In fact, vitamin deficiencies are rare, unless you do something outlandish like settle and live on crops. The reason humans need so many vitamins in the first place is that we could easily get them, so could easily drop synthetizing them to put more resources in growing brains to outsmart each other. Most animals need fewer vitamines.
I'm not aware of either a similar trade-off, much less a similar change in conditions (disease would have to become rare before agriculture, then common again), with disease.
I've also heard a plausible argument that agriculture results in much less mineral content in the soil. Note that organic agriculture as usually defined isn't going to solve the problem-- the manure from animals eating plants from lower mineral soil doesn't get the mineral level back up.
Nothing but deliberately putting minerals back (which ones? how much?) or another glacial period is going to change the situation.
I don't think evolution always compensates for changed conditions-- sometimes the pathways aren't available, sometimes the lucky chance doesn't ...
In a different forum I frequent ( The Ornery American ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.
I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.
Here are some of the relevant threads he began:
- where he requests contacts
- where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book
- where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments
Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.
So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?