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It's been interesting to watch the health and fitness space around brain health and correlations with diet and exercise. People seem to finally be converging ar

It's been interesting to watch the health and fitness space around brain health and correlations with diet and exercise. People seem to finally be converging around some common truths that have been known for thousands of years. I All roads seem to be pointing towards finding a balance between what we are evolved for as a species and modern life.

ben_w 3y ago
We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry", we merely endured starvation, prions, and scurvy… or died because we couldn't endure it. Sometimes we just got lucky with good fishing or fertile farmland, but we were never in control. I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry" I'm not so sure. Some ancient societies had a pretty advanced idea of what makes a good diet. And people in any time period can tell that "if I eat this way, I feel better and if I eat that way, I feel worse".
- xeromal 3y ago
  Yup, national height increasing rapidly after the advent of easy food is a clear indication humans have been malnourished for a long time
  - throw74774 3y ago
    Not necessarily. There are health disadvantages that come from being taller, and also from having higher caloric intake. It could be that we’re adapted to less food, and when we have more we get both taller and less healthy on average.
- wyldberry 3y ago
  Yet we clearly prioritized certain foods and the human body adapted around those foods. Over time tribes converged on what plants were safe to eat (and which had defense chemicals that didn't make them suitable to eat), and prioritized certain animals for hunting. One thing I find interesting with that is how tightly coupled mongol armies were to an animal based diet, and how they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. You'll often find many people not willing to wade into discussing food and exercise anymore because peiple treat it almost religiously. It makes discussion hard in the space because now food is so tightly coupled with society and culture. We know the ancient greeks and romans exercised. Warriors of successful societies prioritized being fit of body. To have a discussion we'd have to get to common definitions of what exercise is.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. I think a really solid case can be made that agriculture was the biggest mistake humans have made.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      Yeah, starving sounds awesome, hate that so many people will miss out on it.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Pre-agricultural peoples didn't generally do much starving, and it's not like people now don't starve.
        klyrs 3y ago
        Most of their babies died, too.
      - yamtaddle 3y ago
        One of the more notable features of the economy of agricultural Europe before the introduction of New World crops was regular mass starvation.
- tayo42 3y ago
  how many thousands? eating kosher goes back thousands of years already. you would have to go back a long time like pre agriculture. that is about 10k years. that is a lot of generations of people to adapt.
- bashmelek 3y ago
  From my own readings, fowl meat was known to be healthy to the Greeks, and Cabbage was a stereotypical prescription to sick Romans.
- akprasad 3y ago
  As an aside, ancient cultural knowledge for finding and preparing food is surprisingly sophisticated and non-obvious [1], even if it does not lend itself to an explicit rational model: > A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    That was an interesting read! Thanks!
- shane_b 3y ago
  the history of exercise is just living. not that long ago, just living required constant movement. in my own childhood i had to do a ton of labor that was just living, not a job.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > history of exercise is just living The Greeks and Romans intentionally exercised outside daily toils.
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      The rich slave owning Greeks and Romans while not marching to another battle? Do we know anything about the exercise habits of the poor (other than the dude in the bathtub) or the slaves?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > rich slave owning Greeks and Romans while not marching to another battle? Yes. > Do we know anything about the exercise habits of the poor (other than the dude in the bathtub) or the slaves? This is a notorious blind spot in our knowledge of our antiquity. It’s partly why the ruins at Pompeii were so interesting.
- uoaei 3y ago
  People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff. Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo. Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him. Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?
  - pertymcpert 3y ago
    The problem with TCM is that they don't accept what they don't know, they'll just make something up about "heat" or something. So while there are for sure real treatments that work, it's also lumped in with a bunch of other BS so you can't ever be sure it will work. That's the main difference between western and TCM. Western medicine we quite often know something works (because of double blind studies) but we don't always have an explanation. TCM is fundamentally untrustyworthy in the 21st century. And you can get placebos anywhere.
- throw74774 3y ago
  If this were true, people would have died of scurvy at random as opposed to only when forced into a restricted diet at sea.
Aaronstotle 3y ago
I'm hopeful that with a lot of these realizations, we change our habitats to be more in tune with our nature. Something like walking meetings or setting time aside to move. Humans are incredibly intelligent, however intelligence doesn't mean we should forget our ancestral roots. We are meant to move; sitting in offices and eating junk food while getting information blasted into our brains from glowing rectangles is a recipe for disaster. I'm optimistic that we will transition to a more human-centric way of living/working.
- wyldberry 3y ago
  Sounds better than the 40k future.
  - decafninja 3y ago
    Never fear, you can always be lobotomized into a servitor.

ben_w 3y ago

We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry", we merely endured starvation, prions, and scurvy… or died because we couldn't endure it. Sometimes we just got lucky with good fishing or fertile farmland, but we were never in control. I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.

JohnFen 3y ago
> We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry" I'm not so sure. Some ancient societies had a pretty advanced idea of what makes a good diet. And people in any time period can tell that "if I eat this way, I feel better and if I eat that way, I feel worse".
xeromal 3y ago
Yup, national height increasing rapidly after the advent of easy food is a clear indication humans have been malnourished for a long time
- throw74774 3y ago
  Not necessarily. There are health disadvantages that come from being taller, and also from having higher caloric intake. It could be that we’re adapted to less food, and when we have more we get both taller and less healthy on average.
wyldberry 3y ago
Yet we clearly prioritized certain foods and the human body adapted around those foods. Over time tribes converged on what plants were safe to eat (and which had defense chemicals that didn't make them suitable to eat), and prioritized certain animals for hunting. One thing I find interesting with that is how tightly coupled mongol armies were to an animal based diet, and how they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. You'll often find many people not willing to wade into discussing food and exercise anymore because peiple treat it almost religiously. It makes discussion hard in the space because now food is so tightly coupled with society and culture. We know the ancient greeks and romans exercised. Warriors of successful societies prioritized being fit of body. To have a discussion we'd have to get to common definitions of what exercise is.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. I think a really solid case can be made that agriculture was the biggest mistake humans have made.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    Yeah, starving sounds awesome, hate that so many people will miss out on it.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Pre-agricultural peoples didn't generally do much starving, and it's not like people now don't starve.
      - klyrs 3y ago
        Most of their babies died, too.
    - yamtaddle 3y ago
      One of the more notable features of the economy of agricultural Europe before the introduction of New World crops was regular mass starvation.
tayo42 3y ago
how many thousands? eating kosher goes back thousands of years already. you would have to go back a long time like pre agriculture. that is about 10k years. that is a lot of generations of people to adapt.
bashmelek 3y ago
From my own readings, fowl meat was known to be healthy to the Greeks, and Cabbage was a stereotypical prescription to sick Romans.
akprasad 3y ago
As an aside, ancient cultural knowledge for finding and preparing food is surprisingly sophisticated and non-obvious [1], even if it does not lend itself to an explicit rational model: > A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  That was an interesting read! Thanks!
shane_b 3y ago
the history of exercise is just living. not that long ago, just living required constant movement. in my own childhood i had to do a ton of labor that was just living, not a job.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > history of exercise is just living The Greeks and Romans intentionally exercised outside daily toils.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    The rich slave owning Greeks and Romans while not marching to another battle? Do we know anything about the exercise habits of the poor (other than the dude in the bathtub) or the slaves?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > rich slave owning Greeks and Romans while not marching to another battle? Yes. > Do we know anything about the exercise habits of the poor (other than the dude in the bathtub) or the slaves? This is a notorious blind spot in our knowledge of our antiquity. It’s partly why the ruins at Pompeii were so interesting.
uoaei 3y ago
People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff. Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo. Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him. Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?
- pertymcpert 3y ago
  The problem with TCM is that they don't accept what they don't know, they'll just make something up about "heat" or something. So while there are for sure real treatments that work, it's also lumped in with a bunch of other BS so you can't ever be sure it will work. That's the main difference between western and TCM. Western medicine we quite often know something works (because of double blind studies) but we don't always have an explanation. TCM is fundamentally untrustyworthy in the 21st century. And you can get placebos anywhere.
throw74774 3y ago
If this were true, people would have died of scurvy at random as opposed to only when forced into a restricted diet at sea.

Aaronstotle 3y ago

I'm hopeful that with a lot of these realizations, we change our habitats to be more in tune with our nature. Something like walking meetings or setting time aside to move. Humans are incredibly intelligent, however intelligence doesn't mean we should forget our ancestral roots. We are meant to move; sitting in offices and eating junk food while getting information blasted into our brains from glowing rectangles is a recipe for disaster. I'm optimistic that we will transition to a more human-centric way of living/working.

wyldberry 3y ago
Sounds better than the 40k future.
- decafninja 3y ago
  Never fear, you can always be lobotomized into a servitor.