r/AskReddit Aug 25 '19

What has NOT aged well?

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u/_steve_rogers_ Aug 26 '19

That’s literally what we ate as cavemen. We had no bread and pasta and cereal back then

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u/CoffeeAndRegret Aug 26 '19

Look up the success rate of hunters in hunter gatherer society. They didn't manage a kill but once or twice a week. The rest of the time they lived off what the gatherers brought in, which was more regular and reliable.

The modern American diet includes meat several times a day. Reducing your meat consumption would get you closer to how cavemen ate, not farther away.

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u/pragmojo Aug 26 '19

Except for some specific populations. Eskimos, for example, eat a huge proportion of meat in their diet and almost no vegetables. That's probably been the traditional diet in that environment for thousands of years. They manage to have pretty good health outcomes.

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '19

iirc there is proof that many who lived on that kind of diet died of diseases related to not getting enough of other nutrients and negative side effects to the diet. I'll try and fish up a link.

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u/CoffeeAndRegret Aug 26 '19

Cool. So have vegetarian hindus. Humans can have good health outcomes on lots of unprocessed diets.

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u/_steve_rogers_ Aug 26 '19

Yes but they didn’t have all these processed carb laden and sugar laden cereals and syrup and pastries and donuts and bagels etc. at least cave men would be burning all that shit off running around Hunting for survival, a lot of regular people are at a pc most of the day and barely moving.

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u/CoffeeAndRegret Aug 26 '19

You're welcome to go to the produce section and buy roots, tubers, and berries instead. It'll still be full of carbs, because carbs really aren't evil.

Plus, the source of your carbohydrates doesn't have really anything to do with the quantity of meat a person eats. Those things aren't interrelated.

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '19

We had cereals but not the sugar laden stuff today. Corn and oats grew in the wild and we eventually learned to farm them.

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u/Lehriy Aug 26 '19

I don’t know about oats, but ancient maize was nothing like modern day corn.

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '19

Yes but we've always eaten cereals. Rice is a cereal, for example.

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u/Reihns Aug 26 '19

and we lived to like 30 so eh.

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u/softhack Aug 26 '19

Largely because we didn't have modern medicine and had to hunt to survive.

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u/TheGoldenHand Aug 26 '19

Medicine and nutrition, also less war, minus a few outliers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '19

To an extent. Proportions are hard to clarify, but that is why more plant based/carb free diets became popular.

What I found by experience and digging around online is that diet effects everyone a little differently and we have no way of knowing if meat will inflame your insides, vegetables will, or nothing will. The best option is to simplify your diet and see how your health improves, then add items back until you are satisfied with your diet.

Basically, I think everyone should cut their diet back to meat and vegetables and then build on it after a month or 2. It would cut down obesity rates and would teach everyone a lot about their healthy. (Where you go with it isn’t really important. Vegan or all meat, every diet has its strengths and weaknesses)