4 ms·

Our gastrointestinal tract is designed for fruit, like most apes. Not plant or meat. Out of adaptation to new locales without abundant fruit, we've had to learn

• adrianN 6y ago
  Chimps are known to hunt and eat meat. Bonobos too.
  • brnt 6y ago
    Its important to distinguish the majority of diet with the occasional snack, which often happens to supplement a particular nutrient or mineral. My cats eat vegetables daily too, but it only makes up a percent of their diet.
• msla 6y ago
  Except chimps hunt, and get important nutrients from meat, early humans hunted and scavenged meat, and nothing about our digestive system allows us to get as much out of plant matter (including fruit) as an herbivore can; for one thing, we can't digest cellulose. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-the-earliest-humans https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-...
  • brnt 6y ago
    See reply to other comment. The reason to eat fruit is to get easy access to sugar, which we need especially due to our brains. Like how some birds require nectar to be able to power their flight. All animals supplement diets, but despite cows licking saltstone we still observe them getting the majority of intake from other sources.
    • msla 6y ago
      We need sugar to power our brains, but we need protein and fat to build our brains. That requires more than incidental amounts of protein.
      • ben_w 6y ago
        For that to be a good counter-argument, you would need to demonstrate that vegetable protein was “merely incidental” in the case you are arguing against.
        • eyko 6y ago
          Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? Agriculture eventually made that less of an issue but this was not the case until not that long ago (tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of years). It's easier to eat a bug or any small prey than spend a morning gathering spinach and watercress. Humans also ate leftovers from predator kills, like the partially digested contents of herbivore stomachs that had been killed by let's say wolves. Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. Humans did not eat pulses until quite recently (10-15 thousand years ago?)
          • rewq4321 6y ago
            > Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? I'm no expert here, but humans do tend to need far more carbs than protein to be healthy - or at least can operate on something like 10% protein per joule of food consumed. And that's with a decent safety buffer. I think the predictions (based on natural experiments - i.e. famines) were that you could push as low as 4% before a human body can't handle it. Though I'd guess that if you get anywhere close to that your body is going to start making some significant trade-offs. Also: Don't forget about nuts and seeds. > Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. I think a citation (or three) is needed here.
            • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    • primroot 6y ago
      So looking it up, all I can find is that the brain imposes relatively high caloric needs with respect to other organs, but not that those calories need to come from carbohydrates. Do you have any sources on the latter claim? The last time I got exposed to this claim was when a doctor (not a nutrition expert) told me that we must eat fruit for breakfast because our brains need the sugar. To me, both anthropology and personal experience seem to contradict this idea. Maybe I can change my mind.
• mantap 6y ago
  Forget the gastrointestinal tract and look at our teeth. We have a wide variety of different teeth suitable for an omnivorous hunter-gatherer diet.
• amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Nah. Our digestion is not based on fermentation, but on using acid to break things down. It’s closer to a dog’s than a gorilla’s.
• lambdaba 6y ago
  On the contrary, our stomach acidity is higher than even carnivores, indicating we are adapted to scavenging.