These are pretty disingenuous, uncited, and generalized examples. For example, fat has always been fine, excess calories are not. That leads to fatty build-up that does cause serious health issues. The problem is that casuals see 'fat' and equate it with body fat, instead of being focused on what science has been saying saying all along: eat that calories you need and not past that as you'll gain weight. Marketers have used this confuse to sell products, "low fat" craze, but that has never been the staple of nutritional understanding.
Lets also remember even the ones that the "ancients" got right, they got millions wrong, most of which were seriously dangerous. The modern person's appeal to the past is insane to me. I think if you could travel back in time to live in one of those cultures you value so much, you'd see nothing but sickness, death, and other horrible things that would be trivially treated in post-enlightenment societies.
Unfortunately, bullshit like 'ancient wisdom' has become popular of late thus parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme/fundamentalist religiosity, and dangerous cargo cult-like beliefs like treating cancer with green tea.
This is a mischaracterization of the past 30 years. In the 1980s, American's really were told to drastically reduce their fat intake due to a misunderstanding of LDL. It remains recommended to only be 10% of your daily intake of calories -- a statement of the percentage of calories you should eat as fat, not a statement about excess calories, which can be regarded as bad in general regardless of their source. If you look at what took place in the following 30 years since this stance, fat intake has in fact been reduced quite considerably in the United States, yet heart disease has increased. This has nothing to do with worshiping "ancient wisdom", its simply identifying an error science made (which it is allowed to do), and rectifying it without historical revisionism.
Unfortunately, bullshit like 'ancient wisdom' has become popular of late thus the parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme/fundamentalist religiosity, and general dangerous cargo cultness like treating cancer with green tea.
That's a false dichotomy. It is possible to look to ancient practices with an eye towards using those as foundations for research. We didn't do that; instead, we let threw out all of that knowledge, the good and the bad, and we have 100 million sick people in the US and over a billion around the world.
I'm a firm believer that we can find good answers in science, but we are doing a piss-poor job and have been for 50 years. In fact, I'd go so far to see we've done very little nutritional science over the last 50 years; instead, we've done nutritional marketing in white coats. If people are rejecting what nutritional researchers are saying, they have only themselves to blame.
Things have gotten a little better in the last decade, but large organizations like the AHA, ADA, AND, and, of course, the US government, still seem to be stuck following the marketing literature of companies like Conagra and Monsanto rather than the science.
We didn't do that; instead, we let threw out all of that knowledge, the good and the bad, and we have 100 million sick people in the US and over a billion around the world.
I'm not sure what you expected scientists to do. None of the "traditional wisdom" was confirmed as true, it all had to be tested and was considered suspect until such testing had taken place.
On top of that, traditional diets had shortcomings. It's hard to produce enough calories for today's population to survive, without a larger proportion of those calories coming from grains.
Faced with this change in the food landscape, and with faith in traditional wisdoms rightly shaken, nutritionists have been basing their advice on reasoning from first principles, and preliminary results. They got it wrong badly. But at least we were on the path to a better understanding of nutrition. It's been too slow, and nutritionists were not skeptical enough of preliminary results, but lucky us, these are problems science knows how to fix.
There is more involved than just calories. It's surprising that this myth continues to hold, when we understand how differently macronutrients are treated in the body. Calories are a second-order effect: you don't gain weight because you eat too many calories, your body demands more calories because it is hormonally/nutritionally imbalanced and, therefore, shunting energy into fat cells instead of allowing it to be used for energy. And this doesn't get into the fact that a high percentage of chronically ill patients (CVD, diabetes, dimentia) are thin.
Having dealt with being overweight most of my life, I can't help but believe the reason the myth holds on is because it is a way to justify judging fat people as less than skinny people since they just "can't control themselves".
Eat a better macronutrient ratio, and the body responds positively, even for isocaloric diets, whether for weight loss[1] or for maintenance[2]. But, really, isocoloric doesn't mater; what matters is ad libitum eating. Ironically, every study that I've read that compares low carb diets against low fat diets allows ad libitum eating for the low carb but restricts caloric intake for the low fat. Why is that? Even with that constraint, the low carb diets win[3].
3. http://nutrition.stanford.edu/documents/AZ_abstract.pdf (I have a lot of respect for Christopher Gardner. He's a vegetarian who started this study because he believed a vegetarian diet would trounce other diets. It didn't, but he didn't try to game the results. That's an unfortunately rare behavior in nutrition research where so many people seem to be more concerned with proving their idea correct than finding the truth.)
Where do you get from that 'fat has always been fine'? It's been the target of demonization by trendy dietitians for essentially the second half of the 20th century. This article on the subject made it to the top of HN a while ago:
GP is not making a very clear argument, but you are piling on a fat helping of hubris.
First you appear to believe the specious nutritional myth that weight gain is a matter of calories in vs calories expended. Of course that appeals to scientifically-minded due to the comforting immutability of the laws of thermodynamics, but it ignores the fact that the human metabolism and satiety mechanisms are extremely complex and powerful. Even if you had a magic meter of all calories going in and out it wouldn't begin to solve our nutritional problems at a society level.
Second, things like the paleo (little p) approach to diet and health are not about "ancient wisdom". It's about the fact that we evolved under certain conditions, and while those conditions were constantly changing, the rate of change accelerated exponentially after industrialization and have completely been completely decimated in the last 60 years (less than one lifespan). While western medicine has made amazing strides in the last century, nutrition is still very much in its blood-letting dark ages. Looking to ancestral lifestyle clues is just good sense given the paltry information we have available. None of that is to poo-poo the scientific evidence we have, but understand that human nutrition is far too complex for nutritional science to yet provide convincing answers.
A lot of folks around here are so quick to look down their nose to people are too "granola" and make seemingly un-scientifically-subtantiated decisions like not eating processed foods or preferring "natural" or "whole" foods. But you know what? In the lack of sufficient knowledge, these hippies are making far smarter decisions than the geek who decides that since we don't have proof we might as well carry on with the average American diet. We pat ourselves on the back for our scientific literacy and rational decision-making, but deep down we are animals subject to the same conditioning and addicted to the same heavily processed foodstuffs which are almost certainly leading to all kinds of nasty health outcomes. We don't want to change our diet not because it's the rational decision, but because it fucking tastes good.
People don't look down their noses at those who say things like "eating food that has been processed less is probably better for you".
People do, rightly, criticise those who claim problems with diet are all fixed with a single thing - paleo! Keto! No HFCS! No carbs!
Also, it's easy to deride calories out : calories in but it is fundamentally true that if a person eats fewer calories than they use they will lose weight. The fact that some people have gut flora that helps them stay thin and others have gut flora that makes it easier to gain weight and other people have a small genetic influence does not stop CO:CI being true, it just means that CO:CI is very hard to follow for some people. Suggesting that those people receive cognitive behaviour therapy and exercise programs along with lifestyle change to help them lose weight is usually met with stiff disagreement about the efficacy of these evidence based interventions.
CO:CI is impossible to follow period. There is simply no way to measure accurately both ends. It might be useful as a tool to some people, but as an objective solution it's just a banal truism with no reproducible path to success.
Other than that, I'm in complete agreement with what you said.
Lets also remember even the ones that the "ancients" got right, they got millions wrong, most of which were seriously dangerous. The modern person's appeal to the past is insane to me. I think if you could travel back in time to live in one of those cultures you value so much, you'd see nothing but sickness, death, and other horrible things that would be trivially treated in post-enlightenment societies.
Unfortunately, bullshit like 'ancient wisdom' has become popular of late thus parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme/fundamentalist religiosity, and dangerous cargo cult-like beliefs like treating cancer with green tea.