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News & ArtsMonday, March 11, 2013
Science Clogged Arteries Are Not So New to the Human World
Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 4:00 PM
Nature...
Clogged arteries are seen as the quintessential symptom of an unhealthy modern lifestyle. But the condition was common across the ancient world, even among active hunter–gatherers with no access to junk food, a study of mummies has found.You are thinking what I thought when reading this post: It's not that surprising because those in the ruling class, those who, like us, had lots of food and drink, where the ones who were mummified. But...“There’s a belief that if we go back in time, everything’s going to be OK,” says cardiologist Greg Thomas of the University of California, Irvine, a senior member of the study team. “But these mummies still have coronary artery disease.” The paper is published in the current issue of The Lancet1.
The researchers say that they found a level of disease equivalent to that in modern populations — a result Thomas describes as “a shock”.
“[The scientists] scanned the common man and woman and they’ve got the same disease,” says Thomas. Rather than excess cholesterol, he suggests that high levels of inflammation — caused by smoke inhalation or chronic infection, for instance — may have triggered the disease in these individuals.There are two reason why I'm quick to side with these findings: one, if true, they will deal a considerable blow to the adaptive-lag hypothesis that's so popular in the evolutionary psychology world. (Those who agree with the ALH argue that our bodies were made for the wild and difficult Pleistocene environments and not, say, the comforts of the city, which are all new and alien to us.) And two, it might show that at least some of this talk about what is and is not healthy is mere moralizing, a kind of Christianity by other means.
2
While I appreciate knowing exactly what predispositions are coloring your interpretation of the data, exactly how old are these mummies? The linked story seems vague on this point. Are they actually old enough to contradict ALH?
3
at least some of this talk about what is and is not healthy is mere moralizing, a kind of Christianity by other means.
Yes.
Yes.
4
Or, it could be a succinct way of stating that evolution didn't give a shit what happened to us after the age of 40.
5
“We’ve oversold the ability to stop heart disease,” he says. “We can slow it down, but to think we can prevent it is unrealistic.”
^^^THIS^^^
^^^THIS^^^
6
Clogged arteries are usually a symptom of high cholesterol which comes only from animal protein. We have had clogged arteries as long as we have been eating meat. This is not news.
7
@6 -- but, but, cavemen ate meat and cavemen were so healthy because we evolved to be cavemen so we should ignore dietary studies and just do what the cavemen did, after all, it worked so well for them ...
8
@ 6, the mummies came from different parts of the world and ate different diets. Heart disease is often hereditary. It's not nearly as simple as you would like to believe.
9
#7, better watch out 'cause if you dis' what cavemen ate then the paleo-diet people will be after you.
10
@4 I'll tell that to the Pharoah Ramses who had lots of children in his 70s and 80s.
One question would be, would a Toltec diet prove more useful than a Paleo diet, @9, since it allows you small amounts of unprocessed sugars and chocolate, as well as raw meats in small amounts? The common breakfast for the last few hundred years in many parts of Europe and America included songbirds - people put out nets and ate them.
One question would be, would a Toltec diet prove more useful than a Paleo diet, @9, since it allows you small amounts of unprocessed sugars and chocolate, as well as raw meats in small amounts? The common breakfast for the last few hundred years in many parts of Europe and America included songbirds - people put out nets and ate them.
11
@4: We are one of few species where we tend to live significantly past our reproductive prime. It's mostly because of the "grandmother effect", in which older adults help raise grandchildren, indirectly improving their evolutionary fitness by helping their children become better parents.
12
The human body was not designed. It evolved. There is an important distinction there to be made, in that design implies that it's complex processes all serve logical ends. They don't.
We grow hair whilst int he womb that covers our entire fetal body, and then lose it. We grow gills in said state, and then lose those too. We retain vestigial organs such as the appendix and the coccyx, remnants of times when these played a prominent role. Men have nipples. We grow body hair, but not enough to serve a useful purpose. And even if we could produce enough to provide any degree of warmth, we don't do so at the time of lives when our bodies are most vulnerable to cold.
Human evolution is more of a random rather than a directional path. Mutations arise that are mostly deleterious, occasionally helpful. Some, like the HbS gene are both-inherit one copy and you are immune to malaria. Inherit both, and you have sickle cell anemia.
This is hardly the result of design.
We grow hair whilst int he womb that covers our entire fetal body, and then lose it. We grow gills in said state, and then lose those too. We retain vestigial organs such as the appendix and the coccyx, remnants of times when these played a prominent role. Men have nipples. We grow body hair, but not enough to serve a useful purpose. And even if we could produce enough to provide any degree of warmth, we don't do so at the time of lives when our bodies are most vulnerable to cold.
Human evolution is more of a random rather than a directional path. Mutations arise that are mostly deleterious, occasionally helpful. Some, like the HbS gene are both-inherit one copy and you are immune to malaria. Inherit both, and you have sickle cell anemia.
This is hardly the result of design.
13
@11: I understand that your point is the conventional wisdom where human evolution is concerned. And I am saying perhaps this study challenges that.
14
I think Esselstyn and Ornish's data are pretty convincing: a diet of 10% of calories from fat = no heart disease.
15
I'm always suspicious of the phrase "the human body wasn't made for this". The human body wasn't made to eat weath, drink milk, wear shoes, sit on a chair. Well, the human body wasn't made for vaccines and antibiotics either. e_e
17
@16 using a different definition doesn't make the other person wrong. And if we were to get pedantic, it was made, just by a complex system of processes which continue even today, not by a sky dude.
19
Wow. Talk about cherry picking a very rough, very tenuous, and veeeery specific data point to support your completely unrelated bias.
Medical science has never claimed that coronary artery disease is a new thing. It is in fact a biologically predicted outcome of living X numer of years while eating X. The idea is that primitive peoples usually died of infectious disease, trauma, malnutrition, exposure, and violence long before the net effects of coronary artery disease would manifest fatally.
I'd be curious as to what exactly you mean by "this talk about what is and is not healthy is mere moralizing?" Because THAT sounds like another sort of moralizing - the kind you use to rationalize.
Gee. I wonder if "what is considered not healthy" coincides to your own lifestyle and thus you're desperate for any sort of spurious validation and justification for said lifestyle? Noooooo. Not that.
Go get some exercise already, Charles. It is scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be good for you.
Medical science has never claimed that coronary artery disease is a new thing. It is in fact a biologically predicted outcome of living X numer of years while eating X. The idea is that primitive peoples usually died of infectious disease, trauma, malnutrition, exposure, and violence long before the net effects of coronary artery disease would manifest fatally.
I'd be curious as to what exactly you mean by "this talk about what is and is not healthy is mere moralizing?" Because THAT sounds like another sort of moralizing - the kind you use to rationalize.
Gee. I wonder if "what is considered not healthy" coincides to your own lifestyle and thus you're desperate for any sort of spurious validation and justification for said lifestyle? Noooooo. Not that.
Go get some exercise already, Charles. It is scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be good for you.
21
almost any point in the past was healthier for the average human. dropped into 1860 for instance; to survive you likely become tom sawyer smoking a pipe under an apple tree catching all the fish you can eat. Dropped into todays world you get in the soup line, get a job selling illicit medicine which results in the tedious slavery of imprisonment. [Or you could get a good parka and move to sarah palins backyard where one could still conceivably subsistence fish]
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