This topic always becomes an ideological football in public discussions. Nevertheless...
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.
Are you saying that your initial reaction to the headline ("For 2 million years, humans ate meat and little else") and first line ("...hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals") was to note the obvious corollary that "There is little argument that Paleolithic diets were higher in plants than recent Polar diets..."?
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.
Nope. Because the article doesn't talk about polar diets and polar diets are not on my mind otherwise.
Thinking about it for 3 seconds, a "mostly" meat diet doesn't seem at all at odds with being higher in plants than a polar diet, which I gather is pretty much exclusively meat-based.
Well, regardless of the topic at hand (the point about brain-size shrinking when eating plants certainly sounds interesting), already the infographics are full of obvious typos ("Domesticsted", "Larg prey") which suggests shoddy editing at least. While that made me chuckle a bit in the context of "brain size" it also leads me to not giving to much credence to the quality of the rest of the text (which I cannot really judge on its merits because it's outside my area of expertise). I do tend to refer to the Gell-Mann effect [1] in instances such as this though...
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?
I'd be very surprised if there was one answer to "what should humans eat?". It probably depends on so many factors unknown to scientists, that the best way is to just try different diets until you feel good.
I didn't see brain size linked directly to diet here, only saw it on the infographic. In another study recently, I saw brain size linked to the challenge of hunting large animals (like cave bears and mammoths)
That’s interesting because I’ve also read that animal brain size is positively correlated with group communication and social network size. In order for early humans to successfully hunt large animals, especially large predators, I would imagine it would take quite a lot of group communication and coordination.
I'll be skipping the brains, personally. Prion disease is among the more terrifying of the many horrors which biology has made a part of the human condition.
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.
I think the answer is pretty simple: we should eat varied and follow the seasons. That many get pretty sick by going into ketosis shows how unhealthy we are. A healthy human can switch between a diet with lots of carbohydrates and one with few without problems. I'd posit that more than 99% of humans cannot switch between fat burning and glucose burning without getting sick because of withdrawal symptoms.
The actual paper
was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise.
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.
I would say 95,000 years is plenty of time to begin to develop adaptations in diet. If as a species our survival was still threatened by starvation for another 100k years we might see more adaptation towards meatless, but that seems unlikely.
It depends how much of an advantage a certain diet brought from a procreative standpoint.
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.
>95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet
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?
Yes if you eat grass and somehow survive to procreate you will have adapted to be able to digest it and sustain your species. Of course if you lack the genes you’ll die off and if the whole species lacks any genes and all that’s left to eat is grass, we all die. I believe from studying skeletons we know that agriculture first led to a decline in physical fitness and overall health - evidence that we weren’t well adapted at that time.
That's not how evolution works. The question to ask is, if most food sources except for grass disappeared, would humanity as a whole (through mass starvation and the resulting natural selection) adapt to be able to survive on grass within the next 95000 years? And the answer isn't necessarily yes; humans might also just go extinct.
>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.
That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.
In 2019, age 30, I ate only red meat (and a little fish) for about 8 months. It was by far the peak of my physical condition. Better sleep, stronger workouts, no mid-day grogginess. Blood test results were as best as one could hope for, apart for the debatable "high cholesterol".
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.
I had a similar experience, but with lots of noodles. I spent some months living in Singapore and I ate a lot of noodle and rice (but especially noodle) dishes almost every day, at lunch and dinner, because there are plenty of good ones there and I just can't get enough of them. I lost weight, slept better than normal (in spite of the commonly held claim that pasta at night is terrible for sleep), had less gas, felt better in general; in spite of not doing more physical activity than normal. Periods of more meat didn't work so well for me, though.
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.
And I know of two people (bitcoin evangelists, lol) who had explosive diarrhea or an impacted bowel on a meat only diet, and had to be hospitalized.
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.
>The body can adapt quite nicely to many foodstuffs
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.
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.
I first heard about it on Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson episode and then Shawn Baker - I'd suggest to hear the latter as he is a an orthopedic surgeon, weight lifter, and is 52 years old. Kinda gives it more credit.
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"
Why do we have to wait for anecdotal reports? There are numerous people who have followed this diet for decades in the US, but more importantly, there are entire tribes of humans who have eaten carnivorous diets for thousands of years. How much plant-based foods do you think the average Inuit consumes?
1. Bigger groups === more and better data. I didn't know anyone growing up who was interested in ketogenic or carnivorous diets, now it's much more common.
2. Huge difference between the diet of a westerner following carnivore and traditional tribal carnivorous diets
4. And most importantly, there's a lot of research showing that high levels of IGF-1 associated with diets high in red meat are not good for longevity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY
The meat you can buy in any big supermarket in the US is awful quality that much of the world bans from importing. It's no surprise that meat is more expensive elsewhere.
Not just humans..., I think subsisting and surviving by taking from the environment is what life has done since the beginning. Our success at doing so is now the problem, because of scale, but I think natural selection requires the competition, otherwise I think animals would just be blob-like. Even then we can imagine eventually all blobs multiply and cover the planet, and there would be no choice but to compete at that point, forcing some blobs to evolve into predators, and the others to evolve evasion tactics, etc.
That said, it would be great to move away from mass farming, even if it means changing diet.
There seem to be some rather dubious assumptions there, notably that hunting is a more efficient way of acquiring nutrition than gathering. I'm not a specialist in the field, but my understanding was the opposite.
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/
For prehistoric nomads hunting would definitely be a more reliable source of food. Think of winters, when there's little to gather but you can still hunt a mammoth or some other large prey. This way, you take advantage of the muscle/fat the animal built while eating stuff you can't eat.
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.
Hunting small game is reasonably reliable. Hunting primarily big game, as the study is suggests, is the textbook example of unreliable high risk, high reward strategies we teach undergrads about.
What modern human foragers often do is exploit a huge variety of strategies all at once. They're also highly opportunistic and social mechanisms are used to distribute the successes across a large number of people. For instance, if a bunch of Hadza hunters come across a beehive full of honey, they'll stop hunting and eat it. Such finds end up being a significant source of calories for the Hadza, but the study's argument is that this sort of omnivorousness is a recent innovation.
Most of the human population resides in places that don't have harsh winters or winter at all. I have a hard time believing the carnivore diet was required to sustain life anywhere but the northern hemisphere even during the ice ages, eurocentrist bias here?
Those mammoths suggest the presence of rather substantial amounts of greens, unless they belonged to a rare variety of ketogenic mammoths (an ecosystem consisting of mammoths all the way down?).
Legumes to me are healthy, but i can't see them as 100% peak human food, you have to soak them for hours and many people get bloated, then there are also certain amounts of anti-nutrients.
I’m expecting truly engineered food to be a breakthrough over the next 100 years. Imagine people being able to eat something akin to a chocolate bar that has all the nutrients one would expect from a full meal. Protein shakes are close to this, but they are still just a mix of vegetables mostly (and the ones I drink have high sodium.) I know everyone is expecting lab grown meat, and I’m sure there will be some of that, but I think we aren’t thinking about the possibilities and it could be people in 300 years eat textures and flavors far better than anything we can imagine, while being as healthy as physically possible.
Those are religious issues, and there is no objective standard to what we will be horrified by. The only safe bet is that humans will be different in different cultures, and thus different people will find different things bad.
People weren't horrified about cruelty against slaves not so long ago, and look at where we are now. I bet most people of that era would not believe we'd ever reach the point we got now. I bet many would even be willing to die on wars for over their now-completely-unacceptable ethic standards.
That is a pretty bad example as what we have today is not much better, it's just hidden in poor countries. "Being horrified" is something most say they are and then they go buy clothes made by people living a life as bad as slaves used to.
The argument about tools indicating a change in diet: perhaps the baskets and pounders used for vegetable diets didn't survive as long as the flint spearheads. They could seem to 'disappear' in the historical record, simply because they leave no recognizable long-term evidence.
My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA)
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.
There are some rare individuals whose diet needs ingredients found only in animal products. I have come across exactly 2 in my lifetime. That said, these people would still be vegan if they ate animal products. Veganism, by definition, seeks to exclude animal products "as far as is possible and practicable".
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.
I've been vegetarian for 25 years. I'm male, 45 years old, my resting heart rate is around 50, and I can run 10km in under 50 minutes (and I do this about 3 times per week).
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".
This hasn't been my experience being vegan. I actually feel great, vitality and everything. My whole family is and they're also fine like everyone else. We just make sure we eat good balanced meals.
there are a lot of micronutrients that humans depend on that can be easy to miss out on when you switch to a vegan diet. but this is the case with any "extreme" diet.
Not dishonest, and not FUD. I'm simply stating the obvious -- we have cultural norms around a balanced omnivore diet that happen to include a lot of these micro and macronutrients. Most people don't even think about it and will only be deficient in a subset of micros. When people swap to veganism or vegetarianism they don't have the same cultural norms to fall back on and struggle to fulfill micro and macronutrients, which results in stories like the one upthread. It doesn't do your cause any favors when you ignore people's suffering from lack of nutrition while trying to swap onto it.
As far as the extreme label goes, any highly restrictive diet is extreme. Veganism, carnivore, keto, etc.
You still don't get it. Whatever you're going on about is only "obvious" to you. "Cultural norms" are your judgements and your biases. There is no mandate to "suffer" from a "lack of nutrition," millions and millions of people are vegetarian and just fine. I'm one of them. My CBC and vitamin panel came back as 100% normal.
Meat agriculture is killing us slowly like cigarettes and cancer, and kills us quickly.
1918 most likely zoonotic route:
Birds -> pigs (at a "piggery") -> humans.
2019 SARS-CoV-2 most likely zoonotic route:
Bats -("wet market")> humans.
You seem to emphasize edge-case FUD and "other" people who don't agree with your value judgements rather than opening your eyes to meat agriculture as a slow-moving existential threat to our survival like and causing climate change.
It's very unfortunate that you're so narrow-minded.
> 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.
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.
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with vegans, it seems like most people do lol. I was vegan for about a year, and I found it through self experimentation. I felt much lighter and energetic when I didn't eat meat. I did feel more burnt out mentally though. Through some research I started taking fish oil and feel much better now. Overall I'd say I feel great and would recommend my diet, especially considering my belief that how we treat animals is one of the biggest ethical dilemmas we are currently facing. May I ask what he ate? Considering that in the 90's there weren't many meat/dairy alternatives for vegans I am not sure how he developed a heart attack.
He did this when I was 15. I was forced to be vegan as well, since he put the groceries in the house.
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.
It's easy to have a crappy diet regardless of diet religion. My uncle is a knuckle-dragging idiot who only eats fried meat like sausages, has diverticulosis, obese, and is one step away from colon cancer.
> 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.
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).
Just to throw my own vegan diet anecdote onto the growing pile:
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.
That documentary is rife with inaccuracies as well. It's a consequence of having a bunch of wealthy Hollywood folks convert to veganism, and then jump on board with pushing a diet as the be-all/end-all.
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.
Oxalates are an anti-nutrient. You don't eat a bunch of oxalate-containing foods or Vitamin C like spinach, soy, almonds, or beets, that was your mistake, not the type of diet.
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.
Yep... It was definitely my fault for doing the vegan diet "wrong", but it was also really easy to do it wrong on accident, which people need to be aware of.
I thought I was doing the right things. I was taking a multivitamin and supplementing my B12 according to common vegan recommendations. Nobody mentioned the possibility of kidney stones though!
Hey, that's okay. Maybe try it again with different aspects. I had a neighbor in the college dorms who went vegan without any research, and gave himself depression and other psychological/neurological problems (probably a lack of B12). I think it's wise to get blood tests after major dietary changes to be sure everything is good.
Personally, I'm a lazy vegetarian, not a vegan per se. I really want to give up dairy, but cheeses are soo darn tasty. I have a single 6 mm kidney stone from chronic high cortisol levels, not diet (according to doctors).
Other things I do:
- Gender-specific multivitamin
- Vegan B complex
- Vegan 10k IU avg per day D3 + K MTK-7 (once a week 50k IU + using up 5k I still have)
- Magnesium citrate (prevention of kidney stones and magnesium)
- No HFCS, limit sugary products, and not adding salt (semi-keto). I get plenty of I, Na, and Cl from other foods
- Unsalted pistachios
- Unsalted cashews (very few because oxalates and gas)
- Roasted, unsalted pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
- Omega-3 foods
- Cook using avocado oil or butter
- Fresh olive oil when added without cooking
- Water, lots of water (reverse osmosis water store subscription since I live in an apartment)
- Intermittent fasting (40 lbs. / 18 kg to lose)
- Veg like broccoli and plain potato
- Limit salt, spinach, sweet potato, chocolate, tea, some nuts esp. almonds (which are also the second leading cause of breaking teeth after ice)
- Excess vitamin C creates oxalates endogenously. Megadosing it is the surest way to kidney stones
There ought to be a book: Safer Diets and Fasting: What you need to know
I still eat veggies. They are just a side dish now instead of being the main course.
Nowadays I try to eat a more traditionally "balanced" diet. I eat a decent amount of meat and dairy and eggs in addition to grains, legumes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. I then use basic portion control to control my caloric intake and my weight.
It's been almost a year now since I abandoned pure veganism and switched back to a "normal" diet and I haven't had any more occurrences of kidney stones (knock on wood).
Went in a peanuts store to get... well... peanuts. They have all sorts of *nuts.
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.
What you are describing is not a fanatic. You are describing someone adhering to the basic tenants of their philosophy. A vegan fanatic would refuse to use cash in Australia because it contains tallow, an animal product used as a slipping agent in banknotes.
Guy saw the Satan in the form of a coated almond. It's ridiculous. Twist it, turn it anyway you wish, you're only fooling yourself. It's extremism.
Then there are also the vegan protesters that throw themselves on the roads in front of food trucks. Adhering to their philosophy much? Faith Militants.
People throwing themselves in front of food trucks are fanatics. People casually asking if a food that commonly contains an ingredient their moral code prevents them from eating and then choosing not to eat it are not fanatics.
Nothing about their interaction has any impact on your life, other than maybe making you wait an extra 20 seconds in this particular case.
I agree with your irritation (I too would like more authoritative information about this, as it is outside my expertise). However, with regard to the links you posted, I think these are actually the same source and and the HuffPost "article" is just reposted content, not a second opinion on that other viewpoint.
Some strange comments in this thread- but this headline doesn’t make sense. Humans (homosapiens) first appeared about 300k years ago, so no we haven’t been eating only meat for 2 million years.
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?
Is it common to refer to all hominids (here: homo habilis and homo erectus) as humans? For some reason I thought the term human was limited to homo sapiens (195k years old)
I'm a vegan and I could give a crap how we ate 100k years ago. It has no bearing on building a contemporary diet conducive to health optimal health and pollution related outcomes.
Given trophic levels, meat takes far more energy, land, and clean water to produce. Population studies repeatedly show that large amount of meat consumption leads to individual and population health issues. The same is true of sugar and alcohol, I readily admit, and assume kinds of meat don't require as much energy.
We are fishing our oceans to extinction, destroying essential natural area to grow soy and corn which we then waste 90% of as cow feed.
There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back, unless the laws of physics are rewritten such that eating meat reduces the amount of atmospheric carbon.
> There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back
I don't really eat meat myself but I don't believe you, sorry. What about "if you ate meat you could increase your brain capacity by 500 cc and live a longer, healthier life". Would that make you go back? I bet it would. Even if it wouldn't, it would probably make the majority of people go back for sure.
You cannot seriously make an argument that we as humans should potentially accept any diminished quality of life in regards to our mental capacity and health to "reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon".
Again, as I said, I don't really eat meat and I'm all for saving the environment but arguments like that are the reason why it's so hard to convince "ordinary people" of the importance of sustainability and long-term thinking. The only alternative is only presented with these radical, self-destructive requirements.
Why not pour the all the efforts of vegan evangelism into sustainable lab-grown meat? If it works, all problems solved, everybody can eat as much meat as they want (or not), the environment is saved and a lot of (potentially increased) brain capacity freed for other human improvement.
If, and I mean if, such a health outcome differential between being a vegan and not, then it would be widely known. As far as I am able to garner from known population studies my children will be a few inches shorter due to a vegan diet, no less intelligent, and will have a very compassionate ethical starting point, which is something I personally value.
However, if veganism required is to scale back massively scientific research due to drops in human intelligence, I would be on the fence... Further, I do recognize that giving up meat to be an actual sacrifice of summer form... There seems to be a large biological desire to eat meat, which probably is actually largely derived from gut bacteria, if I were to guess. Still, perhaps giving up meat is an actual sacrifice. With my indifference to meat after 16 years or so, I am heavily biased towards veganism as a tool for meeting the climate needs of our current planet biosphere.
Nah, man, I really don't like meat and I can't think of a defendable defense for it's continued consumption given what we know today.
Devil's advocate: Would you not be annoyed that your individual health is reduced so that the "commons" is healthier?
I think part of the problem is people will not sacrifice their own health. It's mainly a "that sounds great, you go first" mindset. Thankfully with population growth slowing I think we're not nearly as bad off as you might think.
There are seaweed eating sheep in Scotland who do not produce methane (due to their diet) and live on beaches (so no land use). My point is that your statement "meat takes far more energy, land, and clean water" while more or less true for most meat today is not settled fact.
So I take it you’d also prefer your beak to be cut, because your captors are trying to stop your kind from pecking each other to death, because you are being held captive in extremely crammed living spaces to save money and to create more profit out of your life.
Seriously, watch any factory farm video and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to wish that kind of life for yourself.
But the good thing now is we neither have to club animals to death like cavemen or factory farm animals as our society does now.
While true, there are a lot of invasive (read: habitat destroying) animal species in North America (for example) and we got rid of most of the wolves, so hunting wild game should be a viable alternative to veganism for exactly those reasons.
It‘s not about eating animals being un/natural. That’s not the (main) argument. It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability.
Besides: Even if you claim us humans were carnivores for thousands of years, what does that prove? First off, humans are omnivores. And secondly, with this kind of argumentation we could say that for hundreds of years we had kingdoms (or slavery), so why have democracies (or universal human rights)? Humans do make progress, and the past does not prove or justify anything.
> It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability.
I think that should play absolutely no role in determining whether or not eating meat is better for you than a plant-based diet. It either is or isn't but animal cruelty and sustainability has nothing to do with that.
IF we determine that more meat is better, we can totally focus and increase our efforts towards growing sustainable meat. This can be from sustainable farming or (more likely to be sustainable in the long-term) lab-grown alternatives.
However, you cannot make this argument backwards, i.e. that we shouldn't eat meat because it was bad for the environment or the animals even if it was good for us. I get that some people think like that but it is not a "sustainable" argument for the majority of people to give up their potential health and brain capacity to save the environment or some chickens (if you want to take this to a hypothetical extreme).
I agree, whether or not meat is good or bad for you is a question that shouldn't consider environment impact. Questions like: Whether one should eat meat, whether the government should enact policies which discourage meat production, and whether we should invest in lab grown meat are questions that should consider cruelty and sustainability.
How is it not reasonable to give up some things for the environment? Your health isn’t going to be doing so well if you don’t have a livable environment
Can I encourage you to think this through to the end because I see this argument so often. Never in human history has self-imposed restraint with regard to scientific exploration, possibilities and development given us any real advantage. The loser will be the one who practices that restraint of scientific exploration (not develop nuclear power, not go to space, not develop certain vaccines from stem cells). He will die out. The winner will be the one who ignores it, kills the other with atom bombs, has nuclear power, vaccines, super-soldiers and space habitats. And if the winner then comes to the conclusion that he might dedicate some of his energy and over-engineered super-brains to saving Earth and the environment, again, he will have a much bigger chance of success at this, too. You may well find this reprehensible but it is certainly axiomatic for humanity as a whole.
As a whole, people will never accept something in the long-term that requires measurable and hard sacrifices from them. For a current example just look at how hard it is to convince people to stay in lockdown (and those benefits are arguably much more obvious and immediate than "effects on the environment").
The answer to your second statement is more obvious still:
If my health (and brain capacity, for arguments sake) is increased, I will have the ability to solve the other problems in the way that we humans traditionally solve problems outside of dogmatic and religious spaces: By scientific advancement.
Why should potentially limit my brain capacity and health to have a shorter lifespan in a potentially slightly more liveable environment? That makes no sense, sorry. Only if we all (including scientists, investors and innovators) live longer and healthier lives, then there will be both incentive and opportunity to solve problems of the environment in a way that does not require personal sacrifice (think carbon capture, lab-grown meat, becoming an interplanetary species and growing meat on asteroids if you want to take it that far) ;-)
I would not say devastating but it does certainly make you think. My wife is a vegetarian and I simply don't eat meat myself most of the time (I eat it very occasionally but don't like most meat for simple reasons of taste; I am completely apolitical and non-sectarian about it).
I thought this gave us certain health benefits of course (I try to eat healthy) but I would obviously have to reconsider this if it was indeed true that eating more meat would be preferable with regard to health and mental performance.
The article is not enough to convince me (I already commented about its questionable editorial quality) but I might look at the study itself and keep the subject on my radar anyway.
I think it was an old hippie thing, arguments from being closer to nature (rather than merely less harmful) were powerful back then. Today? The comparisons between wild and domestic crops are broadly circulated in the press and memes, premium mock meats are pushed by companies purporting to be high tech operations, there's no way you'd be spearing wild tofu swimming up the river because it doesn't exist.
Haven't seen any of that either. Not saying no one says that but I have trouble believing that it is a persistent enough meme to be attributed so broadly to any social movements.
There is a media bias here, but it's not what you're implying. It is Israeli media picking up a story promoted by Israeli scientists. This is common practice for media in EMEA countries.
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.
While I don't disagree with your point I don't think you can state that someone being a fan of a low carb diet is not unbiased unless you also say that every single other piece of research on this topic is also biased if it's by someone not "being a fan of low carb diets" (IE. eating like almost everyone does).
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.