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jonahbenton

Tell that to your genetic predecessors.

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Turns out the model of the primarily meat eating ancestors may be wrong.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Which sort of makes sense when you consider our closest relatives are primarily plant eaters.

Those are extremely recent ancestors, from less than ten thousand years ago. Moreover they were located in a place (the Andean highlands) where it is likely that there were not enough animals to allow them to sustain themselves by hunting.

Our ancestors have shifted to a diet with a large percentage of animal fat and meat, which has lead to a simplification of our digestive system, for more than a million years.

Only during a little more than the last ten thousand years there has been a reverse shift towards a lower percentage of animal food, most likely after we had exterminated most suitable wild animals, which forced us to become creative and discover agriculture, otherwise we might have become extinct, like our prey.

Now, with our reduced digestive system, we could not live eating the kind of plants eaten by a gorilla or even by a chimpanzee. We need much more nutritious food, which can be provided only by plant seeds, the only parts of plants that are rich in proteins.

If 30% of what they ate was meat, then roughly 3/5ths of their caloric intake was meat. And as the study you posted states, they were eating mammals not fish or birds.

I guess you're assuming this is about the weight of food they are eating. Why?

What they're actually doing is measuring the isotopes in the carbon of the bodies of the human remains. You don't get any carbon in your body from the water or from the fiber in plants.

So your estimate correction needs to go the other way - the study says that > 80% of carbon in the bodies of early human foragers comes from plants. That means that also > 80% of the caloric intake comes from plants. Or alternatively, it would mean that > 95% of what they ate (by weight) was plants.

"My predecessors did it" is not moral reasoning.

Tell them what? that we've grown so fat and stupid on the abundance the earth provides that we can't properly manage it and will probably cause millions undue suffering because we don't want to reduce our meat consumption to less than 250lbs per year despite it being easily possible?

Heh, I eat a lot of meat and still less than 250lbs per year. That's a perfectly fine number. The parent was saying that zero was the right number. Zero is really not the right number for much of the current human population. We shall see what happens in the future.

I'm with you that the collective we is fat and stupid and would go further than our various systems and patterns solve for predatory behavior against both humans and non-humans leading to those outcomes, and it is super unfortunate.

250lbs per year is the american average

0 is a great number for rich countries to aspire to. Without some sort of massive crisis (which we're heading towards globally) it would probably take at least 100 years to even halve the current consumption levels. It took roughly 100 years to go from an average of 10lbs of chicken consumption per year (1920) to the current 70lb average (2020). Chicken is really where all the growth for meat consumption has come from.

Beef has been fairly steady per capita, and has decreased from its height a few decades ago — but the population keeps rising so it can't continue like this.

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