Did we evolve to eat meat?

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

Most plants have lectins which are indigestible and damaging to the GI tract. Maybe we figured this out after a while. The only way to get the same levels of proteins and amino acids that we get from animals from plants and fruit is to eat a wide variety. Was that wide variety available to all in the past? Would a few days searching for large quantities of a wide variety of plants and fruit be 'easier' than hunting one animal?

No, that wide variety was not available to all in the past. That is a great point you are making and I believe most humans have lived on suboptimal diets throughout history.

Joe, what do your INSTINCTS tell you? Put a child in a room with meat and fruit and he'll eat the fruit. If he is young enough at least. The thought of hunting an animal down is disgusting to me and I would certainly prefer fruit if one of them has to be sacrificed. That said, if I need to survive, yes I will hunt the animal down, but only in circumstances of utter need and it requires me to shut out my conscience.

 

[Joe]

Re: Questions

Yeah, unimportant to the argument is right. Although we prefer to discuss here. You seem to be nitpicking and trying to not understand the essence of the point trying to be made. Draw an x and y axis with small to large animals and their weights on the axes. Then chart their weight to MBR ratio. Does it go up? Is it a straight line? Maybe not, is it a squiggly line, probably.

Joe, I really do not see why I am not trying to understand the point being made. I am trying the best I can. The whole point you are making here I have said before, you call it a squiggly line, I call it deviations from the straight line. I think we got to the same conclusion.

And let's assume it is straight, no deviations and not squiggly, then it is only straight, because a logarithmic scale is used. If a linear scale used the line certainly is NOT linear, even without deviations from the fit.

logarithmic scales are used widely. So are you going to take exception with all uses of it? Why take exception with this use of it when the underlying point that it was being used to illustrate - MBR increases in relation to mass - is true. You have called into question the entire article based on this and other rather spurious points. So should I dismiss your entire position because you started out by wondering why, if you evolved to eat them, you don't salivate at the sight of an animal? What did you evolve to eat? You like plants yes? Do you salivate at the sight of field of cabbage?

 

[Joe]

Re: Questions

Most plants have lectins which are indigestible and damaging to the GI tract. Maybe we figured this out after a while. The only way to get the same levels of proteins and amino acids that we get from animals from plants and fruit is to eat a wide variety. Was that wide variety available to all in the past? Would a few days searching for large quantities of a wide variety of plants and fruit be 'easier' than hunting one animal?

No, that wide variety was not available to all in the past. That is a great point you are making and I believe most humans have lived on suboptimal diets throughout history.

Joe, what do your INSTINCTS tell you? Put a child in a room with meat and fruit and he'll eat the fruit. If he is young enough at least. The thought of hunting an animal down is disgusting to me and I would certainly prefer fruit if one of them has to be sacrificed. That said, if I need to survive, yes I will hunt the animal down, but only in circumstances of utter need and it requires me to shut out my conscience.

He'll eat what he is used to eating, if he is old enough to have eaten habitually with adults. And that, I think, is the key to the answer to your question. Additionally, the entire official theory of human evolution is massively flawed, so I don't see how we can expect to come to an accurate answer to whether or not humans evolved "naturally" to eat meat. For all we know maybe someone came down in a spaceship and told us to eat meat or we would be destroyed! We simply can't know the differing types of conditions that have prevailed on this planet throughout human history that affected what we did and did not eat. Although we are starting to come to some tentative conclusions.

On a separate note: It was clear from the beginning Dirk that your issue concerns the morality of eating animals, but you weren't being honest about that. The moral argument, while related, has different questions and answers. Not being honest about where you are coming from just makes you sound defensive and like you have an ulterior motive, which is not conducive to fruitful (excuse the pun) discussion.

 

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

Finally, all doubts were erased in my mind due to an experience we all went through here over the Christmas holidays which is described and discussed in this thread:

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.0

It started getting interesting right about here:

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg217142#msg217142

While this thread was going on, we were fighting for my son's life.

I post about it here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg218777#msg218777

Then here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg218872#msg218872

Here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg219052#msg219052

Here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg219512#msg219512

Here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg219517#msg219517

Here:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg220386#msg220386

And finally:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=20995.msg221943#msg221943

That sounds like a hefty experience Laura. I hope all is fine again.

I don't want to get involved in getting medical advice, but isn't it widely known that vegetables are hard on the digestive tract? For instance, Doug Graham (author of the 80/10/10) diet recommends to leave out vegetables and greens for at least a few months for everybody having bowel issues. Perfectly ripe fruits are ok though and in extreme cases he advices fasting (water only).

I imagine that this is a deeply emotional experience, but how does this convince you for 100% that meat is the way to go? An irritated digestive tract just reacts differently then a healthy one.

 

[Laura]

Re: Questions

Why not? It sounds like a reasonable hypothesis to me.

Because why should this source where a lot of energy can be extracted from relatively easy be 'meat' and why not something else?

High quality protein and fat is essential for human health.

Agreed and this is present in fruits and vegetables as long as you eat them in their whole forms and in sufficient quantities.

Most plants have lectins which are indigestible and damaging to the GI tract. Maybe we figured this out after a while. The only way to get the same levels of proteins and amino acids that we get from animals from plants and fruit is to eat a wide variety. Was that wide variety available to all in the past? Would a few days searching for large quantities of a wide variety of plants and fruit be 'easier' than hunting one animal?

Not only that:

Does protein leach calcium from the bones? Yes, but only if it is plant protein

The "eat-meat-lose-bone" idea has apparently become popular due to the position taken by Loren Cordain on the topic. Dr. Cordain has also made several important and invaluable contributions to our understanding of the diets of our Paleolithic ancestors. He has argued in his book, The Paleo Diet, and elsewhere (see, e.g., here) that to counter the acid load of protein one should eat fruits and vegetables. The latter are believed to have an alkaline load.

If the idea that protein leaches calcium from the bones is correct, one would expect to see a negative association between protein consumption and bone mineral density (BMD). This negative association should be particularly strong in people aged 50 and older, who are more vulnerable to BMD losses.

As it turns out, this idea appears to be correct only for plant protein. Animal protein seems to be associated with an increase in BMD, at least according to a study by Promislow et al. (2002). The study shows that there is a positive multivariate association between animal protein consumption and BMD; an association that becomes negative when plant protein consumption is considered.

The study focused on 572 women and 388 men aged 55 - 92 years living in Rancho Bernardo, California. Food frequency questionnaires were administered in the 1988 - 1992 period, and BMD was measured 4 years later. The bar chart below shows the approximate increases in BMD (in g/cm^2) for each 15 g/d increment in protein intake.

The authors reported increments in BMD for different increments of protein (15 and 5 g/d), so the results above are adjusted somewhat from the original values reported in the article. Keeping that in mind, the increment in BMD for men due to animal protein was not statistically significant (P=0.20). That is the smallest bar on the left.

Does protein leach calcium from the bones? Based on this study, the reasonable answers to this question are yes for plant protein, and no for animal protein. For animal protein, it seems to be quite the opposite.

Even more interesting, calcium intake did not seem to be much of a factor. BMD gains due to animal protein seemed to converge to similar values whether calcium intake was high, medium or low. The convergence occurred as animal protein intake increased, and the point of convergence was between 85-90 g/d of animal protein intake.

And high calcium intakes did not seem to protect those whose plant protein consumption was high.

The authors do not discuss specific foods, but one can guess the main plant protein that those folks likely consumed. It was likely gluten from wheat products.

Are the associations above due to: (a) the folks eating animal protein consuming more fruits and vegetables than the folks eating plant protein; or (b) something inherent to animal foods that stimulates an increase in the absorption of dietary calcium, even in small amounts?

This question cannot be answered based on this study; it should have controlled for fruit and vegetable consumption for that.

But if I were to bet, I would bet on (b).

Reference

Promislow, J.H.E., Goodman-Gruen, D., Slymen, D.J., & Barrett-Connor, E. (2002). Protein consumption and bone mineral density in the elderly. American Journal of Epidemiology, 155(7), 636 - 644.

 

[Laura]

Re: Questions

I don't want to get involved in getting medical advice,

Not necessary, we have a doctor in the house.

but isn't it widely known that vegetables are hard on the digestive tract?

Exactly. So why should anyone stress their body like that continuously?

I imagine that this is a deeply emotional experience, but how does this convince you for 100% that meat is the way to go? An irritated digestive tract just reacts differently then a healthy one.

As you just said, vegetables are hard on the digestive tract. A healthy one can become unhealthy by eating vegetables and can then heal by eating meat.

It's a no-brainer to me.

 

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

He'll eat what he is used to eating, if he is old enough to have eaten habitually with adults. And that, I think, is the key to the answer to your question.

And what does he eat if he is young enough to eat out of instinct instead out of habit?

Additionally, the entire official theory of human evolution is massively flawed, so I don't see how we can expect to come to an accurate answer to whether or not humans evolved "naturally" to eat meat. Maybe someone came down in a spaceship and told us to eat meat or we would be destroyed!

Lol, yeah, maybe :).

On a separate note: It was clear from the beginning Dirk that your issue concerns the morality of eating animals, but you weren't being honest about that.

Is it? If it was such a big moral issue, then why do I eat meat at the moment?

The moral argument, while related, has different questions and answers. Not being honest about where you are coming from just makes you sound defensive and like you have an ulterior motive, which is not conducive to fruitful (excuse the pun) discussion.

Lol.

No, the place I am coming from is that I have first hand experience of how it feels to do the 80/10/10 diet correctly.

Which is EXTREMELY hard and I would love to be convinced otherwise, otherwise I have to make it a point to go back there again, because it is the ultimate of all diets.

And yes, maybe, maybe, I would also like to see you guys try it at some point and tell me that I am right :p.

 

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

As you just said, vegetables are hard on the digestive tract. A healthy one can become unhealthy by eating vegetables and can then heal by eating meat.

It's a no-brainer to me.

The meat doesn't heal it. The body heals itself as long as you stop irritating it. Apparently meat is less irritable for an irritated digestive tract than the veggies you were giving him.

I am not a proponent of eating huge amount of vegetables, there are hardly calories in there anyway. Though you need some leafy greens in order to alkalize and supply minerals.

 

[Laura]

Re: Questions

Sorry, but we've tried the 80/10/10 diet with disastrous results.

 

[truth seeker]

Re: Questions

Joe, I really do not see why I am not trying to understand the point being made. I am trying the best I can. The whole point you are making here I have said before, you call it a squiggly line, I call it deviations from the straight line. I think we got to the same conclusion.

Perhaps the real issue is that in your quest to uphold your worldview, you seem to take much of the information given to you and twist it in order to avoid facing the possibility that you may be wrong.

My question is why would someone who finds so much wrong with this forum be interested in it? I wouldn't think that carnivores would see the use in going to a raw food forum. So what is it that you are really interested in gaining? If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge concerning diet, try it for yourself and see.

Joe, what do your INSTINCTS tell you? Put a child in a room with meat and fruit and he'll eat the fruit. If he is young enough at least. The thought of hunting an animal down is disgusting to me and I would certainly prefer fruit if one of them has to be sacrificed. That said, if I need to survive, yes I will hunt the animal down, but only in circumstances of utter need and it requires me to shut out my conscience.

Why is this? Can you consider that perhaps your own past wounding has caused you to placed you in the position of never wanting to hurt anything else? Perhaps by identifying yourself with the plight of animals you have placed yourself in the position of eating strictly vegetables so that you can feel better about yourself? This may be a method of avoidance - thinking that we can avoid causing pain to another that we ourselves have felt- a method of control.

 

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

Sorry, but we've tried the 80/10/10 diet with disastrous results.

Interesting, could you elaborate on how you did it? Or did you write up about it?

It works great for me, as long as I do it in the right way, which is an incredible difficult skill to master in itself.

 

[shijing]

Re: Questions

As you just said, vegetables are hard on the digestive tract. A healthy one can become unhealthy by eating vegetables and can then heal by eating meat.

It's a no-brainer to me.

The meat doesn't heal it. The body heals itself as long as you stop irritating it.

That seems to be more semantic quibbling. Laura didn't say that meat would actively heal the body, she suggested that healing of the body would be the result of switching from vegetable consumption to meat consumption -- when it would no longer be irritated, as you say.

 

[Laura]

Re: Questions

Sorry, but we've tried the 80/10/10 diet with disastrous results.

Interesting, could you elaborate on how you did it? Or did you write up about it?

It works great for me, as long as I do it in the right way, which is an incredible difficult skill to master in itself.

I'm not so sure it works great for you. But then, that's just my perspective. You seem to be having a hard time grasping the inner content and meaning of words; possibly brain fog due to lack of animal fats and proteins in the diet. I've seen the same thing in many, many people who eat raw foods and limit their fats.

Warning: I'm not trying to be insulting, I am sincerely concerned here.

You keep missing points, twisting words, and basically failing miserably in your argument, but don't seem to have the capacity to see that. It seems to be a sort of semantic aphasia. This discussion with you reminds me of an article I read some time ago:

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

''I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,'' Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

''Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in ''self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ''grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ''identify grammatically correct standard English,'' and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ''expert'' panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ''false consensus effect.''

When high-scoring subjects were asked to ''grade'' the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

''Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,'' the researchers concluded.

In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ''he who knows best knows how little he knows.''

And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as ''above average'' on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the meaning of ''average'' in statistical terms.

''I'm not sure the average person thinks of 'average' or 'percentile' in quite that literal a sense,'' Funder said, ''so 'above average' might mean to them 'pretty good,' or 'OK,' or 'doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.''

But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated there are many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.

In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out ''You stink!'' -- truthful though this assessment may be.

 

[Joe]

Re: Questions

And what does he eat if he is young enough to eat out of instinct instead out of habit?

Children that young are not able to understand what is good for them until they experiment via trial and error. He might go for the tangerine rather than the steak because of the sugar content, but would he thrive on tangerines? He might get addicted to the sugar highs and eat lots of fruit. Would that be a positive evolutionary step? Humans are apparently not simply animals. What their bodies know to be right for them to eat can be very different to what what the human being CHOOSES to eat for any number of other reasons including the workings of the human brain. You seem to be trying to find a simple answer to a complex scenario.

[quote author=Dirk] Is it? If it was such a big moral issue, then why do I eat meat at the moment?[/quote]

So when you said:

[quote author=Dirk] The thought of hunting an animal down is disgusting to me[/quote]

we were not to infer that moral issues around eating meat have influenced your line of argumentation?

 

[Dirk]

Re: Questions

My question is why would someone who finds so much wrong with this forum be interested in it? I wouldn't think that carnivores would see the use in going to a raw food forum. So what is it that you are really interested in gaining? If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge concerning diet, try it for yourself and see.

Because there seems to be a lot of right and truth here on the forum too. Realize that lots of it challenges my own world view. I am pretty sure you guys are right about more things than I am.

Why is this? Can you consider that perhaps your own past wounding has caused you to placed you in the position of never wanting to hurt anything else? Perhaps by identifying yourself with the plight of animals you have placed yourself in the position of eating strictly vegetables so that you can feel better about yourself? This may be a method of avoidance - thinking that we can avoid causing pain to another that we ourselves have felt- a method of control.

I do eat animals. And the more I eat them, the less I care about them. I don't believe in eating strictly vegetables. Tried that with disastrous results. There aren't enough calories in it anyway.