He's also given many talks which are on youtube on the topic, one of which is his talk of the same name at the Beckman institute [1]. It's a little under 90 minutes and is enormously entertaining as well as being informative.
the confusing things for a layman is the different kinds of messages we receive from those pop-science outlets.
on one hand they claim chronic or recurring inflammation is THE big health problem, and if we could it under control everything we'd be much healthier.
on the other hand there are messages like inflammation is good for your body because it keeps it working and e.g. the reason vegetables are so healthy is because they are basically indigestible and therefore cause mild inflammation, ergo good.
so what is it now? or are there different kinds of inflammation?
> they claim chronic or recurring inflammation is THE big health problem
> on the other hand there are messages like inflammation is good for your body because it keeps it working
There's no contradiction here. The first one is chronic, it's long term.
The second one is acute, it's short term, to heal or to deal with invaders.
Also, as the comment below mine points out, even this split is a massive simplification. There's many different types of inflammation, some good, some required for survival, and some which can do damage over time if they never get shut off.
maybe we're using the word "imflammation" to describe too much stuff?
I mean, we name viruses & bacterias by their category/shape/etc, so shouldn't we do something similar to inflammation? eg. blue, vege-inflammation, red inflammation, pink-diamond-shaped inflammation
inflammation-from-burn, etc?
> The study used a panel of 19 cytokines—small immune-signaling proteins—to assess inflammation patterns. While these markers aligned with aging in the Italian and Singaporean datasets, they did not replicate among the Tsimane and Orang Asli, whose immune systems were shaped by persistent infections and distinct environmental exposures.
[...]
> The authors call for a reevaluation of how aging and inflammation are measured across populations and emphasize the need for standardized, context-aware tools. "Factors like environment, lifestyle—such as high physical activity or a very low-fat diet—and infection may all influence how the immune system ages," said Cohen. "Understanding how these elements interact could help develop more effective global health strategies."
Not sure how you think your fictitious categories would help or present any new ideas. The study already does what you call for, but using science instead of imagination.
It is my understanding that we have tried anti inflammatory interventions and they didn’t help. So the conclusion that inflammation per se is not the problem seems to check out.
It's also frustrating how, for the targeted anti-inflammatories we do have, there's no real way to know which one will be the most effective for someone other than trying several until you find one that does. More options are always better, but many common autoimmune conditions have approved drugs that target TNF, JAK, and four or five different interleukins... it'd be nice if there was a predictive blood test that showed whether you had abnormally high levels of any of those targets so you didn't have to guess wildly. (And even then, there are at least a few overlapping drugs for each of those targets, but at least "try an IL-17 inhibitor" gives you a smaller pool :P)
from what I have read, it appears that while the weight loss plays a role that the anti-inflammatory effects exist independently of that as well.
I am cheating as I don't want to do a lot of writing to summarize so I just had chatGPT summarize for me:
Mechanisms Beyond Weight Loss
Direct Action on Immune Cells:
GLP-1 receptors are found on several immune cells (like macrophages, T cells, and dendritic cells).
Activation of these receptors can suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines (like TNF-α, IL-6) and enhance anti-inflammatory ones (like IL-10).
Reduction in Systemic Inflammation:
Studies show reduced levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukins in patients taking GLP-1s, even when controlling for weight loss.
In diabetic patients, GLP-1s can reduce oxidative stress and endothelial inflammation, improving cardiovascular outcomes.
Improved Gut Barrier Function:
GLP-1s may reduce gut permeability ("leaky gut"), which helps prevent the translocation of inflammatory endotoxins (like LPS) into circulation.
Neuroinflammation:
In animal models, GLP-1s cross the blood-brain barrier and have shown protective effects against neuroinflammation, relevant in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
That sounds like something that would be important to notice, and that understanding why it happens would lead to an explanation of the causes of rust, hopefully followed by methods to help prevent things rusting.
So a bored immune system will find targets that really shouldn’t be aimed at. Something about that old adage of idle hands and mischief but immune systems and aging related chronic illness
We do not really know what causes misdirection of the immune system in the old age. "Boredom" (= underutilization) is just one of many hypotheses. Differences between lives of jungle dwellers and urban people are just too big to pinpoint one root cause (such as parasitic infestations). Various chemicals may also play a role, as may artificial light, differences in food composition etc.
Let's say you're eating some wheat. You have no issues with it.
One day, you eat wheat that was contaminated with something, call it thing X. It causes a reaction. Yet the reaction now targets wheat and thing X, and so wheat is now troublesome.
Getting sufficient protein is a challenge, especially as people get older. For better or worse, animal protein is efficient for absorption but most people aren’t likely to limit themselves to whey.
Not really, there are autoimmune conditions that can be triggered via external stimuli in which gluten causes mayhem to your body, even tho you are not sensitive to it per se.
Typically the vegetables are also dead when you eat them. "Don't eat dead things" is a moronic statement dreamed up as an attempt at shock value. It doesn't mean anything and can be safely ignored.
But in practice don't most people mean tofu when talking about soy beans for protein? That tends to come out at 10-13g per 100g. Same for cooked cans of soy/edamme beans and most other canned lentils/pulses? I've never seens 30g per 100g for cooked canned beans in reality.
I eat a high protein, vegetarian diet optimised for lifting weights, and "Approximately no additional grams, if you pick the right legumes." doesn't really add up for me. For the main sources of protein I usually try to eat daily:
and then also supplement with whey protein powder to get to my daily protein target (~150g). To get there with just legumes I'd need to consume 15 cans of cooked lentils (i.e. not achieveable in reality).
I also eat those yes. Something I don't see mentioned for a high protein diet often is gram flour. 22g protein per 100g and can be made into socca very quickly and easily with just water and small amount of oil.
Beef is dense in some nutrients but it certainly is not more nutrient dense in general. Plugging food into cronometer.com should be mandatory in HN nutrition discussions.
You are imagining that the article said anything about gluten having anything to do with inflammation.
The article did not say anything about going vegan.
The Bolivian and the Malaysian tribes ate a whole food, plant based diet that was not exclusively plant based. They are on 2x the fibre of anyone in the West and they are not eating farmed animals that have been fed with commodity crops such as corn.
What this means is that their diet is incredibly low fat, and your summary does not point to that.
Regarding protein, animals get their protein from plants, and, if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed. See Beri-beri and how that came about with American rice that lacked protein.
In the West, where we wash our food, we need a souce of vitamin B12, which can either be supplemented or come from meat. Plants have no need for vitamin B12 so they don't have any, even though they have everything else we need. If you don't wash your food then there is an abundance of B12 from bacteria in dirt, so it is not a problem.
Note that the tribes don't consume dairy, which is no surprise. Even the Romans thought it was a bit weird when they got to England to see grown men drinking milk from cows. In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.
Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't. Milk is for babies, and it is species specific.
Anyone that tells you otherwise is just a victim of milk marketing and has not left milk out of their diet for long enough to realise that life without dairy is better.
Sugar is not the root of all evil, it just rots your teeth and feeds yeast-like bacteria all the way down your digestive tract. It is the combination of excess fat and sugar that is to be avoided if you want to avoid diabetes and all of the other non-communicable chronic diseases.
In summary, stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.
>Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
This threw me off. I don't know anyone ethnically local to my area that is lactose intolerant except for one grandma and it indeed becomes more common with age.
Nobody else has odd rashes or digestive tract issues linked to it. We know perfectly well how some populations have adjusted to being capable of properly digesting it so your claims seem wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase#Genetic_expression_and...
> Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they?
This is such an odd claim that I struggle to even find a good way to approach it. Have you seen, as an example, all of Northern Europe? I don't think I even know anyone who is lactose intolerant, dairy is a major food group for practically everyone here, regardless of age. I'm guessing you must come from a very different cultural and regional background.
I know like three people, americans with germanic/north europe ancestry, and they all became lactose intolerant after high school. If they drink milk they get the runs.
>Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
That's highly dependent on your ancestry. Practically all of non-mediterranean Europe has no problem digesting milk.
> Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
I was nodding in agreement until this. I’m from the UK and although I don’t know my dna history, I’d say I’m likely of European heritage and possibly even a Celt, based on my family history.
I don’t know a single lactose intolerant person and speaking from personal experience I do not suffer from rashes or digestive tract issues of any kind. The only possible inflammation related issue I have is relatively mild psoriasis, which doesn’t go away when cutting dairy out of the diet (I’ve tried for extended periods).
Lactose is just another sugar, there’s no reason to believe that certain ethnic groups can’t build up a tolerance to it. Especially when you consider the timeframes. It has been ~10,000 years since humans started creating cheese, presumably we’ve been drinking animal milk for much, much longer.
> if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed
You'll get a lot of total proteins, but you'll have a very unbalanced amino acid intake unless you're going heavy on soy. Which most societies had no access to until recently.
> In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.
Interesting thing: in a lot of hot climates (Greece, India, Middle East as a whole) heat and bacteria worked together with milk to give us a pretty interesting food product: yogurt. And the bacteria in yogurt is often considered to be beneficial.
> stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.
In the US at least, until recently, the government recommended 11 servings of grains a day. 3 servings of dairy as well.
I think the only real conclusion to make here is: we don't know anything about what foods are healthy, and probably won't in our lifetimes. Everything is fad driven to some extent. Saturated fats were evil and sugar was good. Then sugar was evil and oils were healthy. Now cooking things with solid blocks of beef fat is being done to Make America Healthy Again(tm) because a single serving of seed oils will give you cancer. In a few years the idea of a Malaysian tribal diet will be mainstream and the true solution to becoming healthy again. Then we'll find out, like all diet studies before it, that there's some odd compounding factor and it turns out diet really had nothing to do with the difference.
Open the news any given day and there's an article about red wine and coffee being great for your health. The next day there's an article saying a single sip is disastrous to your health. The day after that, 6 glasses of wine and 4 pots of coffee are the minimum daily intake necessary to stay healthy. The following day, having ever been near wine will ruin your health forever and you are doomed.
Eat what doesn't make you feel or look like shit. We all have different bodies. If what you're eating makes you tired or you're getting unexpected weight gain, try something else. If you feel energized and comfortable in your body and you're at a healthy weight, you're probably okay.
> You'll get a lot of total proteins, but you'll have a very unbalanced amino acid intake unless you're going heavy on soy.
This is trivially untrue if you know how to look up amino acid profile for food.
You need less than a few grams of each essential amino acid (most people don’t seem to know this) which is trivial to consume from plants.
A 200g can of garbanzos gives you about 1/3rd of each of the day’s EAA’s in less than 300 cal. And they aren’t even a particularly protein dense option.
If anyone wants an interesting read on inflammation / stress for lay audiences, I'd recommend 'Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers' by Sapolsky.
I'd be cautious with Sapolsky claims. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/30/its-sapols...
He's also given many talks which are on youtube on the topic, one of which is his talk of the same name at the Beckman institute [1]. It's a little under 90 minutes and is enormously entertaining as well as being informative.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9H9qTdserM
Sometimes the world is really just black and white.
Thanks. Does it provide workable solutions? :)
surprisingly, yes :)
Are they "be a zebra"?
the confusing things for a layman is the different kinds of messages we receive from those pop-science outlets.
on one hand they claim chronic or recurring inflammation is THE big health problem, and if we could it under control everything we'd be much healthier.
on the other hand there are messages like inflammation is good for your body because it keeps it working and e.g. the reason vegetables are so healthy is because they are basically indigestible and therefore cause mild inflammation, ergo good.
so what is it now? or are there different kinds of inflammation?
> they claim chronic or recurring inflammation is THE big health problem
> on the other hand there are messages like inflammation is good for your body because it keeps it working
There's no contradiction here. The first one is chronic, it's long term.
The second one is acute, it's short term, to heal or to deal with invaders.
Also, as the comment below mine points out, even this split is a massive simplification. There's many different types of inflammation, some good, some required for survival, and some which can do damage over time if they never get shut off.
maybe we're using the word "imflammation" to describe too much stuff?
I mean, we name viruses & bacterias by their category/shape/etc, so shouldn't we do something similar to inflammation? eg. blue, vege-inflammation, red inflammation, pink-diamond-shaped inflammation inflammation-from-burn, etc?
The article about this study does exactly that?
> The study used a panel of 19 cytokines—small immune-signaling proteins—to assess inflammation patterns. While these markers aligned with aging in the Italian and Singaporean datasets, they did not replicate among the Tsimane and Orang Asli, whose immune systems were shaped by persistent infections and distinct environmental exposures.
[...]
> The authors call for a reevaluation of how aging and inflammation are measured across populations and emphasize the need for standardized, context-aware tools. "Factors like environment, lifestyle—such as high physical activity or a very low-fat diet—and infection may all influence how the immune system ages," said Cohen. "Understanding how these elements interact could help develop more effective global health strategies."
Not sure how you think your fictitious categories would help or present any new ideas. The study already does what you call for, but using science instead of imagination.
sorry I didn't read the article - just the parent comment
I often make the same mistake, my comment was not meant to be harsh
We do. But you can’t expect social media health influencers/grifters to use them, yet they’re the backbone of American health and nutrition education.
Breaking down muscle is good, not letting the muscle recover is bad
Same kind of thing
The dose makes the poison, but also…
> are there different kinds of inflammation?
Yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation#Types
As an analogy: drinking water is important. Drowning in water is deadly.
It is my understanding that we have tried anti inflammatory interventions and they didn’t help. So the conclusion that inflammation per se is not the problem seems to check out.
I dimmly remember Japanese research about how fasting induced autophagy could help.
There’s dozens of pro-inflammatory signaling proteins. Our anti-inflammatories really only target a small subset of them.
Ideally you need to stop inflammatory signals at the source, but we understand very few of those.
It's also frustrating how, for the targeted anti-inflammatories we do have, there's no real way to know which one will be the most effective for someone other than trying several until you find one that does. More options are always better, but many common autoimmune conditions have approved drugs that target TNF, JAK, and four or five different interleukins... it'd be nice if there was a predictive blood test that showed whether you had abnormally high levels of any of those targets so you didn't have to guess wildly. (And even then, there are at least a few overlapping drugs for each of those targets, but at least "try an IL-17 inhibitor" gives you a smaller pool :P)
Are you sure the side effects of the interventions were not the problem?
Studies have shown GLP-1's in addition to weight loss have a significant system wide anti-inflammation effect.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10230051/#:~:text=G...
but is it the weight loss driving all those anti-inflammation benefits
from what I have read, it appears that while the weight loss plays a role that the anti-inflammatory effects exist independently of that as well.
I am cheating as I don't want to do a lot of writing to summarize so I just had chatGPT summarize for me:
Mechanisms Beyond Weight Loss Direct Action on Immune Cells:
GLP-1 receptors are found on several immune cells (like macrophages, T cells, and dendritic cells).
Activation of these receptors can suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines (like TNF-α, IL-6) and enhance anti-inflammatory ones (like IL-10).
Reduction in Systemic Inflammation:
Studies show reduced levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukins in patients taking GLP-1s, even when controlling for weight loss.
In diabetic patients, GLP-1s can reduce oxidative stress and endothelial inflammation, improving cardiovascular outcomes.
Improved Gut Barrier Function:
GLP-1s may reduce gut permeability ("leaky gut"), which helps prevent the translocation of inflammatory endotoxins (like LPS) into circulation.
Neuroinflammation:
In animal models, GLP-1s cross the blood-brain barrier and have shown protective effects against neuroinflammation, relevant in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
This is like saying "it appears machines rust more near the sea than the desert". Well yeah...
That sounds like something that would be important to notice, and that understanding why it happens would lead to an explanation of the causes of rust, hopefully followed by methods to help prevent things rusting.
i.e. I don't understand what you're saying.
So a bored immune system will find targets that really shouldn’t be aimed at. Something about that old adage of idle hands and mischief but immune systems and aging related chronic illness
We do not really know what causes misdirection of the immune system in the old age. "Boredom" (= underutilization) is just one of many hypotheses. Differences between lives of jungle dwellers and urban people are just too big to pinpoint one root cause (such as parasitic infestations). Various chemicals may also play a role, as may artificial light, differences in food composition etc.
Let's say you're eating some wheat. You have no issues with it.
One day, you eat wheat that was contaminated with something, call it thing X. It causes a reaction. Yet the reaction now targets wheat and thing X, and so wheat is now troublesome.
Unsure on the validity of this.
Gluten is like glue. It's possible that your digestive system is simply no longer able process glue, cause it's kinda hard to do.
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Then die from a yet unknown cancerous additive in nutritional yeast.
We have made the food chain too complex.
Getting sufficient protein is a challenge, especially as people get older. For better or worse, animal protein is efficient for absorption but most people aren’t likely to limit themselves to whey.
True but saturated animal fats quickly become an issue if you don't restrict yourself to fish and lean poultry and other lean meats such as rabbit.
Eat them while they're still alive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting#Culinary_use
活き造り
I like my food to wail in pain.
Gluten is only an issue for people sensitive to it. for everyone else its a perfectly fine source of protein.
Not really, there are autoimmune conditions that can be triggered via external stimuli in which gluten causes mayhem to your body, even tho you are not sensitive to it per se.
so, only eat vegetables?
Typically the vegetables are also dead when you eat them. "Don't eat dead things" is a moronic statement dreamed up as an attempt at shock value. It doesn't mean anything and can be safely ignored.
Beans and nuts for protein?
You're aware of how many more grams of food you need with legumes to have the same proteins as a tiny slice of meat?
Protein per 100g of meat (let's say beef): ~26g
Protein per 100g of soy beans: ~40g raw, ~30g cooked
PDCAAS for beef (Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score): 0.92
PDCAAS for soy: 0.91
Approximately no additional grams, if you pick the right legumes.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef
But in practice don't most people mean tofu when talking about soy beans for protein? That tends to come out at 10-13g per 100g. Same for cooked cans of soy/edamme beans and most other canned lentils/pulses? I've never seens 30g per 100g for cooked canned beans in reality.
I eat a high protein, vegetarian diet optimised for lifting weights, and "Approximately no additional grams, if you pick the right legumes." doesn't really add up for me. For the main sources of protein I usually try to eat daily:
Tofu 400g; eggs 3 large; cottage cheese (low-fat) 300g; greek yoghurt (0% fat) 250g; beans/lentils (mixed) 1-3 cans;
and then also supplement with whey protein powder to get to my daily protein target (~150g). To get there with just legumes I'd need to consume 15 cans of cooked lentils (i.e. not achieveable in reality).
Use extra firm tofu. Trader Joe’s has a good one. A 450g pack has 70g protein, about the same protein per calorie as steak.
Tempeh, seitan (gluten), and TVP are the other protein dense staples of a plant based diet.
They are just alien to Americans.
I also eat those yes. Something I don't see mentioned for a high protein diet often is gram flour. 22g protein per 100g and can be made into socca very quickly and easily with just water and small amount of oil.
what weight of beans/lentils per can?
Sorry yes, I'm in the UK and lentils/beans commonly come pre-cooked in 400g cans which usually equates to around 240g drained weight. E.g. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/262490576
Soy beans pre-cooked in cans don't exist in the UK.
thanks.
I don't know if you have checked out black gram, aka urad dal or urid dal. It is used with rice in the batter for idli and dosa in a 1:3 ratio.
high in protein.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigna_mungo
Interesting. Beef is overall more nutritious and tastier anyway, albeit much more expensive.
Beef is dense in some nutrients but it certainly is not more nutrient dense in general. Plugging food into cronometer.com should be mandatory in HN nutrition discussions.
Did you read the article?
You are imagining that the article said anything about gluten having anything to do with inflammation.
The article did not say anything about going vegan.
The Bolivian and the Malaysian tribes ate a whole food, plant based diet that was not exclusively plant based. They are on 2x the fibre of anyone in the West and they are not eating farmed animals that have been fed with commodity crops such as corn.
What this means is that their diet is incredibly low fat, and your summary does not point to that.
Regarding protein, animals get their protein from plants, and, if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed. See Beri-beri and how that came about with American rice that lacked protein.
In the West, where we wash our food, we need a souce of vitamin B12, which can either be supplemented or come from meat. Plants have no need for vitamin B12 so they don't have any, even though they have everything else we need. If you don't wash your food then there is an abundance of B12 from bacteria in dirt, so it is not a problem.
Note that the tribes don't consume dairy, which is no surprise. Even the Romans thought it was a bit weird when they got to England to see grown men drinking milk from cows. In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.
Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't. Milk is for babies, and it is species specific.
Anyone that tells you otherwise is just a victim of milk marketing and has not left milk out of their diet for long enough to realise that life without dairy is better.
Sugar is not the root of all evil, it just rots your teeth and feeds yeast-like bacteria all the way down your digestive tract. It is the combination of excess fat and sugar that is to be avoided if you want to avoid diabetes and all of the other non-communicable chronic diseases.
In summary, stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.
>Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
This threw me off. I don't know anyone ethnically local to my area that is lactose intolerant except for one grandma and it indeed becomes more common with age. Nobody else has odd rashes or digestive tract issues linked to it. We know perfectly well how some populations have adjusted to being capable of properly digesting it so your claims seem wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase#Genetic_expression_and...
> Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they?
This is such an odd claim that I struggle to even find a good way to approach it. Have you seen, as an example, all of Northern Europe? I don't think I even know anyone who is lactose intolerant, dairy is a major food group for practically everyone here, regardless of age. I'm guessing you must come from a very different cultural and regional background.
I know like three people, americans with germanic/north europe ancestry, and they all became lactose intolerant after high school. If they drink milk they get the runs.
>Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
That's highly dependent on your ancestry. Practically all of non-mediterranean Europe has no problem digesting milk.
> Few claim to be lactose tolerant in adulthood, but how lactose tolerant are they? Really it is not a physiological tolerance, but a mental one, an acceptance that odd rashes and a digestive tract that works less than perfectly is normal, when it isn't.
I was nodding in agreement until this. I’m from the UK and although I don’t know my dna history, I’d say I’m likely of European heritage and possibly even a Celt, based on my family history.
I don’t know a single lactose intolerant person and speaking from personal experience I do not suffer from rashes or digestive tract issues of any kind. The only possible inflammation related issue I have is relatively mild psoriasis, which doesn’t go away when cutting dairy out of the diet (I’ve tried for extended periods).
Lactose is just another sugar, there’s no reason to believe that certain ethnic groups can’t build up a tolerance to it. Especially when you consider the timeframes. It has been ~10,000 years since humans started creating cheese, presumably we’ve been drinking animal milk for much, much longer.
> if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed
You'll get a lot of total proteins, but you'll have a very unbalanced amino acid intake unless you're going heavy on soy. Which most societies had no access to until recently.
> In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.
Interesting thing: in a lot of hot climates (Greece, India, Middle East as a whole) heat and bacteria worked together with milk to give us a pretty interesting food product: yogurt. And the bacteria in yogurt is often considered to be beneficial.
> stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.
In the US at least, until recently, the government recommended 11 servings of grains a day. 3 servings of dairy as well.
I think the only real conclusion to make here is: we don't know anything about what foods are healthy, and probably won't in our lifetimes. Everything is fad driven to some extent. Saturated fats were evil and sugar was good. Then sugar was evil and oils were healthy. Now cooking things with solid blocks of beef fat is being done to Make America Healthy Again(tm) because a single serving of seed oils will give you cancer. In a few years the idea of a Malaysian tribal diet will be mainstream and the true solution to becoming healthy again. Then we'll find out, like all diet studies before it, that there's some odd compounding factor and it turns out diet really had nothing to do with the difference.
Open the news any given day and there's an article about red wine and coffee being great for your health. The next day there's an article saying a single sip is disastrous to your health. The day after that, 6 glasses of wine and 4 pots of coffee are the minimum daily intake necessary to stay healthy. The following day, having ever been near wine will ruin your health forever and you are doomed.
Eat what doesn't make you feel or look like shit. We all have different bodies. If what you're eating makes you tired or you're getting unexpected weight gain, try something else. If you feel energized and comfortable in your body and you're at a healthy weight, you're probably okay.
> You'll get a lot of total proteins, but you'll have a very unbalanced amino acid intake unless you're going heavy on soy.
This is trivially untrue if you know how to look up amino acid profile for food.
You need less than a few grams of each essential amino acid (most people don’t seem to know this) which is trivial to consume from plants.
A 200g can of garbanzos gives you about 1/3rd of each of the day’s EAA’s in less than 300 cal. And they aren’t even a particularly protein dense option.