The article completely misstates the purpose and findings of the paper, which isn't being helped by the authors here. The position taken in the paper is much less extreme. To summarize, they're staking out a position that middle paleolithic foraging groups were primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption.
The theoretical contribution is a bit more interesting, and the key line is in the abstract:
> We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter‐gatherers' diets.
The context here being that a perennial problem for the carnivorists has been that almost every foraging group we've documented ethnographically is highly omnivorous (see their rebuttel in 3.1). They're trying to get away from this problem by saying "all of that evidence is irrelevant because lower and middle paleolithic foragers were different". This is an understandable position in general, but specifically tying it to carnivorous dietary reconstructions requires running a gauntlet of theoretical objections, which is why the paper is essentially a long list of retorts to objections.
Personally, I don't find the argument convincing. There's a lot of weasel words to escape having to justify positions they really ought to littered throughout. It suggests the argument they're advocating isn't fully developed yet
e.g.:
> If genetic adaptations to USOs consumption were rather recent, it *suggests* that USOs did not previously comprise a large dietary component.
It's not a particularly well-argued paper, but this article is just a terrible summary of what it says.
That's exactly what the article says, so not sure why you're saying it completely misstates the purpose and findings.
Since the whole point of science communications is communicating nuanced ideas without perpetuating misunderstandings, the fact that discussions here are reflecting the former rather than the latter is what I mean.
However, if there's anyone here who has expertise in this area, I would certainly be very interested to hear what they think. Let me ask more plainly: Should we all ditch salad and go back to eating "bone marrow and brains" tomorrow?
Marrow is excellent eating, and the only reason I wouldn't encourage people to eat more of it is because I want to be able to afford it.
Osso buco on rice brings back so many childhood memories! Absolutely delicious and increadibly nutritious!
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.
If milk drinkers were the only group who could obtain the necessary amount of calories for bearing offspring and sustained existence, then the adaptation would happy much more quickly.
Perhaps even as quick as several generations.
Is it? Is it enough for all kinds of dietary adaptations? If me and my progeny eat grass for 95,000 years, will we adapt to be able to digest it?
On lactose: many of us carry the mutation that helps us digest lactose into adulthood (without any seeming issues). But does that make it ideal to consume? Is consumption of lactose into adulthood causing any issues that I can't readily detect?
That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.
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 return to it, but the quality and price of meat here in Israel makes it so hard.
My experience doesn't fit well with the now popular position that pasta is the devil. And it's also different from yours. My conclusion is that people's bodies are different. What works for one person may not work for another, and probably that's a big part of the reason why it seems to be so hard for experts to agree on what we should eat.
Whereas my athletic performance on a vegan diet has never been better as well.
What to make of this? The body can adapt quite nicely to many foodstuffs as long as you do proper research on what foods to eat so you get all the nutrients you need. Not eating fruit and vegetables just seems folly to me.
In a perfect world yes, but we live in a world where (at least in the West) pretty much everyone is addicted to sugar. A healthy body could switch between burning fat and burning glucose but I have yet to meet anyone who can do this without having been eating keto for a while. It's harder but possible as a vegan and I would recommend it to anyone. Just once and the body is better at switching back and forth.
https://www.mostly-fat.com/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fa...
Important tips here: pick meat cuts that are tasty (which necessarily will have a lot of fat, like the rib eye). Do not pick lean cuts ( gives some people digestion issues) , do not season except with salt. Seasonings interferes with one's taste buds to assess the quality of meat.
https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-An...
The diet is pretty easy depending on how you want to approach. - it's only animal based food (meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese). I'd be careful with people who try to sell you something, search around on different ways to start.
I went cold turkey straight to only meat. It's hard, and it takes a few weeks for your stomach to get used to it. But I did it because previously I never managed to keep a straight diet because there were so many choices, so I kept slipping into the occasional sauces, stews, and FODMAPS. It was much simpler to go "okay i can only eat meat"
That said, it would be great to move away from mass farming, even if it means changing diet.
And sentences such as "[...] baboons [...] devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding [...] while adult Ache and Hadza men spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation, and feeding"? I probably wouldn't go there…
It's kind of convenient that one of the author appears to be selling an app that has just the right diet for the modern troglodyte: https://nutrita.app/author/raphael-sirtoli/
So, I could see prehistoric nomads being mostly carnivores for a whole season. Which would also leave enough evidence on their remains.
But I agree that the authors seem to have a bias/motive (entrepreneurial and academic) to overstress the importance of eating meat, perhaps cherry-picking on the available evidence.
I think this is realistic, in spite of the opposition we can expect from both Big Ag and Big Fake Yoga.
1. We allowed KIDS to use social media all day?? 2. We allowed the climate & oceans to get this bad??
Hard to predict the list of things our descendants will not approve of but looking backwards there's a huge list for our ancestors
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 mother or father's side, he developed heart disease in his early 50s. This was where I first became aware of the scientific fraud that is the lipid hypothesis, and how wrong it is. The Framinham Heart Study has been a source of data that actively refutes the lipid hypothesis for decades, but the nutritional science community has similar issues to many other organizations with tenured experts whose entire reputation is tied to their theories being right.
My experience dealing with militant vegans is that there is no amount or type of evidence that would convince them that a diet that includes ANY amount of animal products is healthy. It's a religion to them, and that's that.
I was a teen when he converted to veganism, and my encounters with these various activists made me absolutely despise them and their ilk. Truly contemptible people in general, who fully believe the ends justify any means.
I don't know enough about your father's case but this might be more co-relation than causation, based on your facts. If going vegan was causing heart issues in people, we'd really know by now.
Scroll back 5 years. My wife and I decided to become vegan (for various reasons - carbon footprint, animal welfare, all that jazz). Having been healthy vegetarians for about 20 years, it should have been easy, but regardless, we were meticulous. In fact, not being the "religious" type, and having found out that bi-valves (oysters, clams, scallops etc) don't have the where-with-all to feel pain, I added them to my diet. We just cut out all eggs and dairy.
Now, I can't swear that going vegan caused my health problems, but about a year after going vegan, my overall "vitality" had dropped (I felt tired, but kept up frequent exercise). But the biggest issue was that I couldn't shake off a cold. It would start with the usual sniffle, and within a few days I have a temperature and my lungs would be infected. I went through about a year of constant on-and-off infections. At the worst point, I had two straight months of infection, seemed to shake off for a few weeks, and got it back again for another two months. I was miserable. I was worried it was something really bad like lung cancer. The doctor prescribed me two types of inhaler, lots of antibiotics and told me I had adult onset asthma.
The inhalers helped me manage things, but I really just felt like I was keeping another infection at bay all the time. I went back on eggs and a small amount of dairy. A few months later I was back running. I haven't had a single problem since. 5 years without inhalers.
I have no idea what really caused my issues. My wife developed an intolerance to soy during our veganism. If she eats tofu for a few days, her skin gets itchy and she eventually get a flare up of rosacea (which btw, she had for months until she figured out the soy connection, but it took weeks after cutting out soy and taking meds before it completely cleared up).
The biggest issue I have with a pure vegan diet isn't just cutting out foods, it's the addition of huge amounts of stuff that you normally wouldn't eat in such high amounts (nut milk, nut butter, nut cheese, nut burgers... soy in everything)
I have encountered these militant vegans too. I don't get into arguments, I just say "it's not for me".
Are people just uncomfortable not knowing and milquetoast answers like "eat a variety" are boring? Are there militant omnivores?
You're missing the point here. They're not looking for reasons to think meat is healthy. You're vegan because you're against animal cruelty and harm that is done in the process to animals and our planet.
The diet aspect of it, yeah you can have bad habits in any diet, your health can decline just eating bad period. There are countless of cases of people's health decline that are not news anymore because it's very common. Hearth disease because of bad cholesterol?, well yeah it's not news we've been seeing that for ages so no gossip there. But what about a vegan person that died. Let's jump into conclusions and use this a reason to keep eating the things we like, because god forbid they take away our pleasures no matter who we hurt. This applies to both perspectives.
The bigger problems, to them, of meat agriculture should be:
- climate change.
- pandemics: 1918, 2019, and more.
- antibiotic resistance.
- pollution: air, water, and soil.
- resource utilization.
- deforestation.
I was voluntarily a vegan in my early 20s from 2001 to 2005. I too felt far better when I first transitioned to veganism, for several months. Over time, I gradually had a hard time keeping my weight at a normal level, and noticed that I healed slower from physical activity, but supplementation helped with that. The thing that ended up doing me in was an experiment to try to gain muscle mass (I had lost it while being vegan and working construction) where I started eating fish and eggs ended up having the unforeseen side-effect of curing my depression.
I'm not prescribing any diet to anybody, but it wasn't a great fit for me.
My father's development of heart disease was no mystery. He's a dumb redneck who went vegan because of a woman and the ensuing social circle that gave him what he always wanted, a sense of community. He's a shitty cook, except for meat, and so he ended up replacing meat with carbs and vegetable oils. Refined carbs trigger the liver to crank out triglycerides into the blood stream, who consequentially damage arterial linings and cause inflammation. His diet went from being a relatively healthy one that included animal products, but was a lot of game meat and fresh caught fish, to a diet that happened to be vegan but was shitty.
The religious zealots he was around told him that animal products were THE cause of heart disease and cancer and everything else. Total BS of course.
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...
This does not correspond at all with my experience. I know many "militant" vegans, but none of them says that a vegan diet is healthier in itself. They simply don't want to kill animals. Even the most militant of the bunch has this clear. I was explaining to him that my kids enjoy vegan dishes, and he warned me against the dangers of a solely plant-based diet for children. Apparently they'd need some dietary supplements for a correct growth (I didn't really care, because my kids eat a lot of meat and fish, just not every day).
Last year I went on a pure vegan diet for about 6 months (after watching the Netflix documentary "Game Changers").
Everything was going well (or so I thought) right up until I woke up one day with abdominal pain.
Over the course of an hour, it went from feeling like it could be gas or constipation to being the worst pain I'd ever felt. I was literally writhing on the ground while dry retching from the pain. I've never experienced anything else like it before.
Turns out, I had kidney stones.
One of the primary causes of kidney stones is too much oxalates in your diet. Guess what oxalates are found in? Practically every vegetable I had been eating for months.
It's one thing to claim (accurately) that a good, careful vegan diet is healthy for a person and very healthy for the planet. It's a whole different ballgame to claim that a healthy vegan diet is nutritionally superior to any and all diets that include any form of animal products, which is essentially what Game Changers claims.
There was a rather entertaining and informative debate about Game Changers between a bad-ass vegan MMA fighter and another nutritional expert on Joe Rogan's podcast, and one thing they both end up acknowledging is that Game Changers is a propaganda film disguised as a documentary.
People can give themselves gout from eating foods high in purines. Is that the fault of a carnivorous diet?
It's the same as idiots who go on extreme, no-food fasting diets and give themselves gallstones because they don't have any lipid intake to empty their gallbladders periodically.
People have to know what they're doing and not blame a lifestyle change when it's their fault for not doing it right.
Before me a customer was talking to the seller about stuff. The seller offers him to try an almond coated with chocolate and cinnamon, which according to him is the best thing in the store. The customer asks if the chocolate has milk in it. Because, God forbid, he can't have anything animal related, cuz he's vegan. He wouldn't even touch it, not a single one.
These people are fanatics and unless you're a good samaritan-psychologist, don't even bother. Give them weapons and we'll be living a Game of Thrones Faith Militant episode.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
Those non-human animals we hunted were living freely and we lived in more harmony with the natural world.
Now we breed, torture and kill millions and millions of non-human animals and in the process destroy our biosphere [0]
We can live perfectly healthy on a plant-based diet - see the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine: https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition
We have the brains & technology to create food that is healthy and nutritious without having to continue to support the destructive and cruel factory farm industry.
So the question should be how come we accept this immense cruelty and destruction caused by the factory farm industry?
Damian Mander - founder of International Anti-Poaching Foundation put it best: https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100
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[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme...
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
— Andy Rooney
if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
Don't pay too much attention to these "discoveries" being 100% true
But most importantly, you're overlooking the authors' bias. 1st/last authors seem to be making an academic career on proving that humans are carnivores. 2nd author is a self-confessed fan of low-carb diets, and listed as the founder of a company offering a nutrition tracker based on the same principles.
Not exactly an unbiased trio. And without the hinges of peer-review that would stop them from making wide claims, I would skip the news article altogether.
And not being unbiased is probably why you won't see their research on international media, that would arguably be a bit more picky, having a wider selection of science stories to choose from.
