[tuatoru]

> Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dietary practice to "only eat that which our ancestors ate 1000 years ago"

So: wheat, barley, rye, and oats filled with rat droppings, small stones, weevils, weed seeds, and funguses like mildew and ergot?

[m0llusk]

That is a distraction. People have always cleaned their food before cooking and eating it, we just do that better now.

The idea is that the longer a food is around the more likely it is that any problems with it can be understood and countered. For example, we now understand how and why to prevent pellagra by treating corn with alkali before consumption. The most obvious target of this methodology are recently introduced industrial foods such as white cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, and hydrogenated fats. Meat and root vegetables are in turn older and more reliable than the grains you mention.

[wolverine876]

> People have always cleaned their food before cooking and eating it, we just do that better now.

Is that true? What I've read of sanitation doesn't seem to suggest that. Even so, it's not a minor matter of degree. We understand germs and sanitation.

> The idea is that the longer a food is around the more likely it is that any problems with it can be understood and countered. For example, we now understand how and why to prevent pellagra by treating corn with alkali before consumption. The most obvious target of this methodology are recently introduced industrial foods such as white cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, and hydrogenated fats. Meat and root vegetables are in turn older and more reliable than the grains you mention.

We don't need to go back 1,000 years for that. Just eat whole (i.e., unprocessed or less-processed) foods. We didn't learn about e coli and pellagra in 900 CE, but in probably in the last century or so.