Must be a tax on rich folks, And by rich, I mean a untapped revenue source. I’m sure the government will tout this as a big win. when it does nothing but increase the tax burden on citizens. If people want to eat or drink unhealthy stuff. I guess that is there choice. I really don’t want the government telling me what to eat.
Where you limit your food options to roughly what was available to people in the paleolithic era.
What were those exatcly?
Where did you come up with that?
Given that life expectancy over the past 12 000 years has been roughly half what is was today, and our diet has probably changed quite a bit over that time, what with moving from hunting/gathering to agriculture and industrial agriculture, I am guessing that diet, generally is not a main factor in determining life expectancy.
But if it was, the evidence seems to show that on average we have a better diet now than we did 12 000 years ago.
Also people are taller, probably run/swim and are generally stronger, overall we have been quite good in the last 150 years at figuring out what improves the human race - and it is not eugenics.
Modern medecine and a good balanced diet.
Some other interesting things
- In prehistoric times (which would include Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods in the table above), human infant mortality was 20-30%. (For wild animals, the figure is 60-80%.) Few people lived much past the end of their fertile reproductive period.
- Paleolithic females died younger than males due to the stresses of pregnancy and childbirth while still carrying the burdens of food-collecting and moving camp.
- “The best explanation for relatively short [Paleolithic] life span is the combination of stresses of nomadism, climate, and warfare. The latter is especially clear in the Jebel Sahaba population, where projectile wounds affecting bone are very common and ‘almost half the population probably died violently.’ [Wendorf 1968]” [Note: violence/trauma as a major cause of death was also true of the Mesolithic as well.]
Oh yeah, it turns out that the Heart and Stroke foundation sells it’s logog to unhealthy food - who woulda thunk it?
Does the health check logo hype health or sell food?
Originally aired January 23, 2008 — You’ve seen the Health Check logo. It’s the friendly red checkmark that appears on nearly 1,500 packaged food products in this country, representing the approval of the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
If a product bears the logo, that means Heart and Stroke has evaluated it and concluded it complies with their criteria, which is based on the recommendations of Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating.
So. Does the logo mean it’s the healthiest choice? The answer is a little complicated. As Wendy Mesley reports, it turns out that some of Heart and Stroke’s Health Check products don’t get top marks in other food-rating systems.
Leave everything behind, move somewhere far from civilization, and then see what you can get.
What if there was something else getting better/worse commensurate to diet getting better/worse?
How? And what is a “better diet”? What goals are you setting as the standard for “better”?
Why is being taller better?
And it could be that we have figured out a lot of good, helpful things while letting our diet get out of control, and still have a net plus in our well-being!
By the way - click on the quote link - can’t seem to make it work.
Leave everything behind, move somewhere far from civilization, and then see what you can get.
Do I get to take a tribe with me so I least have a basic division of labour? How about some stone tools?
And would that be Paleolithic Arctic, Mediterranian, Sub-Saharan Africa? I would imagine the diet would vary hugely - and the life expectancy would probably be roughly the same.
until very recently there were plenty of humans still living the same way they were 10 000 yrs. ago, Aboriginies, Papa New Guineans, and that tribe that was recently spotted in the Amazon, the african pygmies, the Inuit 100 years ago
You could go and find out what their diet is like… they would have highly varied diets - I am guessing the human body adapts to just about anything.
What if there was something else getting better/worse commensurate to diet getting better/worse?
Certainly with the advent of the Industrial revolution, the wear and tear on the average human body, esp. in the first world is far less compared to 100 or 150 years ago. So yes there are multiple factors that have contributed to our increasing Average Life Expectancy.
I probably have a more balanced diet than my Grandfather who grew up as a peasant farmer in Hungary - of course he is now in his 90’s so maybe that proves that diet is not such a factor. Given that what he eats would be frowned upon by just about every dietary “specialist” out there.
Why is being taller better?
Well given that humans are in competition with each other, being tall can give someone an edge in certain fields - basketball for instance, and some recent studies have shown that taller people earn more money
In Making Sense of the Labor Market Height Premium: Evidence From the British Household Panel Survey (NBER Working Paper No. 14007), authors** Anne Case**, Christina Paxson, and Mahnaz Islam use nine waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the large labor market height premium observed in the data, where each inch of height is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in wages, for both men and women. They find that half of the height premium can be explained by the association between height and educational attainment among BHPS participants. Of the remaining premium, half can be explained by taller individuals selecting into higher status occupations and industries. These effects are consistent with the authors’ earlier findings that taller individuals on average have greater cognitive function, which manifests in greater educational attainment, and better labor market opportunities…
The findings in the NBER paper suggest that the association between height and earnings may be driven by the influence of early life health and nutrition on adult height, educational attainment, and occupational choice.
And here is a wiki article all about Height discrimination
And it could be that we have figured out a lot of good, helpful things while letting our diet get out of control, and still have a net plus in our well-being!
I agree - like technology and advanced medecine.
Too bad all of our medecine in socialised, we would probably have far better medical technology right now.
Paleolithic era…
Medicine: nope. Prison: nope. Can get away with murder: yup. Chance to starve to death: much greater than today. Chance your meal will kill you before you kill it: much greater than today. Chance you will freeze to death: much higher than today. etc…
I think there were more factors than nutrition alone when it came to the lifespan of people in that era.
“What was the average lifespan in the paleolithic era? I am guessing about half of what it is today.”
And the low lifespan was not because of the diet. Correlation does not imply causation. The main issue was diseases and lack of sanitary knowledge, but once someone survived the first 25 years, the person had good chances of hitting 60, 70 or even 80.
Even the most primitive folks have their elders afterall.
The tarahumara folks in Mexico have 60 years old men that easily runs marathon’s distance.
I think there were more factors than nutrition alone when it came to the lifespan of people in that era.
Agreed - if you’ll note my later posts I am arguing that point.
And the low lifespan was not because of the diet. Correlation does not imply causation. The main issue was diseases and lack of sanitary knowledge, but once someone survived the first 25 years, the person had good chances of hitting 60, 70 or even 80.
Even the most primitive folks have their elders afterall.
The tarahumara folks in Mexico have 60 years old men that easily runs marathon’s distance.
Agreed - I am arguing that point in my later posts.
Check them out.
In fact, I am arguing in most cases, diet does not matter all that much for average lifespan.
My second point is that one cannot blame obesity on government intervention. I fully agree that our eating habits have been manipulated by such intervention. Everything you said is probably true, yet it still does not prove that Obesity would be any less prevalent in a free market.
At the end of the day, body fat is about calorie intake vs. outtake. How you take in those calories is not as important as people think it is for the physiological circuits regulating that level of fat. And behavior itself is a product of complex regulating feedback circuits, so saying that it’s just a behavior problem ignores the causal physiological (and neurological) circuitry that shapes this behavior.