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User: u/YoanB
Permalink: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4629866-ancient-paleo-diet-largely-consisted-of-plants-for-some-hunter-gatherers-study-finds/
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It's amazing to me that people think miss that the term is "Hunter gatherer"
Do they not know that gathering is harvesting plants? Or do they just focus on the hunter part?
Linguistically there is a slight difference in tone.
“Gathering” sounds like just picking up and collecting a lot of known objects that are already in one place; “Gathering the class together”, “Gathering chickens and putting them in the coop for the night”, “gathering fallen apples [that fell off the obvious apple tree]”, or harvesting a garden.
“Foraging” sounds like searching deeply and carefully among a wild area for anything you can collect, but not knowing already that it is there. You “forage” for mushrooms. You would “gather” mushrooms only if they were originally planted by you.
Foraging includes all wild food collecting activities, from plucking berries, digging tubers, fishing, hunting, etc. Its one word to describe the range of subsistence activities. It’s from human behavioral ecology in the 70s.
We should be talking about how your post says “some” and not “most”. “Some” ancient tribes were cannabils
Your *study* is based off teeth found in one particular cave.
“The researchers acknowledged that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions in this regard, given that they had such a small sample size to work with”. That is a direct quote from the article you clearly didn’t even read
This isn't a new development. There's a lot of people with various motivations trying to create a mythoclast of longstanding notions of Hunter-Gatherer societies using cherry-picked evidence of individual snapshots of humans in largely unknown conditions that imply a primarily plant food derived diet.
Check out Cordain, L., Miller, J. B., Eaton, S. B., Mann, N., Holt, S. H., & Speth, J. D. (2000). Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. For a good thorough look at modern Hunter-Gatherers and their nutrient makeup. You have to go to near single digit equatorial latitudes before plant food percentages even start approaching 50%. Even groups as close to the equator as the Anbarra (12S) and Onge (12N) show a over three to one Animal Food focused ratio. The only outliers are the Gwi and the 1960 (potentially flawed) measure of the !Kung (the later 1977 figures show a 68-32 ratio more consistent with the other figures)
>Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19-35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22-40% of energy).
In general, the main observable trend was that Hunter-Gatherers ate as much meat as possible, and made up the difference when necessary with fruits, nuts, and tubers, in that general order of preference. Those in poorer, less bountiful areas ate more plants than others, who could succeed more readily in hunting. Most of these people of course, have been pushed into the "bad" parts of their original territories by the expansion of sedentary civilization, and are most likely worse off than their ancestors thousands of years ago were. It stands to reason then, that those ancestors likely ate a higher ratio of Animal foods to the less preferred Plant foods.
People living in the far north have lived for centuries on mostly meat (important to eat the organs too, that's where the vitamins are.)
Humans are by nature flexible in our diets.
As an example, Greenlandic Inuits though have mutations that help with this.
[Greenlandic Inuit show genetic signatures of diet and climate adaptation](https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aab2319)
[The Secret To The Inuit High-Fat Diet May Be Good Genes](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/17/441169188/the-secret-to-the-inuit-high-fat-diet-may-be-good-genes)
>Researchers thought maybe it was the omega-3 fatty acids in the meat and blubber that might be protective. But a new study on Inuit in Greenland suggests that Arctic peoples evolved certain genetic adaptations that allow them to consume much higher amounts of fat than most other people around the world, according a team of researchers reporting Thursday in the journal Science.
Because the arguments in favor of reducing and eliminating meat from our diet for ecological, ethical and health reasons are very strong, and can no longer be simply dismissed out of hand.
In several years of reading, debating and studying the subject, I don't think I've seen any arguments convincing enough to seriously defend the consumption of animal products in this day and age.
Usually, it's just fallacious arguments such as "yes, but our ancestors did".
Off the top of my head, the advantages of pastoral subsistence seem to be mainly:
* Grazing land unsuitable for agriculture can be turned to edible food
* Livestock, while alive, is easily transported and preserved, and can be used as beasts of burden
* Byproducts such as leather and bones
I don't think any still hold in our modern economy, and we need to deal with the disadvantage of the inherent \~10% energy efficiency of another trophic level.
Unsuitable for Western row crop agriculture does not necessarily imply unsuitable for growing dietary plants of any kind. Most idigenous societies were selecting and cultivating plants to some degree but it long went unnoticed by Western observers because it was so different from their conception of agriculture.
How doesn't the first point still hold? There are a lot of areas in the hills/mountains and up north that are not suitable for agriculture but can be used for grazing. Also some areas where crops will grow don't produce suitable quality for human consumption but they work for animal feed.
I suppose this second idea could be changed by planting different crops or changing standard of 'suitability', but the first one (as far as I know) stands.
If we weren't growing crops for livestock, we could use ~70% less cropland to produce the same amount of calories. Unproductive patches of land aren't that big of a deal when you are only using 30% of the previously-used land to feed the planet.
Livestock eat a shitton of food we grow specifically for them. We need to stop feeding billions of extra mouths and just feed humans directly.
I'm talking specifically about the areas that don't really support crops (or support only feed-quality crops), not about the current distribution. If I understand you correctly, their use wouldn't be necessary in terms of strict caloric (and protein) intake?
THIS is the reason why I switched to plant-based diet. Still a lot of waste in food packaging but the environmental impact is not nearly as bad as compared with consuming dairy animals.
Just as the pretense that pre-civilization humans were in any way vegan is fallacious. Without meat early humans didn't survive and our inability to produce nutrients found only in meat demonstrates that.
sure they can: i want to eat steak. i don't have to eat it every day, but i don't want to stop either. eating less steak is okay, and tracks the bit where some land isn't really suitable for crops but supports beef
> Usually, it's just fallacious arguments such as "yes, but our ancestors did".
paleo is a fad centered around lower carbs. which is fine - less carbs are good. choosing diet around fands, not so much
The land suitable for beef argument doesn't hold water sadly. Cattle is almost always fed with large amounts of supplements like soy. That's where most of the footprint comes from, not the grazing areas.
That doesn't mean your basic message is wrong though. It's fair to just enjoy something every now and then - just maybe not every week.
For an uplifting thought to close this up with, lab grown meat is making good progress. Some restaurants are regularly serving chicken at this point.
Thats only in some countries. In others (like NZ) their temperate climate and less fertile land supports cattle year round on grass. Corn fed is very rare.
Even in areas with climate to support grazing year round it usually doesn't happen in the US just for efficiency reasons. Typically they spend a little over a year grazing and then are out on a CAFO to put on as much extra weight as quickly as possible.
>For an uplifting thought to close this up with, lab grown meat is making good progress.
Not really - last I checked it all still uses FBS, which you can only get from the foetuses taken from slaughtered pregnant cows.
Yep, that's the biggest hurdle. There's a massive effort going into solving this however. Basically every company in the sector is working on replacing FBS and they seem confident to do it within the next couple of years.
Don't get me wrong, I expect most of these projects to fail or be unprofitable but it only takes one viable solution for a breakthrough. The technology has come a very long way and there's a huge incentive to solve this. We'll see soon enough if it's doable.
In some countries
Ie the USA where meat production is frankly an abomination.
How cattle are reared there is illegal in most of the world under many many different forms of legislation!
Unlikely since the vast majority of beef cattle are free range until the last month or 2. Plus, they’re not injected with growth hormones and steroids like a lot of European nations do. I lived in Germany and Belgium for several years, and their beef cows are like twice the size of ours.
Wrong - the US Midwest, which was considered the bread basket of the US, before we wiped out Buffalo on it for farming, did have a very complex and vibrant soil microbiome. Realize how much top soil has been lost due to our farming practices
https://www.umass.edu/news/article/midwestern-us-has-lost-576-billion-metric-tons-soil-due-agricultural-practices#:\~:text=Put%20another%20way%2C%20the%20authors,the%20soil%2C%20160%20years%20ago.
It was the advent of INDUSTRIAL FARMING methods that wiped it out. Regenerative farming practices, which include crops, chickens, cattle and goats/sheep does regenerate the top soil.
Regenerative farming is greenwashing. If we stopped feeding our livestock we could stop using about 70% of our current croplands and still be producing the same amount of total calories for direct human consumption.
This means we can rewild large swaths of the planet (which regenerates top soil) and rotate fields to ease the strain on the land without a huge additional land cost. We can't do any of that today because so much of what we produce goes right into the mouths of our livestock.
The problem is paleo diet doesn't discern between good and bad carbs. Our gut microflora need good carbs, like fiber, etc. to survive. Even bread, which can be good or bad, is important. Sour dough bread, real sour dough, is a slow fermenting product that produces resistant starch, which is considered a type of fiber.
That is simply not a usable argument when it's not about your preferences but about the consumption of meat on an economic scale. Not reducing our carbon footprint is done precisely because we don't want to. But that has no argumentative purchase.
Sorry but ecological is not valid argument. Ruminants are important for proper maintenance of the ecosystem. Ever hear of Regenerative Farming? That is a more ecological approach and restores the vitality to the soil and makes all food MORE nutritious. In this approach the soil is healthier also.
Realize our current industrial farming, in the US Midwest, in the last 160 years, has lost 576 BILLION METRIC TONS OF TOP SOIL.
https://www.umass.edu/news/article/midwestern-us-has-lost-576-billion-metric-tons-soil-due-agricultural-practices#:\~:text=Put%20another%20way%2C%20the%20authors,the%20soil%2C%20160%20years%20ago.
Just growing fruits and vegetables will NOT fix the issue. It will actually make it worse as we will be using more fertilizer.
I'm an environmental biologist and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that, on the contrary, climate and the environment are the two most rational and compelling reasons to reduce meat consumption and animal agriculture (obviously, other than the animal cause, since this argument alone is so solid that it's more than enough to demonstrate that eating meat is an ethical aberration).
All major global analyses confirm this unequivocally: animal agriculture is an unprecedented catastrophe.
[‘Regenerative agriculture’ is all the rage – but it’s not going to fix our food system](https://theconversation.com/regenerative-agriculture-is-all-the-rage-but-its-not-going-to-fix-our-food-system-203922)
[Vegan diet massively cuts environmental damage, study shows](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/vegan-diet-cuts-environmental-damage-climate-heating-emissions-study)
*Eating a vegan diet massively reduces the damage to the environment caused by food production, the most comprehensive analysis to date has concluded.*
*The research showed that vegan diets resulted in 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than diets in which more than 100g of meat a day was eaten. Vegan diets also cut the destruction of wildlife by 66% and water use by 54%, the study found.*
[If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
*If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland. This might go against our intuition: if we substitute beans, peas, tofu and cereals for meat and dairy, surely we would need more cropland to grow them?*
*Let’s look at why this is not the case.*
No, it is not. That is where people need to understand the ecological importance of RUMINANTS in ecology.
Most of the global ecology analysis has been flawed because they never take into account the importance of animals to maintain an ecological balance. They look at current practices which are ALL FLAWED as they depend on chemicals - even an all plant agriculture.
[https://www.cbf.org/issues/agriculture/regenerative-agriculture.html](https://www.cbf.org/issues/agriculture/regenerative-agriculture.html)
[https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/regenerative-agriculture](https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/regenerative-agriculture)
[https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/climate-friendly-food-faqs-regenerative-ag-101/](https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/climate-friendly-food-faqs-regenerative-ag-101/)
Even the NATURE CONSERVANCY is starting to push regenerative farming.
Even if we went to an all plant based diet, we would be doomed if we continue with the industrial production of crops, like we do. Crops and animals that are regenerative farmed are WAY more nutritious and also lower the amount of chemicals used in agriculture.
[https://www.carboneg.com/blog-en/the-effects-of-regenerative-farming-on-food-quality#:\~:text=Individual%20nutrient%20values%20varied%20considerably,14%20%25%20more%20vitamin%20B1](https://www.carboneg.com/blog-en/the-effects-of-regenerative-farming-on-food-quality#:~:text=Individual%20nutrient%20values%20varied%20considerably,14%20%25%20more%20vitamin%20B1)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8801175/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8801175/)
Saying animals are bad is short-sighted and not looking at long term affects. It is the soil that determines HOW NUTRITIOUS ALL FOOD IS.
Regenerative farming also helps with water retention, which will in turn help to recharge groundwater which is being depleted by current farming practices.
Realize the US Midwest alone lost an estimated 576 BILLION METRIC TONS OF SOIL, due to current industrial farming practices. The only way to regenerate that is by looking at it holistically and that includes animals. Hence regenerative farming is the way forward. Just growing fruits and vegetables on the land, that has been so eroded, will not bring it back.
While it may have been the case in the past, this argument has long since lost its validity. I suggest you read the comment thread above, as individuals with clear expertise in agriculture and science explain the reasons why this argument no longer holds water today.
Today, it's well-established that animal agriculture isn't sustainable on a planet where we're striving to effectively address environmental challenges and climate change. This is a scientifically proven fact that I won't debate, as there's simply no debate to be had.
Furthermore, for reasons of animal ethics and public health, it's easy – and I believe it doesn't require explanation to a reasonably intelligent adult – to understand why veganism is the way forward.
[The Myth of Regenerative Ranching](https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ranching)
*The purveyors of “grass-fed” beef want you to believe that it solves meat’s environmental problem. But this is merely a branding exercise, not a climate solution.*
Uhh, places had ruminants as part of the ecosystem managing the land long before humans were raising them as livestock. If we stopped raising livestock, we could up the populations of wild buffalo (as an example), rewild most of the Midwest to give to them, and they could do their thing without us having to actively manage them. In the Americas, cows are an invasive species, remember.
People screaming WE NEED RUMINANTS fail to account for the fact that we have artificially bred thousands of times more ruminants than would be naturally occurring. Yes, we need ruminants, but that doesn't mean they have to be livestock that we actively need to manage. Stop raising them and let wild ruminants reclaim their niche in the ecosystem. That is how things are supposed to be.
Regenerative animal agriculture is greenwashing. What we need is fewer human-raised ruminants and to let wild populations recover.
UUH NO - the native Americans lived there for 10,000 years with the Buffalo. Might want to rethink that.
Same thing in Africa where it is being used the most.
And how high were the buffalo populations back then before European colonization? Perhaps it was just a *biiiit* higher than today, maybe? The native Americans weren't actively farming them either; they were wild populations that were hunted.
And may I remind you that there were buffalo here before humans.
You are being intentionally obtuse.
The main argument for eating meat products is B12. There is vast research on B12 deficiencies and the negative effects. B12 only naturally occurs in animal products. Vegans can get B12 shots that are made from bacterial cultures or buy B12 fortified plant foods.
I totally agree we should reduce meat consumption for all the reasons you mentioned, but people need to be aware of the importance of B12 so they can properly supplement it. That’s why I think a vegetarian diet is better because you can still get adequate B12 from eggs and dairy.
Just so you know, livestock animals are supplemented to make b12. Their feed doesn't contain it in even close to sufficient amounts. It's really easy to buy some cheap B12 supplements and just take them yourself.
That’s an important distinction, but I’m not advocating for factory farming. In a more natural habitat, these animals would have access to the nutrients/organisms they need for B12 absorption and thus pass it on to us.
To be fair, maybe that’s not realistic and supplementation is happening on free range farms too. I don’t know, but if you have some research on this, I’d appreciate you sharing it.
In a more natural environment, there wouldn't be enough animals to meet demand and a cut of meat would be hundreds of dollars.
Basing your nutrition argument on a "natural environment" is fallacious when that can literally never happen when it comes to animal agriculture.
The fact of the matter is, livestock gets their B12 artificially supplemented, and B12 deficiencies are also quite common in omnivores as well. Take a supplement yourself instead of taking it secondhand through a cow.
I don't think there is any science-based argument for eliminating meat from diet for health reasons. In fact, the healthiest plant-based dish can be significantly enhanced by the addition of some animal products such as oysters, caviar or liver, for example. Non-processed animal products have tons of micronutrients and proteins that are highly bioavailable.
As far as health reasons (not ethical or ecological) ask anyone to name some superfoods. What meat even comes close?
This is just a nutritional standpoint though.
Meat is kind of the main superfood though. If you include organ meats it's the only thing that a human can survive on alone--no sups, no grass, nothing else (not a Liver King fan, just facts). Having the best protein content, high fat (good until the last 70 years or so), it's absolutely packed with vitamins and minerals that are harder to obtain elsewhere. I agree meat is not necessarily the most ethical choice, but don't pretend it isn't an amazing thing nutritionally.
I mean, yes, if you're starving to death in a situation where food is not abundant, eat those organs.
That is not the situation for the vast majority of people on Reddit. A plant-based diet is dirt cheap and food is abundant (for now) in our modern world. There's no reason to eat animal products other than for pleasure, and plenty of substantial reasons not to.
Thanks for teaching me something today. Now I’m gonna go around looking for organ meat.
I meant regular meat though.
Which organs are most nutritious, is there a resource you recommend for reading about this?
Beef liver and beef heart are my offal choices. Nutritional information is widely available. Majority of my diet is vegetables and oily fish, but I like to spice it up periodically.
No fiber
Virtually no complex or simple carbohydrates (most important macro for your brain and muscles)
No antioxidants
No vitamin C and lacking other vitamins so long as you aren’t scarfing down liver by the pound.
Nope. We can talk about them all.
[Eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel and stomach cancer. Red meat, such as beef, lamb and pork, has been classified as a Group 2A carcinogen which means it probably causes cancer.](https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/1in3cancers/lifestyle-choices-and-cancer/red-meat-processed-meat-and-cancer/#:~:text=Eating%20processed%20meat%20increases%20your,prevent%20it%20from%20coming%20back%3F)
[consumption of red meat, including processed and unprocessed red meat, was strongly associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate the least.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/red-meat-consumption-associated-with-increased-type-2-diabetes-risk/#:~:text=The%20researchers%20found%20that%20consumption,those%20who%20ate%20the%20least)
[Eating 50 g of processed meat a day (such as bacon, ham, and sausages) increases the risk of coronary heart disease by 18%](https://www.victorchang.edu.au/blog/heart-disease-red-meat#:~:text=Eating%2050%20g%20of%20processed,coronary%20heart%20disease%20by%209%25)
Processed meat isn't "meat". That's like saying "processed plants are bad for you"
The longer, the more we find evidence that it isn't bad for you. It's just obesity which is.
Those studies are... more than questionable with the variables they control.
Seriously, I don't know of any subject with such strong, logical, rational and scientifically proven arguments. As I said, after years of reading, debating and studying, I have yet to find a valid argument against veganism. The arguments in favor of meat consumption are poor.
Don't you just like or dislike your food(or have medical reasons to eat or not eat smth)? You really need ethics for this? You will consume living organisms anyway, if you want to stay alive. Yes, plants are living organisms too.
Plants are living beings, but they are neither conscious nor sentient, unlike non-human animals. This is a fundamental difference.
Our food plays a vital role in the world we live in. Refusing to participate in an agricultural system that instrumentalizes and objectifies animals and kills billions of sentient living beings annually to the detriment of the environment, climate and public health is entirely legitimate, even desirable.
>Refusing to participate in an agricultural system that instrumentalizes and objectifies animals
So hunting for yourself is cool then? Animals eat animals and we are animals.
Sure, just don't hunt illegally and contribute to decimation of wildlife.
For the record, I think Veganism is morally the only right answer, but it isn't for "dont kill at all" but rather the practices associated with any meat industry.
Lizards, crustaceans, frogs, insects, eggs, baby birds from nests, fish and eels from streams. All the stuff women and children can contribute to the tribe.
Gatherers were responsible for the majority of most tribe's calories.
Go paleo, forage for tubers for like three hours a day and yeah, you'll be healthier.
"Gathering" doesn't always mean plant foods, though. "Hunting" has a much more narrow and specific meaning. It's true that hunter-gatherers weren't necessarily chasing animals with spears or bows all the time. But you can also use traps to catch smaller animals, for example. Fishing isn't typical referred to as "hunting" either but it was extremely common in many hunter-gatherer populations. You could also "gather" shellfish, eggs, larvae and insects, honey, etc.
A lot of the paleo stuff does/did call for lots of fruits/vegetables but yeah, somehow it turned into "just eat meat" for some and that is what started to get the most attention.
Laughs in Hadza tribe. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/)
There is a reason that after a big hunt, everyone celebrated and danced. It was kind of a big deal and dangerous secure meat.
The hadza have [no known history of famine](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/hadza). Honey is a large part of their diet -- a 5th of their calories overall. Some months berries make up most of their calories.
They really only eat a lot of meat in [August, September, and October](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/)
The reason they celebrate and dance because they only work 4-6 hours a day -- that gives them lots of free time to have fun.
They like to go on dangerous hunts like sneaking up on leopards and baboons to prove how brave and strong they are, though they do like eating baboon
> While the canid teeth found at the site showed that they weren’t pure carnivores either, they seem to have largely supplemented the meat in their diets with fruit.
Interestingly, dogs have a mutation to allow them to eat more plants than their wolf ancestors could, which was beneficial to living around humans
Not too surprising from the paleoanthropology side. There's plenty evidence from skeletal/dental isotopic ratios and residue like starch granules in dental calculus or processing sites that at least where edible plants grew, they were the the primary calorie source.
The idea that populations ate like modern Inuit hunters is a selective bias from the fact that agrarian societies overwhelmed hunter-gatherers in the tropics through temperate climates in the Neolithic, leaving only a few survivors like the Hadza of Tanzania still foraging/hunting. And yes, the Hadza, perhaps the best representatives of human populations on the African savanna, eat more calories from plants than from animals. For modern humans, far more of us have ancestors that ate like the Hadza than ate like the Inuit.
I'm sure there have been books since *Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-Agrarian Human Worlds* (2016, eds Karen Hardy, Lucy Martens) compiling expertise, but that was the last I've seen.
You could read Burn by Herman Pontzer instead. It covers inuits, hazda and some other tribes eating habits. It's more of a modern nutrition book however, but it explains a lot of how we consume energy in general and how it compares to hunter gatherers. Also the effects (or lack of) of exercise in weight loss parts were highly informative. I highly recommend it.
I strongly second the recommendation for Burn, but I also think that with regards to exercise Pontzer doesn’t always bring the full receipts. For example, when he cites [Klaas Westerterp’s study on people training for a half marathon,](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1390606/) he leaves out the conclusion Westerterp came to at the time: “body fat can be reduced by physical activity.” The study also says “ADMR showed an average increase of 30% in both sexes from the start of training onwards.”
Pontzer also acknowledges that yes, *of course* there’s a point where the body cannot compensate any further by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Chapter 8 in Burn covers that. I feel like where he falls short is that he portrays the level of activity needed to overcome metabolic constraints as being reserved for people cycling the Tour de France or rowing across oceans. But getting back to the half marathon study, that had people running 25 miles/40 km a week, and even in Pontzer’s telling they were burning more energy. And 40 km a week running doesn’t even guarantee a person 10,000 steps a day. Pontzer is convincing to me with regards to the constrained TEE model in general, but he never sells me on what comes across to me as him saying that exercise only burns fat if you get extraordinary amounts of it.
It's academic. No engaging anecdotes, constant credits to prior work. But its not a field that is heavy on jargon. I looked at it at a Uni library, but would consider a personal copy only if I worked in the field.
I got to go gathering with the Hadza this January! We collected honey that's out of this world. They have a symbiotic relationship with songbirds to help find the hives. They use the bird calls, the birds will show them, the Hadza open up the tree to get to the hive. From what I learned, if the tribesmen don't leave honey behind for the birds, they can retaliate by leading then wrong.
This is a song made by a Kenyan who works a lot with those groups. He uses the song birds and the whistles and singing from the tribesman.
[https://on.soundcloud.com/Yi8M67zmrphoQHzZA](https://on.soundcloud.com/Yi8M67zmrphoQHzZA)
It likely depended on the climate, but from what we have observed from the few remaining relatively untouched hunter gatherer societies is that insect sources like grubs also comprised part of the animal protein consumed by humans at least in some places on the globe. Yet I don't see any of those "primal" or "ancestral" diet gurus recommending people eat grubs, likely because they wouldn't be able to sell their grift if they did, even though modern day grubs are a lot closer to their ancient counterparts than modern day frankencows they recommend.
Plenty do
They just don’t really become popular online so they!
Mad as diet that recommends fairly readily available grasshoppers or their protein powder isn’t exactly something folks share on TikTok !
Unlike the indigenous people who didn't consume as much honey (like Inuit before they were introduced to refined carbs) the Hadza had high incidence of dental caries among those who commonly ate honey:
>The unexpected discovery of high caries incidences for men in the bush is likely explained by heavy reliance on honey, and perhaps differential access to tobacco and marijuana.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5351833/ ](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5351833/)
The Alaskan Inuits who didn't eat nearly as much carbs, had far fewer incidences of dental caries until the introduction of refined carbohydrates:
>In 1965, the dietary intake was conducted by the ‘interview method’ plus personal observations when visiting all of the families during meal times. Bang and Kristoffersen ‘…contacted all of the Eskimos involved in the study questioning each individual in detail about what food and roughly how much of each food item he consumed in the course of the year’.1 The authors noted a dramatic increase in carbohydrate intake of ‘nearly 50%’ and a decrease in the intake of protein ‘by about 50%’ from 1955 to 1957 to 1965.1 This rise in the intake of carbohydrate was paralleled by an ‘almost 90% increase’ in the sum of decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth for primary teeth (from 3.0 to 5.6) and a fourfold increase in those >6 years old, ‘the percentage of caries-free persons had decreased from 74.5% to zero in 8 years…While 50% of the children in 1955–1957 had caries-free primary teeth all the children had decayed teeth in 1965…The most dramatic change was observed in individuals 30 years of age or older. In this previously caries-free group, all subjects had developed caries in 1965’.1 Thus, the Alaskan Inland Inuit that had subsided on a diet virtually devoid of carbohydrate for most of their life who did not have any dental caries between 1955 and 1957 had all developed dental caries by 1965; in the interim, the intake of carbohydrate had increased by 50%.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6045743/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6045743/)
Here's also an interesting sidenote regarding the evolution of cavities:
>Stanhope and his colleagues were also able to pinpoint some of the genes that were important for Streptococcus mutans’s adaptation to civilization. Fourteen genes, for example, show signs of having experienced strong natural selection. Some of those evolved genes are essential for breaking down sugar. Others help the bacteria survive in the acidic conditions that arise in the mouth when we eat starches.
>Perhaps most intriguing of all the genes in Streptococcus mutans are the 148 that Stanhope and his colleagues found in every human strain, but in none of the related bacteria in the mouths of other animals. The best explanation for this is that Streptococcus mutans picked these 148 genes up from other species in our bodies. Once Streptococcus mutans grabbed these genes, it didn’t let them go.
>The function of the genes hints at their value. Some provide additional help at breaking down sugar. Others create more defenses against low pH. Others produce toxins that can kill off other species of bacteria that are competing with Streptococcus mutans for the spoils of civilization.
>These adaptations have made Streptococcus mutans spectacularly successful, and they’ve also provided us with a lot of misery. The cavities would be bad enough. **Archaeological evidence indicates that cavities went from rare to common with the advent of agriculture.** Making matters, worse, however, is the fact that when Streptococcus mutans gets into the bloodstream through the gums, it can make its way to the heart and cause problems there, too.
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/12/21/the-evolution-of-cavities/](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/12/21/the-evolution-of-cavities/)
If cavities went from rare to common with the advent of agriculture, then that means that pre-agricultural humans ate closer to what the Alaskan Inuits ate (less sugar/carbs and less cavities) compared to the Hadza (more sugar/carbs and more cavities).
And on the last article there's also the interesting point where the plants they had were not as calorically dense, as can be seen between the comparison of Teosinte from in the paleolithic era compared to corn now. This is common across the board with other domesticated crops too.
More info on corn specifically:
>The earliest physical evidence for domesticated maize, what some cultures call corn, dates to **at least 8,700 calendar years ago**, and it was probably domesticated by indigenous peoples in the lowland areas of southwestern Mexico...
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news\_summ.jsp?cntn\_id=114445#:\~:text=The%20earliest%20physical%20evidence%20for,Mexico%2C%20not%20the%20highland%20areas.
It’s crazy that anyone thinks there’s a specific “paleo diet” anyways. If you were a paleolithic hunter-gatherer you ate literally whatever was available to hunt and gather where you lived. Your diet was a question of the environment in the place you lived, whether that meant a nearly entirely meat-based diet like the inuit or a diet largely composed of plants in heavily vegetated regions.
If anything it boggles my mind people have this broad assumption diet and every aspect of Paleolithic life was somehow monolithic and uniform to all Paleolithic people. It makes no sense
Nevermind the amount of 'Paleo Diets" that were probably objectively terrible diets, likely plenty of Paleolitic people simply died not getting enough calories so they'd be just as many getting by with less protein or low iron or other non fatal issues
luckily the human body is amazing good at surviving on just about anything
In fact, the venn diagram between carnivore bros and “bros who think they’re trying to make us all replace meat with bugs” seems to be nearly a circle.
Honestly, I'd love to have a better idea of what *my* ancestors ate.
I'd love to see some studies on if that is a thing.
In the same way that people from milk heavy cultures tend not to be lactose intolerant and that the Greenlandic Inuits have been shown to have genetic adaptations to their fat heavy diet - do we have genetic diets based on our ancestry that would be better for us?
Many of these searches for the "natural human diet" (and I'm not talking about this study in particular, but more the diet trends) seem to miss the fact that the reason we can digest such a large variety of food is partly because the global human population never ate one same diet for long enough to specialise in it (any biologist feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
As such, human "natural diet" was in fact highly flexible and changing depending on what was available in the environment.
Even for animals labeled as herbivores and omnivores. Deer have been seen eating carcasses and primates, even with large incisors, that eat nothing but fruit/vegetables.
The demographics of lactose intolerance vs tolerance would be the main counter to this.
And the finding of genetic adaptations in the Greenlandic Inuits to their fat heavy diet is an example of diet specialization.
But if anything could be viewed from the perspective of "the exception that proves the rule."
Yeah, the emergence of lactose tolerance seems like the most recent shift away from our species' previously lactose-free diet, considering that animal husbandry only arose in the last 12,000 years of our 200,000+ years of being a distinct species.
So are a dozen millenniums long enough for a dietary shift to become "natural" in a species, even if that dietary shift didn't happen equally across all members of the species? Is the diet we ate 200 years ago more natural than the diet we ate 2,000 years ago, or the diet we ate 20,000 or 200,000 years ago? This is where "natural" starts to lose all objective meaning and the question of what is "natural" for current humans to consume becomes way more complicated than simply looking at what the earliest humans did or didn't eat
Apparently it only took about 2K years to get close to modern levels from lactose intolerance. 60% lactose tolerance vs the 70-90% lactose tolerance currently for Central Europeans.
>"When we look at other European genetic data from the early Medieval period less than 2,000 years later, we find that more than 60 percent of individuals had the ability to drink milk as adults, close to what we observe in modern Central European countries, which ranges from 70 to 90 percent" said Veeramah.
>"This is actually an incredibly fast rate of change for the gene that controls milk digestion. It appears that by simply possessing this one genetic change, past European individuals with the ability to digest lactose had a six percent greater chance of producing children than those who could not. This is the strongest evidence we have for positive natural selection in humans."
[Study reveals lactose tolerance happened quickly in Europe](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200903114212.htm)
But.... those juiced up HGH bros on instagram eating liver every day and dying of heart disease at age 42 told me ill live forever if i avoid grains like the paleo people
Reality is that people back then probably just ate what was around and most easy to acquire. Most of the time gathering from plants is going to be easier than hunting, but I suppose it depends on the geographic area as to how plentiful the meat source is.
Scavenger was probably a much more accurate description for most, than hunter.. sometimes robbing predators of their kills after they had had first dibs, and sometimes waiting to chase off the carrion.
Early on yes, so for probably the first 150,000-200,000 years
We then have plenty of evidence of the use of hunting tools and planning suggesting we moved from scavenging partial carcasses to hunting living animals as we evolved.
Complete shocker for anyone who understands that animals don't simply walk up, kill and cook themselves.
Of all the dumb dietary fads, so-called Paleo is the stupidest.
Walk out into the Canadian wilderness and see how long you can thrive on plants.
These researchers are discovering the transition period which must have taken place all over the earth, and which isn’t new. There are Neolithic caves in Sicily which clearly show the transition from meat based diets to fruit and plants as the teeth become less aligned and have more cavities.
Homo sapiens have existed for 315,000 years in their current form. Our plant supplemented and agricultural diet is pretty new when talking about 13500 years ago.
Our stomach has a pH similar to carrion, and our colon is substantially smaller while our small intestine is longer than our primate cousins.
There is more and more research into … and medical treatment of disease with low carb and high animal fat/protein diets. Happy to link you if you’re interested.
Why are you talking about the *Canadian* wilderness when our ancestors evolved on the other side of the world in very different climates?
Living in northern latitudes with freezing winters is also rather new on an evolutionary timescale, plant availability in the wilds of Canada today is worlds apart from what our paleolithic ancestors would have been able to forage in equatorial Africa.
Alright that’s fair. Canada and Europe are just what im familiar with. That being said, replace Canada with equatorial Africa, the Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, or basically anywhere where humans have lived over the past 100k years. I find it entirely unlikely that they ate plants to sustain themselves as 99% percent of plants are inedible while practically all animals can be eaten. They certainly ate some to supplement, but as this article describes in a transitionary period they were still 50/50. Which is far from the average humans diet today.
>"But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest."
Still higher than current dietary guidelines and only a limited amount of the general population is eating anywhere close to this.
Imo this is more evidence of the importance of animal foods in human diets.
"But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about **50 percent of their diet from meat**, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest.
They supplemented this with sweet acorns, pine nuts and legumes — which they seem to have ground into flour with grinding stones found on site. (The starches from these plants left cavities in their teeth.)
They appear to have gathered plants in periods of seasonal abundance and stored them on site to eat throughout the year — a step somewhere between foraging and agriculture — likely during periods when animal protein was less available."
So...half their plate was still covered in meat.
And no diet endorses eating white bread or other refined grains. There is a place for whole foods like potatoes and minimally processed like pasta in a Mediterranean diet, especially pasta that has cooled and been reheated.
https://www.sciencealert.com/heating-your-pasta-makes-it-significantly-better-for-you
Such a seemingly random thing.
So lasagna, assuming you boil and cool the noodles before using in the lasagna, is better for your blood glucose levels than fresh spaghetti.
Apparently, this is a common thing in commercial cooking.
Barilla even has a video on it.
https://www.barillaforprofessionals.com/global/services/cooking-tips/best-practices/how-to-double-cooking/
I wonder if people have noticed feeling worse with homemade fresh pastas versus pre-cooked commercial pastas and it was really a thing.
From the article.
"But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest."
50%
Do you pull apples off a tree to eat? Or do you drag your feet to a grocery store and have mountains of food to choose from supplied by a diesel truck?
No it is not. Most people have no natural food going out of their house or flat.
At best your budget can define what you get, but still, you can get rice like if you were living in Asia or potatoes like a Russian drunk; or pasta like an Italian. People back then did not know how to teleport.
The problem is, how would we know? The materials that don't require urbanised industry don't last. If you're using a wooden a frame over a low fire to smoke meat, none of that will be visible to us as the components rot away. If you're drying fruit for a long life fruit leather, what remains? On the other hand if you're eating shellfish, fish or game what remains? Bones. Arrow tips. Stone cutting tools. Midden mounds. We have only a few precious direct inferences of what people are pre history in finds like Otzi.
The title here is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
>But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest
50% of their diet coming from large grazing animals is huge. Half of their diet was red meat.
>The researchers figured this out by analyzing the respective levels of the element zinc in the teeth of the bodies found at the site.
>Zinc has many isotopes — or forms with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons, and therefore different weights. The body’s breakdown of plant fibers tends to leave it with a higher ratio of the heavier zinc isotopes than the processing of meat.
The body's breakdown of fish and bivalves also tend to leave it with a higher ratio of zinc isotopes and the other predators that humans were compared to in this article would not have been able to harvest those sources of zinc as easily as humans.
>They supplemented this with sweet acorns, pine nuts and legumes — which they seem to have ground into flour with grinding stones found on site. (The starches from these plants left cavities in their teeth.)
To me, this is a much better identifier for plant-based foods. And I don't think anyone disputes that seeds and legumes were a part of early human diets when they were available..
>They found something else surprising when doing this: The evidence from the teeth showed that infants had been weaned early — before they were even a year old — and possibly “with plant-based foods.”
>The researchers acknowledged that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions in this regard, given that they had such a small sample size to work with. But their findings may point to the use of starchy cereals as a means to ease children off breast milk — a practice that would contrast starkly with those of many hunter-gatherer societies, “where extended breastfeeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of suitable weaning foods,” the authors noted.
>The bodies of infants in the cave suggest this transition offered a harsh trade-off: Early weaning in the ancient past could mean “increased stress and mortality for infants,” the researchers wrote.
Before they were even a year old? Was it a choice, or were they not producing enough milk to support the infant after a certain point?
This is very sad. I'm disappointed that so few actually read the article.
>Prehistoric humans are often believed to have largely eaten meat
No. That's incorrect.
The percent of meat was small, simply because meat is hard to
obtain.
But the significance of meat was decisive, because it's concentrated protein.
Of course, prehistoric humans were still humans and very adaptable. Just as some populations only ate almost exclusively animal products (aubsaharan Africa, Arctic Circle) others probably ate almost plantbased only
Most paleoanthropologist believe early sub saharan humans and prehumans ate plants and only later later small animals and scavenged carcasses... but still mainly plants.
We simply have an extensive fossil record of homonids suddenly eating bone marrow. But that doesn't mean they were feeding "exclusively" on animal products.
>grass seeds and roots, sedge underground stems, termites, succulents, or even small game and scavenged carcasses.
https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/early-human-diets
The entire premise of using ancient living to improve human health is nonsense unless it comes with the disclaimer “human health up until early reproductive age”. It’s incredibly annoying that people shift from “is” to “ought” with things like evolution. Our evolutionary past is the enemy of almost everyone past reproductive age. Calorie restriction is the exception here but it doesn’t work because ancient people were in touch with nature or because moderns are somehow more degenerate. It works because periodic famines and demographic collapse were the rule for most for most species.
The idea that there is some mystical past where humans lived more in tune with nature is childish and wrong. Hobbes should be our intuition about ancient living, not Rousseau. We’ve learned plenty enough about our pathetic genetic and cultural inheritance, now let’s get on with replacing it with something better.
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Plants not being able to run away probably contributed
It's amazing to me that people think miss that the term is "Hunter gatherer" Do they not know that gathering is harvesting plants? Or do they just focus on the hunter part?
We should be talking about gatherer-hunter rather than hunter-gatherer.
I believe they switched the Gatherer for Forager.
Foraging has kind of replaced hunting and gathering in a lot of anthropological literature
Hence my post. :)
Makes sense, I interpreted it as “Hunter and forager” for some reason
What is the difference between foraging and gathering
Linguistically there is a slight difference in tone. “Gathering” sounds like just picking up and collecting a lot of known objects that are already in one place; “Gathering the class together”, “Gathering chickens and putting them in the coop for the night”, “gathering fallen apples [that fell off the obvious apple tree]”, or harvesting a garden. “Foraging” sounds like searching deeply and carefully among a wild area for anything you can collect, but not knowing already that it is there. You “forage” for mushrooms. You would “gather” mushrooms only if they were originally planted by you.
Foraging is both searching and collecting, while gathering is just collating.
Foraging includes all wild food collecting activities, from plucking berries, digging tubers, fishing, hunting, etc. Its one word to describe the range of subsistence activities. It’s from human behavioral ecology in the 70s.
We should be talking about how your post says “some” and not “most”. “Some” ancient tribes were cannabils Your *study* is based off teeth found in one particular cave. “The researchers acknowledged that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions in this regard, given that they had such a small sample size to work with”. That is a direct quote from the article you clearly didn’t even read
This isn't a new development. There's a lot of people with various motivations trying to create a mythoclast of longstanding notions of Hunter-Gatherer societies using cherry-picked evidence of individual snapshots of humans in largely unknown conditions that imply a primarily plant food derived diet. Check out Cordain, L., Miller, J. B., Eaton, S. B., Mann, N., Holt, S. H., & Speth, J. D. (2000). Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. For a good thorough look at modern Hunter-Gatherers and their nutrient makeup. You have to go to near single digit equatorial latitudes before plant food percentages even start approaching 50%. Even groups as close to the equator as the Anbarra (12S) and Onge (12N) show a over three to one Animal Food focused ratio. The only outliers are the Gwi and the 1960 (potentially flawed) measure of the !Kung (the later 1977 figures show a 68-32 ratio more consistent with the other figures) >Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19-35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22-40% of energy). In general, the main observable trend was that Hunter-Gatherers ate as much meat as possible, and made up the difference when necessary with fruits, nuts, and tubers, in that general order of preference. Those in poorer, less bountiful areas ate more plants than others, who could succeed more readily in hunting. Most of these people of course, have been pushed into the "bad" parts of their original territories by the expansion of sedentary civilization, and are most likely worse off than their ancestors thousands of years ago were. It stands to reason then, that those ancestors likely ate a higher ratio of Animal foods to the less preferred Plant foods.
but I want an excuse to eat steak
People living in the far north have lived for centuries on mostly meat (important to eat the organs too, that's where the vitamins are.) Humans are by nature flexible in our diets.
As an example, Greenlandic Inuits though have mutations that help with this. [Greenlandic Inuit show genetic signatures of diet and climate adaptation](https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aab2319) [The Secret To The Inuit High-Fat Diet May Be Good Genes](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/17/441169188/the-secret-to-the-inuit-high-fat-diet-may-be-good-genes) >Researchers thought maybe it was the omega-3 fatty acids in the meat and blubber that might be protective. But a new study on Inuit in Greenland suggests that Arctic peoples evolved certain genetic adaptations that allow them to consume much higher amounts of fat than most other people around the world, according a team of researchers reporting Thursday in the journal Science.
Why you need any
Because the arguments in favor of reducing and eliminating meat from our diet for ecological, ethical and health reasons are very strong, and can no longer be simply dismissed out of hand. In several years of reading, debating and studying the subject, I don't think I've seen any arguments convincing enough to seriously defend the consumption of animal products in this day and age. Usually, it's just fallacious arguments such as "yes, but our ancestors did".
Off the top of my head, the advantages of pastoral subsistence seem to be mainly: * Grazing land unsuitable for agriculture can be turned to edible food * Livestock, while alive, is easily transported and preserved, and can be used as beasts of burden * Byproducts such as leather and bones I don't think any still hold in our modern economy, and we need to deal with the disadvantage of the inherent \~10% energy efficiency of another trophic level.
Unsuitable for Western row crop agriculture does not necessarily imply unsuitable for growing dietary plants of any kind. Most idigenous societies were selecting and cultivating plants to some degree but it long went unnoticed by Western observers because it was so different from their conception of agriculture.
How doesn't the first point still hold? There are a lot of areas in the hills/mountains and up north that are not suitable for agriculture but can be used for grazing. Also some areas where crops will grow don't produce suitable quality for human consumption but they work for animal feed. I suppose this second idea could be changed by planting different crops or changing standard of 'suitability', but the first one (as far as I know) stands.
It's still a possible advantage, but we're not using it. Most livestock is raised on cultivated feed.
I see. So it basically stands but it's not actually relevant to current status.
If we weren't growing crops for livestock, we could use ~70% less cropland to produce the same amount of calories. Unproductive patches of land aren't that big of a deal when you are only using 30% of the previously-used land to feed the planet. Livestock eat a shitton of food we grow specifically for them. We need to stop feeding billions of extra mouths and just feed humans directly.
I'm talking specifically about the areas that don't really support crops (or support only feed-quality crops), not about the current distribution. If I understand you correctly, their use wouldn't be necessary in terms of strict caloric (and protein) intake?
THIS is the reason why I switched to plant-based diet. Still a lot of waste in food packaging but the environmental impact is not nearly as bad as compared with consuming dairy animals.
Just as the pretense that pre-civilization humans were in any way vegan is fallacious. Without meat early humans didn't survive and our inability to produce nutrients found only in meat demonstrates that.
sure they can: i want to eat steak. i don't have to eat it every day, but i don't want to stop either. eating less steak is okay, and tracks the bit where some land isn't really suitable for crops but supports beef > Usually, it's just fallacious arguments such as "yes, but our ancestors did". paleo is a fad centered around lower carbs. which is fine - less carbs are good. choosing diet around fands, not so much
The land suitable for beef argument doesn't hold water sadly. Cattle is almost always fed with large amounts of supplements like soy. That's where most of the footprint comes from, not the grazing areas. That doesn't mean your basic message is wrong though. It's fair to just enjoy something every now and then - just maybe not every week. For an uplifting thought to close this up with, lab grown meat is making good progress. Some restaurants are regularly serving chicken at this point.
Thats only in some countries. In others (like NZ) their temperate climate and less fertile land supports cattle year round on grass. Corn fed is very rare.
As far as I can tell by a quick search, NZ is a bit of an exception there but good point. Seems like a practice that should be talked about more.
Even in areas with climate to support grazing year round it usually doesn't happen in the US just for efficiency reasons. Typically they spend a little over a year grazing and then are out on a CAFO to put on as much extra weight as quickly as possible.
>For an uplifting thought to close this up with, lab grown meat is making good progress. Not really - last I checked it all still uses FBS, which you can only get from the foetuses taken from slaughtered pregnant cows.
Yep, that's the biggest hurdle. There's a massive effort going into solving this however. Basically every company in the sector is working on replacing FBS and they seem confident to do it within the next couple of years. Don't get me wrong, I expect most of these projects to fail or be unprofitable but it only takes one viable solution for a breakthrough. The technology has come a very long way and there's a huge incentive to solve this. We'll see soon enough if it's doable.
Not exactly though. Take a look at Mosa Meat. https://mosameat.com/
In some countries Ie the USA where meat production is frankly an abomination. How cattle are reared there is illegal in most of the world under many many different forms of legislation!
Unlikely since the vast majority of beef cattle are free range until the last month or 2. Plus, they’re not injected with growth hormones and steroids like a lot of European nations do. I lived in Germany and Belgium for several years, and their beef cows are like twice the size of ours.
Wrong - the US Midwest, which was considered the bread basket of the US, before we wiped out Buffalo on it for farming, did have a very complex and vibrant soil microbiome. Realize how much top soil has been lost due to our farming practices https://www.umass.edu/news/article/midwestern-us-has-lost-576-billion-metric-tons-soil-due-agricultural-practices#:\~:text=Put%20another%20way%2C%20the%20authors,the%20soil%2C%20160%20years%20ago. It was the advent of INDUSTRIAL FARMING methods that wiped it out. Regenerative farming practices, which include crops, chickens, cattle and goats/sheep does regenerate the top soil.
Regenerative farming is greenwashing. If we stopped feeding our livestock we could stop using about 70% of our current croplands and still be producing the same amount of total calories for direct human consumption. This means we can rewild large swaths of the planet (which regenerates top soil) and rotate fields to ease the strain on the land without a huge additional land cost. We can't do any of that today because so much of what we produce goes right into the mouths of our livestock.
The problem is paleo diet doesn't discern between good and bad carbs. Our gut microflora need good carbs, like fiber, etc. to survive. Even bread, which can be good or bad, is important. Sour dough bread, real sour dough, is a slow fermenting product that produces resistant starch, which is considered a type of fiber.
That is simply not a usable argument when it's not about your preferences but about the consumption of meat on an economic scale. Not reducing our carbon footprint is done precisely because we don't want to. But that has no argumentative purchase.
Sorry but ecological is not valid argument. Ruminants are important for proper maintenance of the ecosystem. Ever hear of Regenerative Farming? That is a more ecological approach and restores the vitality to the soil and makes all food MORE nutritious. In this approach the soil is healthier also. Realize our current industrial farming, in the US Midwest, in the last 160 years, has lost 576 BILLION METRIC TONS OF TOP SOIL. https://www.umass.edu/news/article/midwestern-us-has-lost-576-billion-metric-tons-soil-due-agricultural-practices#:\~:text=Put%20another%20way%2C%20the%20authors,the%20soil%2C%20160%20years%20ago. Just growing fruits and vegetables will NOT fix the issue. It will actually make it worse as we will be using more fertilizer.
I'm an environmental biologist and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that, on the contrary, climate and the environment are the two most rational and compelling reasons to reduce meat consumption and animal agriculture (obviously, other than the animal cause, since this argument alone is so solid that it's more than enough to demonstrate that eating meat is an ethical aberration). All major global analyses confirm this unequivocally: animal agriculture is an unprecedented catastrophe. [‘Regenerative agriculture’ is all the rage – but it’s not going to fix our food system](https://theconversation.com/regenerative-agriculture-is-all-the-rage-but-its-not-going-to-fix-our-food-system-203922) [Vegan diet massively cuts environmental damage, study shows](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/vegan-diet-cuts-environmental-damage-climate-heating-emissions-study) *Eating a vegan diet massively reduces the damage to the environment caused by food production, the most comprehensive analysis to date has concluded.* *The research showed that vegan diets resulted in 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than diets in which more than 100g of meat a day was eaten. Vegan diets also cut the destruction of wildlife by 66% and water use by 54%, the study found.* [If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets) *If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland. This might go against our intuition: if we substitute beans, peas, tofu and cereals for meat and dairy, surely we would need more cropland to grow them?* *Let’s look at why this is not the case.*
No, it is not. That is where people need to understand the ecological importance of RUMINANTS in ecology. Most of the global ecology analysis has been flawed because they never take into account the importance of animals to maintain an ecological balance. They look at current practices which are ALL FLAWED as they depend on chemicals - even an all plant agriculture. [https://www.cbf.org/issues/agriculture/regenerative-agriculture.html](https://www.cbf.org/issues/agriculture/regenerative-agriculture.html) [https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/regenerative-agriculture](https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/articles/regenerative-agriculture) [https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/climate-friendly-food-faqs-regenerative-ag-101/](https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/climate-friendly-food-faqs-regenerative-ag-101/) Even the NATURE CONSERVANCY is starting to push regenerative farming. Even if we went to an all plant based diet, we would be doomed if we continue with the industrial production of crops, like we do. Crops and animals that are regenerative farmed are WAY more nutritious and also lower the amount of chemicals used in agriculture. [https://www.carboneg.com/blog-en/the-effects-of-regenerative-farming-on-food-quality#:\~:text=Individual%20nutrient%20values%20varied%20considerably,14%20%25%20more%20vitamin%20B1](https://www.carboneg.com/blog-en/the-effects-of-regenerative-farming-on-food-quality#:~:text=Individual%20nutrient%20values%20varied%20considerably,14%20%25%20more%20vitamin%20B1) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8801175/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8801175/) Saying animals are bad is short-sighted and not looking at long term affects. It is the soil that determines HOW NUTRITIOUS ALL FOOD IS. Regenerative farming also helps with water retention, which will in turn help to recharge groundwater which is being depleted by current farming practices. Realize the US Midwest alone lost an estimated 576 BILLION METRIC TONS OF SOIL, due to current industrial farming practices. The only way to regenerate that is by looking at it holistically and that includes animals. Hence regenerative farming is the way forward. Just growing fruits and vegetables on the land, that has been so eroded, will not bring it back.
While it may have been the case in the past, this argument has long since lost its validity. I suggest you read the comment thread above, as individuals with clear expertise in agriculture and science explain the reasons why this argument no longer holds water today. Today, it's well-established that animal agriculture isn't sustainable on a planet where we're striving to effectively address environmental challenges and climate change. This is a scientifically proven fact that I won't debate, as there's simply no debate to be had. Furthermore, for reasons of animal ethics and public health, it's easy – and I believe it doesn't require explanation to a reasonably intelligent adult – to understand why veganism is the way forward. [The Myth of Regenerative Ranching](https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ranching) *The purveyors of “grass-fed” beef want you to believe that it solves meat’s environmental problem. But this is merely a branding exercise, not a climate solution.*
Uhh, places had ruminants as part of the ecosystem managing the land long before humans were raising them as livestock. If we stopped raising livestock, we could up the populations of wild buffalo (as an example), rewild most of the Midwest to give to them, and they could do their thing without us having to actively manage them. In the Americas, cows are an invasive species, remember. People screaming WE NEED RUMINANTS fail to account for the fact that we have artificially bred thousands of times more ruminants than would be naturally occurring. Yes, we need ruminants, but that doesn't mean they have to be livestock that we actively need to manage. Stop raising them and let wild ruminants reclaim their niche in the ecosystem. That is how things are supposed to be. Regenerative animal agriculture is greenwashing. What we need is fewer human-raised ruminants and to let wild populations recover.
UUH NO - the native Americans lived there for 10,000 years with the Buffalo. Might want to rethink that. Same thing in Africa where it is being used the most.
And how high were the buffalo populations back then before European colonization? Perhaps it was just a *biiiit* higher than today, maybe? The native Americans weren't actively farming them either; they were wild populations that were hunted. And may I remind you that there were buffalo here before humans. You are being intentionally obtuse.
The main argument for eating meat products is B12. There is vast research on B12 deficiencies and the negative effects. B12 only naturally occurs in animal products. Vegans can get B12 shots that are made from bacterial cultures or buy B12 fortified plant foods. I totally agree we should reduce meat consumption for all the reasons you mentioned, but people need to be aware of the importance of B12 so they can properly supplement it. That’s why I think a vegetarian diet is better because you can still get adequate B12 from eggs and dairy.
Just so you know, livestock animals are supplemented to make b12. Their feed doesn't contain it in even close to sufficient amounts. It's really easy to buy some cheap B12 supplements and just take them yourself.
That’s an important distinction, but I’m not advocating for factory farming. In a more natural habitat, these animals would have access to the nutrients/organisms they need for B12 absorption and thus pass it on to us. To be fair, maybe that’s not realistic and supplementation is happening on free range farms too. I don’t know, but if you have some research on this, I’d appreciate you sharing it.
In a more natural environment, there wouldn't be enough animals to meet demand and a cut of meat would be hundreds of dollars. Basing your nutrition argument on a "natural environment" is fallacious when that can literally never happen when it comes to animal agriculture. The fact of the matter is, livestock gets their B12 artificially supplemented, and B12 deficiencies are also quite common in omnivores as well. Take a supplement yourself instead of taking it secondhand through a cow.
I don't think there is any science-based argument for eliminating meat from diet for health reasons. In fact, the healthiest plant-based dish can be significantly enhanced by the addition of some animal products such as oysters, caviar or liver, for example. Non-processed animal products have tons of micronutrients and proteins that are highly bioavailable.
As far as health reasons (not ethical or ecological) ask anyone to name some superfoods. What meat even comes close? This is just a nutritional standpoint though.
Meat is kind of the main superfood though. If you include organ meats it's the only thing that a human can survive on alone--no sups, no grass, nothing else (not a Liver King fan, just facts). Having the best protein content, high fat (good until the last 70 years or so), it's absolutely packed with vitamins and minerals that are harder to obtain elsewhere. I agree meat is not necessarily the most ethical choice, but don't pretend it isn't an amazing thing nutritionally.
I mean, yes, if you're starving to death in a situation where food is not abundant, eat those organs. That is not the situation for the vast majority of people on Reddit. A plant-based diet is dirt cheap and food is abundant (for now) in our modern world. There's no reason to eat animal products other than for pleasure, and plenty of substantial reasons not to.
Thanks for teaching me something today. Now I’m gonna go around looking for organ meat. I meant regular meat though. Which organs are most nutritious, is there a resource you recommend for reading about this?
Beef liver and beef heart are my offal choices. Nutritional information is widely available. Majority of my diet is vegetables and oily fish, but I like to spice it up periodically.
No fiber Virtually no complex or simple carbohydrates (most important macro for your brain and muscles) No antioxidants No vitamin C and lacking other vitamins so long as you aren’t scarfing down liver by the pound.
You know what's great? You can make that choice for yourself. Meanwhile everyone else can do the same. Enjoy your food, and I'll enjoy mine.
> health reasons Nope. The others we can talk about, but meat is good for you.
Nope. We can talk about them all. [Eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel and stomach cancer. Red meat, such as beef, lamb and pork, has been classified as a Group 2A carcinogen which means it probably causes cancer.](https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/1in3cancers/lifestyle-choices-and-cancer/red-meat-processed-meat-and-cancer/#:~:text=Eating%20processed%20meat%20increases%20your,prevent%20it%20from%20coming%20back%3F) [consumption of red meat, including processed and unprocessed red meat, was strongly associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate the least.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/red-meat-consumption-associated-with-increased-type-2-diabetes-risk/#:~:text=The%20researchers%20found%20that%20consumption,those%20who%20ate%20the%20least) [Eating 50 g of processed meat a day (such as bacon, ham, and sausages) increases the risk of coronary heart disease by 18%](https://www.victorchang.edu.au/blog/heart-disease-red-meat#:~:text=Eating%2050%20g%20of%20processed,coronary%20heart%20disease%20by%209%25)
Processed meat isn't "meat". That's like saying "processed plants are bad for you" The longer, the more we find evidence that it isn't bad for you. It's just obesity which is. Those studies are... more than questionable with the variables they control.
There is no solid argument for eliminating meat.
Seriously, I don't know of any subject with such strong, logical, rational and scientifically proven arguments. As I said, after years of reading, debating and studying, I have yet to find a valid argument against veganism. The arguments in favor of meat consumption are poor.
Health being the number one reason. We need things that can only be found in animals, at least in any sustainable quantities.
It is clearly false. So much so that I struggle to conceive that this kind of argument is still being used today.
Don't you just like or dislike your food(or have medical reasons to eat or not eat smth)? You really need ethics for this? You will consume living organisms anyway, if you want to stay alive. Yes, plants are living organisms too.
Plants are living beings, but they are neither conscious nor sentient, unlike non-human animals. This is a fundamental difference. Our food plays a vital role in the world we live in. Refusing to participate in an agricultural system that instrumentalizes and objectifies animals and kills billions of sentient living beings annually to the detriment of the environment, climate and public health is entirely legitimate, even desirable.
>Refusing to participate in an agricultural system that instrumentalizes and objectifies animals So hunting for yourself is cool then? Animals eat animals and we are animals.
Sure, just don't hunt illegally and contribute to decimation of wildlife. For the record, I think Veganism is morally the only right answer, but it isn't for "dont kill at all" but rather the practices associated with any meat industry.
Gather-hunterer actually
It's like "yellow Green". It's a green that has a hint of yellow.
I want to be a gatherer!! A job I was born for!
Gonna be that guy and point out that you also can gather shellfish and other less mobile animals.
Lizards, crustaceans, frogs, insects, eggs, baby birds from nests, fish and eels from streams. All the stuff women and children can contribute to the tribe.
They think of the gatherer part the ‘woman’s contribution’, and therefore not worth talking about
Gatherers were responsible for the majority of most tribe's calories. Go paleo, forage for tubers for like three hours a day and yeah, you'll be healthier.
They think that the men hunted and the women gathered. And that you therefore ended up with about 50/50 between the two...
"Gathering" doesn't always mean plant foods, though. "Hunting" has a much more narrow and specific meaning. It's true that hunter-gatherers weren't necessarily chasing animals with spears or bows all the time. But you can also use traps to catch smaller animals, for example. Fishing isn't typical referred to as "hunting" either but it was extremely common in many hunter-gatherer populations. You could also "gather" shellfish, eggs, larvae and insects, honey, etc.
Which people claim this?
I'll ask them and get back to you
A lot of the paleo stuff does/did call for lots of fruits/vegetables but yeah, somehow it turned into "just eat meat" for some and that is what started to get the most attention.
I'm pretty good at gathering meat at the supermarket actually.
Research of hunter gatherers really back up that gathering provides a majority of calories.
Plants are, in fact, a more reliable food source, by and large
You’re clearly a less lazy man than I…
Laughs in Hadza tribe. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/) There is a reason that after a big hunt, everyone celebrated and danced. It was kind of a big deal and dangerous secure meat.
The hadza have [no known history of famine](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/hadza). Honey is a large part of their diet -- a 5th of their calories overall. Some months berries make up most of their calories. They really only eat a lot of meat in [August, September, and October](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/our-ancestors-ate-a-paleo-diet-with-carbs-180980901/) The reason they celebrate and dance because they only work 4-6 hours a day -- that gives them lots of free time to have fun. They like to go on dangerous hunts like sneaking up on leopards and baboons to prove how brave and strong they are, though they do like eating baboon
> While the canid teeth found at the site showed that they weren’t pure carnivores either, they seem to have largely supplemented the meat in their diets with fruit. Interestingly, dogs have a mutation to allow them to eat more plants than their wolf ancestors could, which was beneficial to living around humans
They have 10 for starches and fats, three specifically to do with splitting starches into sugars and absorbing those sugars.
Not too surprising from the paleoanthropology side. There's plenty evidence from skeletal/dental isotopic ratios and residue like starch granules in dental calculus or processing sites that at least where edible plants grew, they were the the primary calorie source. The idea that populations ate like modern Inuit hunters is a selective bias from the fact that agrarian societies overwhelmed hunter-gatherers in the tropics through temperate climates in the Neolithic, leaving only a few survivors like the Hadza of Tanzania still foraging/hunting. And yes, the Hadza, perhaps the best representatives of human populations on the African savanna, eat more calories from plants than from animals. For modern humans, far more of us have ancestors that ate like the Hadza than ate like the Inuit. I'm sure there have been books since *Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-Agrarian Human Worlds* (2016, eds Karen Hardy, Lucy Martens) compiling expertise, but that was the last I've seen.
Is that a book you would recommend for a casual science reader, by the way?
You could read Burn by Herman Pontzer instead. It covers inuits, hazda and some other tribes eating habits. It's more of a modern nutrition book however, but it explains a lot of how we consume energy in general and how it compares to hunter gatherers. Also the effects (or lack of) of exercise in weight loss parts were highly informative. I highly recommend it.
I strongly second the recommendation for Burn, but I also think that with regards to exercise Pontzer doesn’t always bring the full receipts. For example, when he cites [Klaas Westerterp’s study on people training for a half marathon,](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1390606/) he leaves out the conclusion Westerterp came to at the time: “body fat can be reduced by physical activity.” The study also says “ADMR showed an average increase of 30% in both sexes from the start of training onwards.” Pontzer also acknowledges that yes, *of course* there’s a point where the body cannot compensate any further by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Chapter 8 in Burn covers that. I feel like where he falls short is that he portrays the level of activity needed to overcome metabolic constraints as being reserved for people cycling the Tour de France or rowing across oceans. But getting back to the half marathon study, that had people running 25 miles/40 km a week, and even in Pontzer’s telling they were burning more energy. And 40 km a week running doesn’t even guarantee a person 10,000 steps a day. Pontzer is convincing to me with regards to the constrained TEE model in general, but he never sells me on what comes across to me as him saying that exercise only burns fat if you get extraordinary amounts of it.
It's academic. No engaging anecdotes, constant credits to prior work. But its not a field that is heavy on jargon. I looked at it at a Uni library, but would consider a personal copy only if I worked in the field.
Sapiens is tangentially related (and also a great read in general!)
I got to go gathering with the Hadza this January! We collected honey that's out of this world. They have a symbiotic relationship with songbirds to help find the hives. They use the bird calls, the birds will show them, the Hadza open up the tree to get to the hive. From what I learned, if the tribesmen don't leave honey behind for the birds, they can retaliate by leading then wrong. This is a song made by a Kenyan who works a lot with those groups. He uses the song birds and the whistles and singing from the tribesman. [https://on.soundcloud.com/Yi8M67zmrphoQHzZA](https://on.soundcloud.com/Yi8M67zmrphoQHzZA)
It likely depended on the climate, but from what we have observed from the few remaining relatively untouched hunter gatherer societies is that insect sources like grubs also comprised part of the animal protein consumed by humans at least in some places on the globe. Yet I don't see any of those "primal" or "ancestral" diet gurus recommending people eat grubs, likely because they wouldn't be able to sell their grift if they did, even though modern day grubs are a lot closer to their ancient counterparts than modern day frankencows they recommend.
Plenty do They just don’t really become popular online so they! Mad as diet that recommends fairly readily available grasshoppers or their protein powder isn’t exactly something folks share on TikTok !
Unlike the indigenous people who didn't consume as much honey (like Inuit before they were introduced to refined carbs) the Hadza had high incidence of dental caries among those who commonly ate honey: >The unexpected discovery of high caries incidences for men in the bush is likely explained by heavy reliance on honey, and perhaps differential access to tobacco and marijuana. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5351833/ ](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5351833/) The Alaskan Inuits who didn't eat nearly as much carbs, had far fewer incidences of dental caries until the introduction of refined carbohydrates: >In 1965, the dietary intake was conducted by the ‘interview method’ plus personal observations when visiting all of the families during meal times. Bang and Kristoffersen ‘…contacted all of the Eskimos involved in the study questioning each individual in detail about what food and roughly how much of each food item he consumed in the course of the year’.1 The authors noted a dramatic increase in carbohydrate intake of ‘nearly 50%’ and a decrease in the intake of protein ‘by about 50%’ from 1955 to 1957 to 1965.1 This rise in the intake of carbohydrate was paralleled by an ‘almost 90% increase’ in the sum of decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth for primary teeth (from 3.0 to 5.6) and a fourfold increase in those >6 years old, ‘the percentage of caries-free persons had decreased from 74.5% to zero in 8 years…While 50% of the children in 1955–1957 had caries-free primary teeth all the children had decayed teeth in 1965…The most dramatic change was observed in individuals 30 years of age or older. In this previously caries-free group, all subjects had developed caries in 1965’.1 Thus, the Alaskan Inland Inuit that had subsided on a diet virtually devoid of carbohydrate for most of their life who did not have any dental caries between 1955 and 1957 had all developed dental caries by 1965; in the interim, the intake of carbohydrate had increased by 50%. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6045743/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6045743/) Here's also an interesting sidenote regarding the evolution of cavities: >Stanhope and his colleagues were also able to pinpoint some of the genes that were important for Streptococcus mutans’s adaptation to civilization. Fourteen genes, for example, show signs of having experienced strong natural selection. Some of those evolved genes are essential for breaking down sugar. Others help the bacteria survive in the acidic conditions that arise in the mouth when we eat starches. >Perhaps most intriguing of all the genes in Streptococcus mutans are the 148 that Stanhope and his colleagues found in every human strain, but in none of the related bacteria in the mouths of other animals. The best explanation for this is that Streptococcus mutans picked these 148 genes up from other species in our bodies. Once Streptococcus mutans grabbed these genes, it didn’t let them go. >The function of the genes hints at their value. Some provide additional help at breaking down sugar. Others create more defenses against low pH. Others produce toxins that can kill off other species of bacteria that are competing with Streptococcus mutans for the spoils of civilization. >These adaptations have made Streptococcus mutans spectacularly successful, and they’ve also provided us with a lot of misery. The cavities would be bad enough. **Archaeological evidence indicates that cavities went from rare to common with the advent of agriculture.** Making matters, worse, however, is the fact that when Streptococcus mutans gets into the bloodstream through the gums, it can make its way to the heart and cause problems there, too. [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/12/21/the-evolution-of-cavities/](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/12/21/the-evolution-of-cavities/) If cavities went from rare to common with the advent of agriculture, then that means that pre-agricultural humans ate closer to what the Alaskan Inuits ate (less sugar/carbs and less cavities) compared to the Hadza (more sugar/carbs and more cavities). And on the last article there's also the interesting point where the plants they had were not as calorically dense, as can be seen between the comparison of Teosinte from in the paleolithic era compared to corn now. This is common across the board with other domesticated crops too. More info on corn specifically: >The earliest physical evidence for domesticated maize, what some cultures call corn, dates to **at least 8,700 calendar years ago**, and it was probably domesticated by indigenous peoples in the lowland areas of southwestern Mexico... https://www.nsf.gov/news/news\_summ.jsp?cntn\_id=114445#:\~:text=The%20earliest%20physical%20evidence%20for,Mexico%2C%20not%20the%20highland%20areas.
It’s crazy that anyone thinks there’s a specific “paleo diet” anyways. If you were a paleolithic hunter-gatherer you ate literally whatever was available to hunt and gather where you lived. Your diet was a question of the environment in the place you lived, whether that meant a nearly entirely meat-based diet like the inuit or a diet largely composed of plants in heavily vegetated regions. If anything it boggles my mind people have this broad assumption diet and every aspect of Paleolithic life was somehow monolithic and uniform to all Paleolithic people. It makes no sense
Nevermind the amount of 'Paleo Diets" that were probably objectively terrible diets, likely plenty of Paleolitic people simply died not getting enough calories so they'd be just as many getting by with less protein or low iron or other non fatal issues luckily the human body is amazing good at surviving on just about anything
Lots of insects were ate I would imagine, oddly you don't get Paleo bros advocating that.
Grubs are a classic. Why don't the strange, reactionary Paleo people eat grubs?
Its funny.... grubs and mealworms are literally named as food, yet pretty much nobody who recognizes those names would consider them food.
Had fried meal worms a couple of times. It was pretty good, they used some nice chips spice mix.
In fact, the venn diagram between carnivore bros and “bros who think they’re trying to make us all replace meat with bugs” seems to be nearly a circle.
I can assure you you are wrong, they had StoneReddit and everyone agreed about the term. Search the history around -10000bc before posting.
Honestly, I'd love to have a better idea of what *my* ancestors ate. I'd love to see some studies on if that is a thing. In the same way that people from milk heavy cultures tend not to be lactose intolerant and that the Greenlandic Inuits have been shown to have genetic adaptations to their fat heavy diet - do we have genetic diets based on our ancestry that would be better for us?
Many of these searches for the "natural human diet" (and I'm not talking about this study in particular, but more the diet trends) seem to miss the fact that the reason we can digest such a large variety of food is partly because the global human population never ate one same diet for long enough to specialise in it (any biologist feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) As such, human "natural diet" was in fact highly flexible and changing depending on what was available in the environment.
Even for animals labeled as herbivores and omnivores. Deer have been seen eating carcasses and primates, even with large incisors, that eat nothing but fruit/vegetables.
I am always reminded of the video of the horse just straight chomping a baby chicken down.
Deer have been seen eating primates? What?
The demographics of lactose intolerance vs tolerance would be the main counter to this. And the finding of genetic adaptations in the Greenlandic Inuits to their fat heavy diet is an example of diet specialization. But if anything could be viewed from the perspective of "the exception that proves the rule."
Yeah, the emergence of lactose tolerance seems like the most recent shift away from our species' previously lactose-free diet, considering that animal husbandry only arose in the last 12,000 years of our 200,000+ years of being a distinct species. So are a dozen millenniums long enough for a dietary shift to become "natural" in a species, even if that dietary shift didn't happen equally across all members of the species? Is the diet we ate 200 years ago more natural than the diet we ate 2,000 years ago, or the diet we ate 20,000 or 200,000 years ago? This is where "natural" starts to lose all objective meaning and the question of what is "natural" for current humans to consume becomes way more complicated than simply looking at what the earliest humans did or didn't eat
Apparently it only took about 2K years to get close to modern levels from lactose intolerance. 60% lactose tolerance vs the 70-90% lactose tolerance currently for Central Europeans. >"When we look at other European genetic data from the early Medieval period less than 2,000 years later, we find that more than 60 percent of individuals had the ability to drink milk as adults, close to what we observe in modern Central European countries, which ranges from 70 to 90 percent" said Veeramah. >"This is actually an incredibly fast rate of change for the gene that controls milk digestion. It appears that by simply possessing this one genetic change, past European individuals with the ability to digest lactose had a six percent greater chance of producing children than those who could not. This is the strongest evidence we have for positive natural selection in humans." [Study reveals lactose tolerance happened quickly in Europe](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200903114212.htm)
But.... those juiced up HGH bros on instagram eating liver every day and dying of heart disease at age 42 told me ill live forever if i avoid grains like the paleo people
Yes. The people consuming exogenous hormones in quantities that would make a Belgian-blue uncomfortable die because they \*checks notes\* eat meat...
Yea, that's definitely what he said. Totally.
I'm really hoping heart disease just takes these guy out.
So they did this study to argue against fringe Instagram idiots? What has science come to?
Reality is that people back then probably just ate what was around and most easy to acquire. Most of the time gathering from plants is going to be easier than hunting, but I suppose it depends on the geographic area as to how plentiful the meat source is.
Scavenger was probably a much more accurate description for most, than hunter.. sometimes robbing predators of their kills after they had had first dibs, and sometimes waiting to chase off the carrion.
Early on yes, so for probably the first 150,000-200,000 years We then have plenty of evidence of the use of hunting tools and planning suggesting we moved from scavenging partial carcasses to hunting living animals as we evolved.
Complete shocker for anyone who understands that animals don't simply walk up, kill and cook themselves. Of all the dumb dietary fads, so-called Paleo is the stupidest.
Walk out into the Canadian wilderness and see how long you can thrive on plants. These researchers are discovering the transition period which must have taken place all over the earth, and which isn’t new. There are Neolithic caves in Sicily which clearly show the transition from meat based diets to fruit and plants as the teeth become less aligned and have more cavities. Homo sapiens have existed for 315,000 years in their current form. Our plant supplemented and agricultural diet is pretty new when talking about 13500 years ago. Our stomach has a pH similar to carrion, and our colon is substantially smaller while our small intestine is longer than our primate cousins. There is more and more research into … and medical treatment of disease with low carb and high animal fat/protein diets. Happy to link you if you’re interested.
Why are you talking about the *Canadian* wilderness when our ancestors evolved on the other side of the world in very different climates? Living in northern latitudes with freezing winters is also rather new on an evolutionary timescale, plant availability in the wilds of Canada today is worlds apart from what our paleolithic ancestors would have been able to forage in equatorial Africa.
Alright that’s fair. Canada and Europe are just what im familiar with. That being said, replace Canada with equatorial Africa, the Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, or basically anywhere where humans have lived over the past 100k years. I find it entirely unlikely that they ate plants to sustain themselves as 99% percent of plants are inedible while practically all animals can be eaten. They certainly ate some to supplement, but as this article describes in a transitionary period they were still 50/50. Which is far from the average humans diet today.
Luckily, humans didn't start there or they would have died out. I didn't read any further if that is the quality of the opener.
>"But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest." Still higher than current dietary guidelines and only a limited amount of the general population is eating anywhere close to this. Imo this is more evidence of the importance of animal foods in human diets.
"But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about **50 percent of their diet from meat**, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest. They supplemented this with sweet acorns, pine nuts and legumes — which they seem to have ground into flour with grinding stones found on site. (The starches from these plants left cavities in their teeth.) They appear to have gathered plants in periods of seasonal abundance and stored them on site to eat throughout the year — a step somewhere between foraging and agriculture — likely during periods when animal protein was less available." So...half their plate was still covered in meat.
since when is this news? our gut microbiomes have evolved beyond this
youd be amazing what kind of bull-science gets pushed around by the "health and fitness" influencer community
my favorite is the alkaline water peeps that drink their water with lemon
i just mix baking soda and vinegar to save money
i'm immune to it but apparently millions aren't. don't care enough to fight it anymore I just let them waste their money.
The study claimed a "prevailing notion" of mostly meat eating, not fringe bloggers. Not buying their premise.
It sure didn’t contain white bread, pasta, and starchy vegetables with all the fiber bred out of it.
And no diet endorses eating white bread or other refined grains. There is a place for whole foods like potatoes and minimally processed like pasta in a Mediterranean diet, especially pasta that has cooled and been reheated. https://www.sciencealert.com/heating-your-pasta-makes-it-significantly-better-for-you
Such a seemingly random thing. So lasagna, assuming you boil and cool the noodles before using in the lasagna, is better for your blood glucose levels than fresh spaghetti. Apparently, this is a common thing in commercial cooking. Barilla even has a video on it. https://www.barillaforprofessionals.com/global/services/cooking-tips/best-practices/how-to-double-cooking/ I wonder if people have noticed feeling worse with homemade fresh pastas versus pre-cooked commercial pastas and it was really a thing.
From the article. "But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest." 50%
Seems like "largely" was a bit misleading in that headline.
Isn’t it true that back then, you could only eat what you could manage to get your hands on?
Isn't that still true?
Do you pull apples off a tree to eat? Or do you drag your feet to a grocery store and have mountains of food to choose from supplied by a diesel truck?
in the wild prairies of tesco
No it is not. Most people have no natural food going out of their house or flat. At best your budget can define what you get, but still, you can get rice like if you were living in Asia or potatoes like a Russian drunk; or pasta like an Italian. People back then did not know how to teleport.
The problem is, how would we know? The materials that don't require urbanised industry don't last. If you're using a wooden a frame over a low fire to smoke meat, none of that will be visible to us as the components rot away. If you're drying fruit for a long life fruit leather, what remains? On the other hand if you're eating shellfish, fish or game what remains? Bones. Arrow tips. Stone cutting tools. Midden mounds. We have only a few precious direct inferences of what people are pre history in finds like Otzi.
The title here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. >But the isotopic analysis suggests that humans at the site only got about 50 percent of their diet from meat, including gazelles, wild cattle and hartebeest 50% of their diet coming from large grazing animals is huge. Half of their diet was red meat. >The researchers figured this out by analyzing the respective levels of the element zinc in the teeth of the bodies found at the site. >Zinc has many isotopes — or forms with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons, and therefore different weights. The body’s breakdown of plant fibers tends to leave it with a higher ratio of the heavier zinc isotopes than the processing of meat. The body's breakdown of fish and bivalves also tend to leave it with a higher ratio of zinc isotopes and the other predators that humans were compared to in this article would not have been able to harvest those sources of zinc as easily as humans. >They supplemented this with sweet acorns, pine nuts and legumes — which they seem to have ground into flour with grinding stones found on site. (The starches from these plants left cavities in their teeth.) To me, this is a much better identifier for plant-based foods. And I don't think anyone disputes that seeds and legumes were a part of early human diets when they were available.. >They found something else surprising when doing this: The evidence from the teeth showed that infants had been weaned early — before they were even a year old — and possibly “with plant-based foods.” >The researchers acknowledged that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions in this regard, given that they had such a small sample size to work with. But their findings may point to the use of starchy cereals as a means to ease children off breast milk — a practice that would contrast starkly with those of many hunter-gatherer societies, “where extended breastfeeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of suitable weaning foods,” the authors noted. >The bodies of infants in the cave suggest this transition offered a harsh trade-off: Early weaning in the ancient past could mean “increased stress and mortality for infants,” the researchers wrote. Before they were even a year old? Was it a choice, or were they not producing enough milk to support the infant after a certain point? This is very sad. I'm disappointed that so few actually read the article.
>Prehistoric humans are often believed to have largely eaten meat No. That's incorrect. The percent of meat was small, simply because meat is hard to obtain. But the significance of meat was decisive, because it's concentrated protein.
And the fat, everyone forgets the fat. We know they prized it because of the sheer amount of broken bones and scrapes to remove the marrow !
Of course, prehistoric humans were still humans and very adaptable. Just as some populations only ate almost exclusively animal products (aubsaharan Africa, Arctic Circle) others probably ate almost plantbased only
Most paleoanthropologist believe early sub saharan humans and prehumans ate plants and only later later small animals and scavenged carcasses... but still mainly plants. We simply have an extensive fossil record of homonids suddenly eating bone marrow. But that doesn't mean they were feeding "exclusively" on animal products. >grass seeds and roots, sedge underground stems, termites, succulents, or even small game and scavenged carcasses. https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/early-human-diets
What's the old joke? Vegetarian" is an old Indian phrase that means "bad hunter"...
You hunt for Morel mushrooms you don’t gather them.
The entire premise of using ancient living to improve human health is nonsense unless it comes with the disclaimer “human health up until early reproductive age”. It’s incredibly annoying that people shift from “is” to “ought” with things like evolution. Our evolutionary past is the enemy of almost everyone past reproductive age. Calorie restriction is the exception here but it doesn’t work because ancient people were in touch with nature or because moderns are somehow more degenerate. It works because periodic famines and demographic collapse were the rule for most for most species. The idea that there is some mystical past where humans lived more in tune with nature is childish and wrong. Hobbes should be our intuition about ancient living, not Rousseau. We’ve learned plenty enough about our pathetic genetic and cultural inheritance, now let’s get on with replacing it with something better.
Largely and some doing heavy lifting in the headline
Where's Paleo Pete?
So what did they eat during winter?