January 15, 2025
We have made nutrition infinitely harder than it needs to be. Here’s the rule of thumb that dissolves most nutrition questions instantly.
If a food shows up across both time (millennia) AND diverse cultures, it’s likely compatible with human health. If it doesn’t, be skeptical.
Why might this be optimal? What does this solve?
You can’t fake showing up across time and cultures. Modern food companies can fund studies, manipulate variables, and craft narratives. But they can’t forge history.
This rule of thumb exposes the absurdity of how we approach nutrition science. We spend billions studying the mechanisms and effects of foods that have only existed for decades, while ignoring the vast empirical evidence of what humans have actually thrived on for millennia. Our very existence today is proof of what works: traditional, whole foods that have stood the test of time.
The implication is that most nutrition research is asking the wrong questions. We’re using sophisticated tools to study novel foods instead of asking why certain foods show up everywhere across time.
The rule of thumb’s power comes from its ability to generate clear answers while bypassing our ignorance about human biochemistry. We don’t need to understand all the mechanisms. The experiment has already run.
I imagine the first objection to my rule of thumb is the easiest to dismantle:
“But ancient cultures suffered from malnutrition!”
Yes, but that’s actually evidence of the framework’s power. If populations stuck with certain foods despite scarcity and periodic malnutrition, it suggests those foods were highly compatible with human biology. They weren’t just adequate, they were good enough that cultures maintained them even when facing significant pressure to find alternatives.
The next objection might be something like:
“Modern foods have better nutrition, we’ve engineered them to be superior!”
But this misses how natural selection works. Over thousands of years, cultures would have gravitated toward the most nutritious available foods through trial and error. The foods that persisted weren’t random they were selected for.
Next.
“But what about population bottlenecks or cultural inertia keeping suboptimal foods in use?”
Over millennia, cultures that chose truly suboptimal foods would have been outcompeted by those with better nutrition. The very persistence of a food through time, competition, and hardship validates its compatibility.
“We live longer now though!”
True, but that’s primarily due to reducing infant mortality, controlling infectious disease, and medical intervention not because our base nutrition is superior to traditional diets.
“Different cultures ate wildly different things though!”
Exactly and this shows that humans can thrive on diverse foods. What matters isn’t the specific foods, but their time tested status within any given culture.
The rule of thumb’s power comes from this, over a long enough timeline, foods that caused health issues would have been abandoned or led to population decline. The very persistence of a food through millennia is the strongest possible evidence for its compatibility with human health.
Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan, M.D.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon