Originally Posted by
Leisesturm
You can do a lot of things when your life expectancy is 25 years, plus/minus 10, like it was 8,000 years ago! It is a stretch to say Butter is as healthy as Olive Oil.
Similarly, you could do lots of things when you were constantly either hunting, foraging or working to get food and constant activity and caloric scarcity had people typically lean and a bit hungry. Historically, people adapted to all kinds of diets and situation. So a lot of what's good for you individually has to do with which gene package you ended up with - and whether you stay active or not.
Life expectancy figures are averages and can be misleading. They're calculated from birth and are heavily skewed by things like high infant and child mortality rates and high rates of death from infection and accident. If you escaped those tragedies early on, it wasn't at all uncommon to live into your 60s or 70s without the aid of modern medicines. Contemporary hunter gatherer populations have very little obesity, metabolic or cardiovascular disease. Their metabolic health is generally quite good. No surprise. They don't have Twinkies and refrigerators and they spend nearly two hours a day doing moderate to vigorous activity. So they are fit.