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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5682 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

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Here's a competing theory:

Various branches of humanity evolved to survive quite effectively off whatever the local diet was. The Mediterranean diet is great for the Mediterranean genome, the medieval-times British diet works great for the medieval-times British genome, and so forth.

This suggests that most of us probably have a diet that works well for us - we just might not know what it is.

When "a new diet" becomes popular, a bunch of people try it, and a bunch of people discover that they've finally found the diet That Works For Them. This isn't a perception deal, this isn't a matter of paying attention, the diet really does work for them, so they talk about how it's been a miracle and try to spread it.

But it doesn't work for everyone, because no diet works for everyone.

I've seriously thought about trying to put together a Diet Book that just collects every cuisine that seems to work nutritionally for a significant set of people, then puts them all in one place, with the note "go through this book, stick to each diet for a month or two or three; if you find one that works, keep doing it".

I have considered this before, but there are two problems I ran into. What is the relevant period? Should one base his diet on what his ancestors ate 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago, or 50,000 years ago? We now know that a lot of natural selection due to changes in diet occurred during the neolithic, so maybe that is the relevant period, but my understanding is that most people had terrible diets and terrible health as a consequence. Didn't Europeans mostly just eat bread and milk and weren't they consistently malnourished? We must have some adaptations to this diet, but it is probably still not an optimal diet for us. We clearly never adapted perfectly to this diet, so maybe we should go back further and eat mostly fish, like they did in the paleolithic, or maybe we should supplement the neolithic diet with the fruit, vegetables, and meat that I understand only the rich ate large quantities of.

Two reasons this doesn't seem plausible: frequent migration and frequent changes of diet. We find wheat cultivated 10k years ago, and that's obviously just a lower bound, it might've been so before that without evidence. But - "and Germany and Spain by 5000 BC". 5k years is enough time for some evolution, but how much? And humans and ancestors, over a million years of evolution, would've had to adapt to many different kinds of food, leading to all humans today being able to survive on a wide range of diets.

There certainly are adaptations to different foods among different people - but how significant are these, and adaptations to what, and do they have much to do with modern diets? not sure.

If you look at skin colour, it is clear that, over a few thousand years, we can adapt to local conditions despite migration. We don't need to keep adaptations for conditions from millions of years ago. We can just be adapted to the conditions of the last few thousand years.

Natural selection takes a long time to bring a new mutation to significant frequency in the population, but if a genetic variant is already common in a population - as it would be if two populations have recently mixed together and the variant was common in one of the populations - it wouldn't take long to spread to nearly everyone if there is strong selection.

Yes, but - if the variant was already present, and if there was strong selection. This is going to be true for some variants - but which variants, and what effect they have, is a question! Humans lived in europe for a long time before skin color adapted. So concluding 'if you are from the mediterranean historically, then eat what they eat there' is not going to work well.

That seems pretty far-fetched to me, in that a thousand years is nowhere near long enough for human level selection effects to occur. I could perhaps buy that our gut biomes adapted to ancestral diets, but I tend to suspect old fashioned diets being better for us is more just a matter of ancestral wisdom/modern processed food being utter shit. Like, obviously a balanced meal of lean protein, grains, and mixed vegetables is gonna be better than fast food or whatever sodium loaded nonsense one picks up in the freezer aisle.

A few thousand years is certainly enough, see lactase persistance.

In 500 years americans will be svelte and healthy off of a diet of corn sugar, vegetable oil, and preserved meats.

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