Ancestral Health, Actually

The Case for Anti-Nutritionism, Part 2

Is respecting our shared humanity and restoring pride and dignity in our physical capability the key to an endemic health crisis?

Photo by Justin Hu on Unsplash

Last week I cracked open some ideas as to why the health and fitness industry has become religiously, politically, morally, and vindictively obsessed with nutrition in spite of mounds of evidence supporting more holistic interventions for lifespan and healthspan.

However, I certainly don’t want to be a complainer. That’s easy, and there’s plenty of it online. I want to present some possible opportunities for resolution and some actionable ideas that we can move forward with.

So, here we go!

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Opportunities for Resolution:

Ignored Variables:

A truly “ancestral lifestyle” incorporates much more than food — nature, community, spirituality, play, etc. This is well documented in the work of Herman Pontzer regarding lifestyles of the Hadza. Further, this illustrates that humans evolved to be such effective hunters and gatherers that we’re afforded the privilege to learn how to play and think rather than simply exert all movement towards curating food. Notably, this is a trait that seems present across virtually all mammals.

We see this effect also pan out across Western cultures — cue the Roseto Effect. In the 50’s and 60’s a group of Italian-Americans living in Pennsylvania had a notably long and healthy lifespan despite smoking, drinking, and eating lots of lard and meat. What happened in the intervening 30 years as traditional family and community cohesion eroded? Mortality and cardiovascular disease rates skyrocketed even as lard was swapped for “heart healthy vegetable oils".”

Further, we see modern research (Mandsager, 2018; Argentieri, 2025) noting that:

“17% of variation in risk of death” is related to environmental factors, and of those 25 environmental factors the most potent were “smoking, socioeconomic status, physical activity, and living conditions.” The only diet related item in the Top 25 Index is “cheese intake” at number 23.

If we were to bring so-called “Blue Zones” into this discussion we would do well to note that in such communities they exhibit many of the the protective factors in those Top 25; again noting that their longevity benefits are certainly not just from diet any more than they are just from pharmacology.

Respecting Humanity:

I have vegan friends. We hang out together, sometimes eat together. You know what we almost never talk about? Food. And if we do it’s from the perspective of curiosity, not judgment or sabotage.

The world has never quite recovered from the dividedness of the COVID era, and I want to give a few political examples, not to derail this article, but to exemplify how nutrition has become a proxy war for deeper cultural and moral anxieties.

Welcome to the front pews of in-authenticity. On one side we have Andrew Tate — facing over a dozen charges of rape and human trafficking — and Brian “Liver King” Johnson — who profited 10s of millions of dollars lying to the suicidal children he allegedly wanted to inspire.

On the other side we have the “healthy at any size” and so-called “body positivity” folks featuring Amy Schumer who deleted her “fat pics” (her words) from Instagram after starting Ozempic and Lizzo has be caught at least a few times photo-shopping her new “fit pics.”

We all must partake in consuming food for our survival. There is no such thing as a “bloodless diet.” The cost of life continuing is the consumption of other (life) energy — healthy plants don’t grow without fungi and bacteria decomposing other dead plants and animals.

Nevertheless, such practices need not become our sole / soul identity. There are so many other (good) reasons to befriend and interact with someone. On that note…

Time Stacking:

We spend a lot of time shopping for, planning, prepping, and eating food. What if we spent just as much time, perhaps an hour or two per day, moving (exercising) and socializing (in person, not online)?

Even better, what if we did those things in conjunction with each other?! We’d likely see an exponential rather than additive effect — the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts!

We also don’t need to condemn ourselves to monastic isolation. Loneliness is often, though not always, a perception. Your friends don’t care if you order a burger without the bun or get a salad instead of fries. The strangers across the room care even less. The wait staff? They’re noticing alright, noticing if you pay/tip them appropriately and treat them with kindness.

Which brings us back to that whole respect thing.

Real confidence in and love for yourself comes from experience and starts with respect. If you have to shout to convince me of something, you’ve already lost. Regardless of the chosen proxy, what will you let be the projective siphon for your vitriol and self-loathing?

You will start (and stay) where you spend the most attention. Make it count.

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Real Talk About Food:

As mentioned previously, confirmation bias and all sorts of ex-post-facto, rhetorical ploys, and logical fallacies will be used to justify various dietary practices. However, we must account for and at least consider the very real possibilities that our primal ancestors were wrong and that discordance theory is a very salient hypothesis.

It is objectively true that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease have risen dramatically in the last 30 years, let alone 150 or 10,000 years. While observable indigenous peoples have significantly lower rates of these preventable illnesses, they are also not competing at Olympic levels.

It may be comical to imagine the first caveman that had to suffer through eating a rotten egg or trying to milk a bison. It’s a much less funny reality to imagine whether or not, if you took them to Burger King, would they eat the fries? Absolutely… because they’re hungry and they don’t understand that it’s possible for calories and nutrients to be disconnected. If someone didn’t fall over dead, or get diarrhea, or start vomiting, then they would probably keep eating whatever was available and preferably tasted good (which is supposed to mean it has nutrients).

Many fit-fluencers, try as they might, don’t get to have their cake and eat it too. You cannot throw out blanket panacea statements with the easily defensible position of “marketing to the general population”, then start tossing around terms like “optimal” and “peak” and “elite” all while doubling back to clinical populations to flex your authority.

Those populations — general, elite, and clinical — all require distinct levels of intervention. Has anyone stopped to ask, how can one run a full time clinic / practice while still lurking around grocery stores and podcast circuits to create content every day? Here’s a dirty secret… they can’t.

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Beyond the Plate

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As far as I’m concerned, protein is the king of macro-nutrients. Animal fat / protein alone probably helps us as a society recover from at least 50-70 years of mis/dis-information from “the experts.” If we remove other obvious “junk” (soda, cookies, chips, candy, cake, and microwavable anything) we’ve gone back another 100 years or so.

If you really want to get picky, modern agriculture and year-round access to fruits and vegetables nationwide is a post-WW2 creation. The advent of domesticated agriculture (heavy vegetable and grain consumption) at large is only about 10,000 - 20,000 years old in our 2.5 million year evolution.

On that note, the “roots and fruits” that are consumed by indigenous tribes (with about 50,000 - 70,000 years of intact culture) also don’t look anything like what you’re picking up at the local grocery store (since about WW2). On top of that, seasonality matters too. How “natural” is it for you to shovel down handfulls of almonds every day or to be eating strawberries in Michigan in February?

This is what I mean by “anthropology as a starting point rather than an end goal.” I didn’t say any of those things above were “bad.” They’re just not “ancestrally congruent.” What else isn’t ancestrally congruent: cell phones, climate control, automobiles, electricity, national and international sports… I like all of those things, and generally they make our lives better.

So, we need to think for ourselves around the details of what actually fuels, moves, and fulfills us. Human evolution isn’t an excuse to eat Skittles and french fries, it’s a call to accountability that we need to earn our margins for error (cue “elimination diets / protocols”).

However, as Mark Sisson points out (paraphrasing):

“The goal isn’t to see how restrictive of a diet I can eat and not die. The goal is to enjoy as diverse of a diet as I can and still achieve the health markers and physical outputs I desire.”

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Informed Indifference and Modern Wisdom:

Discordance theory (and the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis) often stop when and where it’s convenient for people; however if it has taught us anything, it should be that anthropology is a starting place for therapeutic lifestyle change rather than an end-goal.

The goal of a healthy life should be a happy life, neither of which need to include “perfect nutrition.” We might be far better off aiming to be healthy “enough” to forget about “longevity” long enough to actually do something meaningful in our lives.

Our post-industrial obsession with empiricism combined with technocratic access to data and noisy numbers — not to mention talking heads clamoring for attention online — has embodied the expression “missing the forest for the trees.”

We don’t need to forsake “science” or “medicine” or “tradition.” We need to keep them accountable for their outcomes — in a place far from the internet — on the ground floor where we actually have to live, breathe, and interact with each other.

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