
The Western diet has nearly killed our ancestral microbiome - sergeant3
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution
======
parasubvert
So in Northern China, most food is

\- raw food is rarely eaten unless it has a thick / peelable skin \- mostly
veggies are cooked in oil \- starch heavy (flour for dumplings or baked goods,
and rice) \- spice heavy (chili, Szechuan peppercorn) \- sodium heavy (soy,
bean pastes, and preserved vegetables) \- lots of odd ingredients from a
western point of view (mushrooms, fermented beans) \- no set "breakfast" foods
vs "supper" foods per se; more like "banquet" foods vs . "Everyday"

I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and
raw food to be barbaric. Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying
goes.

I can next talk about India, Pakistan, Bangkadesh and its varied regional
diet...

My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these
completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...

~~~
bmm6o
> _I 've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads
> and raw food to be barbaric_

I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that
they need to cook their vegetables in China to make sure they are safe to eat.
Tap water isn't generally potable there, or is that just in cities?

~~~
fizgig
As I understand it, safe water was historically a problem, which led to the
prevalence of hot tea for drinking. I guess culture in Asia tended towards
boiling water, as opposed to Europe's tendency to ferment beverages to make
them safer?

I forget the source where I read this, but there were supposedly vendors who
only sold hot water. Water is a really cheap commodity, so the currency
reflected that. Those lightweight, fractional-cent coins with the holes in
them were kept on a string by the water vendors to easily take/dispense for
selling hot water.

It's been years since I read this, so I may be totally off base with my
recollection. But it makes sense given the problems associated with very dense
populations and potable water in pre-industrial times.

~~~
DanBC
Some people say the "alcohol was safer than water" thing is a myth.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856)

Some people aren't convinced.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7798470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7798470)

------
yourapostasy
This is an interesting angle on the gut microbiome knowledge that we are just
now starting to explore and establish. It is also an intriguing sidebar to
Jared Diamond's essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" [1]
(see this [2] discussion for a more balanced commentary that tackles the
essay's actual points instead of the misleadingly sensationalist title).

There are some pretty sensationalist claims asserted for the gut microbiome at
the moment, but it's early days yet so we're not certain what works for who,
when, where, and why. I can say on a personal anecdote that after decades of
not being able to eat the spicy foods that I enjoyed in childhood, I went
through a course of probiotics for a year (they actually hang out here on HN),
and now I can dial up the heat. It wasn't a controlled, double-blind study,
but I'm sufficiently satisfied with my N=1 experiment to tentatively ascribe
the result to the probiotics until new evidence arises to show me otherwise.

[1] [http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-
in...](http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-
history-of-the-human-race)

[2]
[http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...](http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=184150)

~~~
filoeleven
Is the probiotic you took the one from General Biotics? I was interested in
trying them out but I never got any feedback on whether a one-month supply
would be enough to notice any benefits or if it's something that requires a
few months to kick in.

~~~
yourapostasy
Yes indeed, that's who I used. I didn't notice any change after just a month,
it took a year; I'm taking a break at the moment to see if any symptoms
resurface. The original article for this thread mentioned that the mouse model
the researchers are building indicates that successive generations of mice
with weaker biomes did not improve after starting on a heavier-fiber diet
(though long-term, who knows if it might start improving). Might there be a
possibility that biome damage has a similar pathology, and reconstitution via
probiotics takes an especially long time? Nobody knows at this point.

GB is not exactly cheap if you are on a student budget, so in the interest of
full disclosure and crufty, messy, crowd sourcing pseudo-science, I'll offer
some caveats of what else I was trying at the same time that might have also
yielded my results. I tried two other brands of probiotic before settling on
GB: Dr. Ohhira's and Bio-K+. Six months on Bio-K+ followed by two months on
Dr. Ohhira's. At the same time, I went to a 20 mg / day maximum net
carbohydrate, high-fat, moderate protein diet. I used testing strips to verify
that I actually went into ketosis, and cycled to a 100 mg net carbohydrate day
once 1-2 months to break weight loss plateaus. So before you "follow in my
footsteps" and commit to a year of GB, be aware I had confounding factors that
might also explain what happened to me (the ketogenic diet is the next
candidate for a cause, but I've never heard of anyone being able to eat spicy
foods again by starting that diet).

If I had the time and access, I'd pay to try bacteriotherapy using donor
material from an athletic donor who likes spicy food. I suspect
bacteriotherapy is good for more than just CDI.

The GB guys are super helpful and friendly, and you go month-to-month. I found
suspending or cancelling super easy and hassle-free. So if you are curious to
partake in your own N=1 experiment on gut microbiome reconstitution for just a
month (though they themselves say don't count on any changes before within
months), I encourage you to try it out and share your results.

------
dualogy
On a cellular level for most all animal life, "nature"/evolution doesn't care
about a long healthy _post-reproductive_ lifespan (there was never and
couldn't be reproductive selection pressure for that) --- since most everyone
can handle western diet approximately up to their reproductive/prime age
without adverse effects on their reproductive capacity, I see no "derailing of
evolution". Heck, evolution is a never-ending series of derailings by
definition.

Sure, they breed kids with a gut flora that deals with indigestable cellulose
even worse than previous generations, but will they make it to their own
reproductive prime age? Chances are, they will.

Which is all "evolution" cares about, harsh as it may sound.

~~~
erispoe
There is very much pressure for that. Natural selection is just about passing
genes to the next generations. If by living longer you can increase the
safety, and the reproductive success, of your offsprings, you select for that.

Reproductive success in a natural selection context is not only about the
sheer number of offsprings you have, it's about how good you can disseminate
genes to the next generations. If genetic mutations allow you to increase that
dissemination by caring for your offsprings, then it's selected.

~~~
dualogy
I'm not saying parents are programmed to fall over and die exactly the moment
they have sucessfully reproduced, clearly in those species incl us only the
offspring of caring+longer-lived parents have survived to reproduce themselves
--- past that prime age we just lose that comparative youthful invincibility
against "environmental stress and accumulated damage and the resulting ever-
accelerating degeneration" (incl "western diet") because there never was
selection pressure favouring people who thrive well into old age and age in
supreme health on any chow or fodder without suffering severe degeneration and
disease.

~~~
erispoe
"there never was selection pressure favouring people who thrive well into old
age and age in supreme health on any chow or fodder without suffering severe
degeneration and disease"

Can you back that up? Actually having living healthy grand-parents can be a
boon to reproductive success: they can take care of kids, while parents are
out hunting or gathering. So yes, if you have genetic mutations favoring
living old enough to be grand-parents, it is subject to selection pressure.

Plus, it's been a while since we started caring for old people. In that
context, because evolution is all about context, having healthy elderly is
also a boon to reproductive success since it doesn't divert resources from
child care to elderly care.

Any genetic mutation that is expressed and results into higer reproductive
success in a specific context is subject to selection.

------
jerryhuang100
Does this mean someday the cross-population fecal transplantation might be a
thing in the future? Say at GNC there would be varieties of "Tanzanian
Microbiota Pill" or "Burkina Faso Immune Boosting Smoothie".

~~~
pjlegato
I'm sure there are 5 startups already hard at work on packaging up exotic
feces and delivering it by bicycle via an on-demand mobile app.

~~~
maxxxxx
It will be drone delivery. And nobody will dare shooting them down!

------
myth_drannon
Each part of the world developed a fitting diet. You couldn't expect a Russian
to have fiber rich diet, it's mostly fat and proteins you can get during the
long winters. I'm curious about the role of these bacteria as an anti-
inflamantory. I know many adult immigrants coming to Canada started to have
hay fever in matter of couple of years since their arrival. Big drop in gut
flora as a result of a diet change?

~~~
ovi256
Russians and Eastern Europeans eat vegetables, even in winter, at almost every
meal. But these are veggies that are easy to store through the winter: root
veggies like beetroot, cabbage and potatoes, not leafy stuff like letuce or
cress, which obviously does not store. The Americans stereotypes about this
part of their diet is indeed true. They also like to have fruit for desert,
even for feasts, sometimes offered before pastries or cakes. They associate
Christmas with eating sweet oranges or clementines as well, not just cakes or
meats.

~~~
xentronium
> _Russians and Eastern Europeans eat vegetables, even in winter, at almost
> every meal. But these are veggies that are easy to store through the winter:
> root veggies like beetroot, cabbage and potatoes, not leafy stuff like
> letuce or cress, which obviously does not store._

Also, food conservation! Pickled veggies and sauerkraut have always been
stapled foods for me.

Speaking of diets. During the last ten-fifteen years people in Russia have
developed a taste for fresh vegetables and fruit available immediately from
the supermarket shelves. This trend is being reversed quite quickly due to
skyrocketed prices (and the ridiculous embargo on agricultural production from
eu and some other selected countries). Well, back to dachas, I guess.

------
viach
It just added another criteria to natural selection process, not derailed
anything

------
debacle
This is an anti-fat, anti-meat rant guised as journalism with a noble savage
and quasi-scientific tint.

~~~
noondip
I am intrigued - what is the argument to be made for a pro-fat, pro-meat diet?

~~~
clock_tower
I would expect the Atkins and Paleo diets, and the controversies around them,
to be a good starting point -- or even Gary Taubes' _Good Calories, Bad
Calories_.

~~~
noondip
I've found quite a detailed and critical review of Tabues. What do you think
of [http://plantpositive.com/1-the-journalist-gary-
taubes-1/](http://plantpositive.com/1-the-journalist-gary-taubes-1/)

------
tomcam
Far fewer babies die at birth and our life expectancy is, what, twice what it
was historically?

~~~
loco5niner
Unfortunately, due to abortion, I wonder if more babies die than before...

------
timrpeterson
And so what?

------
jzwinck
Search for "evolution" in this article and you will find nothing about the
headline topic. Just a couple token mentions of how things are different now
than during most of our evolution--a fancy way of saying "before."

Rather than derailing our evolution, the "Western Diet" _is part of_ our
evolution. Our children's hair does not fall out due to malnutrition, and
that's pretty cool (if you want to see a place where it does, go to Papua,
where they do a mostly simple vegetarian diet like the Burkina Faso folks
praised in this article).

As for the "Western" part of the headline...a diet lower in fibre and higher
in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia, which
happen to be two of the largest countries in the world, and very much in the
East. So don't feel too bad about which hemisphere you were born in.

~~~
bad_user
Modern processed food managed to increase our daily calories intake while
decreasing the essential nutrients that we need. Malnutrition is becoming a
problem again and worse, for the first time in history you can see overweight
kids that are malnourished. And I disagree that the "western diet" has
anything to do with our wins against malnutrition.

> _a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be
> found in China and Indonesia_

On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions? The normal diet in China
and Indonesia is plant based. Yes, they eat a lot of rice, but that rice is
much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached,
white flour that we call bread nowadays.

And don't mistake the food that you can eat in your local Chinese restaurant
to what the Chinese are actually eating. For example much of the food promoted
in western Chinese restaurants (at least the ones where I've been) is
unbelievably greasy and sweet. But guess what, the food being eaten in China
is not sweet, sugar and soy sauce being used only sparingly in only some meat-
based dishes, but that's not the norm.

Also singling out one nutrient or another is reductionist science and
represents everything that's wrong with western nutrition and health-care.
Remember cholesterol? That was a fucking fiasco for which the medical
community never apologized for. We need more Omega-3? Sure, put some in the
supermarket sliced bread. Does our food have so much high-fructose corn syrup
or other corn derived substances in it, that we can effectively be called the
corn people? Oh, point to the Chinese for also eating sweat stuff. Do the
French eat saturated fats and wash it with wine? Call it a paradox.

~~~
mmorris
>> The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based.

Speaking of a group of about 1.6 billion people as if they were a monolith is
not particularly productive.

Just looking at China itself, there is huge variation in the "average" diets
between different provinces (e.g., Shanghainese dishes tend to be sweeter,
Sichuanese dryer and spicier, etc.). And even at that provincial level it's
kind of silly to lump everyone into a single average.

~~~
dghughes
I find it funny when people see China as a single country imagine if someone
referred to Europe with all its cultures as a single culture who all ate the
same thing. Now picture China with probably 5,000 years of culture must be
immensely more diverse.

~~~
muddyrivers
Exactly. I am kind of annoyed when people assume I speak Cantonese simply
because I am Chinese. Cantonese speakers only constitute 5% of total Chinese
population. Nobody assume if you are European, then you speak Italian.

------
adventured
This is an entirely moot premise.

Human evolution is no longer in the hands of nature in the sense that people
most commonly think of it. It will never be again.

We've taken over direct control of our evolution. That's not an exaggeration,
it's a fact of our present circumstances. These are the early days, yes, but
non-the-less. The time scale of meaningful human evolution is about to shift
from tens of thousands of years, to decades.

In that time we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove
countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly. The
technology will accelerate at an incredible pace from here, becoming very
common; leading edge CRISPR knowledge and capabilities today will be laughable
in 30 years.

Our evolution has done anything but been derailed, it's about to leap forward.

Who here really thinks humans ~500 years from now, will have much in common
with humans of today? I don't think what exists at that point will be
reasonably considered human at all, as we know the term. Nothing can really
stop that outcome except an extinction event. The only question is what we
become, not whether we change; and taking over control of our evolution is
part of that.

~~~
meric
Newborns of wild animals raised in captivity cannot be released back to the
wild, because they lack the survival skills they could otherwise have learnt
from their parents. It is true with many species - a species' accumulated and
inherited knowledge, passed down generation to generation, about how to
survive and thrive in the environment, is _part of_ that species' evolution
history. This apply to humans as well as to almost all other animals. It is
misguided to think human evolution is "not in the hands of nature", because
the accumulated inherited knowledge we have about the world, the capital we
build that is passed down to our children, and technology we implement, are
part and parcel of nature itself. Are our bodies nature? Are our gut bacteria
nature? Do our neurons work apart from nature? Is the tendency to want to be
"better than the joneses" to attract a better mate ourselves, or help our
children to do so, part of nature, or an artificial phenomenon? What about our
desires to live in shelter of our construction, impulse to educate our
children, to pass them what we have and improve their ability to thrive? I
think all of these behaviours are nature in and of itself, and because all
things we do spring from nature, those things _are nature too_ , even down to
our computers and any AI we may build in the future - because products of
nature is nature itself.

 _Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world
or universe_ [1] If humans are separate from the universe, then where does the
universe end, and we begin?

However, besides this nitpick, I agree with all your points. In the future,
nature will select some genes based on their fitness _as predicted by nature_
, as well as actual fitness at the current moment.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature)

~~~
kbatten
Surely there is also instinct at play here. A cat raised in captivity still
can hunt mice and if its released into the wild it could survive and
reproduce. And of course there is the famous california condor story where
they are now all either raise in captivity or decedents of those.

~~~
meric
_Survival data were available for 169 kittens. Overall, 127 of the 169 (75%)
kittens died (n = 87) or disappeared (40) before 6 months of age. ...Eighty-
one of the 169 (48%) kittens died or disappeared before they were 100 days
old._

Well, some of them are bound to make it...
[http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/9571/can-cats-
surviv...](http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/9571/can-cats-survive-in-
the-wilderness)

------
knodi123
You know what _really_ derailed our evolution? Western medicine. Those pesky
doctors have virtually ended the selection pressure against people with
myopia, or those who are vulnerable to pneumonia.

If we really wanna get evolution back on course, we need to start letting the
weak die. Personally, I think that sounds awful, and I think derailing our
evolution is a small price to pay.

~~~
raimondious
That's why the concept of "derailing" evolution is silly. There's no set
course for evolution to be derailed from... in fact that's the entire basis of
the concept of evolution. Diet and medicine are just evolutionary pressure,
just like every other part of the environment since life began.

------
dschiptsov

      s/Western Diet/Western Food Industry/

