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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

Homo sapiens has been eating red meat for 200,000 years. It is very unlikely it is net harmful to us.

From an evolutionary perspective, all you can conclude from that is that it was unlikely to be a net detriment in the prevailing conditions of the vast majority of that time.

Heart disease in later life was unlikely to be a substantial downside compared with the nutrient and caloric density of the meal throughout most of human history. Now, with much easier access to a wide range of foods, and a much higher chance of surviving to be killed by heart disease, that may no longer be the case.

This is a very good point that I see people miss quite often. Evolutionary pressure doesn't mean we adapt to optimize lifespan and health in our environment. The primary driver is the survivability of subsequent generations, not to reduce suffering.

In general, if most people simply avoided refined sugar, refined vegetable (seed) oils and minimized corn, soy and refined grains, they'd be much better off.

Combined with reducing snacking in general (2-3 meals a day) and a longer 3-5 day fast once a quarter, we'd all be better off regardless of the macro profiles.

I do feel that a lot of people getting more calories from protein than fat is a bit lopsided though. A lot of natural sources of highly available protein are accompanied with 0.5-3g of fat per g of protein. Meaning calories from fat should be higher than protein (9c:g vs 4c:g).

Alive ancestors help the subsequent generations.

But they've already done that, so it seems late to optimize for having reproductively successful ancestors

People with living parents and grandparents would have likely had a better chance of survival than those without living family members. Thus, those with genes that have adapted to live longer and healthier would still have had an evolutionary benefit, despite no reproductive benefits.

It might be true even today, let alone in the caveman era.

While I personally think your idea is likely, you really only need people to live to be about 50 or 60 to accomplish this, I think. If every generation has kids from around 15-20 years old, which seems very likely in our distant past, then you only need to be about 60 to have three generations of descendants (children, grand-children, great-grand-children), in which case by this argument perhaps you've done enough already and are free to die by whatever means you prefer after that point.

Maybe our advantage was that we, unlike other primates, had a lot of individuals even only making it to 40 years old in the distant past before they got eaten by tigers or succumbed to all manner of mosquito-borne diseases et cetera.

It's not the earliest age of reproduction that matters, but the latest age. If a woman can give birth at age 40, and descendants with living parents and grand-parents have a significant survival advantage, then it makes sense that we've adapted to live to over 80.

Heart disease is happening in ages today that many people thousands of years ago were reaching. Excluding infant deaths, the biggest killer was infection. The correlation of most human illness is more strongly tied to metabolic syndrome than anything else. The driver for most inflammation is refined sugars, not red meat. Glycation of LDL cholesterol is what's happening as a result of ever increased blood glucose, this leads to not just repair of inflammation but plaquing.

note: I say this as someone sitting eating easter hershey's candy coated easter eggs (thankfully they are only around this time a year, and I limit myself to only a few).

I'm not saying never have certain things... but there's a huge difference to one snack/dessert with refined sugar once or twice a month, and several times a day. We're also consuming FAR more available simple carbohydrates in general from strains selected for flavor preferences that coincide to higher absorption as well, and more significantly higher yields. We couldn't feed the world without GMO corn, soy and wheat. That doesn't mean they should be preferred when you can make better choices and have a more rounded diet.

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