[ExI] pale diet again: RE: It's not only the fittest who survive.

[Stefano Vaj]

On 3 April 2011 09:24, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Serious question to the paleo dieters... Why would we emulate a diet
> that resulted in a 25 year life span? I understand the bit about us
> being evolved to the diet, but we also were living short fast
> difficult lives at the time. Is that what we want to return to? It
> just seems counter intuitive to me.
The point has been raised innumerable time, but it arises from a
confusion between life expectation and lifespan.

The first is obviously determined by inter alia things such as
infantile mortality, your chances of being killed by a rival tribe or
eaten by a predator, the risk of starving to death, or today your
exposure to car accidents.

As to the second, it would appear that in spite of relative advances
in medicine, sheltering, etc. we had to wait until the XVIII century
to reach back paleolitic standards. Individuals in their seventies or
eighties were in fact more frequent in hunter-and-gatherer society
than they were in Europe when America was discovered.

-- 
Stefano Vaj