| | Bill,
I do not apologize for being short with you regarding this matter. I think I made a good case about the morality of continued engagement in post 18. I admit that I'm holding somewhat of a double standard here, with you and Bob. Ironically, it's because I respect your intellects (though Bob may not admit that he is in possession of an intellect, because intellects are immaterial things).
;-)
With other types of folks, I'd go around and go around -- revealing to 3rd party readers just how ignorant or arrogant the other guy is. Indeed, in my half decade of contribution here, I performed this altruistic task with the likes of G. Stolyarov II, Daniel Barnes, Nick Otani, and the late Nathan Hawking (among several, several others).
Call me tired or full of expectations, but I'd rather have a more mutually-informed kind of a discussion with you (and Bob). You could take that as a compliment, though you might only be able to view it as a backhanded one, nonetheless. Your words have touched me, however, and I now have a change of heart and a willed extension of generosity. Please, allow me to answer your earlier inquiries ...
In Post #6, you recommend consuming saturated fats at less than 10% of total energy, but from one of the articles you cited, the author says that the paleolithic hunter-gathers consumed saturated fats between 10% and 13% of total energy. Please take what I wrote in post 6 more literally (I meant it more literally than your quote implies). What I wrote there was a summary of points from an article -- rather than a recommendation. This might appear like rhetoricized semantics, but the subtle point here really does make a difference. Now that I've established that I wasn't recommending anything in post 6 (except maybe for folks to retrieve a copy of the article and scour it), it's easier to evaluate it for things like consistency.
It turns out that saturated fats formed roughly 7-13% of total energy in really old diets so, you're correct that I was incorrect -- just not correct that it matters (because I wasn't giving a recommendation; which is when summaries can be seen as morally deficient when they're incomplete or otherwise imperfect). In short, your ability to find a discrepancy, while laudable, doesn't damage the picture of old food. If you want me to personally take a stand and recommend a level for saturated fat, fine: 7-13%.
;-)
Also, you can correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be arguing that because our remote ancestors ate a certain way, it follows that we should eat that way. Why? Because we evolved on such a diet? But the fact that we evolved on it does not mean that every component of it is necessarily consistent with optimal health and longevity.
I am arguing what you say I'm arguing (in spirit if not in letter). The logic is to get the environment that human genes thrive in -- though I understand your fine point about how Natural Selection only "focuses" on getting members of a species to reproductive age. If you read more about the science, particularly the last reference about consideration of counterarguments, then you would find that there is a "consilience" going on here -- instead of merely one line of reasoning pointing to why we should eat certain things. For a refresher, here's what Whewell meant by consilience ...
Whewell called this type of evidence a “jumping together” or “consilience” of inductions. An induction, which results from the colligation of one class of facts, is found also to colligate successfully facts belonging to another class. Whewell's notion of consilience is thus related to his view of natural classes of objects or events.
To understand this confirmation criterion, it may be helpful to schematize the “jumping together” that occurred in the case of Newton's law of universal gravitation, Whewell's exemplary case of consilience. On Whewell's view, Newton used the form of inference Whewell characterized as “discoverers' induction” in order to reach his universal gravitation law, the inverse-square law of attraction. Part of this process is portrayed in book III of the Principia, where Newton listed a number of “propositions.” These propositions are empirical laws that are inferred from certain “phenomena” (which are described in the preceding section of book III).
The first such proposition or law is that “the forces by which the circumjovial planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to Jupiter's centre; and are inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those planets from that centre.” The result of another, separate induction from the phenomena of “planetary motion” is that “the forces by which the primary planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to the sun; and are inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those planets from the sun's centre.”
Newton saw that these laws, as well as other results of a number of different inductions, coincided in postulating the existence of an inverse-square attractive force as the cause of various classes of phenomena. According to Whewell, Newton saw that these inductions “leap to the same point;” i.e., to the same law. Newton was then able to bring together inductively (or “colligate”) these laws, and facts of other kinds of events (e.g., the class of events known as “falling bodies”), into a new, more general law, namely the universal gravitation law ...-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online
So, though your point stands that Natural Selection only "cared" about reproductive success -- which can, at least "logically", be something different than optimal health and human longevity -- the fact that old food is good is repeatedly shown to be so under different lines of reasoning (such as the drop in body height and bone density; after the adoption of grains as a staple food).
We are able to live and reproduce quite satisfactorily on the standard American diet, which as you know is not the best diet for us. Does that mean that our descendants living millennia from now should adhere to such a diet? No? Then why does it follow, based on your evolutionary rationale, that the best diet for human beings living today is a hunter-gatherer diet? There may come a time when processed food becomes healthy for humans, but the genetic code will have to change a lot first -- it'll be a REALLY long time before Hostess Twinkies are healthy for existing humans anywhere on Earth. If mutation allowed for us to make more vitamins from scratch, and to deal better with refined carbohydrate and trans fats, THEN we could live well on Twinkies -- but not UNTIL then will we ever be able to live on Twinkies.
The fact that our remote ancestors survived and reproduced on that diet does not mean that we should follow it -- at least not in all of its particulars. We should follow a diet that gives us optimal health and longevity, even if our remote ancestors didn't follow it.
Agreed. Again, if you read the Consideration of CounterArguments article, you will find similar reasoning outlined (that the Evolutionary Hypothesis, if it is to be ultimately disproven, must be disproven by experiment and nothing less than that).
Ed
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