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Viliam_Bur comments on Optimal eating (or rather, a step in the right direction) - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
Optimal nutrition brings up the issue of human biodiversity, though in other contexts social justice warriors call this "racism" and "pseudoscience." If you have a fairly uniform ancestry, like my relatedness to British and Irish populations as a white Southerner, at least according to what 23andMe tells me, then I have the advantage of studying ethnically similar people for some ideas about optimal diets.
But what should you do if your parents or grandparents come from remote branches of the human species which didn't have the opportunity to interbreed until fairly recently? Seems like you might have conflicting genetics for your diet based on the fact that people in different places evolved to survive on the radically foods available in their local ecosystems.
An interesting point, but a bad way of saying it.
I find it credible that people with different genes could have different optimal diets. How much of those difference would be between different ethnic groups, and how much would be between individuals within the same group, I have no idea. I also have no idea how much "what my ancestors ate" is close to "what would be optimal for me to eat". Also, I have no idea whether a diet optimized for a specific human would be significantly better than a diet optimized for an average human, compared with the improvement we would get by switching from an average first-world diet today.
I would like to see this question answered, preferably by someone who already doesn't have their bottom line written either way.
(A few random thoughts: Food allergies suggest that at least some individuals need wildly different diets than their neighbors. I would expect ethnic group differences in eating dairy products, and in vitamin D requirements. If Soylent becomes popular among people from different ethnic groups, we could get some nice data.)
Also, I'm curious if hybrid vigor might give people of mixed descent some advantages, as well.
Food allergies are basically immune issues, and what I've read of them suggests that they're more likely to come from environment (the immune system gets antsy and starts attacking random harmless compounds when it doesn't have enough actual pathogens to shoot at) than genetics as such, so I think they're probably a non-starter here.
There's plenty of non-allergic variation in what different populations can handle food-wise, though; lactose intolerance and the alcohol flush reaction caused by differences in aldehyde dehydrogenase expression are the first two I can think of. These are often uncontroversially linked to ethnicity: lactose intolerance for example is very common outside North or Central European, North Indian, and certain African populations, and the alcohol flush reaction is a mainly East Asian phenomenon.