My great-grandfather ate white bread regularly from before 1910 and stayed thin all the way into his 90's. He spent his last ten years or so living with my family starting about when I was in middle school, so I remember it well. AFIK, he'd been eating the same kinds of stuff for 50 years -- cornflakes and whole milk for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and meat and potatoes with a few veggies for dinner.
Especially when looking at my own ancestors (all of whom were thinner than me 3 generations back), I tend to discount any sort of "oh they were just genetic freaks" kinds of arguments. None of them really dieted or deprived themselves, but they were used to pretty bland monotonous diets. I clearly remember ordering pizza in high school and they tried eating it with forks and knives and said they weren't big on "Italian food". The truth is it's the more recent generations who are the freaks. We're used to access to pretty much any kind of tasty, convenient food whenever we want it.
Seth's blog is pretty awesome, also. The man is extremely inventive and clear thinking. That being said, I personally believe that most of what he's found can be accounted for by the placebo effect, but his ideas and reports from other people always make me think.
Seth is a very interesting fellow with some fascinating ideas (butter improves mental reasoning, standing on one leg can improve sleep, flavorless calories interfere with weight setpoints), but I think he's made a mistake in arguing against man-made climate change.
He isn't arguing against climate change. He is arguing that the people who do argue climate change are making arguments from religion, rather than science. And I tend to agree.
As near as I can tell from his writing, his key objection is the inaccuracy of climate models and their predictive failure. While it's a truism that any model with enough free variables can "fit" a data set, this does not render the exercise useless.
Nor are models the only reason we think people are driving the global temperature change. There are still large numbers of plausible biological/chemical explanations for man-made global warming, and fewer that involve random fluctuations.
In the end, though, I think the best argument is simply caution. There's no backup planet if people like you are wrong, so it's best to proceed as if we're tiptoeing on the edge of a cliff. If 99% of scientists are wrong, then all we'll have wasted are funding dollars as effort. If you're wrong, we might see the coasts become uninhabitable, and wars break out over things like water and land.
Especially when looking at my own ancestors (all of whom were thinner than me 3 generations back), I tend to discount any sort of "oh they were just genetic freaks" kinds of arguments. None of them really dieted or deprived themselves, but they were used to pretty bland monotonous diets. I clearly remember ordering pizza in high school and they tried eating it with forks and knives and said they weren't big on "Italian food". The truth is it's the more recent generations who are the freaks. We're used to access to pretty much any kind of tasty, convenient food whenever we want it.