Atherosclerosis Is Not A Modern Disease. Lifespan Was Shorter Not Longer In Ancient Humans.

Looking at atherosclerotic plaque in people 4000 years ago.

Today we are awash with paleo diet recommendations or vegetarian/granarian/fruitarian diets, all consumed by ancient human beings.  They DIDN'T live longer, they lived much shorter lives.  People never reached 50 years of age, and this age was correlated with rampant atherosclerosis (plaque).  They certainly had orange and apple trees back then.  There is no shortage of apples in Europe, so that is clearly not the cause of atherosclerosis in Europe.  It is not because of an "apple tree deficiency."  Our clean eating ancestors had severe atherosclerosis before the age of 40.  Why could this be?  They ate plenty of apples...

The German and Norse Pagan festivals featured many many apples (to eat). "Brita as Iduna" (1901) by Carl Larsson:

We have a heritable in-born genetic defect of ascorbate synthesis that goes beyond just a sprinkle or dash.  It was the great pioneers such as Pauling, Stone, Cameron, Willis, who initiated the idea of megadose ascorbate consumption (which is not mega but actually normal).  The schizophrenic contradiction of wanting this threshold rescue dose of this genetic defect to be lower by the day is pure insanity.  It is like saying one day humans will not need to drink several glasses of water a day to be alive.  It "ain't gonna happen."  The orange tree idea takes us to square one, as the therapeutic dose for atherosclerosis is minimally 4,000 mg ascorbate.  That is 40 oranges, more than a tree may make all year.   Until the day we as a species actually genetically engineer back a working copy (is this natural?) to replace our corrupted yet present Gulo gene, we will need to take in effective amounts of the rescue substance, ascorbate.

That is the whole idea behind science, the mastery of our biological weaknesses, and so called "vitamins."  If we are naturalists to the extreme, throw away your computer, wear burlap sacks, live like a Quaker and we can forget about vitamin pills altogether, plunging ourselves all the way back to 4000 years ago where people were rife with atherosclerosis and lived to a little over 40 years of age despite "perfect" natural diets with no fried or packaged foods.

It's the missing substances, stupid.