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Water bottles were designed[0] to be easy to use. Our digestive system (and everything else about us) are a series of hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks that happened to make their carriers more likely to have descendants.

That an abundance of simple sugars is novel in our diets is at least weakly suggestive that we will be poorly adapted to them. There's even evidence for this; in general the shorter a time a population has had agriculture the higher the prevalence of (Type 2) diabetes. Aboriginies, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans all have way, way higher rates than Asians or Europeans. The Arab world has had agriculture for at least as long as anyone else and they have diabetes out the wazoo though in the more developed parts, perhaps a side effect of really, really liking sweet tea and incredibly sweet treats.

[0] Designed things and evolved things are not even remotely equivalent in an argument about evolutionary changes. Minds can make things better ludicrously faster than the Blind Idiot God.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/




You seem to have found a weird comparison that I didn't intend in my comment. The point I was trying to make is that the man-made thing, water bottles, is better suited to our evolved hands than the natural thing, free-flowing water. Similarly, there is no reason why any food we made ourselves is likely to be worse for our evolved body than any food that was around when the digestive system evolved. That idea, that "paleo" foods are inherently better for us, feels right, but is ultimately fallacious. (I mean, some might turn out to actually be ideal, but it isn't deductively true in the way that many advocates want it to be.)


> there is no reason why any food we made ourselves is likely to be worse for our evolved body than any food that was around when the digestive system evolved

Of course there is. Take an organism, throw it into a random environment. Chances are that it's not going to do as well as it would in the one that it's evolved for.

That's essentially what we're doing when we eat a modern diet - sugar, starch, wheat, beans, etc. are not what we ate when we were hunter-gatherers. It's not particularly surprising that it causes lots of weird and/or bad side-effects.




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