Not sure about variety effect, but overall they had much healthier diet from certain perspective (fruits + vegetables + lean muscles/whatever part of animal). No processed sugars, preservatives and other slow-poison crap. I don't think the diet was complete and for sure some vitamins/nutrients were often missing (ie in winter).

Combine it with much higher activity and they would look like superman with regard to fitness to average human these days. At least those who survived those harsh conditions, infancy and various easy-to-cure-now ails like tooth infection or appendicitis.

Not all preservatives deserve to be called poisons. BHT is a preservative because it's an antioxidant. It's available as a dietary supplement for that reason. Alpha-tocopherol is a preservative additive but is often used to fortify foods with additional vitamin E. Salt, vinegar, and ascorbic acid are all also preservatives.

I doubt that this is true. In the era of colletion and hunting, the diversity of food is based on the near-by ecosystem, which is larger than modern supermarket.

There is no way that's true. No matter how far a person wandered they're not going to come across a bell pepper, lettuce, carrots, potatoes and any meat they could want.

You're perspective is skewed. Your knowledge only includes the local plants that we have created into our international rummaging choices. Bell Peppers are just one modern variety out from the ~30 species of chilies we've discovered. Same for carrots and potatoes and lettuce. I look at the variety of edible vegetation I can get at the grocery store and the only thing I really think of is it's a good day that I don't have to walk 20 miles to the fruit trees to pick the fruit before all the animals do.

Meat? tons of variety, there are like twenty different cat to dog sized animal species in my Montana wilderness before I even have to get to the large herbivores that have less variety. And meat is special anyways, the mink or weasel you can kill is chock-full of 2-5 years worth of collecting resources from various animal and vegetable sources.

Have you ever eaten a pine cone?

Pine needles "contain more Vitamin C than an orange" (I didn't see it specified if that's by gross weight or dry mass) and make decent tea, and many cultures still boil and eat or cook with pine cones.

Modern crops are amazing, but we are literally surrounded by new and forgotten sustenance. It's not always pretty, tasty, or toothsome, but it's there if you have the time and will to turn it into food.

I'm also reminded of villages that "modernized" by trading their old fashioned cast iron cookware in for aluminum and began to suffer from anemia as a result. Iron is abundant in the crust, and eating mineral-rich clay is still practiced by humans and animals around the planet, but their solution was to put cast iron charms in the new pots for luck. It's possible they were in iron-poor areas, but if they were swayed to abandon their traditions by the appeal of commercial marketing, it seems likely they mught also eschew any dirt-eating practices they once might have had.

Highly sceptical of this if we're talking about the non-animal part of the diet.

Hadza ate only 4 non-animal foods, which is much less than what's available at a supermarket.

Hunter gatherers would've had a more diverse diet when it came to meats, eating the entire animal including most organs, but that's more cultural than what's specifically available at the supermarket (it's pretty easy to get organ meat at the supermarket and especially the butcher, but most people don't opt-in).

Right, but worth noting that raw beef, for example, contains a lot more nutrients than cooked beef[1], and includes most of the essential vitamins you would need to live.

Other parts of the animal, like the liver, would provide sources for A and B12, etc.

    > Because of its content in highly valuable
    > nutrients such as iron, zinc, selenium, fatty
    > acids, and vitamins, meat is a unique and
    > necessary food for the human diet in order
    > to secure a long and healthy life, without
    > nutritional deficiencies.[2]

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2621....

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...

The book Sapiens discusses this at length. Our early hunter gatherer ancestors had a much more varied diet compared to agricultural society

This year's Dorito season is going to be plentiful.

They also didn’t live to a ripe age.

That's a bit of a myth. Life expectancy was vastly less than it is now, but that is because of infant mortality, death in childbirth, lack of emergency medicine, etc. Those that survived all that lived about the same as today, about 70-80 years:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25434609?seq=1

correlation_bias.jpeg

Sure, yet still somehow a stronger argument than the comment I was responding too.

Look up "paleolithic ketogenic" diet, a clinic in Hungary is treating "incurable" disease with an all-meat high fat diet. With extraordinary success.

Humans were obviously hunters for most of our evolutionary history, deriving most of our calories from animal fat.

I'm not aware of any scientific consensus supporting fad diets. Sounds like "bro science".

This clinic has researchers and they publish, plus they cure the incurable, it's not something to be dismissed as a "fad". If anything, the fad diet is whatever we're doing since the 50s, or all the way up to the invention of agriculture.

Your argument supposes you know something that the experts in the field don't know, since there is no consensus supporting such a diet.

The increased animal suffering alone is a good reason to not try such a diet, nevermind the small support in the scientific community.

I think I do, I'm in remission from chronic autoimmune disease thanks to this diet.

The clinic publishes research, that it's not mainstream doesn't in any way invalidate their results.