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> provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities But isn’t that the tricky part: how do you figure out what is “right”? If you eat synthesized s
by mahogany 3y ago
> provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities
But isn’t that the tricky part: how do you figure out what is “right”? If you eat synthesized sugar and vitamin C in place of an orange, is it really the same thing? Perhaps the fiber or some other minerals in the orange affect how your body processes and digests the nutrients.
Nutrition is pretty complex and until we know what “right” is, I’d think it’s generally a safer bet to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years, rather than recently devised nutritive cocktails.
- MoSattler 3y ago> to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years Most modern foods (including unprocessed meat and plants) have only been around for a few hundred years or so.
- ecnahc515 3y agoThat's their point, that we should probably not be eating "modern foods".
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoI think he is concerned about revolutionary change, i.e. processed food and artificial suppliments. Bread that is not actually bread. Not evolutionary change - a. different variery of wheat in your bread.
- mahogany 3y agoI'd take a few hundred over a few. My concern, as another commenter suggested, is mostly around radical changes without any longevity in testing or understanding. Even though a lot of our "natural" foods were created via artificial selection, it's a process that happened over many generations. When it comes to food and nutrition, my gut tells me to generally prefer slow over fast. Personally I also think there is a big difference between selective breeding, and distilling foods into constituent parts in order to recombine in various ways. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but I don't fully trust humans to understand and play that part of nature just yet.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoActually there is reason to not prefer foods that we have evolved with because we may have evolved short term trade offs for reproduction that happen to be bad for us long term. Classic example being how evolving with meat doesn’t make saturated fat good for us in the long term. And, further, replacing it with modern unsaturated fats (like canola oil) improves health outcomes. Your heuristic of "we've eaten it for a long time so it must be better" doesn't capture that. Frankly, it seems inevitable that the optimal diet (one that maximizes health through all stages of life) will be a modern artificial one since it seems at its root just a technological problem. But we certainly aren't there yet where we can replace an orange with a synthetic orange pill. That is an interesting world to ponder though.