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Old Wed, Mar-29-17, 22:44
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Zoe says "Heart disease is a disease of civilization". Without context, we could easily fall into the trap of concluding that civilization causes heart disease, then look for specific factors which make a civilization and blame that in part, i.e. smoking, industrial chemicals, "stress" (whatever that means), etc. The proper context is "diseases of civilization", always with comparison to traditional populations as in Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, because it's not just one disease, it's a whole bunch of them and they always come together, and because it's not some factor or other out of many depending on the specific disease, it's the same factor for all diseases.

This factor is sugar and wheat.

For example, smoking. Do we have to be reminded that civilization is not where smoking tobacco came from? Granted, smoking may be a contributor for a particular disease or two, but we can still suffer all the same diseases of civilization to the same degree even if we never inhaled a single smoke particle, so long as we ate enough sugar and wheat for long enough. Which means, for our purpose with the Tsimane, if we remove or significantly reduce sugar and wheat at the population level, smoking to any degree is going to have almost zero impact on outcomes for its related disease of civilization, i.e. heart disease, because smoking ain't it.

I could also argue that hammers are the primary cause of thumb injuries, and we would certainly see a strong correlation between the total number of hammers and thumb injury incidence, but what if we also looked at time-to-heal (which means infection incidence and so forth because wound stays open and allows nasties to go deeper) and found that somehow it wasn't so cut and dry? Well, we can't blame hammers for that, but we could blame sugar and wheat for example, through a simple direct causality sequence where growth hormone is essential to healing, hyperglycemia inhibits growth hormone, sugar and wheat cause hyperglycemia.

Zoe says "The level of physical activity is significant."

But completely, utterly, and absolutely inconsequential. Health leads to physical activity, not the other way around.

For the rest of her post, maybe, I only skimmed it for the obvious.
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