>
>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.
Same here
>-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.
Oh, crap. Maybe people were boiling their water and had realised not to swim
at the beach- polio virus doesn't mind salt water, and summer epidemics were
common in coastal cities. Maybe most of them had already had it.
>-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.
Untrue. If you get pneumonia, they will give you an antibiotic that will
kill the germ. Also, people rarely die of urinary tract infection these
days, but early in the century it was a big killer of otherwise healthy
people. We are still a long way ahead of the germs. We like the war with
germs to be like the Gulf War- totally one-sided. I'd say the point score is
humans 2 billion, germs 500,000 and closing.
>-Aseptic surgery has been around for quite some time,
What, since Pasteur?
>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?
Well, the ALE of surgery in those theatres is bad because they had lousy
anaesthetic drugs, lousy monitors and anesthesiologist were not specialists.
yes, ALE definitely increases with those drugs . I think that paleo diets
would give much bettter increases (as the diseases are due to neoltihic diet
in the first place).
>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.
I'm going to make you hate your tootbrush- look at
http://www.sover.net/~meg/IC.html to see what you stick into your mouth 3
times daily- how totally gross and disgusting! you need to get these
http://www.sover.net/~meg/order.html or this http://www.purebrush.com/.
People's nutrition is worse IMHO- eaitng all that hydrogenated oil and
cheapo grain based horse food. I haven't seen a chart of vitamin intake but
i bet it's still less than in the late 1920's (keep the 30's out of this due
to the Crash, and 40's because of refrigerators in homes.
>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.
Well, i'd have to agree that plenty of people in hospital have hteir
nutrition ignored even after several days of nil by mouth. i'm sure a bit of
folic acids would help them as much as the ascorbate. And multivitamins and
protein even more.
>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.
Maybe i should have sad "our current longevity has occurred in spite of a
diet that causes most of the diseases that people commonly suffer from"-
that would state my belief accurately. i believe that we are actually
unhealthier than ever before but live longer than ever before becasue of
medical intervention. This is a bad situation- people start on drugs earlier
and stay on them for longer. But at least they do live longer. Therefore, if
they ate paleo and didn't get all those degenrative diseases, they would
have enormous life expectancy and fantastic quality of life. No-one has any
concrete figures, but 100-120 years would be pretty realsitic.
>Diet isn't everything -- it's the only thing.
Well, it's the number one thing. All those blank pages in medical textbooks
will be filled with dietary explanations within 15 years. They'll stop
saying "probably immunological" and start saying 'probably nutritional" and
nutritional will encompass the majority of immunological disturbances,
endocrinological disturbances, psychiatric disturbances.
|
