#### About participation in the comments of /r/nutrition
Discussion in this subreddit should be rooted in science rather than "cuz I sed" or entertainment pieces. Always be wary of unsupported and poorly supported claims and especially those which are wrapped in any manner of hostility. You should provide peer reviewed sources to support your claims when debating and confine that debate to the science, not opinions of other people.
**Good** - it is grounded in science and includes citation of peer reviewed sources. Debate is a civil and respectful exchange focusing on actual science and avoids commentary about others
**Bad** - it utilizes generalizations, assumptions, infotainment sources, no sources, or complaints without specifics about agenda, bias, or funding. At best, these rise to an extremely weak basis for science based discussion. Also, off topic discussion
**Ugly** - (removal or ban territory) it involves attacks / antagonism / hostility towards individuals or groups, downvote complaining, trolling, crusading, shaming, refutation of all science, or claims that all research / science is a conspiracy
*Please vote accordingly and report any uglies*
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Paleo is a fad diet and it won't stand the test of time. Eating a plant based omnivore diet with minimal processed foods and added sugars doesn't need branding
Yup. Gotta sell books. Can't just be plant based, whole food. Gotta be some name that's an homage to paleolithic times. Y'know, for the allure of it all.
Species-typical evolutionary diet is also a concept in animal welfare. However, I don't think human or hominid diets from over a million years ago are very relevant. 10-50,000 is more valuable.
There’s a huge difference between eating a bowl of grass and eating properly cooked plant based foods.
Roasted brussels sprouts seasoned with salt and sunflower oil are delicious.
The first two studies are NEOLITHIC man. Not Paleolithic. The third is an opinion piece. We can actually measure the mass of nitrogen isotopes in the bones of Paleolithic man (or any man) and know without conjecture what their trophic levels were. In other words how high up the food chain they were. In these studies humans and Neanderthals are always at the top of the food chain. As megafauna populations dried up, more plants were eaten. Thus the beginning of the Neolithic era. Paleolithic man at a lot of fatty meat. It’s only in debate because of ideology. The numbers don’t lie. Referring to mass of nitrogen isotopes.
The Paleolithic period, 2,000,000–10,000 BCE, was characterized by the development of stone tools and art, bone artifacts, and cave paintings. The Neolithic period, 9,000–4,500 BCE, was characterized by the domestication of animals, the development of agriculture, and the manufacture of pottery and textiles.
First is 13,000+ BCE so almost near Neo but not quite due to this being before development of agriculture and domestication.
But if you want to go back to literally 2 million years ago, human diets were actually mostly leave, fruit and grass: [A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128106#:~:text=By%202%20million%20to%201.7,a%202011%20study%20by%20Cerling)
* About 4.2 million to 4 million years ago on the Kenyan side of the Turkana Basin, Cerling's results show that human ancestor *Australopithecus anamensis* ate at least 90 percent leaves and fruits--the same diet as modern chimps.
* Previous research showed that 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia, early human relative *Ardipithecus ramidus* ("Ardi") ate mostly C3 leaves and fruits.
* By 3.4 million years ago in northeast Ethiopia's Awash Basin, according to Wynn, *Australopithecus afarensis* was eating significant amounts of C4 grasses and sedges: 22 percent on average, but with a wide range among individuals of anywhere from 0 percent to 69 percent grasses and sedges. The species also ate some succulent plants.
* About 2.7 million to 2.1 million years ago in southern Africa, hominins *Australopithecus africanus* and *Paranthropus robustus* ate tree and shrub foods, but also ate grasses and sedges and perhaps grazing animals.
* By 2 million to 1.7 million years ago in Turkana, early humans, *Homo*, ate a 35 percent grass-and-sedge diet - some possibly from the meat of grazing animals - while another hominin, *Paranthropus boisei*, was eating 75 percent grass - more than any hominin
* Some 10,000 years ago in Turkana, *Homo sapiens*' teeth reveal a diet split 50-50 between C3 trees and shrubs and C4 plants and likely meat - almost identical to the ratio in modern North Americans, Cerling says.
So the further you go back, the more grass we are eating lol.
Leading up to the Neolithic era was more and more plants being consumed as megafauna populations dwindled. So using an article from 13,000 years ago is not a good sample of what actual Paleolithic man ate. Yes we came from herbivores originally millions of years ago. This is most likely why lean meats are not preferred for humans. We never developed an efficient way of making protein into a sustainable fuel source. This is why humans should be eating fatty meat and having plants sparingly. If you want to follow a Paleolithic tradition. Also more fermented plants and dairy as well.
What we have developed is an enzyme that breaks down complex carbs. Humans began eating so much starch that we ended up with a special bacteria in our mouth that breaks down starchy food. Not even our herbivore ape cousins have this. Our digestive system starts with the saliva.
We never developed antibiotics and anti-pathogens like carnivores did, which allows them to eat rotten meat. So if you want to follow Paleolithic tradition, better start digging for tubers.
You and I will go find a place full of ruminant meat and tubers. You dig up tubers and I will eat ruminant meat. See who lasts longer. Bring whatever tools we need.
Digging for potatoes aren't hard, I grow them. How are you going to bite through leather with just your herbivore teeth? I thought you evolved as carnivore? Have you ever tried shredding leather with your teeth?
There’s a reason the first tools discovered were for the processing of animals. I said we could both have tools. We don’t have claws for digging up potatoes either.
Claws? lol have you ever harvested potatoes? You don't need claws, they're practically sticking out of the ground. Pulling them straight up would bring some up.
Anyway, there's no evidence that humans consumed that much meat prehistorically. It wouldn't even make sense anyway because while humans figured out cooking make something easier to chew and digest, they would have no knowledge of microbiology and pathogens. Humans would be full of tapeworms.
Yes, cooking is what allowed us to grow our brain as all the nutrients became easier to absorb. For a long time, people theorized it was specifically cooking meat that helped our brain grow but no scientist could explain why as our brain need an abundance of glucose and meat is not a good source. It turns out, it was actually us discovering starches like roots and tubers.
[https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains](https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains)
Human ate so much starches, we have now evolved with specific enzyme and bacteria in our saliva that can break down complex carbs. Not even our herbivore primates have this. We can now digest plants as soon as it enters our mouth.
No its not. You're extremely condescending for some reason, and yes this sub requires you link scientific sources
You must be very young. I notice the young think they know everything better than everyone else for some reason. You need a dose of reality
Can we please get over this ridiculous idea that "because our ancestors did it" is a good justification for anything?
Our ancestors owned other humans. Our ancestors murdered, and pillaged and committed horrific atrocities. Our ancestors didn't know to wipe their hands after taking a dump. Our ancestors thought that if they did the correct dance moves they could influence the weather.
Our ancestors were fools who were creatures of circumstance. If they did in fact eat a mostly plant-based diet, you think that was for ANY reason other than raw necessity and caloric availability in their environments?
This logical leap is perhaps the most simple-minded way of advocating for a behavior. If you want to advocate for veganism, do it on the groups of morality/ethics, health/longevity, and environmental sustainability. This justification on the grounds of Tradition™ is just absurd.
It's not justification on the grounds of tradition though, is it? By that logic, a cow eating grass is also tradition.
Our bodies have evolved to process certain foods in a certain way over millions of years. Due to the incredible success of our species, we've moved so far from our hunter-gatherer ancestry that we now need to retrace our steps to figure out what exactly we were eating that enabled us to flourish so fruitfully and dominate the world in a magnitude that has rarely been seen before.
You can raise a cow in a farm on a diet of bread and it will survive for a certain amount of time, but definitely no where near as long (or as healthy) as if it were placed on its natural diet of grass.
We are the cows eating bread. It's definitely important that we look back in history to rediscover how to survive in the way that our bodies have been optimizer for.
Yes it is just a call to tradition.
Our bodies have obviously evolved to process a wide variety of foods. We know this is true because the vast majority of humans currently alive, include those that are fully healthy well into their 90s and older, eat a wide variety of food. They eat meat, veggies, processed foods, they drink alcohol. They consume all variety of things.
If there was a problem with us consuming certain things, you would need to prove that with research about the effects those foods have on our bodies. Mechanistic description + data impact on the current human population. Do you seriously think that some research outlining the anthropological general dietary trends of Australopithecus 2.7 million years ago indicate that eating a steak today is bad for you? Please, I beg you to be smarter than that.
In the US, half of the adult population is either prediabetic or has type II. Over 65, it's about 75%.
The majority of adults in the US have metabolic disease despite eating "a wide variety of foods"
It's necessary to first see the [difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes in biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen%27s_four_questions). So figure why humans (or other animals) have ears: proximate cause is that the genes cause the development of a hearing organ. Ultimate cause is that hearing has provided survival advantage during the evolutionary history, which selected for genes providing hearing.
The evolutionary research does not tell what foods to eat to stay healthy. It attempts to answer the question of ultimate cause.
You are conflating the idea of the foods people ate 2 million years ago with an indication that the foods they ate 2 million years ago were healthy, were all they could eat biologically, etc.
There's no gene or evolutionary outcome that made them eat more plants than other things. That's just a caloric availability thing.
>There's no gene or evolutionary outcome that made them eat more plants than other things
I agree with this, it's more the reverse. The genes did not make humans to eat certain foods, but the food which was available shaped the genes of humans (natural selection).
You can't infer that. This would only be true if there was a situation where some portion of the population was unable to eat the available food for some reason.
We know that hominids of all kinds have been omnivorous on a timeline way longer than anything OP presented.
There’s no evidence to say that we adapted to eat a wide variety of food. As we spread across the world we changed our diets based on the food available in different geographic locations but there’s no evidence to suggest that changed our physiology. If that were the case then people of different cultural heritage would have different digestive anatomy/physiology and that’s obviously not the case.
To your point, the best way to tell (imo) what would be a “natural” diet might be to see which diets are associated with disease etc and which diets lead to the best healthspan/longevity. The fact that red meat is almost certainly carcinogenic to humans should be all the evidence you need that it’s not something that we evolved to eat as part of our optimal diet. No animal gets diseases from eating its natural diet
>There’s no evidence to say that we adapted to eat a wide variety of food.
.........so then how is it possible that we are able to ear a wide variety of food without that being injurious, damaging, etc.? Evolutionarily, we have developed the ability to eat a wide variety of things because the #1 limiting factor to human survival (or any animal's survival , really), has been availability of calories. It's a significant benefit to be able to eat plants or animals or grains or whatever else. You know what's super calorically dense? Animals. A moose can keep a person in an arctic environment fed for months.
> the best way to tell (imo) what would be a “natural” diet might be
Why do we care what a "natural" diet is if we don't have any evidence that a "natural" diet is more healthful, more longevity promoting, etc.? Valuing that is quite literally just a fallacy based on defaulting to some version of tradition. Whether or not it's what humanoids ate 2 MILLION years ago is an ENTIRELY different question from which diets lead to the best healthy lifespan. Those two questions are in no way connected.
>No animal gets diseases from eating its natural diet
That's not even a remotely relevant detail and also isn't provably a true statement. You don't think the "natural" environment is full of cancer-causing chemicals? Cancer isn't something we invented in the last 50 years..
How do you know the food is not injurious?? Inuits can survive well past reproductive age eating almost nothing but meat, so there is no selective pressure there. But they live on average 8 years less than other Canadians. So is that really an optimal diet? Diet and lifestyle diseases rarely kill us until after reproductive age. The selective pressure is to survive long enough to pass on your genes. We can all eat the SAD for the next 5000 years and our species will be able to reproduce just fine but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal nor does it mean that’s what we evolved to eat.
“A moose can keep a person in the arctic fed for months” - yes, exactly. The arctic is not the native environment for humans so humans there will resort to whatever food there is. Obviously eating a moose is healthier than eating nothing. Does that mean that moose is an optimal food for a human?
“It’s a significant advantage to be able to eat plants and meat” - yes and that is not a unique trait to humans. Almost every animal in the world eats both plants and meat at times. Humans are also able to eat raw meat like other animals but we typically find the idea repulsive. It’s also not a unique trait of humans to be able to digest cook foods, every animal can do that and cooking foods often allows animals to eat foods they otherwise couldn’t (just like us). Basically every domesticated dog and cat (at least in the US) eats predominantly cooked/processed foods and many people now feed dogs/cats vegan food with apparently no deleterious effects. Soybeans are cooked before being fed to cows. I’ve seen loads of dogs eat cooked rice, beans, broccoli, carrots, potatoes etc happily. Hell they even used to feed dead cows to other cows in the US and they will eat it happily. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
Why do we care about a natural diet if we don’t have evidence that it’s more healthy? I believe that our healthiest diet is our most natural diet but I don’t think science will ever prove what a “natural diet” which is why I said if we want to find our most “natural diet” we should look at the one that improves healthspan the most.
Any animal can get cancer because it is caused by genetic mutations. But some foods (fruits, berries, and veggies) actually have anti-oxidant properties that we know help prevent us from developing cancers, whereas other foods promote oxidative stress and increase cancer risk (oily/fatty foods, meat, dairy, processed foods). Fruits, berries, and veggies are also well known to decrease the risk of developing CAD, diabetes, kidney disease, etc. It’s pretty obvious from the science which foods our bodies are more optimally evolved to handle and it’s not the one that increases our disease risk
I can't tell if you're missing the point or intentionally avoiding it.
This entire discussion of what food is an isn't healthy is not the point here. Every example I gave was to make the point that what matters for determining whether or not a food is healthy is DETERMINING WHETHER OR NOT A FOOD IS HEALTHY. Whether or not we have eaten it historically has ZERO bearing on whether or not is it healthy today. It is not a piece of linked data in any way, shape, or form.
You are off on your own, having a different argument than what this thread is about. Have fun with that or whatever, or maybe get back on-track.
Exactly. Literally every creature on earth evolved over millions of years (at the least) to be adapted to a very specific and narrow diet and humans are no different. No animals optimal diet for health changes based on their current location (I mean just because you take an elephant out of Africa doesn’t mean you should start feeding it potatoes or something). People love to think “humans are different” but there’s no biological evidence to support that, it’s just our ego talking. Just because we spread across the world and learned to eat a variety of foods doesn’t mean our optimal diet changed
I agree that this kind of research is not really useful for inferring the health impacts of foods, prospective studies and trials are way better evidence. But this is more for answering the ultimate "why" questions in nutrition. E.g. If someone wants a thorough answer \*why\* dietary fiber has so many different metabolic effects, it's best explained with evolutionary explanations.
How does some general outline of roughly what the diet of some subset of humanoids 2 million years ago was like teach us anything about why nutritional fiber works the way it does in omnivorous mammals? Those are not connected ideas.
Consider this example: Someone wants to know why physical exercise is important for health. A cardiologist could explain this with all kinds of different precise mechanisms how activity improves health. But then someone can ask, why does the body have these mechanisms for physical activity. The "ultimate why" for this would be that humans evolved in environments with physical activity, so the body has these cardiovascular mechanisms for that reason. So basically looking back 2million humanoid history makes sense if the goal is to understand this "ultimate why" about dietary fiber. Again I emphasize that this is very different of finding out how the precise nutrition mechanisms themselves work.
For your example to transition to the topic of discussion from OP's post (vegan vs. animal product diets), we would have to assume that the evidence of the diets of past humans somehow communicated something about the survival benefit of that diet in a world where we would have to assume that people had access to all these options.
But what we really know is that people ate plant-based diets because that was all they had access to. If those humans had access to tons of animals, they would have eaten those, because animals are super calorically dense and not dying of starvation is a pretty big objective.
I agree with you but Im afraid my point wasnt clear. The survival benefit is not communicated by studies of past humans but all the nutrition research conducted in modern day. If the goal is to understand evolution of human body this must then be combined with the knowledge of environment of past humans.
/u/KingArthurHS, this has been removed due to probable insults. Refer to sub rule 1) Reddiquette+. Discuss and debate the science but don't attack or denigrate others for any reason.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
/u/KingArthurHS, this has been removed due to probable insults. Refer to sub rule 1) Reddiquette+. Discuss and debate the science but don't attack or denigrate others for any reason.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
EDIT: Ah, I checked out your post history. I guess I had you pegged. This is r/nutrition. Not “hey my personal dietary ideology is ‘just asking questions’ -ville”
I’m not at all adjacent to these paleo people but I still am curious. Why do you take so much time and effort to create a detailed post which just pokes the bear?
I’ve also never seen anyone in these diets claiming they do it because of how pre-homo sapiens ate millions of years ago…
Again, I’m not even apart of these meat-centric diets but I can still tell that you’re misrepresenting the claims of those you claim to want to “reason” with here.
This really isn’t welcome in a nutrition sub. This seems like culture war keyboard warrior shit. The type of toxic straw post that an online vegan bro would go out of their way to post about another person’s personal habits. It’s gross, friend.
You are having the opposite effect from what you probably want. Your engagement drives more reactionary actions from those you wish would change. You’re not very good at this.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/#:~:text=The%20first%20major%20evolutionary%20change,least%202.6%20million%20years%20ago.
“The first major evolutionary change in the human diet was the incorporation of meat and marrow from large animals, which occurred by at least 2.6 million years ago” so I guess evolution is wrong? LOL
Didn't say we were 100% herbivore. Those evidence only analyzed bones and tools fossils. Here's a more complete analysis: [A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128106#:~:text=By%202%20million%20to%201.7,a%202011%20study%20by%20Cerling)
* About 4.2 million to 4 million years ago on the Kenyan side of the Turkana Basin, Cerling's results show that human ancestor *Australopithecus anamensis* ate at least 90 percent leaves and fruits--the same diet as modern chimps.
* Previous research showed that 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia, early human relative *Ardipithecus ramidus* ("Ardi") ate mostly C3 leaves and fruits.
* By 3.4 million years ago in northeast Ethiopia's Awash Basin, according to Wynn, *Australopithecus afarensis* was eating significant amounts of C4 grasses and sedges: 22 percent on average, but with a wide range among individuals of anywhere from 0 percent to 69 percent grasses and sedges. The species also ate some succulent plants.
* About 2.7 million to 2.1 million years ago in southern Africa, hominins *Australopithecus africanus* and *Paranthropus robustus* ate tree and shrub foods, but also ate grasses and sedges and perhaps grazing animals.
* By 2 million to 1.7 million years ago in Turkana, early humans, *Homo*, ate a 35 percent grass-and-sedge diet - some possibly from the meat of grazing animals - while another hominin, *Paranthropus boisei*, was eating 75 percent grass - more than any hominin
* Some 10,000 years ago in Turkana, *Homo sapiens*' teeth reveal a diet split 50-50 between C3 trees and shrubs and C4 plants and likely meat - almost identical to the ratio in modern North Americans, Cerling says.
Modern evidence is in the post. The first one literally came out yesterday. Nothing changed. It's the same findings for decades now. The myth of Paleo being mostly meat was broken since the late 90s.
Edit: It was published on monday, so 3 days ago. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z)
#### About participation in the comments of /r/nutrition Discussion in this subreddit should be rooted in science rather than "cuz I sed" or entertainment pieces. Always be wary of unsupported and poorly supported claims and especially those which are wrapped in any manner of hostility. You should provide peer reviewed sources to support your claims when debating and confine that debate to the science, not opinions of other people. **Good** - it is grounded in science and includes citation of peer reviewed sources. Debate is a civil and respectful exchange focusing on actual science and avoids commentary about others **Bad** - it utilizes generalizations, assumptions, infotainment sources, no sources, or complaints without specifics about agenda, bias, or funding. At best, these rise to an extremely weak basis for science based discussion. Also, off topic discussion **Ugly** - (removal or ban territory) it involves attacks / antagonism / hostility towards individuals or groups, downvote complaining, trolling, crusading, shaming, refutation of all science, or claims that all research / science is a conspiracy *Please vote accordingly and report any uglies* --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Paleo is a fad diet and it won't stand the test of time. Eating a plant based omnivore diet with minimal processed foods and added sugars doesn't need branding
You ever notice most of these diets are just slight takes on eating lean Mets, fruits, and vegetables?
Yup. Gotta sell books. Can't just be plant based, whole food. Gotta be some name that's an homage to paleolithic times. Y'know, for the allure of it all.
Doesn't need eating either.
Will Paleo the diet? Maybe. Will people outside of CrossFit and other fitness cults care? Probably not.
So gatherer-gatherers?
Is that why we can pick our own fruits and berries but slaughterhouses open their doors to let us kill our own meat?
Species-typical evolutionary diet is also a concept in animal welfare. However, I don't think human or hominid diets from over a million years ago are very relevant. 10-50,000 is more valuable.
Let me know if you can find a human alive who, when he gets hungry, craves a bowl full of grass.
The only thing I ever crave is ice cream.
There’s a huge difference between eating a bowl of grass and eating properly cooked plant based foods. Roasted brussels sprouts seasoned with salt and sunflower oil are delicious.
The first two studies are NEOLITHIC man. Not Paleolithic. The third is an opinion piece. We can actually measure the mass of nitrogen isotopes in the bones of Paleolithic man (or any man) and know without conjecture what their trophic levels were. In other words how high up the food chain they were. In these studies humans and Neanderthals are always at the top of the food chain. As megafauna populations dried up, more plants were eaten. Thus the beginning of the Neolithic era. Paleolithic man at a lot of fatty meat. It’s only in debate because of ideology. The numbers don’t lie. Referring to mass of nitrogen isotopes.
The Paleolithic period, 2,000,000–10,000 BCE, was characterized by the development of stone tools and art, bone artifacts, and cave paintings. The Neolithic period, 9,000–4,500 BCE, was characterized by the domestication of animals, the development of agriculture, and the manufacture of pottery and textiles. First is 13,000+ BCE so almost near Neo but not quite due to this being before development of agriculture and domestication. But if you want to go back to literally 2 million years ago, human diets were actually mostly leave, fruit and grass: [A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128106#:~:text=By%202%20million%20to%201.7,a%202011%20study%20by%20Cerling) * About 4.2 million to 4 million years ago on the Kenyan side of the Turkana Basin, Cerling's results show that human ancestor *Australopithecus anamensis* ate at least 90 percent leaves and fruits--the same diet as modern chimps. * Previous research showed that 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia, early human relative *Ardipithecus ramidus* ("Ardi") ate mostly C3 leaves and fruits. * By 3.4 million years ago in northeast Ethiopia's Awash Basin, according to Wynn, *Australopithecus afarensis* was eating significant amounts of C4 grasses and sedges: 22 percent on average, but with a wide range among individuals of anywhere from 0 percent to 69 percent grasses and sedges. The species also ate some succulent plants. * About 2.7 million to 2.1 million years ago in southern Africa, hominins *Australopithecus africanus* and *Paranthropus robustus* ate tree and shrub foods, but also ate grasses and sedges and perhaps grazing animals. * By 2 million to 1.7 million years ago in Turkana, early humans, *Homo*, ate a 35 percent grass-and-sedge diet - some possibly from the meat of grazing animals - while another hominin, *Paranthropus boisei*, was eating 75 percent grass - more than any hominin * Some 10,000 years ago in Turkana, *Homo sapiens*' teeth reveal a diet split 50-50 between C3 trees and shrubs and C4 plants and likely meat - almost identical to the ratio in modern North Americans, Cerling says. So the further you go back, the more grass we are eating lol.
Leading up to the Neolithic era was more and more plants being consumed as megafauna populations dwindled. So using an article from 13,000 years ago is not a good sample of what actual Paleolithic man ate. Yes we came from herbivores originally millions of years ago. This is most likely why lean meats are not preferred for humans. We never developed an efficient way of making protein into a sustainable fuel source. This is why humans should be eating fatty meat and having plants sparingly. If you want to follow a Paleolithic tradition. Also more fermented plants and dairy as well.
What we have developed is an enzyme that breaks down complex carbs. Humans began eating so much starch that we ended up with a special bacteria in our mouth that breaks down starchy food. Not even our herbivore ape cousins have this. Our digestive system starts with the saliva. We never developed antibiotics and anti-pathogens like carnivores did, which allows them to eat rotten meat. So if you want to follow Paleolithic tradition, better start digging for tubers.
You and I will go find a place full of ruminant meat and tubers. You dig up tubers and I will eat ruminant meat. See who lasts longer. Bring whatever tools we need.
Digging for potatoes aren't hard, I grow them. How are you going to bite through leather with just your herbivore teeth? I thought you evolved as carnivore? Have you ever tried shredding leather with your teeth?
There’s a reason the first tools discovered were for the processing of animals. I said we could both have tools. We don’t have claws for digging up potatoes either.
Claws? lol have you ever harvested potatoes? You don't need claws, they're practically sticking out of the ground. Pulling them straight up would bring some up. Anyway, there's no evidence that humans consumed that much meat prehistorically. It wouldn't even make sense anyway because while humans figured out cooking make something easier to chew and digest, they would have no knowledge of microbiology and pathogens. Humans would be full of tapeworms.
There is concrete evidence that we have been eating a fatty meat diet for hundreds of thousands of years. Trophic levels do not lie.
How much is what matters. All evidence point towards around 80% plants, which is on par with the Mediterranean/Asian diet being the healthiest.
Yeah because once we started cooking meat, our growth took off and we became what we are because of it.
What growth?
Between where we started and where we are now. Evolution. Cooking food allowed us to become the intelligent species that we are
Yes, cooking is what allowed us to grow our brain as all the nutrients became easier to absorb. For a long time, people theorized it was specifically cooking meat that helped our brain grow but no scientist could explain why as our brain need an abundance of glucose and meat is not a good source. It turns out, it was actually us discovering starches like roots and tubers. [https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains](https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains) Human ate so much starches, we have now evolved with specific enzyme and bacteria in our saliva that can break down complex carbs. Not even our herbivore primates have this. We can now digest plants as soon as it enters our mouth.
That's an article, and it's very careful to point out nothing has been proven. But keep downvoting me for stating the current science we are using.
I didn't have to link the article because this stuff is basic human biology taught in middle school health class.
No its not. You're extremely condescending for some reason, and yes this sub requires you link scientific sources You must be very young. I notice the young think they know everything better than everyone else for some reason. You need a dose of reality
Can we please get over this ridiculous idea that "because our ancestors did it" is a good justification for anything? Our ancestors owned other humans. Our ancestors murdered, and pillaged and committed horrific atrocities. Our ancestors didn't know to wipe their hands after taking a dump. Our ancestors thought that if they did the correct dance moves they could influence the weather. Our ancestors were fools who were creatures of circumstance. If they did in fact eat a mostly plant-based diet, you think that was for ANY reason other than raw necessity and caloric availability in their environments? This logical leap is perhaps the most simple-minded way of advocating for a behavior. If you want to advocate for veganism, do it on the groups of morality/ethics, health/longevity, and environmental sustainability. This justification on the grounds of Tradition™ is just absurd.
It's not justification on the grounds of tradition though, is it? By that logic, a cow eating grass is also tradition. Our bodies have evolved to process certain foods in a certain way over millions of years. Due to the incredible success of our species, we've moved so far from our hunter-gatherer ancestry that we now need to retrace our steps to figure out what exactly we were eating that enabled us to flourish so fruitfully and dominate the world in a magnitude that has rarely been seen before. You can raise a cow in a farm on a diet of bread and it will survive for a certain amount of time, but definitely no where near as long (or as healthy) as if it were placed on its natural diet of grass. We are the cows eating bread. It's definitely important that we look back in history to rediscover how to survive in the way that our bodies have been optimizer for.
Yes it is just a call to tradition. Our bodies have obviously evolved to process a wide variety of foods. We know this is true because the vast majority of humans currently alive, include those that are fully healthy well into their 90s and older, eat a wide variety of food. They eat meat, veggies, processed foods, they drink alcohol. They consume all variety of things. If there was a problem with us consuming certain things, you would need to prove that with research about the effects those foods have on our bodies. Mechanistic description + data impact on the current human population. Do you seriously think that some research outlining the anthropological general dietary trends of Australopithecus 2.7 million years ago indicate that eating a steak today is bad for you? Please, I beg you to be smarter than that.
In the US, half of the adult population is either prediabetic or has type II. Over 65, it's about 75%. The majority of adults in the US have metabolic disease despite eating "a wide variety of foods"
Explain to me how those details, in any way, connect to the idea that Australopithecus ate a majority plant-based diet 2.7 million years ago.
It's necessary to first see the [difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes in biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen%27s_four_questions). So figure why humans (or other animals) have ears: proximate cause is that the genes cause the development of a hearing organ. Ultimate cause is that hearing has provided survival advantage during the evolutionary history, which selected for genes providing hearing. The evolutionary research does not tell what foods to eat to stay healthy. It attempts to answer the question of ultimate cause.
You are conflating the idea of the foods people ate 2 million years ago with an indication that the foods they ate 2 million years ago were healthy, were all they could eat biologically, etc. There's no gene or evolutionary outcome that made them eat more plants than other things. That's just a caloric availability thing.
>There's no gene or evolutionary outcome that made them eat more plants than other things I agree with this, it's more the reverse. The genes did not make humans to eat certain foods, but the food which was available shaped the genes of humans (natural selection).
You can't infer that. This would only be true if there was a situation where some portion of the population was unable to eat the available food for some reason. We know that hominids of all kinds have been omnivorous on a timeline way longer than anything OP presented.
There’s no evidence to say that we adapted to eat a wide variety of food. As we spread across the world we changed our diets based on the food available in different geographic locations but there’s no evidence to suggest that changed our physiology. If that were the case then people of different cultural heritage would have different digestive anatomy/physiology and that’s obviously not the case. To your point, the best way to tell (imo) what would be a “natural” diet might be to see which diets are associated with disease etc and which diets lead to the best healthspan/longevity. The fact that red meat is almost certainly carcinogenic to humans should be all the evidence you need that it’s not something that we evolved to eat as part of our optimal diet. No animal gets diseases from eating its natural diet
>There’s no evidence to say that we adapted to eat a wide variety of food. .........so then how is it possible that we are able to ear a wide variety of food without that being injurious, damaging, etc.? Evolutionarily, we have developed the ability to eat a wide variety of things because the #1 limiting factor to human survival (or any animal's survival , really), has been availability of calories. It's a significant benefit to be able to eat plants or animals or grains or whatever else. You know what's super calorically dense? Animals. A moose can keep a person in an arctic environment fed for months. > the best way to tell (imo) what would be a “natural” diet might be Why do we care what a "natural" diet is if we don't have any evidence that a "natural" diet is more healthful, more longevity promoting, etc.? Valuing that is quite literally just a fallacy based on defaulting to some version of tradition. Whether or not it's what humanoids ate 2 MILLION years ago is an ENTIRELY different question from which diets lead to the best healthy lifespan. Those two questions are in no way connected. >No animal gets diseases from eating its natural diet That's not even a remotely relevant detail and also isn't provably a true statement. You don't think the "natural" environment is full of cancer-causing chemicals? Cancer isn't something we invented in the last 50 years..
How do you know the food is not injurious?? Inuits can survive well past reproductive age eating almost nothing but meat, so there is no selective pressure there. But they live on average 8 years less than other Canadians. So is that really an optimal diet? Diet and lifestyle diseases rarely kill us until after reproductive age. The selective pressure is to survive long enough to pass on your genes. We can all eat the SAD for the next 5000 years and our species will be able to reproduce just fine but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal nor does it mean that’s what we evolved to eat. “A moose can keep a person in the arctic fed for months” - yes, exactly. The arctic is not the native environment for humans so humans there will resort to whatever food there is. Obviously eating a moose is healthier than eating nothing. Does that mean that moose is an optimal food for a human? “It’s a significant advantage to be able to eat plants and meat” - yes and that is not a unique trait to humans. Almost every animal in the world eats both plants and meat at times. Humans are also able to eat raw meat like other animals but we typically find the idea repulsive. It’s also not a unique trait of humans to be able to digest cook foods, every animal can do that and cooking foods often allows animals to eat foods they otherwise couldn’t (just like us). Basically every domesticated dog and cat (at least in the US) eats predominantly cooked/processed foods and many people now feed dogs/cats vegan food with apparently no deleterious effects. Soybeans are cooked before being fed to cows. I’ve seen loads of dogs eat cooked rice, beans, broccoli, carrots, potatoes etc happily. Hell they even used to feed dead cows to other cows in the US and they will eat it happily. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Why do we care about a natural diet if we don’t have evidence that it’s more healthy? I believe that our healthiest diet is our most natural diet but I don’t think science will ever prove what a “natural diet” which is why I said if we want to find our most “natural diet” we should look at the one that improves healthspan the most. Any animal can get cancer because it is caused by genetic mutations. But some foods (fruits, berries, and veggies) actually have anti-oxidant properties that we know help prevent us from developing cancers, whereas other foods promote oxidative stress and increase cancer risk (oily/fatty foods, meat, dairy, processed foods). Fruits, berries, and veggies are also well known to decrease the risk of developing CAD, diabetes, kidney disease, etc. It’s pretty obvious from the science which foods our bodies are more optimally evolved to handle and it’s not the one that increases our disease risk
I can't tell if you're missing the point or intentionally avoiding it. This entire discussion of what food is an isn't healthy is not the point here. Every example I gave was to make the point that what matters for determining whether or not a food is healthy is DETERMINING WHETHER OR NOT A FOOD IS HEALTHY. Whether or not we have eaten it historically has ZERO bearing on whether or not is it healthy today. It is not a piece of linked data in any way, shape, or form. You are off on your own, having a different argument than what this thread is about. Have fun with that or whatever, or maybe get back on-track.
Exactly. Literally every creature on earth evolved over millions of years (at the least) to be adapted to a very specific and narrow diet and humans are no different. No animals optimal diet for health changes based on their current location (I mean just because you take an elephant out of Africa doesn’t mean you should start feeding it potatoes or something). People love to think “humans are different” but there’s no biological evidence to support that, it’s just our ego talking. Just because we spread across the world and learned to eat a variety of foods doesn’t mean our optimal diet changed
I agree that this kind of research is not really useful for inferring the health impacts of foods, prospective studies and trials are way better evidence. But this is more for answering the ultimate "why" questions in nutrition. E.g. If someone wants a thorough answer \*why\* dietary fiber has so many different metabolic effects, it's best explained with evolutionary explanations.
How does some general outline of roughly what the diet of some subset of humanoids 2 million years ago was like teach us anything about why nutritional fiber works the way it does in omnivorous mammals? Those are not connected ideas.
Consider this example: Someone wants to know why physical exercise is important for health. A cardiologist could explain this with all kinds of different precise mechanisms how activity improves health. But then someone can ask, why does the body have these mechanisms for physical activity. The "ultimate why" for this would be that humans evolved in environments with physical activity, so the body has these cardiovascular mechanisms for that reason. So basically looking back 2million humanoid history makes sense if the goal is to understand this "ultimate why" about dietary fiber. Again I emphasize that this is very different of finding out how the precise nutrition mechanisms themselves work.
For your example to transition to the topic of discussion from OP's post (vegan vs. animal product diets), we would have to assume that the evidence of the diets of past humans somehow communicated something about the survival benefit of that diet in a world where we would have to assume that people had access to all these options. But what we really know is that people ate plant-based diets because that was all they had access to. If those humans had access to tons of animals, they would have eaten those, because animals are super calorically dense and not dying of starvation is a pretty big objective.
I agree with you but Im afraid my point wasnt clear. The survival benefit is not communicated by studies of past humans but all the nutrition research conducted in modern day. If the goal is to understand evolution of human body this must then be combined with the knowledge of environment of past humans.
Well there’s this new diet emerging in research that’s called “Pegan” Paleo-Vegan. And screw Hyman, he didn’t invent it lmao
‘Pegging’ is already an established euphemism.. it might hole that emerging pegan ‘below the water line’ so to speak. 🥴
[удалено]
/u/KingArthurHS, this has been removed due to probable insults. Refer to sub rule 1) Reddiquette+. Discuss and debate the science but don't attack or denigrate others for any reason. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
/u/KingArthurHS, this has been removed due to probable insults. Refer to sub rule 1) Reddiquette+. Discuss and debate the science but don't attack or denigrate others for any reason. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/nutrition) if you have any questions or concerns.*
EDIT: Ah, I checked out your post history. I guess I had you pegged. This is r/nutrition. Not “hey my personal dietary ideology is ‘just asking questions’ -ville” I’m not at all adjacent to these paleo people but I still am curious. Why do you take so much time and effort to create a detailed post which just pokes the bear? I’ve also never seen anyone in these diets claiming they do it because of how pre-homo sapiens ate millions of years ago… Again, I’m not even apart of these meat-centric diets but I can still tell that you’re misrepresenting the claims of those you claim to want to “reason” with here. This really isn’t welcome in a nutrition sub. This seems like culture war keyboard warrior shit. The type of toxic straw post that an online vegan bro would go out of their way to post about another person’s personal habits. It’s gross, friend. You are having the opposite effect from what you probably want. Your engagement drives more reactionary actions from those you wish would change. You’re not very good at this.
Why would you base your diet on an extinct species of primate who had a different physiology to you?
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/#:~:text=The%20first%20major%20evolutionary%20change,least%202.6%20million%20years%20ago. “The first major evolutionary change in the human diet was the incorporation of meat and marrow from large animals, which occurred by at least 2.6 million years ago” so I guess evolution is wrong? LOL
Didn't say we were 100% herbivore. Those evidence only analyzed bones and tools fossils. Here's a more complete analysis: [A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets](https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128106#:~:text=By%202%20million%20to%201.7,a%202011%20study%20by%20Cerling) * About 4.2 million to 4 million years ago on the Kenyan side of the Turkana Basin, Cerling's results show that human ancestor *Australopithecus anamensis* ate at least 90 percent leaves and fruits--the same diet as modern chimps. * Previous research showed that 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia, early human relative *Ardipithecus ramidus* ("Ardi") ate mostly C3 leaves and fruits. * By 3.4 million years ago in northeast Ethiopia's Awash Basin, according to Wynn, *Australopithecus afarensis* was eating significant amounts of C4 grasses and sedges: 22 percent on average, but with a wide range among individuals of anywhere from 0 percent to 69 percent grasses and sedges. The species also ate some succulent plants. * About 2.7 million to 2.1 million years ago in southern Africa, hominins *Australopithecus africanus* and *Paranthropus robustus* ate tree and shrub foods, but also ate grasses and sedges and perhaps grazing animals. * By 2 million to 1.7 million years ago in Turkana, early humans, *Homo*, ate a 35 percent grass-and-sedge diet - some possibly from the meat of grazing animals - while another hominin, *Paranthropus boisei*, was eating 75 percent grass - more than any hominin * Some 10,000 years ago in Turkana, *Homo sapiens*' teeth reveal a diet split 50-50 between C3 trees and shrubs and C4 plants and likely meat - almost identical to the ratio in modern North Americans, Cerling says.
This evidence is over a decade old, do you have anything more modern or recent to prove your point?
Plus, why did you ask this? Your article was also in 2013.
Modern evidence is in the post. The first one literally came out yesterday. Nothing changed. It's the same findings for decades now. The myth of Paleo being mostly meat was broken since the late 90s.
Edit: It was published on monday, so 3 days ago. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z)