What food is “natural” for humans?
Discussion
grumbledoak said:
El stovey said:
Or that humans originated in areas where plant based diets were available all year and only started eating meat when the migrated to colder climates much later.
That was long, long before we were humans. Hominids seem to have been omnivores, maybe six million years ago. But it was eating meat, probably fish, that sent us down the path to becoming humans. The mountain gorillas went vegan, got thick, and had to eat their own s
t, remember?Basically, when it comes to discussing nutrition, whatever Mr. X is currently eating is just fine, and everything else is irrelevant, overkill, or a fad 
It's almost impossible to have the conversation without people from both sides taking everything personally, so I'm bowing out before the handbags start swinging. Standard fare. I have said my piece, everyone else is encouraged to do as they please
It's almost impossible to have the conversation without people from both sides taking everything personally, so I'm bowing out before the handbags start swinging. Standard fare. I have said my piece, everyone else is encouraged to do as they please
grumbledoak said:
andy_s said:
Well, perhaps more specifically the cooking of meat (early processed food...?) led to us being able to afford the high metabolic cost of our current brain.
Early processed food? Meat? Ok Boomer.
El stovey said:
I agree I love bbq but a bbq isn’t 100% natural
If a look at a cow or pig I empathise with it a bit, I don’t really think about eating it. An apple or orange looks tasty though in its natural form.
Perhaps it’s just me though.
What you think of as an apple or orange isn't it's natural form though, they've been selectively bred over generations.If a look at a cow or pig I empathise with it a bit, I don’t really think about eating it. An apple or orange looks tasty though in its natural form.
Perhaps it’s just me though.
Take a look at a pre-domestication banana or watermelon for extreme examples.
eta: https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-bef...
If you are thinking along the lines that the diet we evolved eating is optimal for us to eat now, and that "natural" is inherently "better", there are a few things to keep in mind;
What does "optimal" mean for you now as an individual? What has been optimal for your genes in evolutionary history? Are those things aligned?
We ate what we could get our hands on.
The "natural" state of humanity is not very nice.
The distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is somewhat arbitrary anyway - humans have been doing "unnatural" things since we became humans, it's one of the ways we define humanity. Cooking stuff with fire is something our species does. So is making tools, hunting, hoarding, farming. We've been doing these things for a long time and our cultural and biological evolutions have been concurrent and co-dependant. Our inability to take down large game with our claws and teeth does not imply that it's "unnatural" to eat them in any sort of meaningful way.
Many of the disorders from which we suffer and which we think we can minimise by optimisation of our diet are things which for most of our evolutionary history we would have been unlikely to have had the chance to develop - because we wouldn't have lived long enough, and we wouldn't have had access to the quantities of food we have now anyway.
What does "optimal" mean for you now as an individual? What has been optimal for your genes in evolutionary history? Are those things aligned?
We ate what we could get our hands on.
The "natural" state of humanity is not very nice.
The distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is somewhat arbitrary anyway - humans have been doing "unnatural" things since we became humans, it's one of the ways we define humanity. Cooking stuff with fire is something our species does. So is making tools, hunting, hoarding, farming. We've been doing these things for a long time and our cultural and biological evolutions have been concurrent and co-dependant. Our inability to take down large game with our claws and teeth does not imply that it's "unnatural" to eat them in any sort of meaningful way.
Many of the disorders from which we suffer and which we think we can minimise by optimisation of our diet are things which for most of our evolutionary history we would have been unlikely to have had the chance to develop - because we wouldn't have lived long enough, and we wouldn't have had access to the quantities of food we have now anyway.
My take on it - the first "humans" would have simply copied the animals around them. They had no knowledge and based on a typical group of humans throughout time, little common sense. As someone has said it's a case of eating anything that will keep you alive - grass, plants, seeds, berries, fish, little monkeys that the chimps have murdered and thrown away. Canabalism could have kept us going through winter.
There is no one size fits all answer to this, but I think the people saying “probably more plant based than we think” are bowing to current trends towards veganism.
Two basic facts.
1/ We have no evidence of any indigenous culture that didn’t eat meat...they all did.
2/ Some of the Native American tribes where we know in a great deal of detail what they ate, consumed a great deal less veg than they had access to. They had a primarily meat based diet by choice. (And not just the snow bound northerners, but also the plains “Indians”).
In fact, access to easy meat was existential. Literal wars were fought over who had access to the buffalo...no one was fighting wars over access to acorns.
Two basic facts.
1/ We have no evidence of any indigenous culture that didn’t eat meat...they all did.
2/ Some of the Native American tribes where we know in a great deal of detail what they ate, consumed a great deal less veg than they had access to. They had a primarily meat based diet by choice. (And not just the snow bound northerners, but also the plains “Indians”).
In fact, access to easy meat was existential. Literal wars were fought over who had access to the buffalo...no one was fighting wars over access to acorns.
Liokault said:
There is no one size fits all answer to this, but I think the people saying “probably more plant based than we think” are bowing to current trends towards veganism.
Two basic facts.
1/ We have no evidence of any indigenous culture that didn’t eat meat...they all did.
2/ Some of the Native American tribes where we know in a great deal of detail what they ate, consumed a great deal less veg than they had access to. They had a primarily meat based diet by choice. (And not just the snow bound northerners, but also the plains “Indians”).
In fact, access to easy meat was existential. Literal wars were fought over who had access to the buffalo...no one was fighting wars over access to acorns.
Two basic facts.
1/ We have no evidence of any indigenous culture that didn’t eat meat...they all did.
2/ Some of the Native American tribes where we know in a great deal of detail what they ate, consumed a great deal less veg than they had access to. They had a primarily meat based diet by choice. (And not just the snow bound northerners, but also the plains “Indians”).
In fact, access to easy meat was existential. Literal wars were fought over who had access to the buffalo...no one was fighting wars over access to acorns.
The current "trend" toward veganism is very much a "push". Vegetable and grain based food is much higher high profit margin than animal products, and the only way we can possibly eat more of the former is if we eat less of the latter. So we are being misled about vegetarian and vegan diets. It's easy to do because most people know nothing about food or farming. It's very well funded, organised, sophisticated, multi pronged - talk of "plant based" foods being "healthy" or "natural", meat portrayed as "unhealthy" or "cruel" or "causing cancer", anything really. These approaches are effective because everyone picks up on the one "fact" that feels right to them whether it is true or not. And this is all over the media, the medical journal Lancet is involved, at least one BBC documentary recently, a big Hollywood film pretending to be a documentary. And it's all about the money.
El stovey said:
So if we can’t eat raw meat, It’s not really “natural” for us to eat it is it?
From a natural history TV show filmed in Africa somewhere, one of the ways to catch meat is to use a poison dart. But, the poison stays active in the meat so you can't eat it. Unless you cook it. The cooking breaks down the poison and the meat becomes safe.So here's the question. How does that sequence of events come about. Did they start with the poison, then the only guy who cooked his meat survived? Or did they usually cook, and the time they didn't was a bad time? Someones got to die for you to learn this stuff. Sad times.
But perhaps this is partly why we started cooking meat. It avoids the "did you use a poison dart on this one Dave?" question.
grumbledoak said:
We would have first eaten meat the same way other monkeys do it still - killing it with our bare hands and eating it raw.
It is vegetables we have to cook. Most of them are inedible to us raw.
I eat a ton of raw beef and raw organs. Very enjoyable and convenient. So far not dead It is vegetables we have to cook. Most of them are inedible to us raw.
There are still several hunter-gatherer societies on the go, so you can go and look at them (even sit down and have lunch with them) and take a look at their diet. To put it just a bit simplistically I'd say it was "meat when you can get it, which isn't that often, and anything else you can find in the meantime." The idea the diet was "mainly meat" for anything other than a tiny fraction of the population is nuts (geddit?!!??).
But from a health perspective, so what? Was there much evolutionary pressure to tune our tastes and physiology to deliver good health into middle age and beyond? Not much. In any case, we don't have to look deep into the past to figure out what a healthy lifestyle looks like. We've got billions of people doing the experiment for us right now. If we just set the need for ritual and gratification to one side for a few minutes and look at what different groups tend to eat and their average health outcomes, a picture emerges pretty quickly. That bit is easy. The difficult bit is changing ones habits and exercising self-restraint. And it may well be that believing you're eating like a caveman or eating "what we're supposed to eat" is a useful psychological prop for changing ones habits and controlling the urge to binge on curly-wurlies.
But from a health perspective, so what? Was there much evolutionary pressure to tune our tastes and physiology to deliver good health into middle age and beyond? Not much. In any case, we don't have to look deep into the past to figure out what a healthy lifestyle looks like. We've got billions of people doing the experiment for us right now. If we just set the need for ritual and gratification to one side for a few minutes and look at what different groups tend to eat and their average health outcomes, a picture emerges pretty quickly. That bit is easy. The difficult bit is changing ones habits and exercising self-restraint. And it may well be that believing you're eating like a caveman or eating "what we're supposed to eat" is a useful psychological prop for changing ones habits and controlling the urge to binge on curly-wurlies.
ATG said:
But from a health perspective, so what? Was there much evolutionary pressure to tune our tastes and physiology to deliver good health into middle age and beyond? Not much.
ThisEvolution isn't much interested in what happens after the age of 40 or so. If anything the evolutionary pressure is to die off to free up resources, or at best to be available for baby sitting purposes rather than being healthy enough to run around the countryside.
El stovey said:
Another, perhaps more philosophical argument, I heard was someone saying that if we look at an orange or a strawberry etc we want to eat it but if we look at a cow or sheep then our natural instinct probably isn’t to think of it as food. I kind of agreed with this but maybe others think it’s bo
This I could never agree with. I believe it is how people consider “life”, seeing animal have life while disregard plant also have life or just seeing plant as a lower life form.We need some vegans on this thread to give balance to the Keto\Paleo posts
I would rather not restrict my diet to certain foodstuffs, but if I did I think eating seasonal fruit\veg and a reasonable amount of meat and fish with as little non-processed foodstuffs as possible would be a common sense approach.
I would rather not restrict my diet to certain foodstuffs, but if I did I think eating seasonal fruit\veg and a reasonable amount of meat and fish with as little non-processed foodstuffs as possible would be a common sense approach.
People diets were restricted by what was around. It is nonsenical to think there was a universal diet, it varied massively by location.
The human body can adapt pretty well to most foods. You just end up with people thinking their latest fad diet is the best, so shove it down peoples throat , in any thread to do with diets.
The human body can adapt pretty well to most foods. You just end up with people thinking their latest fad diet is the best, so shove it down peoples throat , in any thread to do with diets.
kurokawa said:
El stovey said:
Another, perhaps more philosophical argument, I heard was someone saying that if we look at an orange or a strawberry etc we want to eat it but if we look at a cow or sheep then our natural instinct probably isn’t to think of it as food. I kind of agreed with this but maybe others think it’s bo
This I could never agree with. I believe it is how people consider “life”, seeing animal have life while disregard plant also have life or just seeing plant as a lower life form.1) Meat and fish is tasty, that is why we eat it (even if we have been classically conditioned that it is tasty). Even raw, think sashumi and sushi. Old meat, processed meat, water injected Chlorine meat. That isn't the meat if you grab an animal in a field and kill it and tuck straight in. We were intelligent enough to spot the sources of nutrition that helped breed us into one of the higher performing species on the planet. (Even in recent years the advantage of nutrition has debatable facts - are the modern Dutch taller as they had better food in the mid 1940s as a result of the American WW2 food supplies, in greater quantify and extent than any other Euro nation).
2) We were not meant to be Vegan / vegetarian. There are no cave paintings or hieroglyphics telling us of this fact and had vegans been around 10,000 to 2,000 years BC (before Charcoal) then you can bet they would have made sure that they would have told us via the old media of communication.
3) If say, for example, squirrels had decided that meat was tasty back in the evolution days and they had decided to eat humans rather than us eat them, then they would almost certainly, by destruction of their foe, one main course at a time, have become the dominant species on Earth.
Without 1) - 3) being fulfilled, the human race would never have evolved to where it is in 2019, dependant in its powerfully built, but office building inhabiting directors, whom rush out their offices at the first beeps of Pavlovs Money Laundering Delivery Van to get their lunchtime stash of carbs and protein in the form of the "sandwich".
2) We were not meant to be Vegan / vegetarian. There are no cave paintings or hieroglyphics telling us of this fact and had vegans been around 10,000 to 2,000 years BC (before Charcoal) then you can bet they would have made sure that they would have told us via the old media of communication.
3) If say, for example, squirrels had decided that meat was tasty back in the evolution days and they had decided to eat humans rather than us eat them, then they would almost certainly, by destruction of their foe, one main course at a time, have become the dominant species on Earth.
Without 1) - 3) being fulfilled, the human race would never have evolved to where it is in 2019, dependant in its powerfully built, but office building inhabiting directors, whom rush out their offices at the first beeps of Pavlovs Money Laundering Delivery Van to get their lunchtime stash of carbs and protein in the form of the "sandwich".
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