A Call for a Low-Carb Diet

Re:A Call for a Low-Carb Diet by vacri on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @03:33AM (#8256206)

The whole vegetarian vs meat-eater thing is something of a canard anyway. We're biologically omnivores. If you want to be a vegetarian, that's cool, but you need to ensure your diet covers the things you'd usually get from meats. But at this point, you're making a moral decision, not a nutritional decision - whether you get your protein from fish or from beans matters little to your body, as long as you get it.

Hunter gatherers were lucky to live past 30...

Not true. If you made it past 5-10 years, you were likely to live a fairly full adult life. Infant mortality was very high, but it wasn't like most people dropped dead before 30 if they survived early childhood.

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Re:A Call for a Low-Carb Diet by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @04:55AM (#8256433)

Wikipedia has some numbers [1] on life expectancy at various time in history.

In the Upper Paleolithic, life expectancy at birth was 33 years, and by 15 years of age the total expectancy went up to 54 years.

In Classical Rome, life expectancy at birth was 20-30 years, and by 10 years of age the total expectancy went up to 45-47 years.

In Medieval Britain, life expectancy at birth was 30 years, and by 15 years of age the total expectancy went up to 64 years.

This looks kind of mixed to me. Certainly, as you point out, people weren't "dropping dead at 30". But dying around 45 or 55 is not what people nowadays would call a "fairly full adult life" either.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...

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Re:A Call for a Low-Carb Diet by vacri on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:58PM (#8260421)

Those numbers work fine with what I said, they're fairly full adult lives. Life expectency has been rising over the past few decades with improvements to medical care, but only 50 years ago in the US, it was 70 years. If that's 'full', then the numbers above are 'fairly full', I think. Rome might be a touch short, but it's still much longer than the idea most people drop dead by 30.

Certainly in a sociological sense, most people consider the years 60+ to be twilight years where you're not living life to the fullest - whether it's true or not, that's the perception.

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