> There are all sorts of foods that are terrible from a health perspective, but get grandfathered into a culture because they became popular before science really caught on.
Yes and no. There is some element of an inherent scientific method involved in having cultures eat various foods for tens of thousands of years and then seeing which ones are still around at the end of the “experiment”
Perhaps there's some effect there, but this idea that more competitively successful cultures have healthier diets is difficult to reconcile with a lot of other memes around health food.
One also has to reckon with the fact that people's health needs were very different a couple hundred years ago. Once upon a time, the greatest health concern was getting enough nutrition. Also, when your life expectancy is 30, you probably don't give a damn that, if by some chance you live to see 70, all those preserved foods you used to get through the winter will end up having increased the chance that the thing that eventually kills you is stomach cancer.
As TFA's hand-wringing about sugar clearly indicates, though, we're just not playing the same game our ancestors did. The major worry nowadays that it is now, uniquely in history, possible for almost anyone's primary health concern to be that they're getting too much of a good thing.
Surely the species of most foods available nowadays are only a couple centuries or decades old?
Plus there's survivor bias: just because population A survived on food X, doesn't mean it won't halve the life expectancy when introduced to population B. E.g. high calory foods in the oceania populations caused obesity.
Yes and no. There is some element of an inherent scientific method involved in having cultures eat various foods for tens of thousands of years and then seeing which ones are still around at the end of the “experiment”