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What is Healthy Food in 2025? The Answer is Centuries Old.

  • Writer: Stefan Sager
    Stefan Sager
  • Aug 16
  • 6 min read

Updated: Oct 9


Keto, Paleo, Plant-based, Sugar- free or Superfood?


a black and white sketch of a grandmother cooking vs. a flashy influencer with a product

Grandma:

"Alright, darlings. Today we're making my famous lasagna. First, you brown the meat. Not too fast, mind you. You want to get to know it a little bit. That's the key. Respect the meat."


Influencer:

"What up, F.I.T. fam! Today we're optimising my anabolic intake with a five-minute meal prep that's 100% keto-flex, gluten-free, and bio-hacked for peak performance. First step: slam this pre-workout and find your inner beast mode."


Some people believe the secret to a great meal lies in a time-tested recipe, passed down through generations and refined through practice. They value familiar ingredients, careful preparation, and the comforting predictability of tradition.

Others take a more modern approach, blending creativity with technology and wellness trends. They prioritise nutrient density, sustainability, and personal optimisation—often experimenting with new ingredients, smart kitchen tools, and data-driven meal plans designed to fit their lifestyle and goals.


I. The Core Idea

Time as a Filter for identifying Healthy Food


The Lindy Effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age. A book that has been in print for 100 years is likely to be in print for another 100. The core idea is that time is the ultimate stress test. Anything that survives for a long period has, by definition, proven its robustness against the unseen and unpredictable shocks of the world.


When applied to nutrition, the Lindy Effect reframes the entire search for healthy food. It suggests that dietary patterns are a form of cultural technology. A way of eating that has sustained human populations for centuries or millennia has passed the most rigorous clinical trial imaginable: history itself. Its survival is not an accident; it is proof of its compatibility with human biology.


This model encourages deep skepticism of nutritional novelty and profound respect for tradition out of an assessment of demonstrated resilience.


II. The Everyday Analogy

Your Great-Grandmother's Recipe Book


Imagine you have two recipe books. One is a trendy, glossy cookbook published last month. It is filled with complex recipes, rare ingredients sourced from remote locations, and promises of rapid transformation.


The other is your great-grandmother's handwritten notebook, its pages stained with oil and flour. The recipes are simple, built on a foundation of inexpensive, widely available ingredients such as lentils, seasonal vegetables, olive oil, and whole grains.


new receipe vs old cook book

The trendy book is a theory; your great-grandmother's book is a proven result. The Lindy Effect encourages us to trust the recipes that have endured.


We also brought a grandmother in so you can check several foods with her directly before moving onto building the plate in section III.



III. The Practical Toolkit

How to Build a Lindy Plate


The best part is that the Lindy Effect is a practical filter you can apply to every meal. Here is a step-by-step guide to constructing a modern plate based on time-tested wisdom.


Lindy 1: Prioritise Plants with a Long History

Make vegetables, fruits, and legumes the foundation of your diet. Focus on those that have been staples of human agriculture for millennia: lentils, chickpeas, onions, garlic, leafy greens, and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage.

Lindy 2: Embrace Time-Tested Fats

Use fats that have been part of human diets for centuries, not decades. Make extra-virgin olive oil your primary fat source––a food with over 6,000 years of history. Incorporate other whole-food fats like avocados, nuts, and seeds. Be deeply skeptical of industrially processed seed and vegetable oils, which are a recent and evolutionarily novel invention.

Lindy 3: Include Fermented Foods

Fermentation is an ancient method of food preservation that pre-dates written history. Regularly consume probiotic-rich foods such as plain yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and kimchi to support a healthy gut microbiome.

Lindy 4: Apply the Great-Grandparent Filter

This is a simple but powerful rule. When looking at a packaged food product, ask: "Would my great-grandparents recognise this as food?" If the answer is no, it is likely not Lindy. This filter naturally eliminates the vast majority of ultra-processed products that are a primary driver of modern disease.


IV. The Deeper Dive

Foundational Evidence Across Domains


The logic of the Lindy Effect is validated by observing its function across disconnected fields. The foundational evidence in nutrition comes from the world's longest-lived populations.


The Mediterranean diet is the aggregate eating pattern of regions like Crete and Southern Italy. Rich in olive oil, legumes, fish, and vegetables, this diet's components have been staples for thousands of years. Decades of modern scientific research have confirmed what time already knew: this dietary pattern dramatically reduces the risk of heart disease.


Similarly, the traditional diet of Okinawa, Japan––a region with one of the highest concentrations of centenarians––was overwhelmingly plant-based and is credited with their exceptionally low rates of chronic disease.


This same principle of demonstrated endurance is a marker of value in other high-stakes domains:

In Finance

Value investors apply the Lindy Effect by prioritising companies with decades-long track records of profitability through multiple economic cycles. Gold––having served as a store of value for millennia––is considered more Lindy and probabilistically more durable than a cryptocurrency with only a decade of history.

In Business & Technology

A Lindy strategy focuses on stable, long-term customer needs. Customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery: principles that have a longer half-life than any specific technology. The book as a technology has survived for over 500 years, suggesting it will outlast any single e-reader device or content platform invented in the last decade. The scientific why behind this in nutrition is explained by the 🔗Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis. Our ancient biology is poorly adapted to the novel inputs of the modern industrial diet. Lindy-compliant diets work because they remain in harmony with our slowly evolving genes.

Personal Health

To build a lasting base of knowledge, the model advises prioritising the reading of classic books that have been filtered by time over consuming ephemeral daily news. For personal wellbeing, it suggests focusing on foundational habits recommended for centuries––journaling, meditation, and consistent sleep––whose longevity is a testament to their alignment with fundamental human psychology.

Social Health

Social and religious traditions that have been practiced for hundreds or thousands of years, such as communal feasts and marriage ceremonies, persist because they serve a deep-seated human need for connection and meaning. Their endurance is a powerful argument for their importance, suggesting they are aligned with fundamental human social needs.



V. The Advanced Context

A Heuristic, Not a Law


The Lindy Effect is a powerful heuristic for navigating complex systems, but it's crucial to understand it as

a probabilistic tool, not an infallible law. An expert uses it with a critical understanding of its limitations and its interaction with other powerful forces.

The most significant flaw of the Lindy Effect is that it can create a blind spot for genuine, paradigm-shifting innovations. The horse-and-buggy industry, for example, had centuries of proven resilience––it was very Lindy, right before the automobile made it obsolete. However, as humans, we have to make many decisions, and using the Lindy Effect will allow us to be right in most cases.


Many might point to modern food fortification as a strong counterexample. The "unnatural" act of adding iodine to salt or folic acid to flour has been a public health miracle, proving that a modern, evidence-based intervention can be superior to a purely historical approach. This demonstrates the danger of committing the Appeal to Nature Fallacy, which would be just as foolish as dismissing all new ideas.


For the correct application of the Lindy Effect, understand that its purpose is to identify a class of foods, ideas, or strategies that have a higher a priori probability of persistence. It is a powerful antidote to neomania, the bias for novelty, and forces a deep respect for accumulated risk and the test of time.


We often fall into the trap of running at full speed in one direction and, once disappointed, turning around 180 degrees to run in the other.


The Lindy Effect cannot help us to be right every single time. It doesn't mean that all modern things are useless. Instead, it allows us to slow down, process, and evaluate new information until we receive definitive evidence.


Until then, it's probably smartest to stick with what has been time-tested. The Lindy Effect is a foundational tool for building a resilient, Antifragile approach to health and life in a world saturated with fragile trends and those who are incentivised to sell them to us.



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