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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

From my standpoint, I never understood why people focus on the meat side of this diet. I never eat more green vegetables than when I am on a keto type diet. They are everywhere and I even have slight variations into vegetables I do not normally consider.

However one point most people miss, you don't have to cut out BBQ or other meat condiments. You would be amazed how far that tablespoon actually goes and you still stay way under your carb limit. Once I discovered this the dieting got immensely easier. Same goes for types of salad dressing; I tend to the mix it yourself variety from Good Seasons.

I do not let myself slip into reasoning "just one slice of bread" is okay though. You do however need to look beyond foods you are used to. Eventually it became a game for me which made the whole process more fun

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From my standpoint, I never understood why people focus on the meat side of this diet. I never eat more green vegetables than when I am on a keto type diet.

There is a growing group of people who believe in a carnivore diet, not just a keto diet. They have an active subreddit with introductory readings, a FAQ and wiki explaining their reasoning.

http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.ht...

https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/wiki/faq#wiki_2._isn.27t_t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/wiki/plants

https://justmeat.co/

The tldr is that they believe we evolved to primarily eat meat, we get the best most bioavailable nutrients from animal sources, and that most plants have various toxins in them to discourage animals from eating them, and that even when cooked these toxins aren't completely destroyed and a lot of people experience low-level inflammation and irritation from plant sources, without realizing it.

Notable members of that group are Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila.

I personally find Jordan Peterson's content pretty interesting. His daughter on the other hand, she seems pretty scammy. Have a hard time taking that diet seriously. But I guess if it makes people happy, good for them.

Every diet has its grifters, scammers, and celebrities of questionable character attached to it. Actually, every human interest group or endeavour has grifters attached. The carnivore diet being more of a fringe diet, the associated grifters are more fringe characters. Whereas something like the big label on Honey Nut Cheerios indicating that it is good for your heart -- https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/75ba3310-8be0-4e36-91e6-62f... -- is also a grift, and it is a grift that is supported by our biggest corporations and most prestigious institutions.

Fair enough. I guess my assumption is that all diet advice is garbage and people should just figure out what works for them. The government and health system have obviously been of no help to people.

I was surprised to learn when my kids were born that hospital food is just about as greasy and generally unhealthy as any fast food you're likely to come across.

I highly recommend not getting your anthropology lessons from diet subs on reddit. The level of information you get is questionable at best and often informed by incorrect stereotypes with little basis in reality. A lot of the same is happening here, with people talking about specific cold-environment adaptations like high meat consumption as if they apply to all of human evolution.

The current consensus is that groups outside the circumpolar regions typically ate large amounts of plant matter. In many groups it was even a majority of dietary calories, alongside things like honey and probably insects. This is archaeologically well-substantiated, even taking into account formation processes and preservation biases.

I get my anthropology lessons from actually reading the recommended primary sources from all-sides of the debate, and then using my own judgement about what makes the most sense and what is most convincing.

What is one or two best primary sources supporting your view that our hominid ancestors of one million years ago would have been eating mostly plants?

You've fixated on a particular date (1 MYA) and understood "major component of diet" / "majority calories in some groups" to be "all of our ancestors ate mostly plants". Neither is what I said.

First the date: 1 MYA was the time of H. erectus, not the AMH I was referencing. That's fine, but you'll probably be unsatisfied with the evidence from the period because it's notoriously thin. Regardless, by this time our ancestors had shifted to include megafaunal hunting and harder, diverse plant foods in their diet, so H. erectus populations were likely eating both. See [1]. For a good (slightly outdated) overview of the evidence problems, see [2]. In later periods, we can discuss things like dental microwear patterns, archaeobotany, optimal foraging models, and coprolite analysis as the evidentiary bases are so much better.

Secondly, you have to understand the difference between "plants were a large component of the diet" and "carnivores". All the former means is that meat was only about 30-70% of the diet, not upwards of 90%. The exact amount would have varied hugely by group, environment, and even the season or year. The diversity of the plants eaten would also have varied for the same reasons. For instance, some groups in the Mediterranean basin in the later Upper Pleistocene were sedentary foragers who would transition to nomadic hunter-gatherers at other times.

[1] http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1236828

[2] http://doi.org/10.1086/666700

edit: overview of the elements of "forager diets" and the various viewpoints. There's also a large body of literature on archaeobotany, especially from temperate regions.

[3] http://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23148

You've fixated on a particular date (1 MYA) and understood "major component of diet" / "majority calories in some groups" to be "all of our ancestors ate mostly plants". Neither is what I said.

My working hypothesis is that from a few million years ago to 100,000 years ago, our ancestors primarily ate megafauna (80% to 100% of calories) and so that is the diet we are most evolved to thrive off of. In the last 100,000 years, with the rise of agriculture and the extinction of many megafauna, there has been rapid selection pressure for humans to tolerate grains and dairy (and also breeding of tubers and grains to make them much more nutrition for humans). Toleration of plant and dairy food by modern people varies by race and by individual; but everyone can thrive by eating a lot of megafauna.

I am interested in evidence that contradicts this hypothesis -- particularly whether there is evidence that from 100kya to 3mya our ancestors were eating 30% or 50% or 70% or 95% or 100% plants. It doesn't seem like the links you gave me have such evidence. Got anything more convincing? The evidence from dental collagen and brain size energy requirements arguing for an ancestral diet of 80%+ animals seem more convincing to me.

I'm hugely pro-keto, but, I have to say, assuming advice for one group in a given region is true for all people worldwide seems like bad logic.

We already know that the gut biome between two modern Americans can differ so greatly that a diet that makes one person obese will have no negative health impacts on someone else.

We know that obesity seems to be "inherited" to an extent, mediated by epigenetic effects.

And there are examples of populations that can extract nutrients from foods, such as seaweed, that the general human populace can't.

Heck a good friend of mine, if he follows exactly the same keto diet I do, felt physically sick and lethargic for 2 months before he gave up. Meanwhile I was out there doing 3 hour a day intense workouts.

Trying to say there is "one diet to rule them all", well, it doesn't work. Any given diet subreddit is going to be full of people for whom that diet works really well, and a self-reinforcing community will form. Back when I was super active on /r/keto people would come in and ask why it wasn't working for them, and after going through the regular checklist, I'd add "and maybe this just isn't for you!" because sometimes that is true!

I wish I had links to a study I saw where they worked to find an optimal diet for different people and were able to discover that different protein/fat/carb ratios worked well for different people. No one plan worked for everyone!

There is a lot we don't know about human nutrition, and while we can learn from past populations, holding up any one group as having an ideal diet that'll work for anyone, meh.

Heck I've seen people throw citations back and forth at each other for how good/bad cow milk is. Legit research, biochemical pathways explored and explained, and each side seemed to make some good points. None of which changed the fact that people people do GOMAD and put on insane muscle, while other people just get really bloated.

My working hypothesis is that from 3 million years ago to 100,000 years ago, our ancestors primarily ate megafauna. The optimal diet that we evolved for is to nose-to-tail eating of megafauna, so basically cows and sheep, since we killed all the mammoths and deinotherium.

In more recent times, human diets have been under rapid selection pressure, with most human groups being able to tolerate grains, and some being able to thrive off of milk, and other human groups . These populations that underwent selection for certain diets then get mixed around a lot with various migrations, conquests, and intermarriage, and so it is a bit of crapshoot what kind of diet any given modern caucasian American can tolerate. Pretty much any American can thrive on a diet that is very heavy in cow meat, but what kind of dairy or plants can be tolerated is more random.

Out of curiosity, what are the rough outlines of this diet that did not work for your friend?

> Out of curiosity, what are the rough outlines of this diet that did not work for your friend?

Typical keto, equal portions by weight of protein and fat, with green leafy veggies on the side.

He is good at research and did his homework, just... didn't work out for him.

Typical keto, equal portions by weight of protein and fat,

I didn't know there was a typical keto diet. Some people do carnivore, while some people go heavy on vegetable oils and protein powders. Was he eating ribeye steaks? Or chicken breasts and olive oil? Or tofu and almond butter?

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