[bjourne]

Zero evidence for that theory. People didn't know parasites existed so that couldn't have been the reason for abstaining from pork. But if that had been their reason they would also have abstained from chicken because it is even more dangerous than pork (salmonella etc.). But to the best of my knowledge, no religion prohibits eating chicken. Neither could the Jewish priests who created the rule have observed that people who ate pork got sick more often than those who abstained because they didn't. People who eat pork do not have worse health outcomes than people who don't. Also, remember that 3000 years ago meat was a luxury. The average person would eat meat a few times per month at most.

[samspot]

You don't need to know about parasites to recognize a correlation between diet and death. People are very good at detecting patterns.

[alejohausner]

Sailors used to die from scurvy in large numbers, before a connection to diet was discovered. People aren’t as smart as you claim.

[marcus0x62]

I’m not a doctor, but some quick googling indicates that trichinosis symptoms start after a few days of being exposed to the worms, while scurvy symptoms show up after a few months of vitamin C deficiency[0].

I’m pretty sure I - as an ignorant person in this area - could figure out if people around me sometimes ate something, and then got sick within a few days, that maybe I shouldn’t eat that thing.

I doubt I’d be able to figure out that I should eat something on the basis of people getting sick after not eating a whole bunch of things for a few months.

0 - at least one source I found claimed scurvy symptoms could show up as soon as one month after “severe” vitamin C deficiency, but that “more noticeable symptoms would appear later.

[s1artibartfast]

Well, they knew it was tied to sailing, long voyages, and diet.

Scurvy became a problem with the age of sail, and even in the 1500's sailors were recommending citrus, making pine needle teas, and similar efforts.

I think it is amazing that people figured out how to treat and prevent scurvy without a functional understanding of biology, and 300 years before Vitim C was discovered.

I think the fact that they DID figure it out supports the theory more than a couple hundred year delay undermines it.

How many tens of thousands of years did people have to figure it out?

[oyashirochama]

Most of that can be explained by it being the first time to have a long-term trip without fresh fruit and it was discovered fairly quickly, they just didn't have anything that persevered vitamin C since it denatures fairly easy.

Science always has a find an issue, then resolve it any other path is just luck. The sailors of other countries other than Europe did have ways of remedying this issue through various ways.

[airstrike]

That argument doesn't hold, it's false equivalence. It's much harder to detect the lack of some nutrient in your diet overall vs the consequences of eating a specific meat.

[platybubsy]

Doesn't this kind of prove his point? People got sick a lot before they found a pattern and fixed their diet.

[bjourne]

No, people are terrible at detecting patterns. It took medicine a few thousand years before Semmelweis came along and detected a correlation between hand-washing and childbed fever. But also there is no pattern to detect, eating pork just isn't unhealthy (American diet notwithstanding).

[arthens]

I'm not weighting in on the ability of people to detect patterns, but hand washing is a bad example.

Detecting a pattern between 2 things that did happened (everyone but Dave ate pork, and everyone but Dave got sick) is orders of magnitude easier than detecting a pattern between something that did happened (this patient got sick) and something that didn't (everyone washed their hands).

[isleyaardvark]

Well only ancient Jewish priests, in this case. Priests who only give the reason that the pig “has hooves and does not chew its cud" for the ban, instead of pointing out a pattern between diet and illness that people could supposedly detect independently.

[sorokod]

True but then why prohibit something that is known and understood by all?

[conorjh]

same way the quran predicted bacteria etc its never stated outright, oddly enough, divine knowledge but always vague and metaphorical

[Aspos]

One does not need a microscope to see a parasite. People were well aware of meat-borne parasites. Salmonella is invisible to a naked eye, true.

[fortran77]

What an ignorant comment. Jewish priests didn't "create" the rule. G-d did.