That is quite the switcheroo you pulled by declaring a "modern science-derived diet and lifestyle" to be the more calories and more booze and less exercise of the Islanders in this study. How is that "science-derived"?

The point I was making is that the scientific method is our best bet in trying to accurately learn about how the universe works, including as it comes to our health and how our diet affects that. That really doesn't have anything to do with Pacific islanders adopting Westernized habits of, averaged over a population, eating more and drinking more booze and exerting less physical activity and having negative health outcomes because of it...

...except that this study itself is also an exercise in the scientific method, and is part of the scientific method helping us learn better how to optimize our health.

Kristen's blog basically espouses the view that there are lots of new, awful health outcomes that have coincided with the rise of modern food industries and habits, so there are obviously major problems with those habits and the industries that are facilitating those awful health outcomes. So far so good. She has done some valid analysis on a terribly urgent problem.

But then she seems to have decided, well, everything in our traditional cuisine from before modern food industry, and that contrasts with today's modern food industry, must have been beneficial. For example, our ancestors seem to have consumed lots of beef and butter, but from free-grazing grass-fed cattle, which isn't how modern food industry prefers to operate today. So that must be part of what was healthy about our traditional diet, that has since been corrupted.

This represents a too-hasty conclusion to the analytical process. It willfully ignores lots of recent, rigorously performed research to the contrary. She bought into an analytical framework that had some partial validity -- modern industrial food processing has introduced some new deleterious health effects -- but then she was satisfied to stop there and not continue searching for further answers in all available avenues of skeptical and rigorous inquiry. She found a pattern that produced some obvious advantage over the status quo, but then fell into premature whole-hearted acceptance of that pattern and is content just to try to keep matching that pattern, instead of continuing to seek out the best evidence and refusing to stop trying to learn from ongoing research. Additionally, since her partial analysis has yielded a clear antagonist in the form of modern food processing industry, she has allowed her pride in rebelling against that antagonist sustain her faith in exactly her present beliefs, instead of continuing to accept ambiguity and an ongoing openness to even better evidence and better answers than the partially better ones she has already devoted herself to.

Her devotion to that insufficient pattern-matching has even become insidious enough that she refuses to consider overwhelming, rigorously obtained, scientific evidence that lots of red meat and full-fat dairy might also be deleterious to human health -- because she has devoted herself to simplistic pattern-matching based on the initial conjecture that modern food processing equals bad and anything from previous to modern food processing equals good, which includes red meat and full-fat dairy. Her devotion to her halfway-valid analysis has left her willfully defying the best knowledge that we are able to obtain.

(By the way I was even shocked to discover how badly everyone's misconceptions are about what the typical American diet was like previous to modern food processing. There wasn't nearly as much red meat and butter being consumed as most people might assume. Did you know that various beans and chili peppers were major diet staples in early 1800's America as far north as the Canadian border? The reality was actually a lot healthier than the Little House on the Prairie TV version.)

The scientific method as applied to nutrition has revealed that certain traditional cuisines were relatively quite healthy, such as traditional Mediterranean and Japanese cuisines. It doesn't by any means mean EVERY traditional cuisine was equally healthy, such as the Finnish lower boundary condition I mentioned above. The scientific method as applied to nutrition also continues to teach us new and better knowledge of healthy cuisine than any traditional cuisine from anywhere on Earth has ever had. Every traditional cuisine came about in an evolutionary process that depended partly on survivors' bias, partly on anecdote, partly on luck, etc. Like any evolutionary product, they are all imperfect, even the healthiest examples. We only even have the capability of evaluating which are the healthier ones and which the less healthy, through our modern methods of science. What does a traditional Japanese cuisine mean? Does it mean lots of white rice and udon noodles, or lots of seafood, soy products, and seaweed salad? Which are the healthiest? The Mediterranean Sea coast has a lot of surface area. What does a traditional Mediterranean diet mean? Paella? Fettucini Alfredo? Grilled fish and Greek vegetable salad with olive oil? Couscous and goat meat? Unleavened bread and hummus? Only the methods of science allow us to compare all the evidence in valid ways and distinguish among the patterns. If we ate largely traditional Japanese cuisine but with little to no white rice or simple carb noodles, or traditional Greek cuisine but without the feta cheese and substituting whole grain bread, could that be even healthier than any traditional cuisine humanity has yet known? There are no simple answers to anything. And only continuing to explore rigorously, with a sound understanding of the most foolproof methods of exploration, and an acceptance in the meantime that our knowledge remains tentative and must remain open to the best analysis of the best available evidence as we continue to search and discover, will yield the best knowledge and the best outcome. That is what I mean by relying on science.