
The mid-Victorian diet was a mini golden age of nutrition - agarden
https://health.spectator.co.uk/forget-paleo-go-mid-victorian-its-the-healthiest-diet-youve-never-heard-of/
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AdmiralAsshat
_Our study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (here, here, and
here) shows that the majority of the Victorian urban poor consumed diets which
were limited, but contained extremely high nutrient density. Bread could be
expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like apples and cherries
were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted for._

Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than
some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and
people will start to eat healthier.

~~~
mmanfrin
My local grocery store (Berkeley Bowl) is very expensive, on par with Whole
Foods -- however their produce department is shockingly cheap. They even have
bags of bruised food that go for 99c and contain a gallon-sized bag of random
fruits or veggies -- and this is at the super expensive local grocer.

Cheap, good food is easy to find. The problem isn't in the pricing of
watercress and cherries, it's that people don't see those as complete meals
and don't want to go through the effort to cook for themselves. Eating poorly
isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier.

~~~
ksenzee
Easier _is_ cheaper. Don't discount the value of the labor required to prepare
all that produce and bring it to the table.

~~~
wwweston
Not just labor -- expertise. Also, do you have access to fully furnished
kitchen? Living out of a car or in a marginal housing situation where a
kitchen isn't available (or you've got a microwave/hotplate and fridge)
changes some of the cooking.

These considerations aren't conclusive, and I'm sure there are people who find
a way to overcome them, and possibly we could use resources that help others
to do so.

But on HN of all places people should understand the power of marginal gains.
And marginal obstacles.

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clock_tower
I'd never heard of this, but it makes sense: satisfying fruits and vegetables
(artichokes, onions, beets, apples, cherries), some bread (whole-grain, I'd
guess), a little meat. Doubtless tea, too, and a little chocolate, but minimal
sugar. This is definitely a diet to keep in mind!

The article's point on life expectancies, also, is timeless. In almost any
era, if you make it to 5 years old, you'll make it to 70. (This was as true in
the Middle Ages as in the mid-Victorian period.) When we see life expectancies
of 30 or 40 years, it's a sign that most people didn't make it to 5...

~~~
cgh
Correction: a lot of meat. The diet was basically animal protein and
vegetables. In their linked studies, the authors make it clear that offal in
particular was consumed far more heavily than today. I guess it was cheaper
than skeletal muscle meat.

~~~
RogtamBar
Offal not only was, but is cheaper than skeletal meat.

Hearts, for example, are good meat. You can get them for 1$ per pound. Tastes
very similar to normal muscle, but it's darker.

Which is why they're always sold out after 11 am..

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Yeah, we used to get chicken livers at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Funny, I'd
forgotten about that until now.

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mcguire
" _A return to mid-Victorian eating habits is not feasible, given their high
calorie intake and our low-energy lifestyles. This would exacerbate our
already alarming rates of overweight and obesity, problems which were uncommon
and mostly confined to the urban upper middle classes in the mid-Victorian
period but which have become major public health concerns today. Instead, we
recommend that the modern diet be re-engineered, integrating the micro- and
phytonutritional elements of the mid-Victorian 3500–4000 calorie /day diet
into the modern 2200 calorie/day diet. [...] The realities of a need to
promote an intake of nutrients at a level not naturally available in today's
2200 calorie/day diet does require the vexed issue of food fortification and
supplements to be included in strategic public health policy formation.
Inevitably, this also means that it will have to be reflected in the
regulatory sphere._"[1]

Possible translation: If you're going to follow a Victorian diet, you need to
get lower- and middle-class Victorian amounts of exercise: enough to support a
3500-4000 calorie/day diet.

Me, I'm personally wondering if the true bottom-line here is that you could
skip the whole diet thing and get the health benefits purely from a high-
exercise lifestyle? (A _very_ high-exercise lifestyle.)

[1] "An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part three: Victorian consumption
patterns and their health benefits".
[[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587384/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587384/)].

~~~
nikatwork
TFA seems to be fingering carbs and sugar as the key issue, rather than total
calories.

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pjlegato
If you'd like to know what the daily life of mid-Victorian poor people was
like in excruciating detail, check out "London Labour and the London Poor" by
Henry Mayhew:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_Poor)

A major point of interest is that the oceans had not yet been overfished, so
fresh fish was an abundant and extremely cheap source of protein that formed a
major constituent of most poor people's diet at the time.

~~~
HillaryBriss
yes. and i suspect that one must pay more today for meat from animals that are
comparable to those in Victorian times.

our cows, pigs and chickens are fed differently than they were back then. and
it's not just a matter of feed quality. it's a matter of new ingredients (e.g.
some chickens are fed small amounts of arsenic to change their flesh color and
as an antibiotic for certain diseases. and who knows what the hell goes into
farmed fresh water fish - it's literally animal sewage and garbage on some
farms in certain parts of the world.)

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WorldMaker
I could imagine choosing to describe one's diet as Mid-Victorian solely for
the bonus points it would earn one at the next Steampunk meetup.

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alvern
>"In the 1870s Victorian health was challenged by cheap sugar and the first
generation of mass-processed high-salt and high-sugar foods. This dragged
urban health and life expectancy to a nadir around 1900 — a date that
consequently provides a highly misleading baseline. (The trend was even
reflected in people’s height. The minimum height for infantry was lowered from
5ft 6in to 5ft 3in, then later to 5ft, in just two decades.)"

High salt and high sugar led to a shrinking height. Could this be applied to
how the average height is rising in the US?

~~~
bglazer
> The minimum height for infantry was lowered from 5ft 6in to 5ft 3in, then
> later to 5ft, in just two decades.

I suspect this has way more to do with WWI than cheap sugar.

~~~
rjsw
The problems in recruiting healthy men were seen for the Boer Wars, long
before WWI.

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ergothus
The comments on the article are quire interesting, at least to me, as they
show a community that is very confident (even when they disagree with each
other) about broad food "right-ness".

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backtoyoujim
The English show "The Supersizer" did a great take on the Victorian diet. Too
bad that it is not on their youtube channel because it is on many other
youtube channels.

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mhartl
_Forget paleo, go mid-Victorian

[…]

Bread could be expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like
apples and cherries were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted
for. Beetroot was eaten all year round; Jerusalem artichokes were often home-
grown. Fish such as herrings and meat in some form (scraps, chops and even
joints) were common too._

So, a diet with little to no bread that's focused on vegetables and meat
(including fish)—sounds pretty paleo to me.

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mcguire
Call me cynically suspicious, but reading the related articles makes me think
this is intended to indirectly support the supplement industry.

" _[To provide remedies for the appalling state of our health,] Look, instead,
to the food and beverage industries, and to a lesser extent the supplement
companies, who may well step up to the plate with better designed foods and
nutritional programmes once the currently profoundly counter-productive
regulatory system has been re-drafted._ "[1]

Key parts of the argument seem to be that the Victorian diet was better, not
necessarily because of the types of foods, but because of the large amounts of
micro- and phytonutritional elements ingested. It's not possible to make use
of the massive caloric intake today, so...pills.

[1] How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died. Paul Clayton and Judith
Rowbotham.
[[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/)].

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agarden
In my opinion, the interesting thing about the article is not the diet, it is
the claim that if you remove death during and shortly after childbirth, mid-
Victorian era life expectancy was about the same as ours now. If true, that's
a startling counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of modern medicine's
triumph.

~~~
solipsism
Quality of life should be considered as well.

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xiaoma
Why is everyone on this thread so obsessed with protein? If there's anything
most western diets have a surplus of compared to traditional Asian or African
diets, it's protein. Unless you're a vegan who likes junk food over whole
foods, it shouldn't be a problem.

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zkhalique
I'm sorry but what in the article actually makes a solid body of evidence in
support of its thesis?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
It may be worth pointing out that this is an article intended for a broad
audience, not a scholarly work on PubMed.

But I do agree that providing some links to actual data, at the end, would
have been useful.

~~~
cgh
The start of paragraph six provides three links to related studies.

