Re: evolution and diet (was: FITNESS: Diet and Exercise)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2003 - 04:21:57 MDT

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    Ramez Naam wrote:
    > From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
    >
    >>Ramez Naam wrote:
    >>
    >>>Optimized for what? For rapid growth? For least energy used in
    >>>breaking down the food? For greatest free glucose to feed
    >>>the brain? For largest energy supply to hunt and fend
    >>>off predators? For longest life in our ancestral environment?
    >>>For longest life today?
    >>
    >>You're overshooting the ability of modern dietary science to
    >>handle that class of problem. Start with simple things, like:
    >>"On a hunter-gatherer diet it is very nearly impossible to get
    >>*more* sodium than potassium, with a typical hunter-gatherer
    >>intaking perhaps ten times as much potassium sodium. Today,
    >>salt is added to nearly all processed foods. What does the
    >>violation of this assumed metabolic invariant do?" And so on.
    >
    > On a hunter-gatherer diet it is very nearly impossible to get the
    > levels of micronutrients that I consume in my once a day vitamin.
    > Does that mean they're bad?
    >
    > On a hunter-gatherer diet it's very nearly impossible to consume
    > antibiotics. Should I stop using them if I have an infection?
    >
    > If my examples are off the mark, then how do you differentiate good
    > examples vs. bad ones?

    Convergent evidence from evolutionary biology *and* metabolism studies
    *and* outcome studies. The key point here is that it's usually the
    evolutionary biology that provides the hypotheses to be tested. For
    example, ordinary studies will examine the effect of more or less sodium,
    or more and less potassium, and so on, but it's the paleo diet theory that
    would tell you to look at the sodium-potassium *balance* because that's
    the factor - not the absolute level of anything - that's widely out of
    range compared to Paleo days. It's because of all the simultaneous
    interacting factors that you need evolutionary arguments to tell you which
    hypotheses to test. The dietary scientists will examine, i.e., the effect
    of sodium, and start spinning off diets based on the idea that everyone is
    eating too much sodium, etc. What you want to do is probably something
    like this; study of human metabolism shows that sodium consumed interacts
    with potassium consumed, the evolutionary diet theorist does a study of
    twenty hunter-gatherer cultures and figures out what the ordinary balance
    of sodium and potassium would look like and says "Hey, this modern diet is
    way the heck out of range", and *then* you do the outcome study on *the
    balance of* sodium and potassium in a modern diet *compared to an
    ancestrally realistic balance*, rather than performing a study on sodium
    alone, or potassium alone, or a study on modern amounts of sodium compared
    to almost no sodium, and so on.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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