> Sure, but this is also the nirvana fallacy; just because the food available to you isn't 100% perfectly "natural" doesn't mean that it's bad/wrong or that you shouldn't strive to eat as natural as possible anyways.

I think the point is that our conception of which foods are the most "natural" isn't really coherent in the first place.

"It could be better" is not the nirvana fallacy.

But why? Your body doesn't care if the nutrients it gets are from naturally grown animals and plants or from a lab or factory, provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities. It all gets broken down to its constituent components anyway.

> provided they are the right nutrients in the right quantities

But isn’t that the tricky part: how do you figure out what is “right”? If you eat synthesized sugar and vitamin C in place of an orange, is it really the same thing? Perhaps the fiber or some other minerals in the orange affect how your body processes and digests the nutrients.

Nutrition is pretty complex and until we know what “right” is, I’d think it’s generally a safer bet to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years, rather than recently devised nutritive cocktails.

Actually there is reason to not prefer foods that we have evolved with because we may have evolved short term trade offs for reproduction that happen to be bad for us long term.

Classic example being how evolving with meat doesn’t make saturated fat good for us in the long term. And, further, replacing it with modern unsaturated fats (like canola oil) improves health outcomes. Your heuristic of "we've eaten it for a long time so it must be better" doesn't capture that.

Frankly, it seems inevitable that the optimal diet (one that maximizes health through all stages of life) will be a modern artificial one since it seems at its root just a technological problem. But we certainly aren't there yet where we can replace an orange with a synthetic orange pill. That is an interesting world to ponder though.

> to stick with foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds or thousands of years

Most modern foods (including unprocessed meat and plants) have only been around for a few hundred years or so.

I'd take a few hundred over a few. My concern, as another commenter suggested, is mostly around radical changes without any longevity in testing or understanding. Even though a lot of our "natural" foods were created via artificial selection, it's a process that happened over many generations. When it comes to food and nutrition, my gut tells me to generally prefer slow over fast.

Personally I also think there is a big difference between selective breeding, and distilling foods into constituent parts in order to recombine in various ways. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but I don't fully trust humans to understand and play that part of nature just yet.

I think he is concerned about revolutionary change, i.e. processed food and artificial suppliments. Bread that is not actually bread.

Not evolutionary change - a. different variery of wheat in your bread.

That's their point, that we should probably not be eating "modern foods".

Absolutely. But it's important to note that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to consume naturally occurring foods. Now, as we've started to create and consume foods with characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history, such as highly processed foods, it's evident that this can indeed cause problems.

> Absolutely. But it's important to note that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to consume naturally occurring foods. Now, as we've started to create and consume foods with characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history, such as highly processed foods, it's evident that this can indeed cause problems.

I think the original point is that virtually everything we eat has "characteristics unfamiliar to our evolutionary history" because the animals and plants we eat have been bred for various characteristics so extensively, so simply avoiding "highly processed foods" doesn't meant that we're eating the types or quantities of foods that humans would have for almost our entire existence

Modern sourdough made of modern wheat is not very different to sourdough that was eaten in ancient Egypt.

But nobody evolved to eat large quantities of deep fried chicken.

It really depends.

Did your ancestors really eat sourdough for thousands of years in ancient Egypt, or were they hunters or fishermen until more recent times? Agriculture was common but there are societies that don't depend on agriculture, even today.

I think that's debatable! Sure, some foods with a lot of additives are problematic, but so is lots of red meat. Plus there's loads of other ways in which we've digressed from what we've evolved to be used to. Like sleeping on mattresses. Its reasonable to use "natural" as a weak guiding factor, but not for it to override current scientific understanding.