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For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

timesofisrael.com

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Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#31

Post by twobitshifter »

The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise.

1.

95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions.

2.

The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for periods of fasting after consuming large prey. The evidence of this is that our fat reserves are larger than today’s carnivores. Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#32

Post by atarian »

danr4 wrote: post #17

In 2019, age 30, I ate only red meat (and a little fish) for about 8 months. It was by far the peak of my physical condition. Better sleep, stronger workouts, no mid-day grogginess. Blood test results were as best as one could hope for, apart for the debatable "high cholesterol". Unfortunately a couple of trips abroad (damn Italy) and I got back to a more standard diet. Have put on 15kg since. I've been longing to re…

That seems so counterintuitive to what I've been told about a good diet. Any resources you recommend where one can learn more about this?

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#33

Post by femiagbabiaka »

JPKab wrote: post #27
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IGF-1 is a hell of a drug. It will be interesting to see some anecdotal reports from current carnivore diet followers in a few decades.

Why do we have to wait for anecdotal reports? There are numerous people who have followed this diet for decades in the US, but more importantly, there are entire tribes of humans who have eaten carnivorous diets for thousands of years. How much plant-based foods do you think the average Inuit consumes?

1. Bigger groups === more and better data. I didn't know anyone growing up who was interested in ketogenic or carnivorous diets, now it's much more common.

2. Huge difference between the diet of a westerner following carnivore and traditional tribal carnivorous diets

3. The Inuits weren't particularly healthy, I'm not sure why their diet matters: https://www.leoandlongevity.com/post/inuit-health

4. And most importantly, there's a lot of research showing that high levels of IGF-1 associated with diets high in red meat are not good for longevity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#34

Post by danr4 »

imagine99 wrote: post #13

Well, regardless of the topic at hand (the point about brain-size shrinking when eating plants certainly sounds interesting), already the infographics are full of obvious typos ("Domesticsted", "Larg prey") which suggests shoddy editing at least. While that made me chuckle a bit in the context of "brain size" it also leads me to not giving to much credence to the quality of the rest of the text (which I cannot really…

I'd be very surprised if there was one answer to "what should humans eat?". It probably depends on so many factors unknown to scientists, that the best way is to just try different diets until you feel good.

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#35

Post by proc0 »

Not just humans..., I think subsisting and surviving by taking from the environment is what life has done since the beginning. Our success at doing so is now the problem, because of scale, but I think natural selection requires the competition, otherwise I think animals would just be blob-like. Even then we can imagine eventually all blobs multiply and cover the planet, and there would be no choice but to compete at that point, forcing some blobs to evolve into predators, and the others to evolve evasion tactics, etc.

That said, it would be great to move away from mass farming, even if it means changing diet.

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#36

Post by imagine99 »

submeta wrote: post #20
Google234 wrote: post #4

This must be devastating news to the vegans and vegetarians they insist that meat is not natural.

It‘s not about eating animals being un/natural. That’s not the (main) argument. It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability. Besides: Even if you claim us humans were carnivores for thousands of years, what does that prove? First off, humans are omnivores. And secondly, with this kind of argumentation we could say that for hundreds of years we had kingdoms (or slavery), so why have democracies (or uni…

> It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability.

I think that should play absolutely no role in determining whether or not eating meat is better for you than a plant-based diet. It either is or isn't but animal cruelty and sustainability has nothing to do with that.

IF we determine that more meat is better, we can totally focus and increase our efforts towards growing sustainable meat. This can be from sustainable farming or (more likely to be sustainable in the long-term) lab-grown alternatives.

However, you cannot make this argument backwards, i.e. that we shouldn't eat meat because it was bad for the environment or the animals even if it was good for us. I get that some people think like that but it is not a "sustainable" argument for the majority of people to give up their potential health and brain capacity to save the environment or some chickens (if you want to take this to a hypothetical extreme).

Note that I say this a "de facto" vegetarian.

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#37

Post by mkoubaa »

twobitshifter wrote: post #31

The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise. 1. 95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions. 2. The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for perio…

I would say 95,000 years is plenty of time to begin to develop adaptations in diet. If as a species our survival was still threatened by starvation for another 100k years we might see more adaptation towards meatless, but that seems unlikely.

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#38

Post by flowerlad »

JPKab wrote: post #19

My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA) He was about 45 at the time. Within 2 years, his health had markedly declined. There are healthy vegan diets, but his was an unhealthy vegan diet. Despite no history of heart attacks on either his mothe…

> This was where I first became aware of the scientific fraud that is the lipid hypothesis, and how wrong it is.

This fraud is being fueled by the billions being raked in by Big Pharma, through statin drugs.

Read more about it here, and visit the links at the bottom of the story for details: https://medium.com/@petilon/cholesterol-and-statins-e7d9d8ee...

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#39

Post by taejavu »

atarian wrote: post #32
danr4 wrote: post #17

In 2019, age 30, I ate only red meat (and a little fish) for about 8 months. It was by far the peak of my physical condition. Better sleep, stronger workouts, no mid-day grogginess. Blood test results were as best as one could hope for, apart for the debatable "high cholesterol". Unfortunately a couple of trips abroad (damn Italy) and I got back to a more standard diet. Have put on 15kg since. I've been longing to re…

That seems so counterintuitive to what I've been told about a good diet. Any resources you recommend where one can learn more about this?

Search for "The carnivore diet"

Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

#40

Post by mkoubaa »

imagine99 wrote: post #13

Well, regardless of the topic at hand (the point about brain-size shrinking when eating plants certainly sounds interesting), already the infographics are full of obvious typos ("Domesticsted", "Larg prey") which suggests shoddy editing at least. While that made me chuckle a bit in the context of "brain size" it also leads me to not giving to much credence to the quality of the rest of the text (which I cannot really…

I didn't see brain size linked directly to diet here, only saw it on the infographic. In another study recently, I saw brain size linked to the challenge of hunting large animals (like cave bears and mammoths)
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