Everything we eat has been bred for thousands of years. Does any of it have enough in common with our ancestors’ diets that “eat only that” can work?
I suppose one might look at what wild primates eat in the present day to answer that. Part of that is “smaller primates”, so that still might not be the way to go.
I meant “ancestors” on the timescale of one or two centuries (the time it took for the prevalence of obesity to rise from negligible to sizeable), not megayears. By “food types have changed” EY was referring to (I assume) availability of industrial superstimulus foodstuffs full of high-fructose corn syrup and whatnot.
Ok, I had thought this was going in the direction of the whole paleo thing. Eating as we ate a couple of centuries ago looks much more doable, at the individual level. (Changing the whole society would be a whole different thing.) But perhaps “eat food, mostly plants, not too much” is already one of the things EY has tried?
If you can eat “not too much” without your fat cells starving you to death, you’re probably already thin. I haven’t tried “mostly plants” because it’s vastly underspecified and I’m not particularly interested in being told afterward that I ate the wrong plants.
But perhaps “eat food, mostly plants, not too much” is already one of the things EY has tried?
Probably he has; but, unless the fraction of “metabolically disprivileged” people like him has been rising a lot in the past couple centuries, I guess that the rising prevalence of obesity means there are a sizeable number of people who haven’t tried that (seriously enough).
Everything we eat has been bred for thousands of years. Does any of it have enough in common with our ancestors’ diets that “eat only that” can work?
I suppose one might look at what wild primates eat in the present day to answer that. Part of that is “smaller primates”, so that still might not be the way to go.
I meant “ancestors” on the timescale of one or two centuries (the time it took for the prevalence of obesity to rise from negligible to sizeable), not megayears. By “food types have changed” EY was referring to (I assume) availability of industrial superstimulus foodstuffs full of high-fructose corn syrup and whatnot.
Ok, I had thought this was going in the direction of the whole paleo thing. Eating as we ate a couple of centuries ago looks much more doable, at the individual level. (Changing the whole society would be a whole different thing.) But perhaps “eat food, mostly plants, not too much” is already one of the things EY has tried?
If you can eat “not too much” without your fat cells starving you to death, you’re probably already thin. I haven’t tried “mostly plants” because it’s vastly underspecified and I’m not particularly interested in being told afterward that I ate the wrong plants.
Probably he has; but, unless the fraction of “metabolically disprivileged” people like him has been rising a lot in the past couple centuries, I guess that the rising prevalence of obesity means there are a sizeable number of people who haven’t tried that (seriously enough).