The Main Reasons That Humans Have Always Been Plant Eaters

What We Should Eat

let’s talk about what we should eat or what we used to eat first of all none of us were there and none of the people who tend to write and make suppositions about what humans used to eat were there so here again we have to make inferences and part of the problem in my opinion with much of the work that has been done from an anthropological perspective on human diets were done by Western European men who basically had their heads in the wrong part of their Anatomy they came to this issue with the assumption that meat was important for human physiology human development for a human survival and nothing could be further from the truth

i when I gave my lecture on diet and design I specifically addressed the fact that because of our small stomachs and our inability to eat carrion the maximum number of calories that we can get from a package of animal protein is limited furthermore we can’t utilize any of that protein over and above whatever our daily needs consist of and that’s gonna be a very small percentage so from that perspective it is a complete waste of time to spend hours and hours and hours and risk injury chasing around animals trying to kill them to hunt them when you don’t really get a nutritional benefit from it if you understand what I mean

not in equatorial areas however if you decide to move up to places where plants died off during the wintertime and there is no plant food available then you have a reason that you have to eat animals because or if you move into what I call a marginal environment say a scrub desert environment where the types of plants that grow there are not plants that humans can easily eat and assimilate then you start hurting so that you use animals to transform that roughage into a form that you can’t access but all of that was late in human history and human civilization and the point is by the time we were smart enough to do these things we had already been given a suite of organs and physiology by our plant-eating ancestors so at that point it doesn’t matter what we do I mean I can get on an airplane and fly through the air six hundred miles an hour but I better not jump out of it because if I do I’m gonna die that does not mean I can fly it just means I can use technology to overcome my anatomic and physiological limitations

so the the point is again I said this yesterday even the best predators on this planet can I’m sorry for the face in the microphone can only make a kill every 7 to 10 days human beings can’t even get anywhere near that efficient and furthermore if we do manage to kill a large bodied animal most of it will go to waste because it will start to rot before we can consume it so again hunting is not an effective survival strategy for people living in equatorial areas however if you’re living in the Arctic are you living somewhere where the body will freeze and not right then it does become useful but again by that point what you what you are adapted to eat is moot because you adapted to heat plants but you learn to utilize other animals to get your calories if what I’m saying is making sense to you so humans were never hunter-gatherers at best we were gatherers and occasionally we hunted but even in modern Stone Age tribes eighty to ninety percent of the calories are provided by the gathering efforts of women the men are whatever they bring home actually is pretty immaterial if you think about it because if I took away 80% of the food that you would eat say between now and June you’d still be here but if I only I mean excuse it if I took away 20% of the food that you will eat between now and June you still been here probably maybe a little thinner but you still be here if I took away 80% you’d be dead so my point is that humans have always subsisted and survived on plant foods primarily yodhu the Adventist State but

Nutritional Anthropology

first I want to add a little bit in defense of the nutritional anthropologists if you look carefully at some of the studies especially Melvin Conner and Boyd Eaton there are two studies where they actually provided a I think a reasonable guesstimate of what people during Paleolithic times actually consumed they say very clearly during the first 80% of the Paleolithic period we were plant eaters it wasn’t until the last 20% that people started moving north and and began to hunt more but even then and even for those people they still ate a lot of plants and that is validated when you look at their estimates of what humans actually consumed they estimated that humans consume somewhere between 70 and 150 grams of fiber per day so the the seventy at the low end that was the people that were doing more of the hunting one hundred and fifty plot where people do so it really called gatherer hunter Cooper’s exactly it’s a 150 grams of fiber a day

hate to leave a lot of time it’s far great amount of fiber it’s a far greater amount of fiber than the average of vegan eats and we need to recognize that a lot of wild plants are three to four times more concentrated in fiber than our cultivated plants that we bred to be more palatable to the to us and and so that’s something that factors in but but I think the point here is that if you look at the numbers vitamin C intakes were five or six hundred milligrams the guesstimate potassium seven to twelve to ten thousand milligrams those numbers vegans don’t see generally they and and those are nutrients that are concentrated in plant foods so these folks were eating a lot of plants and and a one thing that I did at one point when I first looked at that nutritional anthropology I thought to myself there is no way that people eating a so-called Paleo diet today are even coming close to what true Paleolithic man actually consumed so I did the math I did the math and I took three days worth of recommended paleo menus from the most popular paleo website and I analyzed the diets and then I did the same for a purely exclusively plant-based diet three days of recommended menus analyzed and then I compared them to the Paleolithic estimates and the the paleo folks had three nutrients or four nutrients that were actually closer to true Paleolithic people than the vegans and they were vitamin A cholesterol zinc and I think I’d forget protein of course protein about thirty percent of calories from protein the vegans had I think 13 nutrients closer to a true Paleolithic diet than what people are calling paleo today so I think we are actually eating a plant exclusive diet closer to a true Paleolithic diet than people who claim I

what I don’t get is why paleo people trying to eat paleo are so focused on trying to get that 30% of calories from protein but they don’t carry anything about getting the 70 to 150 grams of fiber or the 5 to 600 milligrams of vitamin C so and then somebody else did the math you did the math in terms of if everybody on this planet eat paleo tell that story I will so I’ll come that in a second I actually want to jump on the nutrient bandwagon because there’s something really fascinating here so you may not all remember this but there was a time when the recommended daily allowance for folate was 200 micrograms a day it was double to for hunt micrograms a day because of decisive epidemiologic evidence that the higher intake of folate around the time of conception massively reduced the risk of neural tube defects a kind of birth anomaly congenital anomaly at the same time and totally independently this exact work that Brenda citing Mel Connor Boyd Eaton and others using and you know that you’re wondering how do they know about nutrients so they’re studying dental wear patterns they’re also studying copra lists which are fossilized fecal remains archeological remains and so forth so you know triangulating every source of evidence they can but this same body of evidence suggested that our native Paleolithic intake of folate was about 400 micrograms a day it was stunning that the epidemiology totally independent was looking for the right answer for health and it was a bull’s-eye on the estimate of what our native intake level was and that’s happened with several other nutrients as well so really interesting so I you know I think what dabbe did to does have relevance but I agree it becomes a pop culture fad where you pick one element of the the so-called story that you like you focus on that you lose the big picture in terms of space

so I did this calculation for a column in Huffington Post some years ago you can look at multiple sources in the Anthropology literature how much space do you need to make a living as a hunter-gatherer so I looked at all the credible sources I could find took the average and multiplied it by seven point eight billion which was the number of Homo sapiens on the planet at that time it’s gone up slightly sins and my calculation was that for the current population of the world to live that way would require 15 times the surface area of the planet including all of the oceans the polar caps and the Sahara Desert

so good luck with that I just want to

Seed Eaters

pop in for just a minute because you’re absolutely right about Boyd Eaton and his colleagues but they are really sort of the second wave of anthropologists who’ve come but who came back looked at what these original anthropologist were saying and said you know what these guys need more fiber in their diet and because Boyd Eaton published a very famous paper called the seed eaters I think no I’m sorry that was Clifford jolly forgive me but he did an analysis of wild foods that were eaten by Stone Age tribes in Africa and compared them to the plant foods that they ate and what he ended up with was the wild animal foods have a calorie content of 1.41 calories per gram and the wild plant foods had a calorie content of one point two nine calories per gram now if you remember your arithmetic and you can round up and round down you’ve got one point three versus one point four statistically that really is no significant difference in calories but when you look at the nutrient content of those foods people who were getting their calories and nutrients from plant foods would be much better off than people who are running around chasing stuff they were unlikely to catch and again that argues that people living in equatorial areas were much more likely to spend their time getting high-quality plant foods than wasting their time chasing animals that they again were very unlikely to catch and also highly likely to become injured if they tried to catch it

and a lot of these anthropologists have come up with these ridiculous theories that well the way humans hunted was we quote ran animals to exhaustion first of all thank you okay I would love to see somebody run an antelope to exhaustion I’m waiting to see that but from a metrics standpoint that is a losing strategy because that means you are going to expend and especially collectively thousands of calories chasing an animal that at most you can extract maybe three or four hundred calories from as an individual that is a complete waste and that is a calorie sync that if you do that day after day you’re going to end up starving to death so that no existing predator on this planet ever has has in the past for currently uses the strategy of running animals to exhaustion that’s that’s foolish it is actually stupid because it’s just a monumental waste of energy you you look at extant predators they will chase animals for maybe three four hundred yards if they don’t catch up to them they leave them alone because they know better than to waste their time and energy then some other researchers at all well humans ate they scavenge they scavenge from carcasses on the Savannah really people end up in the ER everything’s giving from poorly cooked turkey and they’ve got ranges at home that cost thousands of dollars you’re trying to tell me that these people were scavenging off rotting carcasses on the Savannah that is complete male bovine fertilizer okay

it’s in and in and you ask why why do people come up with these ridiculous series is because they have a misplace understanding of the importance of animal foods animal foods are not important for our survival they are not necessary and I don’t think that early human ancestors in equatorial regions wasted their time hunting not until they moved up north developed hunting cultures and then brought them back into Africa

we’re seeing a lot of time on the question but it’s a really interesting question so just a little bit more we’ve invoked Boyd Eaton’s name a couple of times and Boyd and Mel Khanna really are sort of the founding fathers of our modern understanding of Paleolithic nutrition Boyd also happens to be a dear friend and a lovely gentleman and I’d like to commend something to your collective attention in 2015 in Boston Walter Willett and I were privileged to co-chair a conference called old ways common ground so old ways which is a nonprofit was the convener and the goal was to look for the common ground among very divergent views in nutrition so we had some ardent advocates of plant exclusive eating but we invited the Palio experts Boyd was there I had the privilege of introducing Boyd eaten to neal barnard for example so i mean there were some really interesting interactions at the conference but if you google old ways common ground you’ll find all of the conference materials and among them you’ll see a presentation by one of the world’s leading authorities on the Paleolithic diet explaining why modern-day humans need to eat a lot less meat or maybe none and that adds something really important to this dialogue because it’s not just us inside our temple preaching to one another it’s really powerful when you have somebody else from a very different camp say these guys are right