Selection

I was listening to The Tim Ferriss Show, where Dr. Peter Attia was doing some Q&A, and someone asked about whether he thought the ketogenic diet is long term feasible.

To oversimplify, it's a low carb, middling protein diet, where you get most of your calories from fat.

Crystal has done this from time to time and, anecdotally, she lost a bunch of weight, felt better, and saw all her blood content levels improve. This isn't a shining endorsement of the diet, because the way she normally eats is fucking terrible, so any change would have done something similar, probably, but it did curb her constant hunger she gets when she binges on carbs.

It seems pretty fragile, in that you're kind of binary in ketosis or not, and she keeps falling off the wagon when she gets stressed out by totally unpreventable stuff happening, like loved ones dying, or getting sick.

Anyway, in attempting to answer the question, Dr. Attia first talks about looking for a natural experiment, where a society has been long term ketogenic, mentioning his doubts about the Inuit and Masai being valid examples (though oft cited by ketogenic diet proponents).

I don't have strong feelings either way. There's no conclusion I'm getting to here. Mostly just wanted to think on paper. I don't have the answer about ketogenic diets or diets in general, but I'm wary of any dietary advice that isn't along the lines of eating the way peasants (preferably ones you're descended from) generally ate traditionally, which is usually a ton of vegetables and soup for bulk, and small amounts of meat and some sort of staple carbohydrate like rice.

I like the idea of looking to existing societies, because I think it hits a lot of points that matter.

Diet is complicated, because you can eat basically anything and live short term. Even get to breeding age. It's the nature of being omnivores, and that's what we get as individual organisms as a result of evolution.

The thing is that natural selection stops at procreation, and it doesn't matter if you're very healthy, or a fat asshole. If you can procreate, and your children are sufficiently taken care of so they can procreate, you can die from your awful diet at 20, and evolution doesn't care.

But diet is a part of culture, and cultures only persist if the societies that adopt them persist, and that's where health and longevity factor into selection. The longer a person can live productively, the fewer resources are spent getting people productive, the greater the expertise that can develop and be passed on, etc. More efficient societies can largely outcompete less efficient societies, and their culture spreads.

Whatever cultures that exist at this point have survived millenia of selection, and their diets are part of that. The issue now is that tech has allowed us to change so much of what and how we eat so quickly that our modern diets aren't battle-tested, and lack the homogeny that would let them ever get battle-tested.

At the same time, tech and science haven't advanced enough that we fully understand diet and nutrition, so we're in a rough spot, where I think the prudent thing is to defer to precedent until we actually understand more, and not jump all over whatever fads.

That said, I think the paleo diet is dumb as shit, and is going back too far, for one, and seems ignorant to the fact that there wasn't one diet back then anyway.