Does the human body really need such healthy food?

[miniwh]

As in, 5+ a day veg/some fruits etc

For thousands of years humans weren't able to access that type of varied and balanced diet

You could say we need to move with the times but other mammals are in good health by eating what's always been available to them and nothing else

So surely our bodies are designed for fairly restricted and limited diets?

Whatever else existed in the centuries/millennia prior to our own modern history, UPFs did not exist. HTH.

Well there is food and “food” isn’t there? We eat all kinds of processed crap these days that really doesn’t count as food.

If you go back far enough, we mostly ate meat with occasional fruits, nuts, berries, fish /seafood, depending on where we lived. The start of farming, especially of grains, changed all that and the rest - as they say - it’s history.

Well why did everyone move to cities when they had apparently idyllic lives foraging, fishing and farming in the countryside.

Because the country life was not the idyll imagined. Probably regular starvation as food depended on you being strong and healthy enough to forage fish and farm but also totally dependent on weather.

Mainly for work. The industrial revolution moved jobs into cities.

I try and eat healthy food and I'm a vegetarian. I love fruit and veg but brown rice and quinoa. That can go back to the hell it came from....its disgusting. A bit of white rice won't kill me.

But if you only have white rice, it would. Japanese PoWs were prone to diseases like beri beri.

The way the sapiens book describes it is that agriculture, and industrialisation as the successor to agriculture, is good for the population on a macro level and evolution wise we are programmed to do what's best for the population as a whole. But at an individual level you'd have a much better life foraging and not having to support 15 children.

On "cooking from scratch". It's a bit of a wanky and off-putting term imo. I doubt many of us are milling our own flour and mangling our own pasta or whatever. But cooking normal food really doesn't take long and I think it is a habit that can be formed with the right circumstances at play. Barriers are things like access to cooking facilities and affordable ingredients, not time, if you are a confident cook.

I mentioned that earlier. Because they had no choice. Many had been kicked off the land earlier by the distribution revolutions going on since early Tudor times, lasting through to the great event known as Enclosure. A growing population ensured there was no way back. The lives of the urban poor in the cities of the Victorian Age were probably much harder than in the rural areas, except in times of famine, and that age is infamous for its horror stories of squalor and deprivation. The poor of urban areas still, even now, tend to involve more squalor than those in rural areas.

Modern Scotland is an incredibly example of this. If you travel from the borders to to central belt much of the land is mostly sectioned off either with hedgerows, walls and fences. This is when landowners started asserting their boundaries and pushing people towards the central belt. Much later people are pushed down from the highlands to use the land for more profitable cattle and sheep grazing. Most of the population of Scotland now live in the central belt and the majority of land across Scotland is owned by a relatively small number of people. The use and ownership of Scottish land is a weird anomaly compared to the rest of the UK and Europe.

And I hope you don't mind me saying, the Scots have some of the poorest diets and health in Europe. I don't think that is a coincidence.

Not at all, I’d encourage everyone to read up on the Glasgow Effect for a fuller understanding of why that is.