- raw food is rarely eaten unless it has a thick / peelable skin
- mostly veggies are cooked in oil
- starch heavy (flour for dumplings or baked goods, and rice)
- spice heavy (chili, Szechuan peppercorn)
- sodium heavy (soy, bean pastes, and preserved vegetables)
- lots of odd ingredients from a western point of view (mushrooms, fermented beans)
- no set "breakfast" foods vs "supper" foods per se; more like "banquet" foods vs . "Everyday"
I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric. Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying goes.
I can next talk about India, Pakistan, Bangkadesh and its varied regional diet...
My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...
> My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...
Developing a comprehensive and objective view of human digestion wasn't the goal of the research. The primary goal was to disparage the so called modern "western diet," and glorify that of a traditional Exotic Other by contrast. Facts were then selectively chosen to support the pre-ordained conclusion.
For that purpose, only one non-western analysis is necessary, and in particular they must stringently avoid analysis of non-western places that are also heavily into fried food.
The author also goes on about how terrible antibiotics are, the damage they've done to the western microbiome. They further lament with little comment how antibiotics are now appearing with increasing frequency in the remaining environments where Exotic Others still live in a traditional fashion.
They fail to note that this is because in the absence of antibiotics, people -- especially children -- tend to die horribly painful deaths of sepsis at a vastly increased rate, and even exotic others tend to prefer not to die like that when taking $2 worth of pills can prevent it.
The modern Chinese diet is also relatively new (think decades) and china has high rates of diabetes and heart disease and stomach/colon cancers are on the rise.
Come back in 50 years and we'll see how well the Chinese have coped with their modern diet. I'm guessing it won't be so well.
I once took a cooking class in Beijing for home cooks (I speak mandarin and the class was for locals, not foreigners).
The amount of sugar going in some popular dishes was crazy (literally handfuls).
This has nothing to do with modern diet, the trend the GP is speaking is at least centuries old.
Traditional Chinese culture believes raw food damages the Qi of the Stomach. This belief may be grounded in the fact that their traditional way of fertilizing the crops is "night soil" or human excrement. Eating raw vegetables is a maladaptive behavior under those conditions.
It might be also linked with cooked foods being easier to digest. China has had high population densities - and therefore a recurrent problem with crop failure leading to famines - for many centuries (at least in the river valleys), so using non-eatable plants as an energy source to make human digestion more efficient is also an adaptive behavior.
That point on night soil makes a lot of sense. Note that point about thick-skinned fruits and vegetables being seen as safe, in the grandparent post.
I'm also reminded of how the Chinese traditionally regarded cold drinks as dangerous. They didn't even drink wine without heating it -- and certainly would never drink cold water, or tea that had been steeped without being brought to a boil (and, I think, held there).
I don't think the GP is talking about a centuries old diet (note the use of tense e.g 'in modern china, most food is).
Sure, the vestiges of that diet still exist today as do many of the cultural beliefs and habits e.g. only eating cooked foods unless they have a thick, peelable skin, boiling water before drinking it etc.
The point I am trying to make is that the Chinese have taken that traditional diet and added a huge amount of sugar, salt and MSG, not to mention significantly more meat (in recent years, this can often be doctored with water and/or various chemicals by the vendor). If you're eating at a restaurant rather than at home, meals probably contain a good dose of gutter oil too.
That should not be taken in any way as being healthy, and because it's also relatively recent, the effect it will have on the health population is not yet highly visible.
In mainland China they also have a poor concept of proper nutrition and this is exacerbated by the one child policy, with parents and grandparents feeding their only child whatever they want to eat (often sweets, candy, soft drink) rather than what is good for them.
On multiple occasions in China I've known children under the age of 5 with rotting, horrible teeth and when I brought it up with the parents and/or relatives (who I also knew) they laughed it off and said "oh it doesn't matter, they're just baby teeth and new ones will grown in soon and they'll be ok".
They completely failed to realise they were setting their children up for a lifetime of diet, teeth and health related problems.
I've got no problems with the concepts of traditional Chinese cooking, but it's increasingly difficult to find that in modern China.
Mushrooms are popular enough in western cuisine to be ingredients in canned soup (I don't just mean cream of mushroom soup). In the US fresh mushrooms are available in any medium sized grocery store and many people have the hobby of collecting wild mushrooms (notably morels). I'm pretty sure Europe is similar.
Yes, mushrooms are sold in virtually every european supermarket and some, like chanterelles, are considered a delicacy. Collecting wild mushrooms is also quite popular in rural regions of Germany. However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so. There are some poisonous look-alikes to edible mushrooms. Recently, a 16 year old refugee in Münster died because of this [1].
However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so
This is a pet peeve of a biologist I know: even though I know nobody who can determine species like he can, he's still very strongly against collecting mushrooms in the wild and does not do it himself. According to him there are just too many edible mushrooms with a poisonous look-alike which in some cases prefers the same surroundings as habitat and in for which the distinction can only be made by smell, or by squeezing it and see how the color changes, etc. Not sure he's exaggerating but it does illustrate why people die from eating mushrooms out of the wild, time and time again.
Not a biologist, but a fan of flora! He's correct. Maybe not the best comparison, but mushrooms are a lot like snakes. [0] Fact of the matter is, if I saw a snake with any variation of red, black, and yellow I'd be sure to keep my distance. To quote the article:
>Though there is no harm in assuming all colorful snakes are dangerous
I assume all wild mushrooms are dangerous. There is no harm in it. :)
I think it is wise to set a very high bar, but having a moderate amount of experience picking morels, I can trivially tell when I have a real morel or a false one (there are several species of edible morels and several species of confounding mushrooms involved).
I'll have to take your word for trivially telling them apart. To my untrained eye, I wouldn't be able to tell the dangerous species of my region apart from the safe ones.
But looking at the math, the most fatal species belong to Amanita [0]. Amanita contains about 600 varieties (wiki lists 500ish). Of those 500, for my region only, I would need to learn how to identify about 30 varieties. A reasonably feasible amount! But wait... we can trim that number down some more. Ignoring the ones where edibility is unknown, that leaves only 10 or so to identify. Anyone who cared enough could likely easily learn to tell them apart. But with 5 being known as deadly and 1 of those being the angel of death [1], I won't be taking any chances. :)
So go hunt morels after a forest fire. You won't confuse them with the destroying angel. The advice to start with someone who knows the difference among the species that might be confused with morels would still be good to follow.
It's also totally fine to not do anything, I just wanted to point out that your position was extremely conservative on the matter.
My wife, from eastern Asian descent (mixed, but her mother and primary influencer of her diet is from there), cannot understand eating raw foods. She eats almost no raw foods. She likes plenty of veggies, but cooked. She also gets most of her fruit cooked (things like chayote and pineapple cooked with meats and in stews, bananas fried, etc.). Interesting to hear it's a broader cultural thing.
I eat lots of raw food in contrast... salads, veggies with hummus, fruit, etc.
> I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric
I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that they need to cook their vegetables in China to make sure they are safe to eat. Tap water isn't generally potable there, or is that just in cities?
As I understand it, safe water was historically a problem, which led to the prevalence of hot tea for drinking. I guess culture in Asia tended towards boiling water, as opposed to Europe's tendency to ferment beverages to make them safer?
I forget the source where I read this, but there were supposedly vendors who only sold hot water. Water is a really cheap commodity, so the currency reflected that. Those lightweight, fractional-cent coins with the holes in them were kept on a string by the water vendors to easily take/dispense for selling hot water.
It's been years since I read this, so I may be totally off base with my recollection. But it makes sense given the problems associated with very dense populations and potable water in pre-industrial times.
They use a lot of vinegar too, depending on the region. My ex is Chinese and she made a lot of what they called cold dishes. Sometimes raw veggies but also cooked noodles that had been cooled, with sauces added in.
This is an interesting angle on the gut microbiome knowledge that we are just now starting to explore and establish. It is also an intriguing sidebar to Jared Diamond's essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" [1] (see this [2] discussion for a more balanced commentary that tackles the essay's actual points instead of the misleadingly sensationalist title).
There are some pretty sensationalist claims asserted for the gut microbiome at the moment, but it's early days yet so we're not certain what works for who, when, where, and why. I can say on a personal anecdote that after decades of not being able to eat the spicy foods that I enjoyed in childhood, I went through a course of probiotics for a year (they actually hang out here on HN), and now I can dial up the heat. It wasn't a controlled, double-blind study, but I'm sufficiently satisfied with my N=1 experiment to tentatively ascribe the result to the probiotics until new evidence arises to show me otherwise.
Is the probiotic you took the one from General Biotics? I was interested in trying them out but I never got any feedback on whether a one-month supply would be enough to notice any benefits or if it's something that requires a few months to kick in.
Yes indeed, that's who I used. I didn't notice any change after just a month, it took a year; I'm taking a break at the moment to see if any symptoms resurface. The original article for this thread mentioned that the mouse model the researchers are building indicates that successive generations of mice with weaker biomes did not improve after starting on a heavier-fiber diet (though long-term, who knows if it might start improving). Might there be a possibility that biome damage has a similar pathology, and reconstitution via probiotics takes an especially long time? Nobody knows at this point.
GB is not exactly cheap if you are on a student budget, so in the interest of full disclosure and crufty, messy, crowd sourcing pseudo-science, I'll offer some caveats of what else I was trying at the same time that might have also yielded my results. I tried two other brands of probiotic before settling on GB: Dr. Ohhira's and Bio-K+. Six months on Bio-K+ followed by two months on Dr. Ohhira's. At the same time, I went to a 20 mg / day maximum net carbohydrate, high-fat, moderate protein diet. I used testing strips to verify that I actually went into ketosis, and cycled to a 100 mg net carbohydrate day once 1-2 months to break weight loss plateaus. So before you "follow in my footsteps" and commit to a year of GB, be aware I had confounding factors that might also explain what happened to me (the ketogenic diet is the next candidate for a cause, but I've never heard of anyone being able to eat spicy foods again by starting that diet).
If I had the time and access, I'd pay to try bacteriotherapy using donor material from an athletic donor who likes spicy food. I suspect bacteriotherapy is good for more than just CDI.
The GB guys are super helpful and friendly, and you go month-to-month. I found suspending or cancelling super easy and hassle-free. So if you are curious to partake in your own N=1 experiment on gut microbiome reconstitution for just a month (though they themselves say don't count on any changes before within months), I encourage you to try it out and share your results.
On a cellular level for most all animal life, "nature"/evolution doesn't care about a long healthy post-reproductive lifespan (there was never and couldn't be reproductive selection pressure for that) --- since most everyone can handle western diet approximately up to their reproductive/prime age without adverse effects on their reproductive capacity, I see no "derailing of evolution". Heck, evolution is a never-ending series of derailings by definition.
Sure, they breed kids with a gut flora that deals with indigestable cellulose even worse than previous generations, but will they make it to their own reproductive prime age? Chances are, they will.
Which is all "evolution" cares about, harsh as it may sound.
There is very much pressure for that. Natural selection is just about passing genes to the next generations. If by living longer you can increase the safety, and the reproductive success, of your offsprings, you select for that.
Reproductive success in a natural selection context is not only about the sheer number of offsprings you have, it's about how good you can disseminate genes to the next generations. If genetic mutations allow you to increase that dissemination by caring for your offsprings, then it's selected.
I'm not saying parents are programmed to fall over and die exactly the moment they have sucessfully reproduced, clearly in those species incl us only the offspring of caring+longer-lived parents have survived to reproduce themselves --- past that prime age we just lose that comparative youthful invincibility against "environmental stress and accumulated damage and the resulting ever-accelerating degeneration" (incl "western diet") because there never was selection pressure favouring people who thrive well into old age and age in supreme health on any chow or fodder without suffering severe degeneration and disease.
"there never was selection pressure favouring people who thrive well into old age and age in supreme health on any chow or fodder without suffering severe degeneration and disease"
Can you back that up? Actually having living healthy grand-parents can be a boon to reproductive success: they can take care of kids, while parents are out hunting or gathering. So yes, if you have genetic mutations favoring living old enough to be grand-parents, it is subject to selection pressure.
Plus, it's been a while since we started caring for old people. In that context, because evolution is all about context, having healthy elderly is also a boon to reproductive success since it doesn't divert resources from child care to elderly care.
Any genetic mutation that is expressed and results into higer reproductive success in a specific context is subject to selection.
Don't social animals give lie to that? Nurturing young occurs, by definition, past the reproductive lifespan. Its essential to have a functional parent (heck even grandparent in a clan) well beyond infancy.
Semantics. Certainly that's true for most animals, I'm not saying parents are programmed to fall over and die exactly the moment they have sucessfully reproduced, clearly in those species only the offspring of caring parents have survived to reproduce themselves --- past that prime age they just lose that comparative youthful invincibility against environmental stress and accumulated damage and the resulting ever-accelerating degeneration..
Does this mean someday the cross-population fecal transplantation might be a thing in the future? Say at GNC there would be varieties of "Tanzanian Microbiota Pill" or "Burkina Faso Immune Boosting Smoothie".
Each part of the world developed a fitting diet. You couldn't expect a Russian to have fiber rich diet, it's mostly fat and proteins you can get during the long winters.
I'm curious about the role of these bacteria as an anti-inflamantory. I know many adult immigrants coming to Canada started to have hay fever in matter of couple of years since their arrival. Big drop in gut flora as a result of a diet change?
Russians and Eastern Europeans eat vegetables, even in winter, at almost every meal. But these are veggies that are easy to store through the winter: root veggies like beetroot, cabbage and potatoes, not leafy stuff like letuce or cress, which obviously does not store. The Americans stereotypes about this part of their diet is indeed true. They also like to have fruit for desert, even for feasts, sometimes offered before pastries or cakes. They associate Christmas with eating sweet oranges or clementines as well, not just cakes or meats.
> Russians and Eastern Europeans eat vegetables, even in winter, at almost every meal. But these are veggies that are easy to store through the winter: root veggies like beetroot, cabbage and potatoes, not leafy stuff like letuce or cress, which obviously does not store.
Also, food conservation! Pickled veggies and sauerkraut have always been stapled foods for me.
Speaking of diets. During the last ten-fifteen years people in Russia have developed a taste for fresh vegetables and fruit available immediately from the supermarket shelves. This trend is being reversed quite quickly due to skyrocketed prices (and the ridiculous embargo on agricultural production from eu and some other selected countries). Well, back to dachas, I guess.
I would expect the Atkins and Paleo diets, and the controversies around them, to be a good starting point -- or even Gary Taubes' _Good Calories, Bad Calories_.
To the best of my knowledge, healthy food is in fact more expensive. This is not only the conventional wisdom, here[0] is a meta-analysis of studies from 29 countries which supports the hypothesis. For many people, eating healthy is just out of reach.
You may have been a college student on a tight budget, but presumably a) you were only feeding yourself, b) you had ready access to healthy options, which many people in poorer parts of the US in particular do not, thus increasing the price dramatically when you factor in travel, and c) while you may have had limited funds, I'd wager they were largely discretionary, i.e. you also had a meal plan, or some other form of financial support so that if you exceeded your means you would not go hungry. Most college students are fairly well insulated from immediate financial ruin, via parental support and government aid. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, and not making much at that, the difference of a few dollars can be huge.
Beans are about a dollar a pound, cabbage is about 50 cents a pound, frozen spinach is around 1.40 per pound, eggs get as low as a dollar a dozen, chicken breasts are frequently around 2 dollars a pound.
The argument that healthy food is not affordable is garbage. Poor people just tend to make very poor food choices, much as they make poor choices in other areas of their lives that tend to perpetuate their poverty. This isn't hating on the poor (I come from a poor family, I was homeless as a teenager), rather simple recognition of a vicious cycle. What is needed is more education and compassionate outreach.
> chicken breasts are frequently around 2 dollars a pound.
Minor nit pick with this.. idk about where you live, but here the only "chicken" that gets down to that price is what's called "pumped".. ie, you buy the chicken, but it's 30% chicken broth "for enhanced flavor" and so when you cook it, it ends up tasting absolutely terrible.. not to mention reducing the weight of the cooked product considerably. If you've ever tried to pan sear some chicken or something and you end up with a cup of water in your pan, this is your problem.
This shit should be illegal to be sold it's so deceptive. You can tell if you have pumped chicken by looking for the "enhanced with up to 30% water/broth/liquid".. I won't buy any chicken that's "enhanced"(or with "retained water") by more than 5%. Typically that ends up selling here in Cleveland Ohio for around $5/pound or more at a run of the mill grocery store.
I think some of your prices are quite low, but for comparison's sake, I'll just assume they are correct. I pulled calorie counts from the USDA and from calorieking.com
1 pound dried pinto beans - 636 Calories, $1.00
1 pound raw cabbage - 120 Calories, $0.50
1 pound frozen spinach - 108 Calories, $1.40
1 dozen large eggs - 840 Calories, $1.00
1 pound chicken breast (with skin) - 780 Calories, $2.00
Total: 2484 Calories, $5.90 or 421 Calories per dollar
I went to Wal-Mart.com to find some junk food and grabbed a couple of the first items I saw that kept me to about $6 and had online availability (so I could get accurate pricing). I pulled calorie counts from the Kellog website and walmart.com since I had exact branded items.
1 dozen limited edition frosted pumpkin pie pop tarts - 2400 Calories, $3.50
13oz chips ahoy chocolate chip cookies - 1760 Calories, $2.50
Total: 4160 Calories, $6.00 or 693 Calories per dollar
So assuming your prices are correct, you get 65% more food per dollar if buying name-brand junk food without even trying. You could push these prices even lower if you buy generic. You can also sub in a number of different "junk food" options and get similar results (e.g. chips look similar to the cookies, soda should work out in the same ballpark as well).
The prices I quoted were actual prices I pay for food at Kroger (not even the cheapest supermarket) in North Carolina.
The food you proposed as an alternative would result in pretty bad malnutrition, so it isn't really an alternative. You might as well just compare a gallon jug of generic vegetable oil, the results in terms of health will be almost identical:
1 gallon vegetable oil, ~$5, containing ~30,000 calories, comes out to 6,000 calories per dollar.
Finally, note I didn't say healthy food was cheaper than unhealthy food, only that healthy food is completely affordable. Obesity is extremely common among poor people (_far_ more so, in fact, than among the affluent), they clearly can afford a slight increase in marginal cost per calorie.
> The food you proposed as an alternative would result in pretty bad malnutrition, so it isn't really an alternative.
That's kind of the point, and exactly the problem. It's cheaper to eat unhealthy food.
> Finally, note I didn't say healthy food was cheaper than unhealthy food, only that healthy food is completely affordable.
Well, you were replying to a comment that started with "To the best of my knowledge, healthy food is in fact more expensive.", and your comment made it seem as if you disagreed with that premise.
It is certainly true that you can eat healthily on a pretty small budget. The USDA even published guides on this. They have a low-cost and a moderate-cost (which is probably still low-cost relative to many peoples' budgets) plan.
A big issue often left out of these discussions is that it is also very time consuming to eat healthily if you don't have lots of money to spend. If you have the time to cook from scratch, you can make healthy food cheaply. Finding time to cook from scratch is difficult for a lot of people, though, especially people working multiple jobs, or single parents raising kids and also working. If you're starting with raw veggies and dry beans, you're realistically looking at an hour or more of prep and cook time, plus cleanup. If you stop at McDonalds, you're looking at 5 minutes. :\
Another big issue is that a lot of people are honestly pretty bad cooks. It's hard to convince your kids to eat healthy food if you consistently make it taste bad, which is exceedingly likely if you're trying to cook "healthy" by cutting out most salt and fat. Hooray for dry baked chicken breasts and steamed vegetables.
All of this adds up. It's not just monetary cost, but when you factor all of this (and more) in, there are a lot of factors pushing people, especially poor people, toward unhealthy foods that are easy, fast, tasty, and pretty cheap.
The time argument is another one that I really disagree with. It takes less than 5 minutes to dump some beans, water, frozen veggies, and taco seasoning/ranch dressing mix/misc other flavor packet in a rice cooker (you can get a nice one with a slow cooker setting for less than $30) or crock pot. You can also throw ground hamburger, sausage, chicken, etc directly in there with everything else and it'll cook up nice and tender. Want variety? Switch up the frozen veggies you add, the type of bean you use, the flavor packet you add, etc.
You don't have to cut out salt to eat healthily (unless you are a sodium sensitive hypertensive).
I will concede that most people have no idea how to season and flavor food to make it taste good.
Ultimately, it is entirely possible to eat an incredibly healthy, very tasty diet with a moderate amount of variety for very little money and time investment. It just requires a little knowledge and some up front thought.
I guess I'm not sold on the slow cooker thing. It's fine sometimes but I find that gets old really fast.
I agree you don't need to cut out salt to eat healthily, nor do you need to aggressively cut out all fats. But decades of crappy food guidance have taught the American population that healthy food has no salt and low fat and tastes terrible.
Where I live (Finland, a very expensive country) cabbage is typically 30-50 cents per kilogram (including 14 % VAT), less than half what you list. Almost everything is more expensive here, but cabbage is one of the things that is not. And it is a healthy foodstuff, like the others you list.
If cabbage is more expensive in America, it's because people don't want to eat healthy food. It's not cool. But still, it is so cheap that eating too much meat and flour instead is really a choice. Perhaps people are not informed enough to make a rational choice, but nevertheless it is a choice, not something forced on them.
The price of cabbage really doesn't matter. Cabbage is healthy, but you really cannot eat enough cabbage to live on. You'd have to eat almost 17 pounds of cabbage to meet the caloric needs of a 2000 calorie diet. A pound of cabbage in a day would probably be on the upper limit of what I could stomach, even after cooking it down. (Plus it stops being cheap anyway when you look at the price per calorie.)
"Eating healthy" does not mean "eating insufficient calories". You have to actually get enough calories to live. Once you start adding other healthy foods that get the calorie count to the right level, the cost starts to go up.
There have been a number of studies that show it's cheaper to eat unhealthy food. You can eat healthy pretty cheaply, but you can eat unhealthy even cheaper. This is doubly true if you factor in cooking time as having some cost
I don't follow this logic in discourse. First there is the problem that cheap food has lots of calories but no essential nutrients and it's all the fault of those evil companies. And when you point out food that is cheap and has lots of nutrients, people come saying there are not enough calories.
Hey, if you eat some of those cheap calories, but not too much. And then eat some of that cabbage and beans and whatever that has nutrients but not too much calories. I would call it "balanced diet". It's not rocket science, though it does take some brain function.
Cabbage of course isn't the only healthy and cheap vegetable or other foodstuff there is.
The problem with junk food is not just that it is lacking in essential nutrients. If that were the only problem, then Snickers bars and multivitamin supplements would be a healthy diet.
Junk food is unhealthy for a myriad of reasons, including the heavy use of sugars. Humans were not evolved to subsist on sugar and oil (and various corn-derived products), but that is a huge chunk of junk foods.
It is possible to eat fairly cheaply and still healthily, but it is not as cheap as eating unhealthily. It's also far more time consuming because cheaper healthy foods are uncooked and unprocessed, whereas cheaper unhealthy food are generally ready to eat.
When some food has lots of sugar, you can eat less sugar (avoid excess calories) AND save money simply by eating less. Some of that saved money could be used for getting even better nutrients.
Unhealthy food being cheap is no real explanation for obesity.
Yes, and how many of those people do you think have access to food at such rates save for Walmart? Ever been to an urban bodega or corner store? Do you think they're not marking food up above those rates?
I agree that "food deserts" in low income urban areas are a real problem, and it isn't really feasible to lug more than ~4 bags of groceries on a city bus (which really limits how you shop).
If anything, this demonstrates a burning social need: affordable delivery of healthy food to low income families in impoverished urban areas. Logistically I don't even think it would be that hard, since you would only need to provide healthy, cheap staples. One person with a cargo van could make a huge difference!
Search for "evolution" in this article and you will find nothing about the headline topic. Just a couple token mentions of how things are different now than during most of our evolution--a fancy way of saying "before."
Rather than derailing our evolution, the "Western Diet" is part of our evolution. Our children's hair does not fall out due to malnutrition, and that's pretty cool (if you want to see a place where it does, go to Papua, where they do a mostly simple vegetarian diet like the Burkina Faso folks praised in this article).
As for the "Western" part of the headline...a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia, which happen to be two of the largest countries in the world, and very much in the East. So don't feel too bad about which hemisphere you were born in.
Modern processed food managed to increase our daily calories intake while decreasing the essential nutrients that we need. Malnutrition is becoming a problem again and worse, for the first time in history you can see overweight kids that are malnourished. And I disagree that the "western diet" has anything to do with our wins against malnutrition.
> a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia
On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions? The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based. Yes, they eat a lot of rice, but that rice is much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached, white flour that we call bread nowadays.
And don't mistake the food that you can eat in your local Chinese restaurant to what the Chinese are actually eating. For example much of the food promoted in western Chinese restaurants (at least the ones where I've been) is unbelievably greasy and sweet. But guess what, the food being eaten in China is not sweet, sugar and soy sauce being used only sparingly in only some meat-based dishes, but that's not the norm.
Also singling out one nutrient or another is reductionist science and represents everything that's wrong with western nutrition and health-care. Remember cholesterol? That was a fucking fiasco for which the medical community never apologized for. We need more Omega-3? Sure, put some in the supermarket sliced bread. Does our food have so much high-fructose corn syrup or other corn derived substances in it, that we can effectively be called the corn people? Oh, point to the Chinese for also eating sweat stuff. Do the French eat saturated fats and wash it with wine? Call it a paradox.
> On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions?
> And don't mistake the food that you can eat in your local Chinese restaurant to what the Chinese are actually eating.
I live in Asia. My local Chinese restaurants are Chinese, and if I want Indonesian food I can eat it in Indonesia. I should have given a shout out to Thailand as well, where sugar is put in lots of things you wouldn't expect, like fresh fruit juice.
I suppose you can call Indonesian meals "plant based" when they largely consist of a heap of white rice, but I defy you to find the plants in the ever popular "bakso" and Indomie.
I'm actually Chinese and can attest against this. A huge chunk of China relies on wheat as is main grain in the form of noodles, dumplings and steamed buns. White flour is typical for this. Where my family is from, we can't afford much more to flavor our dishes than salt, sugar, vinegar, soy, garlic and maybe something spicy.
I literally don't know what you're talking about, as a Chinese person. Health in China has been getting bad. The reason obesity and other statistics were low compared to other places is because China is very big and there are many places where people are only a generation from starving subsistence farmers.
Considering how popular street vendors are and crappy restaurants, who have been caught using gutter oil, well, China may not be the miraculous country of healthy eaters you think it is.
"The country is now No. 2 for obesity, with its number of obese residents outstripped only by the U.S. Its obesity rate has skyrocketed over the last three decades, resulting in 46 million obese Chinese adults and 300 million who are overweight"
They have more overweight people than the US has people!
>Modern processed food managed to increase our daily calories intake while decreasing the essential nutrients that we need.
This sounds like bullshit that falls into the nostalgia of the past fallacy.
"Chinese kids are almost as fat as American kids:"
Likely because for centuries Chinese believed that "a fat child is a healthy child". Some children are almost force-fed from infancy to early teens. Often only then does the _child_ realize there is a problem. Encouragement to eat is ubiquitous in the Chinese culture. A "hearty appetite" is always considered a good thing, regardless of age or obesity.
It may require two generations to nullify this Chinese traditional belief.
>> The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based.
Speaking of a group of about 1.6 billion people as if they were a monolith is not particularly productive.
Just looking at China itself, there is huge variation in the "average" diets between different provinces (e.g., Shanghainese dishes tend to be sweeter, Sichuanese dryer and spicier, etc.). And even at that provincial level it's kind of silly to lump everyone into a single average.
I find it funny when people see China as a single country imagine if someone referred to Europe with all its cultures as a single culture who all ate the same thing. Now picture China with probably 5,000 years of culture must be immensely more diverse.
Exactly. I am kind of annoyed when people assume I speak Cantonese simply because I am Chinese. Cantonese speakers only constitute 5% of total Chinese population. Nobody assume if you are European, then you speak Italian.
I think it's the specific phrasing that becomes problematic. The GP said "can equally be found in China and Indonesia", which means that there are individuals with said diets in the those countries. This is categorically either true or false.
The parent discussed the diet of these huge countries as if they were consistent across all (or even most) individuals. In my opinion, this becomes highly subjective very fast.
Granted, this argument is pretty pedantic, and the threshold which determines when a group is too large to discuss as a single unit is squishy and highly contextual.
A lot of people in China, maybe not Japan, but China eat from street vendors, it's cheap and tasty, and yrs very sweet and greasy, alternatively salty and greasy. You can buy more expensive food at restaurants etc where things can be better, but few people, in my experience actually cooked at home. Just too busy. YMMV.
> On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions? The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based. Yes, they eat a lot of rice, but that rice is much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached, white flower that we call bread nowadays.
Likewise, I'd ask you what data you used to arrive at your conclusion that rice is healthier for you than bread? A quick googling of white rice vs white bread told me the exact opposite, or at best, that they were relatively equal. Other colors compared similarly, assuming I kept them similar. The terms "rice" and "bread" are way too generic to compare, really.
> Likewise, I'd ask you what data you used to arrive at your conclusion that rice is healthier for you than bread?
There was no conclusion to question. You created a false equivalence because there's an assumption that one MUST be better than the other. That presumption is what the original post questioned. There was no "conclusion"/assertion that flour > rice.
> There was no "conclusion"/assertion that flour > rice.
In your original post, you say "... but that rice is much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached, white flower that we call bread nowadays."
So, perhaps not a conclusion, but an assertion then. Semantics aside, I believe a statement like that should be backed up by data, and I've been unable to find any data that backs up your claim. So again, I ask to know what you're basing that assertion on.
And I disagree that the "western diet" has anything to do with our wins against malnutrition.
Western technological advancements have pretty much everything to do with our wins against malnutrition.
Without question, there are still far too many hungry people in the world. Chronic persistent hunger is an enormous problem that will be difficult to overcome but these people aren't hungry because there isn't enough food. There's food aplenty, we haven't been able to come up with a system for providing it to everyone in adequate amounts.
Evolution is not on rails, so you're right that there's no derailing it. But I think the implications here are pretty clear: we co-evolved in a symbiotic relationship with our gut microbes, the same way that bees and flowers co-evolved, and (per the article) we should worry about antibiotics much like we worry about bee-killing pesticides. I'm sure the bees will evolve pesticide resistance given a few millennia, but we operate on a much shorter timescale, and we would suffer ill consequences from losing them entirely.
The problem with this claim that the western diet is part of our evolution is that we use every trick in the book to combat the negative side effects. I, for instance, have Crohn's Disease, which basically didn't exist 100 years ago. If our Western Diet were influencing our evolution, yeah maybe the population would be healthy because it would be dynamically adapting, but it'd be because people like me would be dead or dying off. But we aren't because of modern medicine. So we're not really evolving that much thanks to our diet. We're handling the negative consequences and getting stuck in a quagmire. Autoimmune diseases are increasing at a crazy rate even now in the East.
Its an urban legend that modern humans are not evolving because, medicine. The bone record for the last 50,000 years shows more evolution than the previous 1M. Probably because civilization has selected for a smaller, lower-calorie, less-aggressive social individual who can thrive in a crowded village or town.
There are side effects in any rapidly-evolving creature. Sports and mutations survive because they are helpful. But they can be hurtful in other, non-fatal ways. I think modern illnesses (need glasses? have a food allergy?) are unfortunate side effects of a rapidly-changing genome.
Well there's a difference between evolution and natural selection. What I was implying was that our diet may not influence our evolution through natural selection because modern medicine may prevent us ridding ourselves of the bad mutations or may keep good mutations that will adapt to western diet from rising to the top. So it makes sense that we are more diverse because the best genes are less competitive. But genetic mutations occur no matter what we eat, so, yes, we'll continue to evolve.
If the genetics of the species are changing over time due to environmental factors (diet, medicine, etc) then is that literally evolution though? Evolution doesn't need to be "positive" nor does it have any goal in mind. It's just how we describe changes over time due to what is or isn't being selected for.
edit: sorry to nitpick but it's just one of those things that always gets me
> a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia,
There is absolutely no way there is a diet higher in sugar for the average person in Indonesia and it is extremely unlikely that their diet is lower in fiber. Many people have access to cheap fresh vegetables through wet markets they can walk to and because of the price it is a significant part of their diet.
Hot muslim countries like Malaysia have problems with sugar due to drinking lots of soda but they aren't ahead of the US in sugar consumption per capita.
I often get frustrated with people who hate the food pyramid. A modern diet now lets people be the biggest, fastest and strongest they have ever been. The only difference is now we have the flexibility to be informed and eat the healthy or destroy ourselves with bad food where previously malnutrition made that call for us.
Modern diet is good in some respects, but bad in others.
Some populations have famously experienced strong detrimental effects on their health when switching away from more traditional diets. North Karelian heart attacks post-WWII are a notorious example.
Within my field of research, we know there's an enormous budding crisis in Southern US. A very significant fraction of all Alabama population is pre-diabetic. This is a massive public health problem. Corn syrup-driven diets are terrible.
Out of curiosity, has the population realized this to any level? Are there any actions being taken to address this? It seems like an incredibly horrible problem!
Alabama state is devoting tons of money to Type 2 Diabetes research. However, the problem is already there. And with all those pre-diabetics, I'm not sure how the healthcare system will be able to function in few years time.
I think it's in part a sociocultural issue. If your rent is low, you tend to avoid buying good food which is usually way more expensive and less satiating than cheap and simple carbohydrates.
Abusing soft drinks is also really problematic. These completely wreck your metabolism with their high concentrations of soluble syrups.
Yes, the CDC has even published material identifying the "Diabetes Belt" which covers hundreds of counties that have almost twice the rate of Type 2 Diabetes than the national average. [1]
Despite the fact that there are many different "food pyramids" the USDA food pyramid was basically pay to play propaganda, created by various food industries. Also note how I say was because the USDA food pyramid existed less than 20 years and was retired in 2011 because the science became undeniable. Of course the new "food plate" really isn't much better and is still USDA propaganda paid for by the food industries.
He's speaking about people in general, not about athletes which eat diets that are highly specific to the task at hand. (runners eat very, very differently from power lifters)
Yet one of the often heard arguments in favour of the pyramid I remember is that it has lots of starches because it was good for people who practiced sports (in general).
I am skeptical that the food pyramid has anything to do with what you call the "modern diet". What seems to be happening is that food is cheaper and more diverse than ever before. This appears to be a byproduct of technological progress and trade, not some government chart.
Fortunately, almost everybody ignores the food pyramid. They just interpret it as "oh, I should try to eat from all the food groups". Fine.
The problem with the food pyramid is that it is based on obsolete science at best, and was probably designed by food industry lobbies.
Human evolution is no longer in the hands of nature in the sense that people most commonly think of it. It will never be again.
We've taken over direct control of our evolution. That's not an exaggeration, it's a fact of our present circumstances. These are the early days, yes, but non-the-less. The time scale of meaningful human evolution is about to shift from tens of thousands of years, to decades.
In that time we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly. The technology will accelerate at an incredible pace from here, becoming very common; leading edge CRISPR knowledge and capabilities today will be laughable in 30 years.
Our evolution has done anything but been derailed, it's about to leap forward.
Who here really thinks humans ~500 years from now, will have much in common with humans of today? I don't think what exists at that point will be reasonably considered human at all, as we know the term. Nothing can really stop that outcome except an extinction event. The only question is what we become, not whether we change; and taking over control of our evolution is part of that.
Newborns of wild animals raised in captivity cannot be released back to the wild, because they lack the survival skills they could otherwise have learnt from their parents. It is true with many species - a species' accumulated and inherited knowledge, passed down generation to generation, about how to survive and thrive in the environment, is part of that species' evolution history. This apply to humans as well as to almost all other animals. It is misguided to think human evolution is "not in the hands of nature", because the accumulated inherited knowledge we have about the world, the capital we build that is passed down to our children, and technology we implement, are part and parcel of nature itself. Are our bodies nature? Are our gut bacteria nature? Do our neurons work apart from nature? Is the tendency to want to be "better than the joneses" to attract a better mate ourselves, or help our children to do so, part of nature, or an artificial phenomenon? What about our desires to live in shelter of our construction, impulse to educate our children, to pass them what we have and improve their ability to thrive? I think all of these behaviours are nature in and of itself, and because all things we do spring from nature, those things are nature too, even down to our computers and any AI we may build in the future - because products of nature is nature itself.
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or universe [1] If humans are separate from the universe, then where does the universe end, and we begin?
However, besides this nitpick, I agree with all your points. In the future, nature will select some genes based on their fitness as predicted by nature, as well as actual fitness at the current moment.
Surely there is also instinct at play here. A cat raised in captivity still can hunt mice and if its released into the wild it could survive and reproduce. And of course there is the famous california condor story where they are now all either raise in captivity or decedents of those.
Survival data were available for 169 kittens. Overall, 127 of the 169 (75%) kittens died (n = 87) or disappeared (40) before 6 months of age. ...Eighty-one of the 169 (48%) kittens died or disappeared before they were 100 days old.
Not quite. Here in Australia we have feral pigs, feral cats, wild rabbits and wild horses (brumbies). All of them started as domesticated animals. And even in this harsh climate they are doing pretty well.
That is true, but the GP's implication is designer babies. Then normal selection is out the window.
For already living, it is hard to predict how hard it will be to go from in vitro to in vivo for gene modification.
At a minimum, with robotisation we will get cheaper beauty surgery and chemicals can affect confidence and work ethics. So e.g. looks and first impressions (for sexual selection) will be quite irrelevant.
No, normal selection is not out the window then. You've only added a second selection mechanism (parents) on top of nature's. And I'm afraid that selection will be based on hype alone.
As to "first impressions" and such, they're based on thousands of years of both social and genetic selection, and I don't think those traits are conveniently located in a single location. Even then, what if the same genome location controls both "first-look judgements" and "jump away from the path of that speeding bike"?
As to editing the genome, I'm afraid I don't share your optimism. I consider our genome to be a 3.2 billion-line BASIC program (the old-skool one, with line numbers and no variable scoping), without unit tests or documentation of course. Sure, you can replace a single line and still have the program compile or run correctly. But how are you going to conclusively prove that your modification has no unintended side-effects, for either current or future generations?
Ok, the title of the article might be misleading, but I suggest you actually read the article, because it talks about the evolution of the microbial community that lives inside you, not your genome at all.
To paraphrase the study by Sonnenburg: It is theorized that a depletion of the microbial biodiversity caused by a low-fiber diet is responsible for many chronic diseases. Mice that were fed a low-fiber diet developed less microbial diversity, but if they were put back on a high fiber diet, their microbial community recovered quickly. However, and most revealingly, if they gave birth to a litter while on a low-fiber diet (and therefore with a weak microbial community) the second generation mice were unable to develop a strong microbial community regardless of diet.
The conclusion is that microbes already present in one's body can adapt according to diet. If a microbial species metabolizes fiber and the host does not consume fiber, the microbe will possibly enter a "dormant" (my invented term) state, but it can be recovered to full strength. Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation, so that generation will not have that microbe species regardless of diet. Over generations, this could lead to extinction of entire microbial species.
THIS is the evolution that the article talks about, NOT genome evolution.
> In that time [decades] we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly.
What's the rush? You're talking about altering the human genome, something COMPLETELY IRREVERSIBLE in a single generation. This article asserts that an enormous part of our bodies was barely beginning to be researched five years ago! The reason this hubris is so common is that a few parts of our bodies are relatively simple and easily understood: the circulatory, respiratory and other systems that exist as meat. On the other hand we barely understand the many systems that live in a complex state of delicate equilibrium: endocrine, immune, and microbial which seems to be apart of both of them.
A lot of microbial diversity comes from putting random shit in your mouth - an activity babies engage in with alarming (to new parents) frequency. Caged mice with impaired microbial diversity don't have the same breadth of opportunity to pick up new microbes via this mechanism that humans do.
One of the primary benefits of raw food is that it is a great way to introduce microbial diversity. On the other hand, a diet comprised only of cooked or sterile processed foods is going to exacerbate microbial diversity issues.
> Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation
It has always been my impression that much of the microbiome is transferred after birth through breast milk, not in utero. I don't have any authority at hand to verify whether this is true, or to what extent, though.
Sexual selection is still a thing, and unlikely to go away for the foreseeable future. Diet affects appearance, appearance affects chances to pass on your genes.
If you're referring to overweight people, people with diabetes or with heart disease don't necessarily look overweight.
I also don't believe that appearance affects chances to pass on your genes. The ability to have sex does. But people with a lower than average appearance score (lets say), have the option of having sex with other people having the same problem. This also bypasses the fact that human beings are very complex animals, capable of falling in love with pretty much anything, including a piece of fiction and that when looking for a partner we also end up looking at other traits.
And please forgive me for my political incorrectness, but as an anecdotal experience, from what I've noticed the people that are breeding a lot (you know, the communities where families of 6 children or more are common place), well those people are downright ugly on average. Which makes sense, given that the people that are breeding a lot are usually the poor and they are ugly and in bad shape mostly due to not having access to health-care. Yet when it comes to having sex, they don't seem to care.
Sexual selection is culturally relative and most people who want to reproduce get to reproduce in most societies, i.e. there is very little sexual selection. Human appearances are very diverse, especially sexual characteristics. It is hard to come up with a characteristic of human appearance that doesn't have a large diversity of phenotypes and from this observation we can reasonably infer that appearance is not strongly selected for.
Basically this. I think that we are in a very awkward time right now, where are we understand how things work mainly in a read-only degree, but are just finally turning on write access.
The next genetic leaps in the next century are going to be stratospheric.
Regarding the headline of this article, if anything, the past century has been great for keeping death at bay and promoting life when it otherwise would not have thrived, but I don't think there will be a major shift in evolution from this because there won't be enough time for it to manifest vs the changes we're about to institute via the above paragraph.
> The next genetic leaps in the next century are going to be stratospheric.
Agreed. I'm afraid your assumption may be completely true. The sad thing is that such a rapid market capture will preclude verification of cross-generational effects of our modifications. And we don't have a good track record for getting things right on the first try.
As a hypothetical example, how many generations do you think it will take to recognize if one particular gene splicing will make interbreeding between spliced vs non-spliced offspring impossible?
If we truly hit an exponential curve, won't standard sexual interbreeding become a thing of the past?
I think the big problem will be actually figuring out which DNA configurations yield a human/whatever that's acceptable by human standards? That is mapping DNAs to expected phenotypes.
Of course, "just splice again". Why not. We can always take one of the original eggs, undo the modification, and put it back in the womb of the now 70-year old mother. And kill the 30-year old defective daughter, while you're at it.
I do hope that is not what you meant with your comment though. I prefer not to think of fellow human beings as living petri dishes, so I don't consider field-patching an acceptable solution when discussing genetic manipulation.
Of course I meant, the next generation need not be split into two types of human. The next generation can change again. The point of genetic modification is, that the next generation doesn't have to exactly resemble the one before. So the straw-man of 'what if they can't interbreed' is moot.
You know what really derailed our evolution? Western medicine. Those pesky doctors have virtually ended the selection pressure against people with myopia, or those who are vulnerable to pneumonia.
If we really wanna get evolution back on course, we need to start letting the weak die. Personally, I think that sounds awful, and I think derailing our evolution is a small price to pay.
That's why the concept of "derailing" evolution is silly. There's no set course for evolution to be derailed from... in fact that's the entire basis of the concept of evolution. Diet and medicine are just evolutionary pressure, just like every other part of the environment since life began.
Evolution doesn't have a "course," it's just what happens when organisms reproduce with modifications. Until we stop reproducing, evolution is working exactly the same now as it always has.
Yes, there is nothing morally good or bad about evolution and natural selection. It just happens to be. People say we stoppped evolution like it's a catastrophy. First, evolution is still happening, we provide a very different context for it. Second, we benefit way more from modern medicine than from slow natural selection. We made our choice, and there is nothing wrong about it.
To add to your point, I think it should be fairly clear by now that human progress outpaces DNA based evolution. Within a thousand years (barring a global catastrophe), we will likely have cured age death and be able to edit DNA at will, making heredity a thing of the past (that is, if humans are still living in meatspace).
- raw food is rarely eaten unless it has a thick / peelable skin - mostly veggies are cooked in oil - starch heavy (flour for dumplings or baked goods, and rice) - spice heavy (chili, Szechuan peppercorn) - sodium heavy (soy, bean pastes, and preserved vegetables) - lots of odd ingredients from a western point of view (mushrooms, fermented beans) - no set "breakfast" foods vs "supper" foods per se; more like "banquet" foods vs . "Everyday"
I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric. Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying goes.
I can next talk about India, Pakistan, Bangkadesh and its varied regional diet...
My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...