Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago.
Sapiens-Sapiens continued this omnivore tradition from the 250ky divergence from neandertal and denisovian
It wasn’t until 50ky ago that the concept of foraging and farming for non-ungulate protein became needed with the collapse of megafauna
There are volumes and volumes of anthropological and biological support for humans being biologically and ecologically tied to living with and consuming large herbivores.
Any nomadic pastoralist community demonstrates this be default with blood and milk being staples, fresh liver as “treats” and fresh cow dung being used as building material.
Vegetarianism, irrespective of how you view things “ethically” diverges significantly with what the human body expects to consume.
Can you survive on rice and beans? Kinda - but the centuries of refinements that have been required to make what we call staple grains, consumable by humans has been absolutely wild to the extent that are staple grains look nothing like their origins, which means they certainly don’t align with human biology.
Golden Rice is a perfect example of how we’ve had to dope and nutrient augment what are considered “basic” staples because they do not provide the necessary vitamins and minerals that you need for sustaining life - in a way that the body efficiently processes them into amino-acids and etc…that we run on
Pasture fed cattle in the other hand, produce be default safe meat that has the nutrient and vitamin profile, at an uptake rate by our biological system, that surpasses all other possible nutrient transfer mechanisms that we are aware of.
"Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago"
I'm pretty skeptical that this specific type of meat was a majority of the diet by itself and I can't find anything to actually back that up. I struggle to find anything to back up most of what you said but the start was what jumped out at me the most.
This metastudy seems to confirm everything the other commenter said:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247
It seems early hominids gradually went from omnivores to almost exclusive carnivores with a strong preference for megafauna - up until their prey's decline and their subsequent return to other primary nutrient sources. While exact diets are hard to reconstruct and subject of debate, there seems to be little doubt that humans hunted said megafauna to extinction, which also had a significant effect on human evolution in many ways. The development of our larger brain needed lots of energy for example and hunting provided 10x more energy per hour of effort than gathering plant based nutrients. Larger brains generally seem to trend with consumption of more energy dense foods. Our ability to store much more fat and fast for longer times than other primates also seems to have developed from the need to hunt primarily large animals dispersed over wide areas.
Thank you. I have some other references in my papers but this was a good reference.
>which means they certainly don’t align with human biology.
After 15 years of veganism should I be dead?
Pasture fed cattle is even less sustainable than the factory farm counterpart. Our ancestors had no choice, and many people around the world don’t either, but the majority of the developed world consumes cruel, environmentally and health destructive foods just for taste/ customs/ tradition.
I cooked a vegan meal nightly for 11 years when I was married, and we had many “pure” vegan friends. I’m exceptionally aware of the vegan lifestyle.
I don’t know a single “pure” no honey, no casein, no red-40 etc…vegan that isn’t supplementing with iron, manganese, magnesium or something else to manange a nutrient deficiency.
Further, there’s no sustainability or consistency in vegan macronutrient profiles. That is to say, unless you’re an Indian ascete you’re not going to get enough macro and micro from lentils, beans, etc… without significant difficulty. Further nutrient uptake rates are exceptionally well known to be in the low percentages for plant proteins versus exceptionally high for red meant from large herbivores.
All that said, I’m not debating whether you can survive on a vegan diet, I acknowledged that you can.
As to the other points I’m not going to go line by line however I will say that there’s a lot of misinformation about cattle/bison farming and carbon impact.
I’d suggest looking at the Carbon Cowboys work and the sustainability of nomadic cattle herder tribes as effectively the most sustainable societies in humanity.
>I don’t know a single “pure” no honey, no casein, no red-40 etc…vegan that isn’t supplementing with iron, manganese, magnesium or something else to manange a nutrient deficiency.
Hello! Here i am. The only supplement I regularly take (aside those for the gym) is B12 which is still overkill but better safe than sorry as most of vegan products are supplemented, one funny thing is that non- vegan foods are supplemented too as factory farmed animals don’t get their vitamins from natural sources either. If you stop to think that 900000 cows, 3.8 million pigs, and 202 million chickens are slaughtered EVERY SINGLE DAY, you’ll realize that the “nomadic cattle herders” are far from the realities of modern world, people love to cite innuit, aboriginal populations, and food deserts whenever veganism is brought up but nor you, me or most of the population belong to those groups, neither are they the problem, I kindly suggest you to look what are the consequences of factory farming, ethically and environmentally, we can live healthy and thrive without destroying our world.
What a load of bs.
> Any nomadic pastoralist community demonstrates this be default with blood and milk being staples, fresh liver as “treats” and fresh cow dung being used as building material.
So if those nomadic pastoralist communities jumped of a bridge you would too? That's basically the point you're making. "if it wasn't the right thing to do, they wouldn't be doing it".
Humans evolved to be omnivores because we were animals of opportunity. We basically evolved exactly so that we can eat whatever we happen to have.
The only real thing that our body expects (or rather has grown accustomed to) from our diet is that it is varied.
There’s a difference between barely surviving on an unsustainable historically novel diet and thriving based on historically documented baseline
That is to say you need to prove why 250,000 years of doing something is wrong and only the last 10,000 years of doing it is right and no one to date has been able to do anything comparable to demonstrating that in anyway biologically technologically cybernetically
The neolithic revolution was worse in every respect for the intersection between human and environment than any other possible transition
We are materially, worse off more anxious, etc. as a function of these changes in our inability to sustainably adapt to them we’ve only been able to adapt and unsustainable ways that are now causing massive structural ecological change to an extent that we cannot predict or even understand the magnitude of impacts from
Just look at your teeth. We are built to be omnivores.
This is a weak heuristic at best misleading and not even remotely comparable to the model I provided
More specifically Look at the teeth of indigenous megafauna herders versus sedentary grain farmers. Incomparable and well researched.
Grains do not allow the teeth to grow correctly because the shearing and grinding forces needed to prevent tooth crowding in human jaw development is done best on whole animal proteins
Try harder
Our teeth says we are built to eat cooked food.
the only human population that is provably subsisting on a meat diet are the Inuit and they like all other artic meat eaters,dont eat a lot of the meat,its the fat that is needed most,to the point that even when starving,a creature will not eat seal meat,if the hide and fat layer are gone as there is a higher energy penalty in eating frozen meat than can be recoverd. Meat was important,but all of the archiological evidence points to it bieng only a small portion of total diet,BUT,there was no replacement for hides,and the siniews used to sew them,especialy into foot wear its a rabbit hole I will resist disertating now
Good point. If you move the goalposts such that the word "meat" is specifically defined as only lean skeletal muscle tissue with the fat trimmed away with surgical precision, you can win the argument.
Sure, if you speak to actual carnivores, they will make it clear that fat, offal, sinews, marrow, etc are all critical parts of their diet, but if you just employ selective redefinition that has no bearing on actual reality, the argument stands strong in your own mental vacuum.
I remember doing the same thing as a thirteen year old at local Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments. Winning debates by stretching dictionaries is a solid move, even if it doesn't get you very far at the nonlocal level.
It's always critically important that our Straw Men are constructed perfectly, to avoid pesky and annoying limitations of the real world.
It'd be pretty amazing, given that we're omnivores, if our omnivore diet was NOT beneficial to us. All things in moderation of course, and in our evolutionary past meat was a much smaller part of our diet than it is today.
That’s just factually incorrect meat has been the majority of our diet up until the neolithic
Look at the diet of Chimpanzees or modern hunter-gatherers. Meat after a successful hunt is more of a treat, not the main part of the diet.
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