5 ms·

Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?

28 points by fortran77 3y ago

om154 3y ago
“What nature intended” seems a bit ambiguous!
- deleted 3y ago
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jebarker 3y ago
No because nature doesn't have intent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gafferongames 3y ago
No
- cj 3y ago
  8th law of journalism: questions in headlines must always be answered “no”
stevenpetryk 3y ago
It's not really surprising that evidence points to ancient humans eating more plants. It'd be ridiculously energy-intensive to have to hunt down every meal.
- hinkley 3y ago
  It's ridiculously energy-intensive to digest some foods.
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  Tell that to lions? Tigers? Bears? Oh my? Maybe you’re not wrong but I don’t think you can make an evolutionary argument here.
  - xnx 3y ago
    "Plant foods make up the majority of a bear’s diet – sometimes as much as 90 per cent." - https://www.bearsmart.com/about-bears/food-diet/ https://www.bearsmart.com/about-bears/food-diet/
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      Bears are sure but there are loads of obligate carnivores that don't have appreciable plant based calories in their diets.
    - salad-tycoon 3y ago
      Sorry, fair enough. It was sticky thing to say but entirely correct. My real point beyond wizard of oz is plenty of animals only eat meat.
  - ribosometronome 3y ago
    >lions? Tigers? And it's super energy intensive! Those guys spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    The existence of carnivores doesn't advance any argument whatsoever about the relative difficulty of one task vs the other nor about what diet would be desirable. In fact there is no evolutionary argument to be made because what we should eat is a complex question that can't be answered by asking what we did eat.
    - salad-tycoon 3y ago
      > In fact there is no evolutionary argument to be made. Agreed, in a short and pithy way I was trying to make this point. I’ve been taught to be weary of the “beautiful savage” argument too, so I don’t think pointing out to tribes that only eat meat or only eat vegetables is useful. As cool as the Hadza are their hunting and eating practices don’t really give me much additional guidance and I tune out when my influencers of choice start waxing poetical about their amazing life changing visit.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  If you've ever tried digging tubers out of the ground, or walking around all day trying to forage enough low-calorie berries or mushrooms, you'd know that harvesting wild plants is probably far more energy-intensive per-calorie on the whole. While one person spending a day hunting a medium-sized or large-sized animal can feed 100 people. (And similarly trapping, using nets to fish, etc.) Fortunately we can do both.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    The thing is, the tuber never fights back. The energy expended on a fruit/mushroom/tuber/plant hunt is predictable, manageable, and can be expended by a large group. Only fit, trained hunters can reliably bring down an animal capable of feeding 100 people, and even then some of them are going to be injured or killed at some point. There's a reason that a lot of hunting and trapping involves fairly small animals, rather than megafauna; when you're netting birds for example the worst thing that happens is you miss. Fishing is great, if you live near bodies of water with lots of fish in them. Coastal communities probably did eat a LOT of fish for much of human history, but only so many fish come up to the coast. Fishing gear is also a bitch to build and maintain by hand, in cultures that still do it making new nets and repairing old ones is a full time job for at least one member of each family. Animal protein also requires prompt preservation or eating, whereas a bunch of yams, cassava and so on can be reliably kept for a very long time.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
      We had meat preservation techniques for a long time, just not with the fridge
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    That depends heavily on the abundance of edible in your area, which by necessity were usually the places people were, and the techniques available for you to hunt. In the pre paleolithic era hunts were often long and multi person affairs to trap and exhaust an animal. Even after the invention of stone tools you needed large parties to really even get close to ensuring you were just hunting all day for nothing.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Watch the series "Alone". It's pretty clear that the contestants cannot survive by foraging for plants alone.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    I think that says more about the foraging skills of modern domesticated humans (and the location choices for Alone) than it does about the nutritional viability of a foraged plant based diet.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Have you watched the show? If you have, what could they have eaten that they didn't know about?
      - jebarker 3y ago
        I've watched a few episodes. As someone else pointed out, they choose locations where there's not going to be much available food, e.g. early winter Alaska. So you can't draw any conclusions about the viability of getting nutrition from foraging in such inhospitable environments. I can't comment on what they could have eaten that they didn't know about because I'm not a skilled forager either. I'm certain though that someone who lived their whole life as a forager would fair better even if only because they could more efficiently harvest what little is available.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        It's clear they had some training on what was available. I doubt the show producers hid knowledge of more substantial flora - if they did, viewers would have made a stink about it. I've been told by a survival expert that gathering food is a full time job, and many of the contestants didn't seem to get that. They'd waste calories building elaborate shelters and carving toys. BTW, if I look around the woods in the PNW, I don't see much flora that could be eaten, even though it's rather lush. Although there are berries and mushrooms, those are far from a complete diet.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Hm IDK. Many cultures did and even still revolve atound hunting large game. Thre are tribes in Siberia that follow around Caribou and dont exactly have a lot of vegetation to forage. It might be more intensive to harvest but it has a lot more calories and precious fat.
- dathinab 3y ago
  worse if you can't cook meat, it's also much more energy consuming and troublesome to digest it in many ways it's also slow to digest, so fruit sugar sources can be a good complement, but are less healthy but then most "fruit sugar sources" also had much less sugar in them before humans messed with them and more of other nutrients and there are stuff like shrooms, roots various plants etc. but also however we look at it, meat was a fundamental component, I mean without supplements or being able to take advantage of a huge variety of plants from all around the world being vegetarians is very likely to lead to some form of malnutrition. But also we have misgrown a lot of plants to be much way less nutrious and have access to a wide variety and access to supplements so it doesn't matter anymore. Additionally even way back you probably could survive on a mostly vegetarian diet without malnutrition, just _mostly_ instead of _purely_ no meat. On the other hand in today's society people consume often way to much meat and often unhealthy meat, too while at the same time not consuming a lot of the plants, roots and mushrooms people likely did eat before civilization started. I guess like so often the answer is balance. But also too-little-nutrious food, both from plants and meat, seems to be becoming increasingly a problem.
- tzs 3y ago
  For an individual or small group perhaps, but if you have a situation where your group can eat the meat of most of a large animal before it goes bad it might be efficient. An animal can have a lot of calories. To give an idea of how much, when I was a kid my father once accepted as pay for a job a butchered cow. He put it in a freezer and it took our family of 3 around a year to finish it. Ancient people didn't have freezers, so it would not be worth it for a small group to hunt and kill a large animal unless it was very easy, because they would only get a few days food out of it before it spoiled. This is assuming they have other food sources, of course. A larger group, say a village with a hundred or so people, would be able to finish eating a large animal before it spoiled. For them it could easily be worth it to send out a hunting party every few days even if that party has to do a lot of work.
CuteDinosaur 3y ago
What the hell is actually this is?
- fortran77 3y ago
  It's the New Yorker, one of the few remaining publications that prints serious longform peices, looking into a modern fad.
  - michaelrpeskin 3y ago
    It may be growing in popularity, but I don't view it as a fad. I've been doing it for nearly 15 years.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet > A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often making pseudoscientific or unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_diet > The carnivore diet (also called a zero carb diet) is a fad diet > There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits.[2][12][13] Dietitians dismiss the carnivore diet as an extreme fad diet
augusto-moura 3y ago
Why this is even a question? There are multiple evidences pointing to gatherer practices even before the Homo Sapiens race, hundreds of thousands of years prior. We see proof of omnivores on primates to this day. If anything, primates started as mostly herbivores and eventually developed hunting techniques
- alextheparrot 3y ago
  Not to address the applicability of this, but you can have advantageous fallback behavior and still say “the system isn’t intended to be in the fallback behavior”.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  We've evolved to rely on cooked food. Our teeth and short digestive tract betray this.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> Betteridge's Law of Headlines, coined by British journalist Ian Betteridge, states that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'No.'"
mattmaroon 3y ago
No.
yukkuri 3y ago
"What nature intended" is nothing. Natural selection is a process, not an entity. It doesn't have "intentions", let alone such easily packaged and sold "intentions" like "humans should only eat meat". The whole premise is flawed and appeals to "nature" are a continual sham to sell people diet fads with at best no effect on health and at worse serious negative effects.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Also humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years. That's not to say we can't die of diseases or such things, but how many animals "hunt" or "forage" in a fucking Kroger, and pay for what they find with value credit slips? How many animals have access to firearms? How many other species have constructed vehicles that conquered land, sea, and sky, sometimes multiples of them even? We can't even comprehend the lifestyle, priorities and perspectives of a medieval peasant, let alone our ancestors who lived in caves and drew stick-animals. The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Nothing we do is natural. Our food is either largely engineered or at the very least, bred selectively for maximum harvests. We can arbitrarily decide to travel thousands of miles from our "normal" habitat and be completely confident we will not only survive, but we do this for recreation. Hell, even the meat these weirdos are obsessing over is the result of millennia of selective breeding for the most meat per animal, and even some genetic engineering which is why factory-farmed chickens have tits so big they can't stand up correctly. "Natural." I challenge anyone to find something in their home that is actually 100% natural.
  - jamil7 3y ago
    > The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Not only ludicrous but also frequently used to prop up all kinds of biases.
  - jondwillis 3y ago
    Only thing I can think of: seeds that I sprout, grow, let flower, fruit, and seed again. Some are cultivars, but some are native. Some of the process isn’t exactly natural, but it could be.
esotericimpl 3y ago
[dead]
FridayNightTV 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. I'm sure that's all that the users who downvoted your comment were reacting to, and they were correct, because we're trying for something else on this site. If you think an article is bad for HN it's enough to flag it and move on. All this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: you've unfortunately been posting flamewar-style comments in other threads too. Can you please not do that? If you'll review the guidelines, you'll see that we're trying for something else here.
scblock 3y ago
The headline is pretty bad, but the actual article is a fairly good if not super deep discussion of the difference between what research shows (wide consumption of plants throughout human history, etc) and the question posed by the really terrible headline. Worth a read I think if you're interested in the topic.
IKantRead 3y ago
It's strange to me that "what Nature intended" is a concept entertained by rational, educated, adults. It's one of those carry overs from a time when we had widespread belief in divine providence that doesn't really hold up under inspection. To be clear on my point: "Nature" is not a rational agent with a plan. No creature evolved a certain way for a reason, they just evolved that way and happened to not die when some others that didn't evolve that way did die. Nature doesn't even "intend" for you to pass on your genes, it's just that that's how the system happens to work such that things that pass on their genetic information still stick around. The very premise that there is some "natural" thing that we would be better off doing, silently assumes a pretty major, border line theological, premise that there is any reason that living things should continue to a path that allowed them to survive to a point. If evolution has any "lesson" teach at all it's closer to "be flexible".
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  I take your points but some of this is just semantic. Absolutely , nature does not have intentions. That’s clearly misunderstood given the wording. But what do people mean when they say this? Clearly its generally better to eat more whole, fresh foods and less processed, preserved foods or things with insane amounts of sugar not found in nature. We can argue if this is truly natural vs unnatural but its a valid guideline nonetheless. Our bodies have adapted to certain types of food and certain “unnatural” foods do have negative effects which are contributing to widespread issues like obesity, diabetes, and probably cancer.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I don't think one needs to take it so literally. "What nature intended" in this context is just another way of saying "optimal given the history of how humans evolved"
  - IKantRead 3y ago
    "optimal given the history of how humans evolved" but this contains the same false logic. The premise that there is something optimal about the state we evolved in has no basis in what we understand about evolutionary processes. Those are just the conditions that we happened to not die in, not the conditions that are in any way "best" or "optimal" for us. It's like sleeping in late and missing a flight that ends up crashing and assuming that the optimal strategy is to always sleep in late. Further, in an ever changing environment, which is what make evolution so important, "history" in a genetic sense is completely uninteresting. Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one. Megafauna probably had many benefits, pre-human existence, from being very large. But being large and reproducing slowly is what ultimately let to their extinction once the environment changed.
seanhandley 3y ago
This reads like satire. > Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles? Attention-grabbing nonsense.
Apocryphon 3y ago
Isn't doing this what drove Jordan Peterson off the deep end?
nonethewiser 3y ago
What is it with people trying to find some magic diet that changes their lives? By all means dont eat like shit and do your best to be healthy but is there really some obscure diet that humans just never thought of that can unlock unbeknown states of well being? Carnivore diet, all fruit diet, etc. It seems like a modern phenomenon that owes itself to an abundance of cheap food. And perhaps a lot of anxiety, depression, or similar.
- squidsoup 3y ago
  Many people experiment with diets like this in an attempt to improve auto-immune and chronic conditions which are not well understood by science. I have no idea how efficacious this is, but it seems like a common refrain.
- michaelrpeskin 3y ago
  I think the search for a magic diet is because of the weird industrial food landscape we're in. Most of our food is designed for cheap production, shelf stable storage, and easy distribution. Nutrition and health aren't really considered. People think "everything in moderation" but when the industrial food supply is so far off of the ancestral norm, moderation really isn't the same thing. You're right people will go off the deep end looking for magic cures. But sometimes a little ancestral influence can help guide us. I've been eating beef, salt, water as my primary food for nearly 15 years. Sometimes I may have a potato here and there with my steak or eggs and bacon for breakfast. But I don't have vegetables or fruit otherwise (they just don't make me feel good). I'm pretty ripped for a middle age guy and have tons of energy and no health problems. I would never proselytize or tell people how to eat, but I do like to give my N=1 data point that shows it's not as crazy as it sounds.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  > What is it with people trying to find some magic diet that changes their lives? Obesity has skyrocketed and "people" don't really understand why. "People" were taught the old food pyramid which was terrible, and if they are trying to find out what they should eat ... where do they go? To the same people that published that old pyramid and have updated it? There are so many contradictory and confusing information sources and people are desparate to get their obesity or looming obesity back under control.
Spivak 3y ago
I feel like this is going to come off pedantic but I think it's the real heart of the issue. Nature doesn't intend shit. Our bodies are a messy junk drawer of evolutionary weirdness spurred on by what resources happened to be available at the time. We're not "made" to eat anything in particular, in fact it's the opposite, we had stuff around and we evolved to get some nutritional benefit from it because it's what was there. We're the garbage disposals of the animal kingdom eating all sorts of random nonsense that's poison to other species. If we could step outside ourselves we'd look on in horror at the roving packs of gaping maws that eat everything in sight. We are frighteningly well adapted to all kinds of random diets. We'll eat whatever nature throws at us, it's what makes us well suited for all seasons and living most anywhere in the world. Trying to crown anything as "best" is like asking a random number generator what number it feels it's most meant to return. In fact just about the only thing that'll do you in is eating the same thing all the time which is why these diets are wild. They appeal to the part of our brains that like to pack things into neat and tidy boxes and build in straight lines rather than embrace the organic mess we are. If your body needs something specific it'll start to crave it. There are bees that evolved to eat the nectar from exactly one species of flower. We aren't that.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  I think "what nature intends" is just a way of asking what do our bodies do best with. For all the weird grab bag mess of evolution there are clearly things our bodies process and gain nutrition from better than others. For all our ability to be "gaping maws" as you put it we can't eat grasses enough to feed ourselves properly like a cow, our bodies aren't built to extract the requisite nutrition from that with our single stomach. It's often deployed to argue that fad diet X or Y is what's best but it's not completely bunk science that there are diets that are better or worse for our health than others.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Our teeth suggest "no."
Bukhmanizer 3y ago
I’m a much bigger fan of the magazine article title “Red Shift”. I’m sure the New Yorker changes it’s online titles to optimize for clicks, but I usually find them much worse.
Narrow2890 3y ago
Headline ending in question mark = answer is no. I love reading articles from established, prestigious media outlets that are less considered and less informative than years old youtube videos on the same topic made by some 20 something for nothing.
- cerealport 3y ago
  [dead]
- leafmeal 3y ago
  Personally I thought the article was informative and interesting, but I'm still curious; can you share some of these videos you're talking about?
dathinab 3y ago
no if so we would only be able to properly digest meat also nature doesn't intend it just does do and the chaos of reality will discard mostly what doesn't work but sometimes what works too
brokencode 3y ago
My favorite crazy quote from one of these influencers mentioned in the article is this one: “plants are poison—they don’t want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion” As if animals do want to be eaten. I’d argue that animals don’t want to be eaten even more than plants.
- phantom784 3y ago
  Plus, some parts of plants do "want" to be eaten - namely fruits, as a strategy to spread seeds.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    It also doesn't address the fact that we've been genetically modifying (read: breeding) plants to be eaten for around 10,000 years. Most of the plants we eat are nothing like their wild antecedents. Compare maize to teosinte, for instance. Or cultivated potatoes to the wild tubers they were bred from -- the wild ones will kill you, full stop. (As an aside, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home," which discusses these topics and many more related to how we came to live the lives we do -- it's a great companion to A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
- zkms 3y ago
  The claim is that plants cannot run nor fight so their defenses must be chemical (or physical, like spines or needles or camouflage) in nature. It's far more difficult for a prey animal to have its muscles/fat/organs suffused with chemicals that will kill/injure its likely predators, especially if its predators have similar metabolic pathways as itself -- it'd be at risk of poisoning itself if the poison broke free! Animals certainly fight back against being eaten (running away, fighting, etc) but once they're dead their meat (barring like, snake venom glands or pufferfish or other poison/venom-suffused sea creatures) won't fight back. Obviously "plants are poison" is phrased for shock value and there are traditions and safe handling practices (like "cooking", or "not eating green potatoes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine) for plants that remove, denature, or prevent the formation of defensive chemicals.
sys32768 3y ago
My friend got scurvy doing this diet, which I cannot help laughing about because I only think of pirates getting scurvy, but now when I hear the word, I picture my friend. Come to think of it, he does look scruffy and a bit malnourished like I imagine pirates of old looking, but he is thinner than he's been in years.
AgnetOrangeS 3y ago
[flagged]
zkms 3y ago
I feel the author is a bit too quick to debunk/discount the weird extreme claims of the carnivore tradfluencer set and jumps into the opposite direction: there seems to be a consilience of evidence (not just archeological) establishing Paleolithic / pre-agricultural humans as hypercarnivores: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 I'm totally in agreement that the "raw meat only" pseudo-traditionalist influencer stuff is absolute ahistorical LARP (the frightening doses of steroids certainly is disqualifying) but humans seem well adapted to hunting animals and digesting meat in ways that other primates just aren't (flagrant examples that come to mind are stomach pH and small intestine vs large intestine size, the linked paper has more). Of course, there indeed have been more recent adaptations to survive better on plants/grains/etc, i think spurred by megafauna becoming more scarce; but that's not really a counterexample for the thesis that prehistoric preagricultural humans ate a lot of meat (not uniquely meat of course!).
- lolinder 3y ago
  TFA doesn't claim that early humans didn't eat meat, they claim that they ate everything. The key claim in the article is that the diversity of food is what is lacking in modern diets, rather than absence of any single large nutrient group. I see nothing in TFA's claims that are incompatible with humans hunting animals and digesting meat more than other primates. Also, I would not take that paper at face value without a lot of other literature around it. Two out of three authors make money writing about the Paleo diet, and they're explicitly proposing a new interpretation of the evidence, it's not a literature review representing any kind of consensus.
zvmaz 3y ago
Is killing sentient beings with a will to live just as strong as ours, and with whom we share a common genealogy, physiology, and even psychology, ethical? This question trivially trumps all other considerations, be them about health, or the environment.
- dathinab 3y ago
  did you know a cow is roughly as much intelligent and self aware as a child and it's not just cows honestly the more you know about animals we eat the less you can objectively reason that it's ethical, it's simply straight forward can't be moralic seen ... well moral is judgemental, non fact based and can in difference to ethic be e.g. race supremacist (and with that I mean human race, not some skin color nonsense). Which means it might be moral depending on the moral system you use. But then moral is fundamental flawed as it might also be moral to brutally torturous kill a women because here husband died a natural death, so yea better use ethics instead of morals
mikae1 3y ago
Nature does not intend anything, that's a religious proposition. We're constantly evolving and adapting to our habitat, albeit slowly.
bell-cot 3y ago
SPOILER ALERT The tl;dr; stuff is in the final 8 paragraphs. The "Liver King" confessed to systematic lying, and it's a bunch of fad diets driven by desperate emotional insecurities. And ~all-meat diets are, in general, far worse than than sugar pills for dealing with the real problems.

28 points by fortran77 3y ago

om154 3y ago

“What nature intended” seems a bit ambiguous!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jebarker 3y ago

No because nature doesn't have intent.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gafferongames 3y ago

cj 3y ago
8th law of journalism: questions in headlines must always be answered “no”

stevenpetryk 3y ago

It's not really surprising that evidence points to ancient humans eating more plants. It'd be ridiculously energy-intensive to have to hunt down every meal.

hinkley 3y ago
It's ridiculously energy-intensive to digest some foods.
salad-tycoon 3y ago
Tell that to lions? Tigers? Bears? Oh my? Maybe you’re not wrong but I don’t think you can make an evolutionary argument here.
- xnx 3y ago
  "Plant foods make up the majority of a bear’s diet – sometimes as much as 90 per cent." - https://www.bearsmart.com/about-bears/food-diet/ https://www.bearsmart.com/about-bears/food-diet/
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    Bears are sure but there are loads of obligate carnivores that don't have appreciable plant based calories in their diets.
  - salad-tycoon 3y ago
    Sorry, fair enough. It was sticky thing to say but entirely correct. My real point beyond wizard of oz is plenty of animals only eat meat.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  >lions? Tigers? And it's super energy intensive! Those guys spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  The existence of carnivores doesn't advance any argument whatsoever about the relative difficulty of one task vs the other nor about what diet would be desirable. In fact there is no evolutionary argument to be made because what we should eat is a complex question that can't be answered by asking what we did eat.
  - salad-tycoon 3y ago
    > In fact there is no evolutionary argument to be made. Agreed, in a short and pithy way I was trying to make this point. I’ve been taught to be weary of the “beautiful savage” argument too, so I don’t think pointing out to tribes that only eat meat or only eat vegetables is useful. As cool as the Hadza are their hunting and eating practices don’t really give me much additional guidance and I tune out when my influencers of choice start waxing poetical about their amazing life changing visit.
crazygringo 3y ago
If you've ever tried digging tubers out of the ground, or walking around all day trying to forage enough low-calorie berries or mushrooms, you'd know that harvesting wild plants is probably far more energy-intensive per-calorie on the whole. While one person spending a day hunting a medium-sized or large-sized animal can feed 100 people. (And similarly trapping, using nets to fish, etc.) Fortunately we can do both.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  The thing is, the tuber never fights back. The energy expended on a fruit/mushroom/tuber/plant hunt is predictable, manageable, and can be expended by a large group. Only fit, trained hunters can reliably bring down an animal capable of feeding 100 people, and even then some of them are going to be injured or killed at some point. There's a reason that a lot of hunting and trapping involves fairly small animals, rather than megafauna; when you're netting birds for example the worst thing that happens is you miss. Fishing is great, if you live near bodies of water with lots of fish in them. Coastal communities probably did eat a LOT of fish for much of human history, but only so many fish come up to the coast. Fishing gear is also a bitch to build and maintain by hand, in cultures that still do it making new nets and repairing old ones is a full time job for at least one member of each family. Animal protein also requires prompt preservation or eating, whereas a bunch of yams, cassava and so on can be reliably kept for a very long time.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
    We had meat preservation techniques for a long time, just not with the fridge
- rtkwe 3y ago
  That depends heavily on the abundance of edible in your area, which by necessity were usually the places people were, and the techniques available for you to hunt. In the pre paleolithic era hunts were often long and multi person affairs to trap and exhaust an animal. Even after the invention of stone tools you needed large parties to really even get close to ensuring you were just hunting all day for nothing.
WalterBright 3y ago
Watch the series "Alone". It's pretty clear that the contestants cannot survive by foraging for plants alone.
- jebarker 3y ago
  I think that says more about the foraging skills of modern domesticated humans (and the location choices for Alone) than it does about the nutritional viability of a foraged plant based diet.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Have you watched the show? If you have, what could they have eaten that they didn't know about?
    - jebarker 3y ago
      I've watched a few episodes. As someone else pointed out, they choose locations where there's not going to be much available food, e.g. early winter Alaska. So you can't draw any conclusions about the viability of getting nutrition from foraging in such inhospitable environments. I can't comment on what they could have eaten that they didn't know about because I'm not a skilled forager either. I'm certain though that someone who lived their whole life as a forager would fair better even if only because they could more efficiently harvest what little is available.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        It's clear they had some training on what was available. I doubt the show producers hid knowledge of more substantial flora - if they did, viewers would have made a stink about it. I've been told by a survival expert that gathering food is a full time job, and many of the contestants didn't seem to get that. They'd waste calories building elaborate shelters and carving toys. BTW, if I look around the woods in the PNW, I don't see much flora that could be eaten, even though it's rather lush. Although there are berries and mushrooms, those are far from a complete diet.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Hm IDK. Many cultures did and even still revolve atound hunting large game. Thre are tribes in Siberia that follow around Caribou and dont exactly have a lot of vegetation to forage. It might be more intensive to harvest but it has a lot more calories and precious fat.
dathinab 3y ago
worse if you can't cook meat, it's also much more energy consuming and troublesome to digest it in many ways it's also slow to digest, so fruit sugar sources can be a good complement, but are less healthy but then most "fruit sugar sources" also had much less sugar in them before humans messed with them and more of other nutrients and there are stuff like shrooms, roots various plants etc. but also however we look at it, meat was a fundamental component, I mean without supplements or being able to take advantage of a huge variety of plants from all around the world being vegetarians is very likely to lead to some form of malnutrition. But also we have misgrown a lot of plants to be much way less nutrious and have access to a wide variety and access to supplements so it doesn't matter anymore. Additionally even way back you probably could survive on a mostly vegetarian diet without malnutrition, just _mostly_ instead of _purely_ no meat. On the other hand in today's society people consume often way to much meat and often unhealthy meat, too while at the same time not consuming a lot of the plants, roots and mushrooms people likely did eat before civilization started. I guess like so often the answer is balance. But also too-little-nutrious food, both from plants and meat, seems to be becoming increasingly a problem.
tzs 3y ago
For an individual or small group perhaps, but if you have a situation where your group can eat the meat of most of a large animal before it goes bad it might be efficient. An animal can have a lot of calories. To give an idea of how much, when I was a kid my father once accepted as pay for a job a butchered cow. He put it in a freezer and it took our family of 3 around a year to finish it. Ancient people didn't have freezers, so it would not be worth it for a small group to hunt and kill a large animal unless it was very easy, because they would only get a few days food out of it before it spoiled. This is assuming they have other food sources, of course. A larger group, say a village with a hundred or so people, would be able to finish eating a large animal before it spoiled. For them it could easily be worth it to send out a hunting party every few days even if that party has to do a lot of work.

CuteDinosaur 3y ago

What the hell is actually this is?

fortran77 3y ago
It's the New Yorker, one of the few remaining publications that prints serious longform peices, looking into a modern fad.
- michaelrpeskin 3y ago
  It may be growing in popularity, but I don't view it as a fad. I've been doing it for nearly 15 years.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet > A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often making pseudoscientific or unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_diet > The carnivore diet (also called a zero carb diet) is a fad diet > There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits.[2][12][13] Dietitians dismiss the carnivore diet as an extreme fad diet

augusto-moura 3y ago

Why this is even a question? There are multiple evidences pointing to gatherer practices even before the Homo Sapiens race, hundreds of thousands of years prior. We see proof of omnivores on primates to this day. If anything, primates started as mostly herbivores and eventually developed hunting techniques

alextheparrot 3y ago
Not to address the applicability of this, but you can have advantageous fallback behavior and still say “the system isn’t intended to be in the fallback behavior”.
WalterBright 3y ago
We've evolved to rely on cooked food. Our teeth and short digestive tract betray this.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

> Betteridge's Law of Headlines, coined by British journalist Ian Betteridge, states that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'No.'"

mattmaroon 3y ago

No.

yukkuri 3y ago

"What nature intended" is nothing. Natural selection is a process, not an entity. It doesn't have "intentions", let alone such easily packaged and sold "intentions" like "humans should only eat meat". The whole premise is flawed and appeals to "nature" are a continual sham to sell people diet fads with at best no effect on health and at worse serious negative effects.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Also humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years. That's not to say we can't die of diseases or such things, but how many animals "hunt" or "forage" in a fucking Kroger, and pay for what they find with value credit slips? How many animals have access to firearms? How many other species have constructed vehicles that conquered land, sea, and sky, sometimes multiples of them even? We can't even comprehend the lifestyle, priorities and perspectives of a medieval peasant, let alone our ancestors who lived in caves and drew stick-animals. The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Nothing we do is natural. Our food is either largely engineered or at the very least, bred selectively for maximum harvests. We can arbitrarily decide to travel thousands of miles from our "normal" habitat and be completely confident we will not only survive, but we do this for recreation. Hell, even the meat these weirdos are obsessing over is the result of millennia of selective breeding for the most meat per animal, and even some genetic engineering which is why factory-farmed chickens have tits so big they can't stand up correctly. "Natural." I challenge anyone to find something in their home that is actually 100% natural.
- jamil7 3y ago
  > The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Not only ludicrous but also frequently used to prop up all kinds of biases.
- jondwillis 3y ago
  Only thing I can think of: seeds that I sprout, grow, let flower, fruit, and seed again. Some are cultivars, but some are native. Some of the process isn’t exactly natural, but it could be.

esotericimpl 3y ago

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FridayNightTV 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. I'm sure that's all that the users who downvoted your comment were reacting to, and they were correct, because we're trying for something else on this site. If you think an article is bad for HN it's enough to flag it and move on. All this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: you've unfortunately been posting flamewar-style comments in other threads too. Can you please not do that? If you'll review the guidelines, you'll see that we're trying for something else here.

scblock 3y ago

The headline is pretty bad, but the actual article is a fairly good if not super deep discussion of the difference between what research shows (wide consumption of plants throughout human history, etc) and the question posed by the really terrible headline. Worth a read I think if you're interested in the topic.

IKantRead 3y ago

It's strange to me that "what Nature intended" is a concept entertained by rational, educated, adults. It's one of those carry overs from a time when we had widespread belief in divine providence that doesn't really hold up under inspection. To be clear on my point: "Nature" is not a rational agent with a plan. No creature evolved a certain way for a reason, they just evolved that way and happened to not die when some others that didn't evolve that way did die. Nature doesn't even "intend" for you to pass on your genes, it's just that that's how the system happens to work such that things that pass on their genetic information still stick around. The very premise that there is some "natural" thing that we would be better off doing, silently assumes a pretty major, border line theological, premise that there is any reason that living things should continue to a path that allowed them to survive to a point. If evolution has any "lesson" teach at all it's closer to "be flexible".

nonethewiser 3y ago
I take your points but some of this is just semantic. Absolutely , nature does not have intentions. That’s clearly misunderstood given the wording. But what do people mean when they say this? Clearly its generally better to eat more whole, fresh foods and less processed, preserved foods or things with insane amounts of sugar not found in nature. We can argue if this is truly natural vs unnatural but its a valid guideline nonetheless. Our bodies have adapted to certain types of food and certain “unnatural” foods do have negative effects which are contributing to widespread issues like obesity, diabetes, and probably cancer.
SoftTalker 3y ago
I don't think one needs to take it so literally. "What nature intended" in this context is just another way of saying "optimal given the history of how humans evolved"
- IKantRead 3y ago
  "optimal given the history of how humans evolved" but this contains the same false logic. The premise that there is something optimal about the state we evolved in has no basis in what we understand about evolutionary processes. Those are just the conditions that we happened to not die in, not the conditions that are in any way "best" or "optimal" for us. It's like sleeping in late and missing a flight that ends up crashing and assuming that the optimal strategy is to always sleep in late. Further, in an ever changing environment, which is what make evolution so important, "history" in a genetic sense is completely uninteresting. Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one. Megafauna probably had many benefits, pre-human existence, from being very large. But being large and reproducing slowly is what ultimately let to their extinction once the environment changed.

seanhandley 3y ago

This reads like satire. > Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles? Attention-grabbing nonsense.

Apocryphon 3y ago

Isn't doing this what drove Jordan Peterson off the deep end?

nonethewiser 3y ago

What is it with people trying to find some magic diet that changes their lives? By all means dont eat like shit and do your best to be healthy but is there really some obscure diet that humans just never thought of that can unlock unbeknown states of well being? Carnivore diet, all fruit diet, etc. It seems like a modern phenomenon that owes itself to an abundance of cheap food. And perhaps a lot of anxiety, depression, or similar.

squidsoup 3y ago
Many people experiment with diets like this in an attempt to improve auto-immune and chronic conditions which are not well understood by science. I have no idea how efficacious this is, but it seems like a common refrain.
michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I think the search for a magic diet is because of the weird industrial food landscape we're in. Most of our food is designed for cheap production, shelf stable storage, and easy distribution. Nutrition and health aren't really considered. People think "everything in moderation" but when the industrial food supply is so far off of the ancestral norm, moderation really isn't the same thing. You're right people will go off the deep end looking for magic cures. But sometimes a little ancestral influence can help guide us. I've been eating beef, salt, water as my primary food for nearly 15 years. Sometimes I may have a potato here and there with my steak or eggs and bacon for breakfast. But I don't have vegetables or fruit otherwise (they just don't make me feel good). I'm pretty ripped for a middle age guy and have tons of energy and no health problems. I would never proselytize or tell people how to eat, but I do like to give my N=1 data point that shows it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Ensorceled 3y ago
> What is it with people trying to find some magic diet that changes their lives? Obesity has skyrocketed and "people" don't really understand why. "People" were taught the old food pyramid which was terrible, and if they are trying to find out what they should eat ... where do they go? To the same people that published that old pyramid and have updated it? There are so many contradictory and confusing information sources and people are desparate to get their obesity or looming obesity back under control.

Spivak 3y ago

I feel like this is going to come off pedantic but I think it's the real heart of the issue. Nature doesn't intend shit. Our bodies are a messy junk drawer of evolutionary weirdness spurred on by what resources happened to be available at the time. We're not "made" to eat anything in particular, in fact it's the opposite, we had stuff around and we evolved to get some nutritional benefit from it because it's what was there. We're the garbage disposals of the animal kingdom eating all sorts of random nonsense that's poison to other species. If we could step outside ourselves we'd look on in horror at the roving packs of gaping maws that eat everything in sight. We are frighteningly well adapted to all kinds of random diets. We'll eat whatever nature throws at us, it's what makes us well suited for all seasons and living most anywhere in the world. Trying to crown anything as "best" is like asking a random number generator what number it feels it's most meant to return. In fact just about the only thing that'll do you in is eating the same thing all the time which is why these diets are wild. They appeal to the part of our brains that like to pack things into neat and tidy boxes and build in straight lines rather than embrace the organic mess we are. If your body needs something specific it'll start to crave it. There are bees that evolved to eat the nectar from exactly one species of flower. We aren't that.

rtkwe 3y ago
I think "what nature intends" is just a way of asking what do our bodies do best with. For all the weird grab bag mess of evolution there are clearly things our bodies process and gain nutrition from better than others. For all our ability to be "gaping maws" as you put it we can't eat grasses enough to feed ourselves properly like a cow, our bodies aren't built to extract the requisite nutrition from that with our single stomach. It's often deployed to argue that fad diet X or Y is what's best but it's not completely bunk science that there are diets that are better or worse for our health than others.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Our teeth suggest "no."

Bukhmanizer 3y ago

I’m a much bigger fan of the magazine article title “Red Shift”. I’m sure the New Yorker changes it’s online titles to optimize for clicks, but I usually find them much worse.

Narrow2890 3y ago

Headline ending in question mark = answer is no. I love reading articles from established, prestigious media outlets that are less considered and less informative than years old youtube videos on the same topic made by some 20 something for nothing.

cerealport 3y ago
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leafmeal 3y ago
Personally I thought the article was informative and interesting, but I'm still curious; can you share some of these videos you're talking about?

dathinab 3y ago

no if so we would only be able to properly digest meat also nature doesn't intend it just does do and the chaos of reality will discard mostly what doesn't work but sometimes what works too

brokencode 3y ago

My favorite crazy quote from one of these influencers mentioned in the article is this one: “plants are poison—they don’t want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion” As if animals do want to be eaten. I’d argue that animals don’t want to be eaten even more than plants.

phantom784 3y ago
Plus, some parts of plants do "want" to be eaten - namely fruits, as a strategy to spread seeds.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  It also doesn't address the fact that we've been genetically modifying (read: breeding) plants to be eaten for around 10,000 years. Most of the plants we eat are nothing like their wild antecedents. Compare maize to teosinte, for instance. Or cultivated potatoes to the wild tubers they were bred from -- the wild ones will kill you, full stop. (As an aside, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home," which discusses these topics and many more related to how we came to live the lives we do -- it's a great companion to A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
zkms 3y ago
The claim is that plants cannot run nor fight so their defenses must be chemical (or physical, like spines or needles or camouflage) in nature. It's far more difficult for a prey animal to have its muscles/fat/organs suffused with chemicals that will kill/injure its likely predators, especially if its predators have similar metabolic pathways as itself -- it'd be at risk of poisoning itself if the poison broke free! Animals certainly fight back against being eaten (running away, fighting, etc) but once they're dead their meat (barring like, snake venom glands or pufferfish or other poison/venom-suffused sea creatures) won't fight back. Obviously "plants are poison" is phrased for shock value and there are traditions and safe handling practices (like "cooking", or "not eating green potatoes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine) for plants that remove, denature, or prevent the formation of defensive chemicals.

sys32768 3y ago

My friend got scurvy doing this diet, which I cannot help laughing about because I only think of pirates getting scurvy, but now when I hear the word, I picture my friend. Come to think of it, he does look scruffy and a bit malnourished like I imagine pirates of old looking, but he is thinner than he's been in years.

AgnetOrangeS 3y ago

[flagged]

zkms 3y ago

I feel the author is a bit too quick to debunk/discount the weird extreme claims of the carnivore tradfluencer set and jumps into the opposite direction: there seems to be a consilience of evidence (not just archeological) establishing Paleolithic / pre-agricultural humans as hypercarnivores: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 I'm totally in agreement that the "raw meat only" pseudo-traditionalist influencer stuff is absolute ahistorical LARP (the frightening doses of steroids certainly is disqualifying) but humans seem well adapted to hunting animals and digesting meat in ways that other primates just aren't (flagrant examples that come to mind are stomach pH and small intestine vs large intestine size, the linked paper has more). Of course, there indeed have been more recent adaptations to survive better on plants/grains/etc, i think spurred by megafauna becoming more scarce; but that's not really a counterexample for the thesis that prehistoric preagricultural humans ate a lot of meat (not uniquely meat of course!).

lolinder 3y ago
TFA doesn't claim that early humans didn't eat meat, they claim that they ate everything. The key claim in the article is that the diversity of food is what is lacking in modern diets, rather than absence of any single large nutrient group. I see nothing in TFA's claims that are incompatible with humans hunting animals and digesting meat more than other primates. Also, I would not take that paper at face value without a lot of other literature around it. Two out of three authors make money writing about the Paleo diet, and they're explicitly proposing a new interpretation of the evidence, it's not a literature review representing any kind of consensus.

zvmaz 3y ago

Is killing sentient beings with a will to live just as strong as ours, and with whom we share a common genealogy, physiology, and even psychology, ethical? This question trivially trumps all other considerations, be them about health, or the environment.

dathinab 3y ago
did you know a cow is roughly as much intelligent and self aware as a child and it's not just cows honestly the more you know about animals we eat the less you can objectively reason that it's ethical, it's simply straight forward can't be moralic seen ... well moral is judgemental, non fact based and can in difference to ethic be e.g. race supremacist (and with that I mean human race, not some skin color nonsense). Which means it might be moral depending on the moral system you use. But then moral is fundamental flawed as it might also be moral to brutally torturous kill a women because here husband died a natural death, so yea better use ethics instead of morals

mikae1 3y ago

Nature does not intend anything, that's a religious proposition. We're constantly evolving and adapting to our habitat, albeit slowly.

bell-cot 3y ago

SPOILER ALERT The tl;dr; stuff is in the final 8 paragraphs. The "Liver King" confessed to systematic lying, and it's a bunch of fad diets driven by desperate emotional insecurities. And ~all-meat diets are, in general, far worse than than sugar pills for dealing with the real problems.