Hard to imagine a diet of cultural significance that would put people into lifelong dialysis, at an epidemic scale.

riffraff 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Well there's cases of diets which came to prominence and caused issues,.from the obesity epidemic of modern west to the pellagra-riddled European countries consuming maize.

It is conceivable that social/natural changes might bring to dietary changes whose damage at scale is only visible on hindsight.

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nine_k 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A diet that makes a particular infection easier to take root is very imaginable.

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bawolff an hour ago | parent [-]

sure, but not if we are just suddenly seeing it now. Most cultural based diets have a long history.

	▲	masklinn 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They do, but it does not take much for economic pressure to make one seemingly small change with wide ramifications e.g. a plant or two which are not economically viable, get substituted, and turn out to be critical, then leading to chronic deficiencies (iirc the British navy got scurvy back after they switched from lemons to cheaper limes, or maybe between two kinds of limes and one had significantly lower levels of vit c). It could also be interactions between the cultural diets and new products historically unavailable to that culture, which are either improperly processed (maize caused a lot of pellagra in europe) or has problematic interactions with components of the cultural diet (I don’t have an example for that, but grapefruit is famous for its medical interactions so nutritional interactions don’t seem impossible). I don’t think it should be the first thread of investigation but it certainly should not be dismissed out of hand if nothing else bears fruit.