The role of meat in the human diet: evolutionary aspects and nutritional value | Hacker News Reader

The role of meat in the human diet: evolutionary aspects and nutritional value

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

46 pointshirundo69 comments

The abstract is clear and readable. It also seems to signal, overwhelmingly, "MEAT GOOD". And the problem here, is that I cannot trust it. Not because I disagree, but because any study involving food feels so heavily lobbied, and so chock full of vested interests vying for a headline. (Red wine is good for the heart! Grass feed meat prevents cancer! Beef is terrible for the environment). It is sadly weaponized science for mass consumption.

As a lay person , my eyes glaze over. Is sugar alright for me in moderation? Or am I poisoning myself? Should I stop eating meat because I want to preserve our environment, or as this study says, will I deprive myself of B12?

How does one know who to believe? It seems easier to just check out and kinda guess through it on ones own.

The thing that sounds off to me is that meat consumption increased a lot in just a few generations. Meat being such a part of a diet is something way too new to be considered evolutionary.

...since the invention of agriculture, yes. But prior to agriculture, meat was a reasonably large part of diet in a number of places.

Relative to native americans or inuit?

Both were most or only meat eaters.

This is absurd, agriculture was invented 10 thousand years ago, what do you think Homo Sapiens ate for the previous 1990 thousand years of its existence?

We were a hunter/gatherer society for a reason. Meat/fat is incredibly nutrient and calorically rich, which gave us the ability to grow our brains out and shrink our stomachs. Once we discovered agriculture, we found we could more safely and sufficiently meet our caloric needs with breads, and meat became a luxury as livestock is expensive and hunting was inefficient and costly in a time that normalized daily labor in the community. Once we industrialized farming, we could once again fulfill our demands for meat.

To be clear, this isn't an academic study, it's basically an op-ed, published in a magazine dedicated to position papers about animal agriculture [1]. I would not read very much into this one specific article.

Unfortunately, the scientific jury is still out about meat consumption from a nutritional standpoint---it's clearly not required, and certain types of meat we're pretty sure are harmful, but consumed carefully there may well be benefits from the non-harmful types. In any case, effect sizes are likely to be small at the population level, or we'd have discovered something major by now.

The upshot? Try changing your meat consumption patterns and see how you feel -- if you feel better, consider making the change permanent!

[1]: https://academic.oup.com/af/pages/General_Instructions#

Don't forget to try to change carbohydrates and fat consumption patterns as well.

Some reportedly do better with low carb and avoiding industrial seed oils.

Which meat we're pretty sure it's harmful?

If it's processed one, sure, like most (ultra) processed food.

If you are about to say red meat, you are misinformed like everybody else that has repeated the same nonsense for the past 3 decades about red meat, cholesterol, etc. So I wouldn't be quick to blame sponsored and biased papers, when even laymen like you and I keep parroting the same unscientific dogmas they have heard over the years, which keep being disproved.

Red meat is not unhealthy. Cholesterol is not unhealthy per se. Cholesterol is a simple metric that is often misinterpreted by GP and has a complete different meaning whether you are eating a lot of carbohydrates and sugar with red meat, or not.

https://youtu.be/rdgS3PuSuyg

In fact, recent studies seem to show that higher LDL levels (you know, the bad one) are correlated with longevity. Go figure. Scientifically, we still have no clue. Then add lobbying and ideology on top. This is how you get modern dietary science.

I usually skip dietary posts on this forum because the same misinformation, whether it's because of parroting or pushing a certain anti-meat agenda, is readily found upvoted to the top. At this point arguing with people about diet is starting to feel quixotic.

In case anyone takes this comment seriously:'There is strong evidence that processed meat and red meat intake increases risk of colorectal cancer.[31][32][33] The American Cancer Society in their "Diet and Physical Activity Guideline", stated "evidence that red and processed meats increase cancer risk has existed for decades, and many health organizations recommend limiting or avoiding these foods."[34]'

This is from Wikipedia. References are to solid science. Not to YouTube influencers.

There you go. Not knowing you can find paper that prove A and papers that prove B, it's just a matter of finding the papers that prove what you most believe in, and QED.

Especially when you use a quote which conveniently puts red and processed meat in the same basket to reach their conclusion.

I'll let you have this one, because as I said, it is quixotic trying to restore some kind of objectivity or educated discussion on dietary matters.

Even under the anthropological point of view, red meat which has sustained humanity for hundred of thousands of years, to "cause cancer" smells like biased nonsense from a mile away. I guess during the last ice age, when herbivores roamed the earth freely and in abundant numbers, the opportunist scavenger Homo Sapiens was eating chicken breast and leafy vegetables.

> There you go. Not knowing you can find paper that prove A and papers that prove B, it's just a matter of finding the papers that prove what you most believe in, and QED.

You would be a lot more convincing if you actually cited some papers.

His point is literally that most papers are lobbyist garbage. He made that rather clear. So how would citing papers he already declares biased help anything?

That was what voz_2's point rather than sph's (unless I missed it).

I cited Dr. Mason's talk, and in general I quite like that entire channel, though as it's called "Low carb down under" it's easy to say it's biased, or, as GP said, that I rely on "Youtube influencers".

The panelists on that channel are all doctors and scientists, with as many papers, science and citations you want. I'm not saying they are not biased, but here I am presenting my sources, which are not a sentence from Wikipedia or repeating Pollan's tired quote.

Yet some would want you to believe Big Meat or Big Keto is actually a thing behind doctors trying to reverse their patients' diabetes or atherosclerosis through the reduction of carbohydrates and the increase of natural, unprocessed foods, such as vegetables, animal meat and fats.

Trust me, it's much easier to market and sell low carb cereals or Impossible Burger, than the real thing everybody's trying their hardest to malign. If it's not beef is the major cause of climate change, it's because steak causes cancer.

> Even under the anthropological point of view, red meat which has sustained humanity for hundred of thousands of years, to "cause cancer" smells like biased nonsense from a mile away

How is this line of argument any better than biased studies?

Humans smoked tobacco for thousands of years too, or are you going to argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer either?

Also, humans used to walk dozens of miles a day. Humans used to not be 40% obese. Humans used to never eat refined sugar.

Lots of things have changed. And even if red meat didn't cause cancer in prehistory, cattle and pigs are raised differently now, and human dietary and mobility patterns are completely different today than even 100 years ago.

None of this is strong evidence for anything.

Trying to determine truth in metabolic science is super hard, and yes there are studies that point in all directions on basically any intervention. So people are understandably very wary of "well, let's toss all that out and start from some other first principles that happen to support my preexisting beliefs" like the "anthropological point of view" you describe.

Not all studies are equally bad, but basically all arguments about historical nutrition have so many confounds that they tell us very little about cause and effect, and a lot about priors (or "bias" as you refer to it elsewhere).

Wikipedia is famous for supressing references that oppose whatever is the current editors' views. I also don't see any links in your post, did something go wrong?

Here's a recent (Oct 2022) reference to solid science [1] which seems to contradict WP claim of strong evidence:

While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between consumption of unprocessed red meat and chronic disease.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z

Nutrition is one of my favorite topics on HN. Not because the discussions have any utility, but because it's amazing to see out of a group of highly intelligent people, the weirdest dietary gospel emerges. Anecdotes about how Wim Hof breathing and drinking only apple cider vinegar solved their IBS or something.

This whole trend of “apple cider vinegar cures X” makes no sense to me. My mother, who suffers from acid reflux, wanted to try drinking an acetic acid solution to cure her acid reflux. All because she saw it on Facebook.

Thinking on it, diet trends really are the “TikTok challenges” of old.

Thank you for helping me turn despair into joy. I was getting upset by all the crazy cultish assertions in this thread. This reminded me how funny it all is. Clearly so much emotion involved when people discuss diet!

I think you are underappreciating the placebo effect here. It is very strong, and it's likely one reason for the proliferation of "X solved my Y" anecdotes.

It may well have -- but through the placebo effect, making it useless for others.

No need to put words in my mouth -- yes, cured meats with nitrites are a pretty well-established human carcinogen. But it's not like other "processed food": we have specific causal mechanisms, and have been doing it for millennia.

Jury's still out on red meat; I was not "about to say" anything I didn't say.

> To be clear, this isn't an academic study, it's basically an op-ed

It is published in the proper articles section of the journal. If it was as opinion piece, it would probably be under the "Perspectives" section.

https://academic.oup.com/af/issue/13/2

Unless you mean to say, that the whole journal Animal Frontiers is opinion pieces.

https://academic.oup.com/af/pages/About

That is exactly what I mean to say, and why I included a link from the published that says exactly that:

> Each issue of Animal Frontiers will consist of a series of invited, peer-reviewed articles that present several international perspectives on the status of a high-impact, timely, global issue in animal agriculture. The articles will be in the form of discussion or position articles that will add to the scientific reviews and original articles published in the journals of the four science societies (Animal, Canadian Journal of Animal Science, Journal of Animal Science, Translational Animal Science, and Meat and Muscle Biology).

Note "articles will be in the form of discussion or position articles".

>As a lay person , my eyes glaze over.

Here's the simple answer: Eat and drink what you want and like.

Ignore anything and everything else anyone tells you, unless it's from your doctor or nutritionist concerning specific health conditions you have.

If you want cake, eat cake. If you want beer, drink beer. If you want steak, eat steak. If you want onions, eat onions. Nothing else really matters.

If you want crystal meth, take crystal meth.

Oh wait, maybe always doing what you want isn't actually that good of an idea.

If you want a straw man, have a straw man.

If I'm misrepresenting your point about following desires first and foremost, then please explain. You say "follow advice tailored to your specific situation", but you don't need to be a doctor or to know the specific situation to say crystal meth is a bad idea, so I'm not misrepresenting you there either.

This is reduction to the absurd, not a straw man.

We eat to live, but to live we must be happy. Eating what would make us unhappy is therefore contradictory to the purpose of eating. Eating must bring joy to life.

Therefore, we should eat what makes us happy, which is to say what we want.

The only counterargument here is to prioritize your body's immediate health needs, because not doing so (eg: not listening to doctor's orders) is to forfeit life which is contradictory to the purpose of eating.

So eat what you want, within the bounds of what your health allows.

This makes sense, but "prioritize not eating what you don't want" is, in a subtle but important way, a different piece of advice than "prioritize eating what you want". The first leads to moderation, the other to gluttony. I oppose the latter formulation.

And your solution is?

Beware of simple answers. Don't thoughtlessly follow your desires. Don't ignore others, but learn from them.

> will I deprive myself of B12?

90% of all B12 supplementation occurs in livestock, join the party!

B12 is a product of bacteria living on the surface of roots in soil. Once you add herbicides, pesticides and general monoculture practices (barren soil baking in the sun, heavy tilling, artificial fertilizers), the conditions for producing B12 fall off a cliff.

The vast majority of our B12 is added via fortification. Heck, a can of Red Bull is >200% of your daily requirement, but unlike the dairy industry they aren't trying to make it sound as if they're the only source of B12 in the world.

I don't take caffeine at all, and the only processed food I eat is bread and cheese. Will I be deprived?

By itself? Probably. That’s where dietary supplements come in though. Ideally from somewhere with strong laws regarding dietary supplements like the EU or Canada.

Exactly. Whether you take the B12 in the form of a supplement or get it through fortified meat, to me there's little difference.

My eldest daughter has gone plant positive. She’s mostly vegetarian, but doesn’t go way out of her way to avoid meats. She eats veggies and tofu from the communal hotpot (were a half Chinese family) even though meat cooks in it as well, She’ll put meat gravy on her nut roast if it’s on the table. We don’t have to adopt extreme positions to make a difference. Most people eat too much sugar, should probably eat more salad and green vegetables, could benefit from a more varied diet. Nobody has to give up anything, but some changes can still make a difference.

It is important to note the role that meat takes in subsistence agriculture: Chicken, for instance not only produce eggs and manure, they also serve as breathing refrigerators: Whenever there is the need, especially in the winter, one can easily kill one or more and eat them. I think cattle plays a similar role at a larger scale.

Obviously, we have moved very far from these basics and industrialized the whole chain, but it should be worth considering that mass adoption of vegan food requires the very same industrialization whereas true organic food will profit from a certain amount of livestock.

> vegan food requires the very same industrialization

Well, there is, for example, flour ?

From Wikipedia:

>In sunny countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, and Bangladesh, there is sufficient endogenous vitamin D due to exposure to the sun. However, [Rickets] occurs among older toddlers and children in these countries, which in these circumstances is attributed to low dietary calcium intakes due to a mainly cereal-based diet

If you treat food as simple calorie numbers, you end up with deficiencies with very bad consequences. This is just an example that I found interesting.

If you don’t properly bake/freeze and vacuum seal your wheat/flour, expect to find lots of little “friends” making a home in your food.

The flour you eat uses copious industrial support, both before and after harvesting.

Fertiliser is called NPK, named for the main chemical ingredients, which come from factories and mines on distant continents.

This gadget is very industrial: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Ka...

The use-by date of flour is generally a few weeks or up to three months depending on the kind of flour and the climate. Providing fresh flour all year requires a bit of technology, too. Not nearly as much as collecting N, P and K and producing fertiliser, but not zero either.

Adding on- chickens are fantastic in the garden, too. Not for the manure (you get that when you let them pick over the compost pile) but for pest control. They are laser-focused on snails, hornworms, all of it. They really are a force-multiplier of the small family farm.

Eating fortified meat or taking supplements, what's the difference? People in current times are mostly able to live of a plant-based diet. There's plenty of alternatives (which are also fortified with e.g. B12) that are as tasty as cheap processed meats most people buy. Most people just WANT to remain naïve about the fact that they're paying other people to kill an animal that is as smart as the one they call "companions".

Synthetic vitamins aren't that good apparantly

That's the point, your meat is fortified, it doesn't make a difference. There's plenty of meat eaters living with a B12 deficiency too.

>Most people just WANT to remain naïve

No, most people don’t care. Huge difference. You are not somehow more knowing and worldly than the average person, in fact realistically you are average.

You're right.

Since I don't eat meat, I had to take my B12 today, was not a burden.

But, ah yes, evolution, I guess we "disconnected" from this kind of meat: https://bigthink.com/the-past/paleo-diet-cannibalism-ancient...

Maybe the good doctors really need to reassess those evolutionary aspects and nutritional value...

I know people that follow the Mediterranean diet who are perfectly healthy and those who are not.

I know people who follow the vegan diet who are perfectly healthy and those who are not.

It seems studies around diets like to spin the wheel and decide to make a paper based on where the wheel lands in one of those 4 options.

Gamechangers is an interesting documentary that presents evidence that vegetarianism may have predated meat eating.

At least eat fish if no other meats & think for yourself, stop relying on others telling you how to think. Search your feelings. Stop taking sides. Be balanced.

Supplements are a scam. They don't "work" OR barely add little if anything of what they claim.

Richard Feynman, famously stated, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Scientific knowledge is always provisional and subject to revision based on new evidence and insights.

Scientific theories and hypotheses are not considered absolute or infallible truths, but rather working models that provide the best explanation of the available evidence at a given time. As new evidence emerges, scientists may revise or even abandon their previous theories to account for the new observations.

Where are your sources for such a claim?

Ethical vegetarians who eat fish are my favourite kind of hypocrites.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the only reason meat is delicious is because we evolved to think meat is delicious.

Reductively can you honestly say there is anything we enjoy or dislike that isn't true for?

Anything that didn't provide an evolutionary or reproductive advantage, or liking it / disliking it is simply a side-effect; e.g. adrenaline pumps / extreme sports, puzzles, modern creative work.

You didn't say anything.

Animals love meat too, so it's not just a human thing. Many of them will prefer meat as well.

otoh, not many people believe vegetables are delicious. That preference should be stronger, from an evolutionary perspective, since it's less work to hunt plants.

It is less work to "hunt plants" but it also carries far more risk from a consumption standpoint due to the biological defenses that plants have evolved to defend themselves and their seeds from undesirable predators. Identifying the correct plants that are safe to eat raw vs those that are safe if prepared properly vs those that are unsafe is pretty knowledge-intensive, and it tends to be geographically limited since flora can vary dramatically based on microclimates.

> the biological defenses that plants have evolved to defend themselves and their seeds from undesirable predators

Hunting and gathering meat doesnt traditionally involve going out into a field and picking up a strip of meat wrapped up in plastic.

Of course, it requires setting up a trap before you harvest the meat fields.

The "trap" in the meat fields being a refrigerator.

Foraging for plants is actually quite difficult. You can try it, go into the woods for a weekend and try feeding only on plants. There are very few edible plants outside of fruit in tropical places. It is easier to catch small birds and rodents, for example.

I think an assortment of roast veges can be as delicious as meat. But a roast spud and a piece of pork crackling are delicious in different ways. The pleasure of eating meat if defiantly more carnal.

> Many of them will prefer meat as well.

This intuitively didn't seem correct. I'd guess that the majority of animals would be herbivorous. What'd odd is I can't find online a referenced percent breakdown of animal kingdom eating habits in terms of herb/omni/carni-vorous.

Anyone know where to find that or something similar?

Not only that. Give a baby vegetables, and they will do everything in their power to avoid eating it. They prefer meat too ;)

I'm at the age where lots of friends are having babies,and this has not been my experience. They love all sorts of vegetables - beetroot, carrot, artichoke, you name it. And at least one toddler really doesn't like meat.

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