Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
To be clear on my point: "Nature" is not a rational agent with a plan. No creature evolved a certain way for a reason, they just evolved that way and happened to not die when some others that didn't evolve that way did die.
Nature doesn't even "intend" for you to pass on your genes, it's just that that's how the system happens to work such that things that pass on their genetic information still stick around.
The very premise that there is some "natural" thing that we would be better off doing, silently assumes a pretty major, border line theological, premise that there is any reason that living things should continue to a path that allowed them to survive to a point. If evolution has any "lesson" teach at all it's closer to "be flexible".
Clearly its generally better to eat more whole, fresh foods and less processed, preserved foods or things with insane amounts of sugar not found in nature. We can argue if this is truly natural vs unnatural but its a valid guideline nonetheless. Our bodies have adapted to certain types of food and certain “unnatural” foods do have negative effects which are contributing to widespread issues like obesity, diabetes, and probably cancer.
"What nature intended" in this context is just another way of saying "optimal given the history of how humans evolved"
The premise that there is something optimal about the state we evolved in has no basis in what we understand about evolutionary processes. Those are just the conditions that we happened to not die in, not the conditions that are in any way "best" or "optimal" for us. It's like sleeping in late and missing a flight that ends up crashing and assuming that the optimal strategy is to always sleep in late.
Further, in an ever changing environment, which is what make evolution so important, "history" in a genetic sense is completely uninteresting. Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one. Megafauna probably had many benefits, pre-human existence, from being very large. But being large and reproducing slowly is what ultimately let to their extinction once the environment changed.
Now there are undoubtedly environments that are better for humans than the Paleolithic one. However, it's hard to say for sure what they are specifically. Every chemical that enters your body has some effect, and if your body was never optimized to handle it, it may have negative effects, even if on the surface it seems better. Trans fats are a great example of this. If we had been eating them for 10,000 years, our bodies would have adapted to make them non-harmful.
Nobody said that.
> Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one.
That's exactly why the history is useful. We carry a long long list of traits, many of which wouldn't be there based on the recent environment, and may actually be counterproductive in it. And all of those are important to know about.
And it's super energy intensive! Those guys spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping.
Agreed, in a short and pithy way I was trying to make this point. I’ve been taught to be weary of the “beautiful savage” argument too, so I don’t think pointing out to tribes that only eat meat or only eat vegetables is useful. As cool as the Hadza are their hunting and eating practices don’t really give me much additional guidance and I tune out when my influencers of choice start waxing poetical about their amazing life changing visit.
While one person spending a day hunting a medium-sized or large-sized animal can feed 100 people. (And similarly trapping, using nets to fish, etc.)
Fortunately we can do both.
Fishing is great, if you live near bodies of water with lots of fish in them. Coastal communities probably did eat a LOT of fish for much of human history, but only so many fish come up to the coast. Fishing gear is also a bitch to build and maintain by hand, in cultures that still do it making new nets and repairing old ones is a full time job for at least one member of each family.
Animal protein also requires prompt preservation or eating, whereas a bunch of yams, cassava and so on can be reliably kept for a very long time.
In some places the only vegetation is mostly useless for humans, consisting almost only of cellulose, but this can sustain ruminants that can then be hunted or domesticated by humans.
On the other hand, hunting in a tropical jungle is pretty difficult, but then you have an abundance of fruits and roots and so, your diet will have far less meat and a lot more plants.
> The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only eleven—less than a fifth—relied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.
Now, to be sure, communities found in the 1960s that subsisted mainly from foraging can _not_ be assumed to be representative of pre-historic people, they are living in the 1960s same as everyone.
But they had access to hunted game as well as foraged vegetables, if hunting is so much more efficient, why did most of them get most of their calories _not_ from hunting? Because they were choosing to inefficiently spend more labor on collecting plants, when they could have been relaxing instead, because they preferred it culturally? I guess it's possible.
Because the efficiency of hunting animals vs harvesting plants isn't universal in actually existing environments humans do and have lived in, but can depend on the specifics of the given ecological location? Seems likely. Maybe the ecologiccal locations most communities the anthropologists looked at in the first half of the 20th century were not representative of pre-historic humans? Certainly could be, but it's certainly not obvious. As OP notes, where hunting seems to beat plant gathering calorically is in extreme environments not representative of African savannah where we thinks humans and their forebears did most of their evolving.
But in general, _most_ of the arguments given when people talk about this topic are based on imagination and what people find plausible or seems like a good just-so story to them, not on any kind of evidence at all. It's a topic where people really are drawn to ideological explanations over clear-eyed looks at evidence, I guess because it's not _really_ just about eating and labor, but about all the cultural implications and assumptions that go along with it for people, many of them that become really tied up with gender, as the OP discusses.
It is in fact not at all clear that hunting is more labor efficient than collecting plants in general, and what anthropological evidence there is from the 20th century (in which in some cases anthropologists really did do caloric input/output calculations) does not neccessarily suggest it at all. Foraging people anthropologists encountered in the 20th century definitely didn't have the kind of success you suggest at hunting -- multi-person parties went hunting, and did not succesfully kill mega-fauna on every expedition, in observed cultures; what they observed was not that a single-person could reliably bring back meat to feed 100 on a daily expedition.
Because at the end of the day, it's not just about efficiency of calorie-gathering anyways. If all your protein is lean, you'll die without other sources of calories anyways. Generally speaking, you needed hunting to meet your protein requirements, and then gathering to fill in the rest of your calories -- especially since women can gather at the same time while men are out hunting. So even if plant-gathering is less efficient calorically, it's still more efficient for the group, considering the gendered division of labor.
Unless you happen to be Inuit, for example, where you might subsist entirely on things like extremely fatty seal meat, since there's not much gathering to be had. Obviously it depends on great deal on your geography.
My original comment was simply pushing back on the assertion that hunting is "ridiculously" more energy-intensive. If you're good with a bow and arrow and there are lots of antelope around...
The idea that one person can on on average day provide calories to feed 100 (for the day?) is not backed up by anthropological observation of foraging people hunting in the 20th century, and I don't see any reason to assume it would have been true for prehistoric people either.
I guess that would have been the much shorter post i could have written.
It might be more intensive to harvest but it has a lot more calories and precious fat.
I've been told by a survival expert that gathering food is a full time job, and many of the contestants didn't seem to get that. They'd waste calories building elaborate shelters and carving toys.
BTW, if I look around the woods in the PNW, I don't see much flora that could be eaten, even though it's rather lush. Although there are berries and mushrooms, those are far from a complete diet.
1. not enough calories
2. a seriously unbalanced diet
and they'd slowly come unglued.
it's also slow to digest, so fruit sugar sources can be a good complement, but are less healthy
but then most "fruit sugar sources" also had much less sugar in them before humans messed with them and more of other nutrients
and there are stuff like shrooms, roots various plants etc.
but also however we look at it, meat was a fundamental component, I mean without supplements or being able to take advantage of a huge variety of plants from all around the world being vegetarians is very likely to lead to some form of malnutrition. But also we have misgrown a lot of plants to be much way less nutrious and have access to a wide variety and access to supplements so it doesn't matter anymore. Additionally even way back you probably could survive on a mostly vegetarian diet without malnutrition, just _mostly_ instead of _purely_ no meat.
On the other hand in today's society people consume often way to much meat and often unhealthy meat, too while at the same time not consuming a lot of the plants, roots and mushrooms people likely did eat before civilization started.
I guess like so often the answer is balance.
But also too-little-nutrious food, both from plants and meat, seems to be becoming increasingly a problem.
An animal can have a lot of calories. To give an idea of how much, when I was a kid my father once accepted as pay for a job a butchered cow. He put it in a freezer and it took our family of 3 around a year to finish it.
Ancient people didn't have freezers, so it would not be worth it for a small group to hunt and kill a large animal unless it was very easy, because they would only get a few days food out of it before it spoiled. This is assuming they have other food sources, of course.
A larger group, say a village with a hundred or so people, would be able to finish eating a large animal before it spoiled. For them it could easily be worth it to send out a hunting party every few days even if that party has to do a lot of work.
We are frighteningly well adapted to all kinds of random diets. We'll eat whatever nature throws at us, it's what makes us well suited for all seasons and living most anywhere in the world. Trying to crown anything as "best" is like asking a random number generator what number it feels it's most meant to return. In fact just about the only thing that'll do you in is eating the same thing all the time which is why these diets are wild. They appeal to the part of our brains that like to pack things into neat and tidy boxes and build in straight lines rather than embrace the organic mess we are. If your body needs something specific it'll start to crave it.
There are bees that evolved to eat the nectar from exactly one species of flower. We aren't that.
It's often deployed to argue that fad diet X or Y is what's best but it's not completely bunk science that there are diets that are better or worse for our health than others.
“plants are poison—they don’t want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion”
As if animals do want to be eaten. I’d argue that animals don’t want to be eaten even more than plants.
(As an aside, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home," which discusses these topics and many more related to how we came to live the lives we do -- it's a great companion to A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
It's far more difficult for a prey animal to have its muscles/fat/organs suffused with chemicals that will kill/injure its likely predators, especially if its predators have similar metabolic pathways as itself -- it'd be at risk of poisoning itself if the poison broke free!
Animals certainly fight back against being eaten (running away, fighting, etc) but once they're dead their meat (barring like, snake venom glands or pufferfish or other poison/venom-suffused sea creatures) won't fight back.
Obviously "plants are poison" is phrased for shock value and there are traditions and safe handling practices (like "cooking", or "not eating green potatoes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine) for plants that remove, denature, or prevent the formation of defensive chemicals.
So the idea that it’s inherently better and healthier to eat animals because “plants are poison” is not only on its face a bad idea, but it’s also a bad idea upon closer inspection.
But the plants are poison idea ignores a very important point - that we eat the parts of plants that have evolved to be eaten, by us and other animals.
For the most part we eat only the seeds and fruit, and we help spread them in an almost symbiotic relationship.
I'm totally in agreement that the "raw meat only" pseudo-traditionalist influencer stuff is absolute ahistorical LARP (the frightening doses of steroids certainly is disqualifying) but humans seem well adapted to hunting animals and digesting meat in ways that other primates just aren't (flagrant examples that come to mind are stomach pH and small intestine vs large intestine size, the linked paper has more). Of course, there indeed have been more recent adaptations to survive better on plants/grains/etc, i think spurred by megafauna becoming more scarce; but that's not really a counterexample for the thesis that prehistoric preagricultural humans ate a lot of meat (not uniquely meat of course!).
Also, I would not take that paper at face value without a lot of other literature around it. Two out of three authors make money writing about the Paleo diet, and they're explicitly proposing a new interpretation of the evidence, it's not a literature review representing any kind of consensus.
It seems like a modern phenomenon that owes itself to an abundance of cheap food. And perhaps a lot of anxiety, depression, or similar.
You're right people will go off the deep end looking for magic cures. But sometimes a little ancestral influence can help guide us.
I've been eating beef, salt, water as my primary food for nearly 15 years. Sometimes I may have a potato here and there with my steak or eggs and bacon for breakfast. But I don't have vegetables or fruit otherwise (they just don't make me feel good). I'm pretty ripped for a middle age guy and have tons of energy and no health problems.
I would never proselytize or tell people how to eat, but I do like to give my N=1 data point that shows it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Obesity has skyrocketed and "people" don't really understand why.
"People" were taught the old food pyramid which was terrible, and if they are trying to find out what they should eat ... where do they go? To the same people that published that old pyramid and have updated it?
There are so many contradictory and confusing information sources and people are desparate to get their obesity or looming obesity back under control.
So people wanting to not have that and over correcting seems to be quite normal.
> obscure diet that humans just never thought of that can unlock
no, but there are many diets which proven wise can affect your performance in various ways. Through if you assume a healthy balanced basis they often aren't just net positive, but have some benefit and some drawbacks.
sadly there are also tons of bad often worse then inefficient diets which promise other things
and not everything which makes you feel good mid term is healthy long term (like oversimplified to short term instead of mid->long term example: fruit sugar is making you feel good short term but is one of the least healthy natural ways to get energy, but juices where for a where long time promoted at healthy by most people, they are not if consumed more then just quite small amounts)
> like a modern phenomenon that owes itself to an abundance of cheap food. And perhaps a lot of anxiety, depression, or similar.
AFIK it's not really modern but probably as old as civilization
and we do have tons of food health issues today
- to much sugar
- many plants and fruits being much less nutrious (or being much more imbalanced)
- highly processed food confusing our digestion system
- implanted diets being the norm
- biorhythms being completely trashed in all kinds of ways
- way way way to much stress
- healthy food in some countries being unaffordable expensive for many
- traces of pesticides messing with our body
- high concentration of cattle and humans making virus and bacteria which affect us pretty bad and spread all over the world (like the bacteria commonly causing tooth decay wasn't a "normal" thing if you go back far enough)
- breeding plants changing them in ways which change which gut bacteria dominates, problem here our immune system might not always play well with that bacteria and we have shown to not always adapt to that so well. Oversimplified Coeliac disease is an example of this and is pretty bad as it (if you consume any gluten) kills you over time (through luckily many people which claim to have Coeliac disease do not have it).
We're constantly evolving and adapting to our habitat, albeit slowly.
and it's not just cows
honestly the more you know about animals we eat the less you can objectively reason that it's ethical, it's simply straight forward can't be
moralic seen ... well moral is judgemental, non fact based and can in difference to ethic be e.g. race supremacist (and with that I mean human race, not some skin color nonsense). Which means it might be moral depending on the moral system you use. But then moral is fundamental flawed as it might also be moral to brutally torturous kill a women because here husband died a natural death, so yea better use ethics instead of morals
Come to think of it, he does look scruffy and a bit malnourished like I imagine pirates of old looking, but he is thinner than he's been in years.
> Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?
Attention-grabbing nonsense.
> A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often making pseudoscientific or unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_diet
> The carnivore diet (also called a zero carb diet) is a fad diet
> There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits.[2][12][13] Dietitians dismiss the carnivore diet as an extreme fad diet
The tl;dr; stuff is in the final 8 paragraphs. The "Liver King" confessed to systematic lying, and it's a bunch of fad diets driven by desperate emotional insecurities. And ~all-meat diets are, in general, far worse than than sugar pills for dealing with the real problems.
also nature doesn't intend
it just does do
and the chaos of reality will discard
mostly what doesn't work
but sometimes what works too
The whole premise is flawed and appeals to "nature" are a continual sham to sell people diet fads with at best no effect on health and at worse serious negative effects.
The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Nothing we do is natural. Our food is either largely engineered or at the very least, bred selectively for maximum harvests. We can arbitrarily decide to travel thousands of miles from our "normal" habitat and be completely confident we will not only survive, but we do this for recreation. Hell, even the meat these weirdos are obsessing over is the result of millennia of selective breeding for the most meat per animal, and even some genetic engineering which is why factory-farmed chickens have tits so big they can't stand up correctly.
"Natural." I challenge anyone to find something in their home that is actually 100% natural.
Not only ludicrous but also frequently used to prop up all kinds of biases.
Evolution of humans is still happening. It's determined by how many of your children survive long enough to reproduce. If you don't have children, for whatever reason, your DNA is edited out of the future.
The factors that drive this have certainly changed over the centuries, but they're always going to be in play (until people are able to customize DNA).
See the movie "Idiocracy" for one take on this.
Replacing MtDNA with that of a donor is already a thing. We are also screening embryos' genes for diseases. Neither of these are true arbitrary-write modications I guess, but we are getting there one step at a time.
The interesting thing is I doubt humans will do well living on other bodies in the solar system without deliberate genetic modification. The modifications would be things like being able to tolerate different gravities, different gas pressure, different air composition, radiation hardening, maybe seeing different light wavelengths, tolerance for various poisonous chemicals, etc.
This is very true and even experts with good communication skills fall pray of perpetuating this misconception.
It's because of all the synergies that emerge in nature, it gets so tempting and to explain these as if they happened through intention. "This butterfly has a pattern that looks like the pattern of trees that grow in it's habitat so it will blend in and avoid prey" sounds so much more like a good argument than "The random mutations in the patterns of these butterflies over time that made them stand out more probably made them easier pray, so survivors would be those that were best at hiding so over time with that selective pressure we are now seeing butterflies that blend in well with the trees, even though they where never at any point able to look at a tree and go 'I want to look like that'".