-), and that some of them are great, and others not. I welcome evidence about what works, even if it’s just “the whole package taken together is effective in this study.”
I don’t find that they are “super-additive”, and my position is actually very close to yours. There may be some unknown interactions, but it’s more we don’t know which specific parts have which benefits, and overall it’s safer to follow most of it.
For example, getting natural sunlight (while avoiding burning), is probably better than taking vitamin D supplements. I don’t know this for sure, but I’d bet that way at least slightly. I suspect that there are some interaction effects as well, but that’s not the main reason I was saying you get the most benefit from enacting everything.
Your starting point for “let’s try this set of practices as a bundle” is somewhat reasonable: we should expect to be optimally calibrated for the ancestral evolutionary environment—except for things like genes allowing for efficient digestion of dairy and wheat have spreading dramatically over the last 10k years. So, to the extent that it’s really true that we’re optimally calibrated for exactly the AEE and the daydreamed bundle of practices really gets us something like it (in all the right ratios), then you should pattern your life exactly after it.
Also: not everything needs to be “just right” because we have some self-regulatory or alternative-synthesis mechanisms that allow us to live in quite different environments and through lean times.
And of course, I assume that life expectancy was significantly less in the AEE—but obviously you hope to suggest only the positive practices. I guess my point is: since we don’t know exactly what parts of the AEE we’re tuned (with low tolerance) for, and we don’t know exactly how to most effectively live by some modern analog of the AEE, it’s best to try and find by science the optimal level of each practice (while holding all other aspects in the best-known-so-far range).
And, as always in such things, you can do what makes you feel happier in the near term by haphazard personal experimentation, while hoping that research will warn in time of any hidden long term damage you’re doing.
Yes. This is the underlying guiding principle. But it begs the question,
What is the best-known-so-far? Clearly the standard American diet is far from it. Clearly less modern diets have benefits over modern ones (and vis a versa!). There are many traditional diets known to have very low levels of diabetes, stroke, and heart disease (the predominant diseases of western civilizations), and which fly in the face of modern nutrition. Why aren’t these diets considered the best-known-so-far?
No one is arguing that a paleo mantra should replace science. People are arguing that the currently accepted theories are grossly wrong, and are offering a new hypothesis.