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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I know there's a perception that nutrition science is churning, and I'm sure that behind the scenes it really is, but at the macro- scale that laypeople care about, aren't the trends straightforward and aren't they unfolding pretty slowly?

* Fat is bad

* Saturated fat is bad, olive oil is good

* Transfats are particularly bad

* Carbs are bad

* Fat's not so bad after all

* Fructose is particularly bad

* Refined carbs are bad, normal carbs maybe not so bad after all, and complex carbs are good

For 50+ years, this doesn't seem that hard to keep up with.

It's also one thing to say that we're "made of carbohydrates" and another thing altogether to suggest that our metabolisms are equipped to process large quantities of purified, metabolically dense nutrients that our ancestors never had access to.

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Also, not that you particularly exercised it here, but the whole what-did-cavepeople-eat argument is totally retarded. Cavepeople clearly could reproduce a fair amount of the time on the diet they had. That doesn't even a little bit mean that their diet was the diet people were 'designed for' or that that was even remotely related to their optimal diet.

(Which obviously doesn't necessarily mean that refined sugar is either good or bad.)

So we should all stop mentioning our ancestors when thinking about what to eat.

Not that I buy into the whole caveman fad, but isn't there evidence that the switch from hunter/gatherer society to agriculture came with a decline in health?

Dunno. Offhand, if the HG diet is berries and meat, and the farm diet is bread and more bread, could be. But we already kinda knew that bread and more bread wasn't the best diet; cavemen don't add more information if that's what was going on.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the truth about nutrition and caveman diets are conditionally independent given currently actually-known science about nutrition. If we didn't have science, and all you had was cavemen observations, that might be valid, but we do, so it's not.

(And by "currently actually-known science" I mean very basic things like that we can't make iron from scratch so if we don't eat stuff with iron in it then we get sick, and same with some amino acids, and same with noticing that if you eat 20 cheeseburgers a day you get fat quickly. Not stuff like whether fat is bad or good.)

Why would it be “totally retarded”? Our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years on a similar diet while our own diet changed together with our environment much more radically in the last few thousand or hundred years. Understanding the diet of our ancestors might at least help us understand what we were optimized to eat.

That’s not to say we should eat what our ancestors ate, it’s just a nice starting point when you want to go hunt for the optimal food. Evolution obviously influences what we can eat – lactose tolerance (only a few thousand years old) is the best example of that – and evolution clearly had not yet time to react to our radically changing environment (cookies still taste absolutely delicious and not the least bit awful as they should).

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