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Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

I am not advocating traditional diets, I am pointing out the silliness of demonizing pasta, bread and rice when many groups of people that basically live on these things do not have the problems that staying away from these foods supposedly solves.

> those guys were tiny

Diet was hardly their only problem.

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"Diet was hardly their only problem."

In terms of growth, it was definitely the major problem.

People did not evolve to get the majority of their calories from carbs.

Now, the "carbs are absolute evil!!!!" people do take it to an extreme, but it's just a fact that signs of nutritional deficiency (e.g., stunted growth) appear in the archeological record as soon as a group of people move from a high-protein, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a high-carb agricultural lifestyle.

If there are any exceptions to this, I'm unaware of them.

You're equating bread and pasta that the food industry puts on supermarket shelves, with the bread and pasta people used to make themselves from flour they got directly from the local mill for grains they got from a local farmer. Not the same thing at all.

Past and bread are grain that has been processed before you eat it. Your body doesn't have to work as hard to turn it into glucose -- zoom. The more your body has to work at processing its carbs the better (but don't eat mulch).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Disease_prevent...

My general sense with keto and the carbs-are-evil philosophy is that it's a handy solution for relatively quick weight loss. It really does work for that.

But it's not at all clear if shunning carbohydrates is a healthier option in the long term, compared with a more diverse diet with similar total calories. As you suggest, there's considerable evidence that grains are not evil.

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