> >D's points are quite valid but our current longevity has nothing to do >with our modern diet. ... > >Our high life expectancy is more related to public hygiene, antisepsis, >aseptic surgery, immunisation, antibiotics, anithypertensive therapy, >diabetic therapy etc than to any improvements in the diet in the last 100 >years. I would hate to think of what our life expectancy would be without >these measures. Sorry, can't let this pass. -As anti-vaccination pundits often point out, the drop in many illnesses cannot be correlated to immunization jabs -- even polio had dropped off dramatically before the Salk vaccine was widely available. -Any improvement in longevity due to antibiotics is/was purely temporary, as the equilibrium shifts and the bugs stay ahead of the pharmo's products. -Aseptic surgery has been around for quite some time, and I'd like to see figures for average life expectancy (ALE) of those who have never had surgeries requiring fully sterile theaters. Ditto for those with the other conditions in the list: does ALE increase on antihypertensives, anticholesterols? Quality of life, maybe, but age at death? I hypothesize, and I'm not the first, that ALE increase has much more to do with better personal and public hygiene (bathing, brushing teeth, replacing the village pump handle) AND with better nutrition. On this last point I emphasize the wirespread supplementation of foodstuffs with vitamins generally, and ascorbic acid in particular. Ascorbate's use as a food antioxidant started in the 1940s, and its consequent elimination of widespread borderline scurvy has probably done more to increase overall public vitality than all of the aformentioned non-Paleo drugs and immunizations combined. Surgeries have better outcomes in resistance to shock and in better healing when just a little ascorbate is added to the diet or used IV during the operation. Seasonally people used to drop dead on the table due to shock, especially in the winter months when their ascorbate levels were low and other bodily stresses high. References available on request. Better surgical technique may be contributory, but better diet is more significant. So saying that "our current longevity has nothing to do" with diet is strongly misleading, and serves merely to reinforce the notion that health can only be achieved and maintained through high-tech means and intervention -- something that true Paleoeaters and others besides know to be patently false, and which profits only the makers & sellers of drugs etc. Diet isn't everything -- it's the only thing.