| >Depends on what diet you compare them to. If you could demonstrate people could live healthy lives on just potatoes compared to a normal Western diet. People (academic even) "demonstrate" this all the time. All meat diet. Vegan diet. Raw diet. One meal per day. The potatoes and lemons diet. Etc. Feed most overweight western adults a restrictive diet, their health is likely to improve dramatically. That's because it's restrictive. Not because of what it is restricted to. If you have >15kg of excess fat, you are probably reslient to undernourishment. The fat loss, lower blood sugar and such will improve your health. Btw, in 19th century ireland, poorhouses published guidelines for the all potato diet. Their clients were undernourished. Their guidelines based on observing individuals who would deteriorate quickly if the diet was insufficient. Their dietary minimum was 3-4kg of potatoes + 1 pint of milk or one portion of sardines or mackerel. You need to eat a lot of potatoes to make this diet sustainable. A modern Irish man is much heavier, and much, much fatter than our great grandfathers. We also do less physical work. In that context, we can survive just fine on a lot of insufficient diets for a very long time. |