From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 16:01:02 MDT
On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 02:11:24AM -0400, gts wrote:
> > No. But this isn't 12,000 BC. This is after 12,000 years of eating
> > the grain and dairy foods, and...
>
> As I wrote to Eliezer, this answer shifts the question from the dairy and
> grain farmers over to you. (I would like to say that it shifts the
> "burden-of-proof" over to you but this term seems to get some people's
> shorts in wad).
By your logic it puts the burden of proof on you who advocate changing the
diet from what we've multiplied on in the last 12,000 years. Sure, pure
grains aren't healthy, but the healthiest societies today are the ones eating
a mix of grains, plants, and lean or fishy meats. It works, and we should
either be adapted to it or else it should have little effect. You want to cut
out those grains, you have to argue.
And I think this whole "4 million years" thing is questionable. Were hominids
eating the same thing for all that time? I doubt it. And what about the 20
million years of primates eating fruits? Although chimps eat some meat.
> If you believe we've evolved so much in the last 12,000 years then you need
> to explain, for example, how it is that humanity could be fully adapted to
> dairy given that a very large percentage of humans, perhaps even the
> majority, find it so difficult to digest milk sugar in adulthood. You need
Well, see, there are different populations of humans who've been eating
different things. Obviously people without the dairy background shouldn't be
drinking or eating it. And people who have been actually eating a paleo diet
instead of domesticated grains, like the aborigines, have more reasons for
concern. But Europeans *do* have the lactose tolerance and we have been
eating grains and beans for a long time. Of course there are ways of dealing
with the lactose, like yogurt.
(Although... agriculture took a while to spread across Europe. Possibly
people from the Middle East are better adapted to it than the Irish, say.)
Look, no one's saying the paleodiet is evil. But when the longest lived
people on the planet have a diet which includes *white* rice, it's hard to
take claims of the evils of grains too seriously. There's limited evidence
from evolution/archaeology, and limited evidence from nutrition, and then
there's the evidence of our eyes seeing living people right now.
-xx- Damien X-)
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