5 ms·

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 du

by jzwinck 11y ago

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.

aplummer 11y ago
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.
- EA 11y ago
  Few, if any, of the biggest, fastest and strongest athletes eat a diet based on the food pyramid.
  - altcognito 11y ago
    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)
    - Shorel 11y ago
      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). It was something said to everyone in high school.
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  A modern diet being better than the past doesn't mean people shouldn't hate on the food pyramid. There's plenty of reasons to.
- will_brown 11y ago
  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.
- nextos 11y ago
  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.
  - pm90 11y ago
    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!
    - debacle 11y ago
      Yes, Healthy at Any Size, Paula Deen, etc. Obesity as a result of poor diet is a point of pride for many people in the US.
      - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
        I thought HAES stood for 'health at every size' meaning you should strive to be healthy no matter how fat you are?
        debacle 11y ago
        No, it means that you can have a BMI of 45 and still be "healthy" in the eyes of people who are definitely not doctors.
    - nextos 11y ago
      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.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  What food pyramid? The one with excess simple carbs and lack of fats that caused the obesity epidemic?
- TelmoMenezes 11y ago
  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.
ced 11y ago
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.
bad_user 11y ago
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.
- mc32 11y ago
  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.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  > 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.
_yosefk 11y ago
It said that the changes in mice due to changes in nutrition were reversible but changes in the offspring of mice with altered diets seemed permanent. That's "derailed evolution", isn't it?
alwaysAttending 11y ago
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.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  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.
  - alwaysAttending 11y ago
    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.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  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
CyberDildonics 11y ago
> 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.

by jzwinck 11y ago

aplummer 11y ago

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.

EA 11y ago
Few, if any, of the biggest, fastest and strongest athletes eat a diet based on the food pyramid.
- altcognito 11y ago
  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)
  - Shorel 11y ago
    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). It was something said to everyone in high school.
atom-morgan 11y ago
A modern diet being better than the past doesn't mean people shouldn't hate on the food pyramid. There's plenty of reasons to.
will_brown 11y ago
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.
nextos 11y ago
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.
- pm90 11y ago
  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!
  - debacle 11y ago
    Yes, Healthy at Any Size, Paula Deen, etc. Obesity as a result of poor diet is a point of pride for many people in the US.
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      I thought HAES stood for 'health at every size' meaning you should strive to be healthy no matter how fat you are?
      - debacle 11y ago
        No, it means that you can have a BMI of 45 and still be "healthy" in the eyes of people who are definitely not doctors.
  - nextos 11y ago
    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.
raverbashing 11y ago
What food pyramid? The one with excess simple carbs and lack of fats that caused the obesity epidemic?
TelmoMenezes 11y ago
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.

ced 11y ago

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.

bad_user 11y ago

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.

mc32 11y ago
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.
jzwinck 11y ago
> 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.

_yosefk 11y ago

It said that the changes in mice due to changes in nutrition were reversible but changes in the offspring of mice with altered diets seemed permanent. That's "derailed evolution", isn't it?

alwaysAttending 11y ago

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.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
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.
- alwaysAttending 11y ago
  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.
soylentcola 11y ago
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

CyberDildonics 11y ago

> 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.