Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Why raw, paleo and keto diets are stupid" video.

@bluesonicstreak7317 Lots of hunter gatherers had carries. They just had fewer, on average, than people today. We find tooth decay in a substantial fraction of ancient teeth, over 10% I believe. I don't know who told you otherwise. That said, they did pretty well on the whole considering there was no toothpaste or other dental hygiene. There are of course exceptions. In a Moroccan cave called Grotte des Pigeons, 56 neolithic skeletons were found from ca. 12,500 B.C., nearly all of whom had extensive cavities. More than 90% had lost at least one first incisor. More than half of the teeth had carries. And these people were hunter-gatherers.
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@drpavel_ The fact is that billions of people have lactase persistence, which is proof of recent human evolution. Humans have also evolved to better metabolize grain, which as you said, didn't used to be available in quantity, which is proof of yet more recent human evolution. Those are both good examples. Over the past 10,000 years or so, humans have evolved perhaps 100 times as quickly as they did over historical time.
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@mrmicro22 Of course we have evolved over the past 10,000 years.
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@toni4729 The Inuit actually have among the highest rates of diabetes in the world. This suggests they have genetic adaptations less suited to a modern diet than the average person, though we don't actually know the cause. But anyway, it is not controversial that disease has always been the biggest killer of humans. Whether farming increased disease or not (a valid question, since it increased population density), it is absolutely false that eating a "paleo" diet will make you immune to disease or anything of the sort. I dare you to find a reliable source saying that disease was NOT the leading cause of death before agriculture.
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@toni4729 My point is that disease has been with us since the beginning and is not some modern phenomenon. People do in fact live longer today than they ever did in the past (due to modern medicine), and while it is clearly true that we don't have optimal diets these days, that doesn't mean that we can solve disease just by improving our diets. A lot of people these days make exaggerated claims about diets like you did earlier in the conversation and use those to justify bad positions that you and I probably disagree with. For instance, they often try to claim that you don't need a COVID vaccine if you follow a paleo diet. So it does matter that you make accurate statements. Eating right won't mean you never get sick or just occasionally get the sniffles or whatever, and there was never a time in human history where that was the case.
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@toni4729 And yes, I agree that a COVID (or flu) vaccine is not going to be totally effective in stopping the disease. I actually got COVID myself after my first dose of the vaccine. Still, like you said, it does help. You are somewhat less likely to contract it at all, and if you do, it will have milder symptoms for a shorter duration and you will shed fewer viral particles on average. We have to use all the tools available to us at this point, and the vaccine is the best one we have.
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@oyuyuy Evolutionary pressure didn't decrease. It increased. Prior to the Neolithic revolution, people had been living roughly the same way for tens of thousands of years. During and after the revolution, life changed substantially. A completely different set of traits was favored, especially with respect to digestion and immunity. Thus, a different type of person tended to survive, and the population evolved. Natural selection favors people who produce the greatest number of successful offspring. Even today, some people produce more and others less. But the type of people who produce more babies is not the same as the type of people who used to, so evolution continues.
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@toni4729 Disease was the most common cause of death prior to the rise of agriculture. In the paleolithic period, 75% of people died due to infection. Sure, they might not have gotten anthrax from their pigs, but they would still get tetanus from the soil or cholera from the water. The reason farming succeeded is because farmers displaced hunter-gatherers. That implies they were healthier, not less healthy. This is exactly the sort of grandiose claim and mythologizing of fad diets that Adam was talking about.
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@bluesonicstreak7317 K2 is not essential, since you can substitute K1. (There may be benefits to consuming K2 specifically, but these are complicated and unclear. If you don't eat any vitamin K at all, you will definitely die.) But it does seem like without some sort of animal products in the diet, humans could never get enough B12. It doesn't have to be meat, because eggs also contain K2, but I assume meat was the major source.
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@toni4729 How many animals in the wild do I see lining up at doctors? What kind of question is that? Most animals in the wild die from predation. But excluding that, disease is once again the number one killer. For animals with no natural predators, disease is always the main cause of death. This isn't a controversial claim, and you can go look it up yourself. You seem to think it is self-evident that without farms, we would all be healthy and hardly get sick, and that is categorically false. Do you have any source backing up a single claim you have made?
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@toni4729 Check out "Late Pleistocene adult mortality patterns and modern human establishment." Old age was quite rare among early humans. Or check out "A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity." Life expectancy depended on region, with about half of people dying in childhood and the remaining half living to their mid 50s on average. Or check out "Three Stages of Health Encounters Over 8000 Human Generations and How They Inform Future Public Health." 75% of ancient deaths were due to infection, particularly by diarrheal diseases. Or look at "High adult mortality among Hiwi hunter-gatherers: Implications for human evolution." Pre-contact, Hiwi hunter-gatherers had a life expectancy at birth of just 27 and a life expectancy at 15 of just a further 31 years. And disease was the number one killer in every age group, from a minimum of 27% in infancy to a maximum of 66% in old age (>40 years). I could go on. Look, it is not controversial that communicable diseases were the leading cause of death of ancient humans. Simply eating a good diet does not turn you into a superhuman who never gets sick. And indeed, not all hunter-gatherers had good diets either (malnutrition was another major cause of death). It's just a myth.
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@toni4729 You are one person. There are also racecar drivers who have never crashed, but that doesn't mean crashing isn't a serious risk for them. It's just a fact that we are all vulnerable to illness, and while farming does bring some of its own risks (due to denser populations and more frequent contact with animals), that doesn't mean if we eliminated farming we could eliminate disease.
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@toni4729 Yes. The claim that fructose specifically is harmful beyond the excess energy it provides is not supported by the research.
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@oyuyuy I didn't say that evolutionary pressure wasn't real, I said that it didn't work the way you imagined. You are correct that in the past, food shortage and bacterial infection were major sources of mortality, and now they are not. That is why the selective pressures have changed. But other things, like viral infections, allergies, and low testosterone, certainly affect fitness. Instead of starvation, we now face obesity. Since obese people are less successful, that is a new evolutionary pressure. Again, as long as some genotypes are more successful than others, we will continue to evolve. That remains the case. And as long as the environment is rapidly changing, we can expect rapid evolution. That is also the case. And for what it's worth, people do still die from disease, famine, war, etc. Maybe they don't in your country, but that isn't the whole world. Moreover, since most of my discussion has been about the past ten thousand years, all of these in fact became far greater problems over this period than they had been in the past. Epidemics barely existed before dense civilizations, war was provincial at best, and famines were more common in some areas (places which eventually stored grain) but less common in others (places where monocultures were periodically ravaged by pests).
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@jpotter2086 You are literally saying we should cut out carbs but not increase the calories we get from other sources. You do understand the calories have to come from somewhere, right? A diet low in carbs is necessarily high in fat. There is no third option.
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@jpotter2086 Explain to me your idea of a diet that is low in both carbs and fat.
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@bluesonicstreak7317 Vitamin K2 deficiency is very rare in any case, so I don't think bioconversion is a real problem people have. Most K2 is produced in the gut anyway. It's not like B12 that can only be acquired by eating cobalamin directly, which is only available in animal products and in supplements.
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@toni4729 That has literally nothing to do with this discussion.
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@toni4729 What is poison? Carbs?
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It's worth mentioning that keto diets have side effects in children. While they can be highly effective in some children for reducing the frequency and severity of seizures, they are not indicated otherwise. Ketogenic diets reduce the production of both insulin and IGF-1, which inhibits growth. Thus, children on ketogenic diets have measurably higher rates of stunted growth and bone fractures. Keto diets also tend to be taxing on the kidneys and increase the risk of kidney stones in both children and adults. If it helps with your seizures, these risks are absolutely worthwhile (and probably lower than the risk of most anticonvulsants), but if you don't get seizures, this is definitely something to avoid.
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@Asd Asd There have always been people with birth defects, and they are not "degenerative people." And what, you think Europeans evolved while Africans and Americans stopped? WTF, man? That's some noble savage bullshit.
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@oyuyuy It's not about "more" or "less" pressure. That's not how evolution works. 50,000 years ago, humans were roughly in equilibrium with their environment. There was strong stabilizing pressure, meaning that any changes to the genome were selected against. So we barely evolved. Then, our environment changed dramatically, especially with the end of the last glaciation and the rise of farming and dense settlements. Suddenly, it was no longer important to be able to digest fibrous plants and much more important to be able to digest cereal and milk. So suddenly, there was destabilizing selection, and particular changes were selected for. So evolution picked up rapidly. Evolution isn't about how hard life is. It's about whether some genotypes are more likely to reproduce than others. If everyone has similar genotypes and new mutations are selected against, then there is little evolution. If there is high genetic diversity or new mutations are selected for, then there is rapid evolution. That's true even if everyone lives to 150. It is simply a fact that some people reproduce more than others, so their genes by definition will be selected for. And if our society changes very quickly, than the genotype which is most successful will also change very quickly. This isn't my opinion man. There are multiple articles about it. I recommend the paper by Hawks, Wang, Cochran, Harpending, and Moyzis titled "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution."
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@btark91 There is some data that a low-carb diet is effective at reducing the bg of type 2 diabetics. (Some studies also contradict this conclusion, for what it's worth.) There is no evidence that keto diets specifically are uniquely effective. In fact, very low carbohydrate diets (<10% of calories from carbs) may be less effective both at 6 months and at 12 months than low carbohydrate diets (10-25% of calories from carbs). And there is no way that you can "kick" diabetes. That's like saying that with a proper low-phenolphthalein diet, you can "kick" phenylketonuria. That's not how it works. In fact, most studies show that the benefits of low-carb diets last only for around 6 months. That could be due to a decrease in compliance, but that still implicates their efficacy. Like they say, the best diet is one you can stick to. If most people are not successful in sticking to the keto diet for even a year, then it doesn't make sense to say that it is the best diet for them. Moreover, "control" calorie-restrictive diets are often equally effective. What the evidence seems to show is that weight loss is the primary reason these diabetics have improving outcomes, regardless of the cause of the weight loss. Example reviews: "Low Carbohydrate Diets and Type 2 Diabetes: What is the Latest Evidence?" Dyson 2015. "Efficacy and safety of low and very low carbohydrate diets for type 2 diabetes remission: systematic review and meta-analysis of published and unpublished randomized trial data ." Goldenberg et al. 2021
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@jpotter2086 What you are describing is replacing calories with nothing. Sure, if you just eat less, you will definitely lose weight. But the question is, if you eat a given amount, what kind of nutrients should you eat?
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@toni4729 People died of infections of all kinds. They were exposed to them through water, soil, food, air, everything, just like we still are. There are some zoonotic infections, yes, but the fact remains that prior to agriculture, infections killed most people. The idea that they "just got the sniffles occasionally" or whatever is false.
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@toni4729 And have you read critical reviews of "Sugar, the Bitter Truth" like "From science to sensational headline: a critical examination of the 'sugar as toxic' narrative"?
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@toni4729 Your posts are pretty obnoxious. You asked me for my sources and I gave you some. How can your response just be "I don't know where you get your research"? Yes you do. Diabetes is not a "pandemic," because it is not communicable. Diabetes is a complicated disease that you want to distill down to a single ingredient even if the evidence does not back that simplification. As soon as I brought up sources, you retreated.
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