A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Paleo diet: rotten meat

Re:A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Pale... by SketchySeaBeast on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @12:40PM (#35359747)

You're not wrong and that's an excellent example. I'm questioning the idea that somehow people were able to consume this food impact-free. I struggle with the common narrative that somehow people were healthier and better in some dark forgotten past and we should return to those times for our own well being. There often seems to be promises that conditions like IBS would stop existing if we did that. But maybe ancient man was cool with having near-constantly runny poos because there was no alternative.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Pale... by mlyle on Thursday March 30, 2023 @03:31AM (#35369317)

> I struggle with the common narrative that somehow people were healthier and better in some dark forgotten past and we should return to those times for our own well being

I think there's a bit of a slightly saner way to put this viewpoint-- that:

- Humans evolved in a very different environment from which we live now

- Our degree of genetic adaptation to modern living is relatively small, because there's been a blink of an eye for it to happen in

- Even if something newer has a sane rationale for it being "healthier" or "better" despite us not having genetically adapted to it, it may not be so: most of our handwaving rationale about complex systems ends up being wrong after careful trials and measurement, and the rest we may be missing a lot of second-order and third-order effects.

Not that I'm advocating for eating rotten meat. I'm just saying that the system is complicated and has a bunch of set-points learned from very different conditions.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Pale... by SketchySeaBeast on Thursday March 30, 2023 @12:25PM (#35375225)

I agree that the system is complicated. But it's hard to make the argument that we were genetically well adapted, or that said adaptation didn't come up with sub-optimal tradeoffs to everything we suffered through when we were paleolithic as well. Evolution is very good at building "good enough" systems for an organism to survive in whatever environment it's in based upon what energy it has available.

I too don't like rejecting things outright, but knowing that, I also don't accept things outright either. We have no reason to believe that eating rotten meat wasn't a choice made out of necessity rather than out of some sort of optimal health.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Pale... by mlyle on Thursday March 30, 2023 @01:13PM (#35376009)

> We have no reason to believe that eating rotten meat wasn't a choice made out of necessity rather than out of some sort of optimal health.

First, basically every choice could be said to be made out of some kind of necessity.

There's a big middle ground even from this. E.g. "eating rotten meat caused a lot of harms, but it also happened to fulfill a couple of somewhat important functions, and thus there was no evolutionary pressure to meet these requirements in any other way"

Thus, even if eating rotten meat today would be a net negative for many, many reasons (and I strongly suspect this is the case), it makes a lot of sense to think about and study what possible benefits it could have had besides merely being available.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Pale... by SketchySeaBeast on Thursday March 30, 2023 @02:41PM (#35377191)

Fair enough. It's not outside of the realm of possibility there is some benefit.

[ Parent | on HN ]