pam:

Absolutely.  The longer I eat paleo, the less tempted I am to cheat.  Like you, my standards for cheating have increased.

DancinPete:

What you need is a simulation that runs faster than real time, so you can see the long-term effects of various dietary and life changes on your simulated clones.

Lauren:

Foresight is a big help: "yes, that'll taste delicious, and I'll feel terrible for the rest of the day".  It is also possible for cultural conditioning to instill an aversion (Muslims and Jews with pork, for instance).

Pete Ray:

I'd seen that article before but forgotten about it.  Thanks for reminding me!  Imagine if the "control diet" for humans was to lock them in a room for weeks on end with a water fountain, a toilet, and a vending machine.

The proverb "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is instructive: people tend to explain things based on what they know.  So for a neuroscientist fresh out of school, well, it's easy to give everything a brain-centered explanation whether it fits or not.

EF:

Thank you!  I'm doing my best to keep gnolls.org both information-dense and drama-free.

JS

Beowulf:

Absolutely true: N=1 is great for short-term effects that we have some way to measure directly (e.g. acne, blood sugar).  The longer-term the effects, the less information N=1 can give us.

Unfortunately there are no easy answers.  Much science is biased and/or unhelpful, and our scientific knowledge is very, very far from complete...so we must do our best to make evolutionary context, science, the historical record, and N=1 all meet in the middle.

JS

Jeffrey:

Abstractions like "vital force" make me uncomfortable because I don't know what they mean.  But since substances as basic as salt affect gene expression (discussed briefly here), it's not a stretch to assume that other foods affect it even more profoundly.

JS

Miki:

That's a good distinction.  Said another way: it only takes N=1 to disprove ("I tried it and it produced an entirely different effect than expected/desired"), but it takes far more than N=1 to prove.  And when we're talking about accounts of other cultures, that's far more than N=1.

(Note to readers!  Miki is too modest to link his own article, so here it is: Can anecdotes and history match science in guiding Paleo nutrition?)

JS

Simon:

You're correct that domestication is a special case, and you're correct that domestication has had great survival value for a few species.  (At the price of great suffering -- but natural selection doesn't care if you're happy.)

In the case of animals, domestication makes them more defenseless -- slower, fatter, and more tame.  However, the plant case is less clear.  Certainly we breed plants to be less bitter, bigger, and tastier, decreasing their toxicity...but, at the same time, we breed them for traits like insect and fungus resistance, which increases their toxicity.  (For instance, corn gluten meal is used as an herbicide.)

I'm glad you enjoy my work!

Paul:

We're trying to make laboratory science, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, and anthropology meet on some sort of common ground.  It's a hard problem!

JS

Kenneth:

That's a great example of exactly the point I'm trying to communicate.  Thank you for bringing it up!

JS

Stefani:

I remember that!  It takes "you are what you eat" to a whole new level.  Not only are our bodies made out of food, food directly alters our gene expression.  Wow!

JS

Dr. Basko:

It seems to my untutored eye that pet food is generally made to be cheap, not healthy: I see no evidence that corn and wheat are part of the ancestral diet of anything in order Carnivora.

Feel free to share your thoughts here, or on the forums.

JS