I'm kind of pro and con on that. It does make for a good evolutionary biology type narrative and explanation. Why would you want your metabolism to slow?! Winter.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the metaphor or whatever of torpor holds as much as Brad believes, e.g. he seems super convinced there's magic in starch/carbs which I just don't believe beyond "they contain energy."
I'm kind of pro and con on that. It does make for a good evolutionary biology type narrative and explanation. Why would you want your metabolism to slow?! Winter.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the metaphor or whatever of torpor holds as much as Brad believes, e.g. he seems super convinced there's magic in starch/carbs which I just don't believe beyond "they contain energy."
I felt the exact same way six months ago, but one could speculate that because I don't have non-24 my bias was less invincible. I've known for a long time that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were eating at least 150g of fiber a day (judging from semi-fossilized feces) and our proto-human ancestors were so reliant on starch we evolved a bunch of extra copies of that one allele to digest it.
I'd rather think of myself as a butter-eating horse lord than a spearer of mammoths, and rather the latter than a runner-down of zebras. Even less glorious is a finder of tubers -- but alas our blood does not lie. In the same way that an ancient philosopher would prefer to think of us as standing upright so that we might raise our eyes to heaven (instead of to better carry water gourds while foraging far abroad for grubs and roots), I'd never eat anything but meat and dairy again if I could. But from the ground the tubers, they call.
150g of fiber a day? That seems crazy high. I think the RDA is like 10-20g, which seems high to me. Do you mean 150g of starch?
The "upright" metaphor is a good one. I think that's one reason the LDL people are such cultists. They just "know" that at the end of the day, we should all be vegans. Hence every result that aligns with that seems reasonable and logical, and everything against it must be bad science/fraud/a mistake.
Heh no I meant 150 g fiber, but provocatively choosing the upper bound for the middle of stage four pleistocene. I saw Tucker the other day talking about carbs and tooth decay, and of course he was right -- the agricultural revolution was the greatest disaster in the history of human health, even worse than this recent seed oils catastrophe, as measured by dental/skeletal changes. But anyway even though anthropologists all know that agriculture created dental problems (and osteopathic diseases), we're still mostly guessing at how much sugar and starch any one population was eating.* With fiber we really don't have to guess --- coprolites preserve fiber just fine. If someone were to really try to run away with the goal posts he could claim that fiber makes coprolites more likely to survive, or that the kinds of microclimates that tend towards the preservation of feces long enough to turn into coprolites are necessarily marginal and exceptional. But what we know is that lots of anatomically modern humans 20k+ years ago were were producing feces of a composition that would indicate 30, 50, 100, and 100+ grams of fiber daily (depending on which samples we're talking about -- most of those are new-world sites IIRC).
All this is anti-vegan, though: they were eating so much fiber because the plant matter they had to eat was so low quality in comparison with what we have after one hundred centuries of selective cultivation. They couldn't possibly have been subsisting purely on such plants. Besides, refuse mounds at those same sites (as well as the coprolites themselves) show that they were eating fish, shellfish, birds, bugs, and reptiles in addition to bigger prey.
*Tucker was blaming all the tooth problems on sugar and starch, but it's worth pointing out that early shifts towards agriculture resulted in diets lacking in various nutrients which can also hurt dental health.
150g fiber seems bizarrely high, not sure how anyone could eat that much. The RDA is 38g for men, and 25g for women. Which I think is way too high.
I actually think fiber is probably bad for your teeth. I notice mine get significantly whiter (maybe 2 shades?) a week or two after I stop eating any fiber (e.g. my short carnivore stints).
I'm completely nonplussed by why you'd mention the RDA. And yes, it's bizarrely high -- the past is like a foreign country, they do things differently there.
Just cause to me, the RDA is unreasonably biased towards higher fiber. I eat less than 1/10th of their recommended amount and my digestion is so much better than when I ate more.
Yeah they're suggesting you eat unnecessary fiber because they think you'd be healthier if you did, rather than you chewing on fibrous tubers all day in between hunting for better sources of food. I imagine that every single prehistoric human who produced a coprolite filled with indigestible fiber would have chosen whipped cream if it had been available (and would have been healthier for it).
I only even mentioned tuber-chewers in the first place as a nod to the long and varied history of the human metabolism. We might do best on high-octane fuel like you're buying, but we're nothing if not flexible.
I'm kind of pro and con on that. It does make for a good evolutionary biology type narrative and explanation. Why would you want your metabolism to slow?! Winter.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the metaphor or whatever of torpor holds as much as Brad believes, e.g. he seems super convinced there's magic in starch/carbs which I just don't believe beyond "they contain energy."
I felt the exact same way six months ago, but one could speculate that because I don't have non-24 my bias was less invincible. I've known for a long time that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were eating at least 150g of fiber a day (judging from semi-fossilized feces) and our proto-human ancestors were so reliant on starch we evolved a bunch of extra copies of that one allele to digest it.
I'd rather think of myself as a butter-eating horse lord than a spearer of mammoths, and rather the latter than a runner-down of zebras. Even less glorious is a finder of tubers -- but alas our blood does not lie. In the same way that an ancient philosopher would prefer to think of us as standing upright so that we might raise our eyes to heaven (instead of to better carry water gourds while foraging far abroad for grubs and roots), I'd never eat anything but meat and dairy again if I could. But from the ground the tubers, they call.
150g of fiber a day? That seems crazy high. I think the RDA is like 10-20g, which seems high to me. Do you mean 150g of starch?
The "upright" metaphor is a good one. I think that's one reason the LDL people are such cultists. They just "know" that at the end of the day, we should all be vegans. Hence every result that aligns with that seems reasonable and logical, and everything against it must be bad science/fraud/a mistake.
Heh no I meant 150 g fiber, but provocatively choosing the upper bound for the middle of stage four pleistocene. I saw Tucker the other day talking about carbs and tooth decay, and of course he was right -- the agricultural revolution was the greatest disaster in the history of human health, even worse than this recent seed oils catastrophe, as measured by dental/skeletal changes. But anyway even though anthropologists all know that agriculture created dental problems (and osteopathic diseases), we're still mostly guessing at how much sugar and starch any one population was eating.* With fiber we really don't have to guess --- coprolites preserve fiber just fine. If someone were to really try to run away with the goal posts he could claim that fiber makes coprolites more likely to survive, or that the kinds of microclimates that tend towards the preservation of feces long enough to turn into coprolites are necessarily marginal and exceptional. But what we know is that lots of anatomically modern humans 20k+ years ago were were producing feces of a composition that would indicate 30, 50, 100, and 100+ grams of fiber daily (depending on which samples we're talking about -- most of those are new-world sites IIRC).
All this is anti-vegan, though: they were eating so much fiber because the plant matter they had to eat was so low quality in comparison with what we have after one hundred centuries of selective cultivation. They couldn't possibly have been subsisting purely on such plants. Besides, refuse mounds at those same sites (as well as the coprolites themselves) show that they were eating fish, shellfish, birds, bugs, and reptiles in addition to bigger prey.
*Tucker was blaming all the tooth problems on sugar and starch, but it's worth pointing out that early shifts towards agriculture resulted in diets lacking in various nutrients which can also hurt dental health.
150g fiber seems bizarrely high, not sure how anyone could eat that much. The RDA is 38g for men, and 25g for women. Which I think is way too high.
I actually think fiber is probably bad for your teeth. I notice mine get significantly whiter (maybe 2 shades?) a week or two after I stop eating any fiber (e.g. my short carnivore stints).
I'm completely nonplussed by why you'd mention the RDA. And yes, it's bizarrely high -- the past is like a foreign country, they do things differently there.
Just cause to me, the RDA is unreasonably biased towards higher fiber. I eat less than 1/10th of their recommended amount and my digestion is so much better than when I ate more.
Yeah they're suggesting you eat unnecessary fiber because they think you'd be healthier if you did, rather than you chewing on fibrous tubers all day in between hunting for better sources of food. I imagine that every single prehistoric human who produced a coprolite filled with indigestible fiber would have chosen whipped cream if it had been available (and would have been healthier for it).
I only even mentioned tuber-chewers in the first place as a nod to the long and varied history of the human metabolism. We might do best on high-octane fuel like you're buying, but we're nothing if not flexible.