Lays and nearly every other brand are just thinner versions of potato chips you could make yourself at home (cut thin, fry in oil, dress in salt). Nothing "blown to smithereens" there.

You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer.

Might it be the beans that are what you're able to live off?

What are Doritos adding to the equation here?

One side they lived till higher 80s, another both till 95. Active till very late, basically maybe 1-2 years before death.

The thing is, they all lived frugally (and under hardships of communist rule, thats why garden). No junkfood as we know today. Tons of slow physical work on that garden. No vices like frequent alcohol consimption or cigarettes.

One of their sons (aka my uncle) smoked half a pack a day. Dead at 54 from heart attack, had a cancer before but got cca cured. Another daughter got over time overweight, little physical activity, and as I learned only recently became over time an alcoholic. Dead from an heart attack at 62.

Some folks I know have much worse lifestyles (ie smoke more than uncle, plus are more overweight, plus are alcoholics) yet keep living much longer.

Not sure what I want to say with all this, maybe that eating veggies is not enough. Its whats the rest of the plate and how much of it, how active you are, how stressed, how much exposure to bad chemicals. And genes, one thing completely out of control, but as mentioned above they alone wont save you.

Actually, they aren't. They're what's left of corn tortillas after the industrial frying process stripped anything that could be considered nutrients (hyperbole, of course), with a little salt added for flavor. Now you just have a calorie dense but non-nutritious glorified salt lick.

It's hardly food, and if you don't think so, try living on nothing but Doritos for a week and see how that works out for you. Potatoes may not be much more than starch and fiber, but I could live off those for any length of time because they are food.

No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. For the general population, not just for farm laborers. Heart disease killed far fewer people per capita per year. If you remove the infectious diseases that we have practically cured, mortality per capita per year in 1900 and 2020 is pretty similar.

Mind you, those infectious diseases were 90% eliminated by sanitation and understanding and 10% modern medicine; tuberculosis deaths were down by 90% from the 1860s to 1947, which is when streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against TB, was used.

For some time I ate similar diets to the one you describe - a poor farmer’s diet high in potatoes and bread, with some vegetables, meats and dairy - and I know people who eat that diet today. None of them are fat. It’s because potatoes and bread aren’t very calorie-dense. It is difficult to eat a caloric surplus every day when the majority of the food in front of you is greyish brown, vaguely mushy and of a sufficiently insufficient density that you must take your time to eat it. Modern processed foods, even the fairly simple ones, take the labor out of eating and make the regular things around us infinitely snackable. Modern foods have just the right amount of sweetness and salt and crunch with the right color and appealing packaging and advertising and so on. A standard potato in a standard kitchen will never have that. There’s a reason why obesity rates precisely track consumption of processed foods.

Only buy things with one ingredient. There, now you’re not eating the science experiment.

I have yet to see any credible evidence that tofu is bad for your endocrine system.