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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!

"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.

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Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.

If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).

What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.

Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.

My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.

Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.

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