Taking your argument to its logical conclusion leads to raw-foodism. But cooking was a tremendous advance in human nutrition, even though we’ve only been cooking for a small fraction of our existence.

This doesn’t mean that I think the Twinkie is a similar advance. But the belief that “what is natural is good” so commonly leads to trouble that there’s a name for it: the naturalistic fallacy.

To me, the common-sense approach is to eat a wide variety of foods and figure that you will get some of whatever is beneficial about them but avoid large doses of whatever is harmful.

My wife is an M.S. in Nutrition and an R.D… and I have read more studies in the Jouranal of American Dietary Association than I can number - it is quite evident that the scientific establishments gets caught up in these linear experiements that tend to just explain one tiny piece of a huge puzzle, and often ignore the interrelationships between the pieces.

I have full confidence that someday, many centuries from now, the scientists will have a decent understanding of the relationship between food & health, but giving how many times they have been wrong aboout things like Vioxx & even Tylenol and countless other topics, it would be foolish to make decision solely based on what the scientific community has established.

To me, common sense says that since Homo Sapiens have existed for about 130,000 years… and in that time we have spent more than 92% of our existence as hunter gatherers… that evolution has created our bodies to flourish as hunter gatherers.

So just taking a common sense approach to risk management would say that we are best off eating like hunter gatherers as much as adjusting for our post-industrial lifestyles.

So yes it may be true that sugars & refined carbs aren’t necessarily poision for us… but pragmatically we should minimize their consumption.

Thank you in advance for your response.

The same should go for deciding what is healthy to eat…we can try to learn from science but we’re probably not going to get very far and we might end up with whopping mistakes instead (margarine, anyone?). Since this whole industrial civilization experiment is barely a blip in the history of our species, it seems to make a lot of sense to stick to the foods that allowed humanity to survive to this point (hint: there wasn’t any high-fructose corp syrup involved…)

Ken, I’m sure there is much in modern medicine that won’t stand up to scrutiny over the long term, and doctors cling to their superstitions as much as anyone else. (Hormone replacement therapy is the obvious big recent debunking.)

But one point I was trying to make is that it’s not surprising that we know so little about diet and health, because it’s extremely hard to do that kind of experiment. And while the scientific method is the only way we’ve come up with to separate truths about the natural world from fiction, it’s not intuitive. The normal way for people to figure out what’s true is to to deduce from observations. It’s been successful enough that it’s our natural form of problem solving.

Er, where was I going with this?