Comment on Rational Health Optimization

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:10:07 GMT

I should have worded it differently. The idea comes not from some known interaction between the different mechanisms, but the unknowns.

For example, until fairly recently, typical medical advice included recommendations such as : eating a lower fat, lower cholestrol diet, staying out of the sun and using sun screen, etc. This advice was based on sound specific knowledge at the time.

Compare that advice to general paleolithic diet/lifestyle advice and we now know of a large number of specific failings in that older advice. They all stem essentially from a fundemental rationality error in over-estimating our knowledge of health, and underestimating our ignorance.

So I didn't mean to imply the full benefit was from some known set of interactions, but rather the full benefit comes from all the unknowns - there is still great deals of uncertainty about many of the interactions between sunlight, vitamin D, weight, metabolism, cancer, etc etc.

In the face of all this uncertainty, the general evolutionary principle has proven to have a timeless advantage in expected outcome. However, this doesn't mean that strong specific evidence for benefits from specifc un-paleolithic behaviours shouldn't be considered. For example, it's pretty clear that brushing your teeth and flossing is good for health, even if it's strictly speaking, unpaleolithic.

Perhaps the web-connection I was referring to is just as simple as summer vs winter behaviour, and our lack of sunlight and vitamin D is causing a perpetual metabolic winter (with associated weight gain and metabolic syndrome and a host of other weak disease associations). Perhaps so, but we don't really know yet.

Discuss