Historical Diets Debate

For most their diet probably wasn't better than a modern diet, just different. If you max out at 40 years, it's difficult to tell if your diet is bad in old age.Farmers and middle-to-lower class people only 90 years ago (as per my grandmother) in my region where mainly eating potatoes, grain, and meat, veggies and fruit were usually only eaten for sundays, since it was more expensive on the market.That doesn't sound like the pinnacle of healthy diets.Even farther back, pe

And neither do we absolutely need to eat plants to live a long, healthy life. Case in point? The traditional Eskimo diet that consisted majorly of fats, offal and meat. They lived long healthy lives only shortened due to the extreme coldness of their environment.

It varies by location -- eg. the Inuit weren't eating much plants most of the time

Probably not, since carbs have always been the easiest food to get and they didn't have this problem. Protein, and especially meat, was always rare and a minority of diet. But greens, fruits, nuts (ish, they have fat) are plentiful.

It might be that a 'poorer' diet can be better. Reason being that they use more raw foods rich in fiber rather than processed flour, sugar, oil, etc.See research on the Okinawan diet. People there had the some of the longest lifespans ever recorded and they ate mostly potatoes (albeit a very nutritious variety of purple sweet potato).Today Okinawa is rich, there are 3 KFCs on the island, and their lifespan has declined.

> people have lived in all parts of the world, with vastly varying dietsYes, though all of them ate animal products and highly valued various animal fats.That being said, we can find evidence of people eating all-meat diets in every corner of the globe, and often times if there were more agricultural people nearby, the carnivores were healthier and stronger (such as the Masai vs. the Kikuyu, the Sami vs. southern agricultural Swedes, etc.). Just because people were healthy eating one ty

Inuit did not did well on an all meat died (btw, they also ate seaweed). Their life expectancy was much lower and they had higher instances of cardiac events. They did survive, that is true, and humans can survive on very different diets, but they did not trive.

Definitely a societal difference in diet.

Well if you want to take a retrospective, we also did not consume it every day. We grazed on other things, including veg, fruit and grains, not unlike traditional societies today.The Inuit don't eat the way they used to, but it was a good deal of fish along with game and berries (ditto for Sami). Their CVD profile has never been reported to be particularly good. Maasai consume mostly milk, and are in a perpetual state of caloric deficit.

The diet of primitive humans was more similar to keto than to current developed country diets and it was in place for hundreds of thousands of years. The first big change was from agricultural civilizations in neolithic, less than ten thousands year ago. Current diet is at most a hundred years old. And specifically the diet that is causing so many problems is only fifty years old.