An Even Worse "Ancestral" Diet Arises

This link started making the rounds of my social media and I went from being a little skeptical to down right incredulous. I don’t know whether it is the book author or the article author that have more fail going on, but needless to say we have yet more people trying to greenwash away healthier eating because “science”, supposedly.

If, after your rant, you have to state, “It’s not that fruits and vegetables are bad for us,” you know you’ve gone off the rails.  We go from embracing 100 million years of ancestry to eat what your ethnographic ancestors ate mostly in order to stay healthy.  Well which is it?  According to Le we only recently started eating vegetables, pretty much after we learned to cook as a species.  The problem with that is that our hominid ancestors were heavy plant eaters, and only more recent species have become more omnivorous.  We as a species didn’t even exist until 100,000 to 200,000 years ago and cooking isn’t inhabiting a lot of that history.  So right there his entire thesis is way off.

Next he decides to attack eating vegetables, kales and salad bars and the like.  He brings up the change in the longevity of Okinawans and Pacific Islanders as they adapted to western diets and claims that it was really about just going away from ancestral eating.  From there he jumps to the conclusion if we all just did that, whatever that means, then all will be great.  So skip the veggies and have the Matzo ball soup!  Of course he neglects to actually look at what those diets were, or if he did then he goes from being misinformed to being disengenous.  He unfortunately picked one area, Okinawa, that has been heavily studied by the Blue Zones group.  What is the big difference between the centenarians and the group with modern diseases?  It is their eating more traditionally, among other things, but what about their traditional diet is so strong?  It is how plant matter and whole food dominant those diets are.  To totally ignore that fact is to miss this biggest point.

Look, if you don’t like vegetables I’m sorry that they have been shown again and again to be part of a healthy diet.  I’m sorry that you can’t eat deep fried whatever day in and day out with your ice cream, if you come from a dairy dominant culture anyway, as health food.   If you naturally don’t have the urge to be active, like me, then I’m sorry that moving your butt is a key part of health as well.  And so on.  As adults we don’t always have to make the “right” decision all the time to be happy.  We can have our indulgences, we can decide that having dessert several times a week, or eating pasta, or not getting much latent exercise is how we want to live.  Just know the impacts of what you are doing is and accept it.  It doesn’t make you bad. It shouldn’t make you feel bad. Life isn’t about being perfect, it’s about living.  Just stop listening to these bullshit artists greenwashing you into believing that unhealthy shit is actually healthy and the other way around.  Own your decisions and be happy with them.  And don’t give money to the con men.