In Reply to: Re: On being a healthy skeptic posted by Paper Boy on August 17, 2007 at 13:28:51:
I understand. I see that your thing is breaking down those old dogmas you once fell for. Cool with me. It was also interesting that you brought up food choices, beause it makes my point about what "studies" support.
When you look for studies that support vegetarianism, you'll find it. You get one group of people saying it's clear we were all made for vegetables and fruits, just by looking at our jaw, teeth, and salivary glands.
http://www.veggie123.com/veggie/chapter3/
Then another set of people will say with utter conviction that we are meant to be omnivores or near-carnivores, just by looking at our teeth.
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1a.shtml
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Philosophy/vegetarian.html
Then you get experts who say there is no such thing as a perfect human diet.
If I can just add to that the Atkins Diet the Zone diet, Neanderthal, the Cave Man Diet, the Paleolithic Prescription, all of these diets all start with the assumption that we should be eating foods that more closely resemble those eaten by our distant ancestors. Now there are two problems with this – the first problem is that which distant ancestors? Human evolution has been proceeding for a very long time and we have lots of ancestors that lived at different times. Are you just going to pull one out of the hat and say we need to be eating like this one? And the other problem is if we return to the diets of one might call traditional foragers you’re left with the same problem. Traditional foragers have been documented to eat in some cases almost nothing but meat if you look at the Inuit or the Alliu down to almost nothing but vegetables. So it’s very difficult to pinpoint the ideal human diet cause I think there is none.
- Peter Ungar