Gut microbes, public health Discourse(TM), mention of child death
Anyone else look at a statement like this...
> People in industrialized countries have far less microbial diversity. They also face more autoimmune disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity. These conditions are rare in nonindustrialized groups.
(Ancient gut microbes link hunter-gatherers in Africa and forager-farmers in South America https://archaeologymag.com/2026/10/gut-microbes-link-africa-and-south-america/ )
...and immediately think, “Wanna compare the infant mortality rates and life expectancy of these societies? Does the rare presentation of autoimmune and chronic diseases reflect occurrence rates or survival rates?”
I'm not saying public health in industrialized countries has no room for improvement, far from it, and certainly industrialized agriculture itself requires deep changes for the sake of sustainability. It's just that every choice has a price, and there are valid reasons industrialization has moved in the directions it has. Nor is it easy to simply cherry-pick the best of every system, given their integrated and embedded nature. It's unhelpful for that kind of systemic discussion to make highly selective comparisons that romanticize societies whose health outcomes we might not find desirable in the aggregate.
fatphobia and ableism in the romanticization of non-industrialized health outcomes
Put more bluntly: Does anyone else's eugenics senses tingle when people go on without full context about how healthy people are in non-industrialized groups and how no one is overweight, diabetic, or chronically ill? Like, nice job telling us your ideal world is one without fat, sick, or disabled bodies I guess...
fatphobia and ableism in the romanticization of non-industrialized health outcomes
@ljwrites definitely a bit eugenics, but also it reminds me a bit of the fremen mirage (the idea that civilized society will inevitably become decadent and weak and then be overrun by manly men from less developed countries) which is notoriously both racist and sexist
so really its the whole trifecta
fatphobia and ableism in the romanticization of non-industrialized health outcomes
@Satsuma This exactly, and I was also thinking of Hitler's propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl spending her later years photographing a branch of the Nuba peoples with a focus on their vitality and physical prowess. It's been pointed out that this emphasis was a continuation of the fascist aesthetics that made her (in)famous, the motif of the strong, healthy, beautiful non-industrialized body in contrast to the soft, decadent, sick industrialized one.