[ExI] Paleo lifespan (and eggs/avidin)

[J. Stanton]

Originally posted by Adrian Tymes:
> You're saying paleos *can* get to 70.  Westerners, on Western diets,
> *can* get far past 70.

If you had read the articles I linked, you would have noticed that 
hunter-gatherers *can* make it into the 90s...

...without the benefit of nursing homes, emergency rooms, antibiotics, 
stents, bypasses, joint replacements, or any of the other benefits of 
modern health care.

Weston A. Price's "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" is essential 
reading on this subject.  It shows what happens to physical health and 
development when traditional cultures adopt the Western diet, with 
hundreds of pictures.

Full text and illustrations here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html

Price was far, far ahead of his time.  He couldn't have understood what 
epigenetics were, but he clearly understood their effects.  And he 
discovered what was later found to be vitamin K2 via its effects on 
dental and bone health.

Originally posted by Kelly Anderson:
> Granted, the Hadza have tobacco, which traditional hunter gatherers
> did not have to deal with, but this hardly sounds like a group that
> lives to an average age of 70.

Again: "The average modal age of *** adult *** death for 
hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68-78 years."  Infant and child 
mortality pull the average down dramatically.

Keep in mind that natural selection has continued to operate amongst the 
Hadza, selecting them for survival in their environment -- whereas 
'civilized' humans haven't been selected for those skills for thousands 
of years.  (If anything, we've been selected for docility in response to 
arbitrary authority.)

Originally posted by Stefano Vaj:
 > But what would be wrong with raw eggs?

Raw egg white contains a protein called avidin, which bonds to the 
biotin in the yolk and makes it biologically unavailable.  Cooking the 
egg breaks down the avidin.

Not that raw eggs will kill you: you just won't get any biotin out of 
them, and they'll bond any biotin in whatever you eat with them.

As far as parasite-free meat, most meat these days is low enough in 
bacteria and parasites that a healthy person won't ever have a problem 
eating it raw.  But there are a lot of unhealthy people out there, and 
there is a lot more paranoia out there than is justifiable.

In fact, I seem to recall that someone brought up earlier the fact that 
intestinal parasites are used to treat autoimmune disease.  It turns out 
we're basically supposed to be fighting some number of intestinal 
parasites, and in the absence of real enemies, our immune system is more 
likely to react mistakenly against our own bodies.

This is related to the reason we have an appendix: it's the place our 
gut bacteria hang out so they can recolonize after we get cleaned out. 
Bush African water sources are generally full of hippo and crocodile 
shit, and get wallowed in by everything from elephants to hyenas: it 
seems likely, at least to me, that Paleolithic humans spent a 
significant amount of time with the trots.

Thus the difference between research and re-enactment when it comes to 
dietary recommendations.  We most likely ate a good quantity of rotten 
meat in the Paleolithic: the health benefits of doing so are dubious.

JS
http://www.gnolls.org