Randaly comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Cyan 17 December 2013 08:43PM

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Comment author: Randaly 25 December 2013 08:53:08AM 3 points [-]

Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are ... well-fed

You mean well-fed in the sense of "not starving," but that doesn't imply "well-fed" in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There's reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there's good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.

Comment author: Sophronius 26 December 2013 11:43:30AM 8 points [-]

I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:

-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 December 2013 06:51:28AM 2 points [-]

But they weren't consuming huge amounts of unstable polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils, either.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 January 2014 07:49:41PM 0 points [-]
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 January 2014 08:31:40PM 0 points [-]

Olive oil is only 10% PUFA and I doubt they were getting 10% of calories from olive oil. Benefits of PUFA are at much lower doses, or in the case of Omega-3 making up for huge O3/O6 imbalances.