Except that eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...
It would be like publishing a paper that says walking upright is harmful and then people start crab walking. Like yes you can explain many back problems with walking upright, but does that actually justify a different form of walking?
> eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...
That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
This topic is "red" meat. That does not include fish, insects, and other non-red meats. The human diet was historically highly dependent upon whatever was locally available until the last 100 years (or less).
Also, the gut biomes of humans were historically very different than ours are today.
Now we have easy availability of lower quality meat (typical modern factory farmed meat which we consume larger quantities of), very different gut biomes, more sedentary lifestyles, and any number of other "new" things that make us abnormal humans in human history spectrum; so it's fair to believe that we could have some negative health effects from eating red meat.
> That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
You don’t need written records to determine the broad strokes of early human diets. That’s an archeological problem for biological anthropologist who in fact have determined that meat entered the human diet around the time our brains grew substantially in size. There’s also cave paintings showing hunting of large animals by early humans.
The very fact that humans universally (barring medical exception) even have the capacity to digest meat is already indicative of this.
> whatever was locally available until the last 100 years
Agriculture was not invented 100 years ago. This is off by at least 2 orders of magnitude. Cows and goats were also domesticated over a very long period of time.
Perhaps by “locally available” you meant “locally available by means of farming and herding because humans lived near those”?
I never said that meat was not available for all of human history or that prehistoric humans did not consume meat.
I'm talking about the (low quality) quantities available to almost anyone almost anywhere in the world for a relatively low price. And from looking at developing economies, it seems increased consumption of meat is an intentional sign of increasing wealth.
As far as large scale domesticated animal production, that is a "relatively" new thing. Before modern transportation, there were many parts of the world where such meat was minimal or simply not available.
Also the quantity and dietary proportion of meat consumed has changed significantly. People may have eaten meat long ago, but it wasn't the staple nor a daily part of the meal for most people.
You don’t mention any time period there, but I assume you mean since the invention of agriculture. At least in temperate zones, people could not have survived on plant sources most of the year until agriculture.
Non-plant protein was probably consumed by almost every pre-historic human. Indeed the quantities were probably lower, but for those societies that consumed insects it could be quite high.
Crickets, grasshoppers, and many other insects have incredibly high protein/mass ratios and are readily available.
I have zero interest in consuming those forms, but I also 99% avoid any animal proteins. If a prime rib steak falls on my plate, however, I will not send it away!
But the agricultural revolution itself is probably one of man's greatest mistakes. It concentrated people, caused greatly increased population growth, ruined lands, created things to fight over, etc.
Pre-agriculture was likely a better natural global balance.
> That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
On the contrary, there is so much evidence of hominids, including humans, hunting and eating large game, that we name eras in prehistory after the tools constructed to aid this pursuit.
My comment wasn't long. I explain the "red" meat point just below that line which you have highlighted.
Indeed humans have probably always consumed some form of animal protein. But there's a lot more going on than just buying cheap ground beef from the supermarket as we can do now for very little cost.
