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Writers using this argument are laughable to me. "Don't you find it odd that the experts blame butter and beef for heart disease, even though heart disease is new and traditional foods are old? Heart disease as we know it was first diagnosed by James Herrick in 1912; it is a 20th century disease. Meanwhile, we (or our ancestors) have been eating milk and butter for 10,000 to 30,000 years and beef for 2 or 3 million."
News flash brilliant writer: The life expectancy of humans has grown radically just within the last 100 years. If you factor out deaths before puberty, the average age has gone from 62 to 75 just recently.
http://www.healthsentinel.com/graphs...rint_list_item
Don't you think that all these extra years eating butter and meat might have something to do with the onset of long-term heart-related problems? Do you think that maybe our ancestors weren't falling over with grabbers because they were dying off at the ripe old age of 35 from an infected wound or a broken bone?
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Or, believe it or not, from something closer to old age than we might think. Agricultural work used to be HARD. Waking up at 4 in the morning to break your back all day, and then maybe eat an imbalanced diet and maybe have food in short supply anyway, doesn't do a lot for a person's health and longevity. People used to be quite small and there wasn't anything like serious medical science or even good sanitation around to keep people in top form. Even if there were, who could afford it? A hard life and dying even before 30 wasn't uncommon.
It's definitely silly to talk about the diseases of old age not inflicting those who often didn't live into old age or anywhere even close in the first place.