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Comment by cromulent | Hacker News Reader

> Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because the diet is from the paleolithic?

People who are on the paleo diet tell me exactly that.

Anyway, they seem healthier than before they started, so taking an interest in healthier food consumption seems to work for them. As you say, the outcome is the important thing.

The Paleo diet may well have made the hunter-gatherers very healthy. However, as I have already passed their life-expectancy, there seems to be no data supporting whether it will work for my longevity ;)

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> I have already passed their life-expectancy

The reason life expectancies were 35 back then was due to horrible infant and early childhood mortalities. People lived on the close order of 100 years (70-80 or so) back long before we had anything like medicine. For example:

> A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or the equivalent of the complete renewal of a human population. [snip] At the time of the reign of emperor Augustus, the Romans decided that a saeculum was 110 years.

In other words, if you wanted to make sure everyone who had been alive for some specific event was dead, you had to wait a hundred or so years. Does that sound like the reasoning of people who expected to die before they hit fifty?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum

First, the age of the Roman republic was a long way from the stone age. Second, by then grain was a HUGE part of the diet, so drawing conclusions about life expectancy from Roman traditions is probably not a great example. Third, Romans didn't live that long - here are a list of emperors I could find who died of natural causes...

Augustus - 75

Tiberius - 77

Vespasian - 69

Titus - 41

Nerva - 67

Trajan - 63

Hadrian - 62

Antoninus - 74

Marcus Aurelius - 58

I'll stop there - the next century is a drag.

I'm not sure why he brought up the Romans. But I think he wanted to illustrate how unintuitive life expectancy is.

According to Wikipedia, which cites brittanica (does anyone have a real source on this?), roman life expectancy was 28!

But if you survived to age 15, your life spam was expected to be much longer.

In this context the HG life expectancy of 33 is better than it sounds.

long life spam? I already get that in my inbox ;)

You must have missed my emoticon.

Horrible infant mortality, and also horribly dangerous lifestyle (chasing after wild game).

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