Was farming a healthier lifestyle than hunting and gathering and why?

Answer 1

Particularly as practiced thousands of years ago when farming first appeared as an alternative to hunting and gathering, there were both advantages and disadvantages to each, but on the whole, the hunter gatherers were healthier. Hunting and gathering tended to produce a more diversified and nutritious diet, was less labor intensive, and since it did not produce as large a quantity of food, it also did not lead to the same high reproductive rate, since hunter gatherers can only have as many children as they can feed. The higher reproductive rate among farming communities eventually lead to to ills of early civilization, such as epidemics, water polluted by sewage, economic disparity and class struggle, etc.

However, hunting and gathering is much less reliable as a food source; if you are just trying to find food in some natural environment, there is never any guarantee of what you will find, and furthermore, there are seasonal variations. In the winter the hunter gatherer may get very hungry, at least in the temperate or northerly lattitudes. And of course, the larger population of farming societies inevitably overcame the smaller bands of hunter gatherers. In a social sense, hunter gatherers could not compete.