4 ms·

Fatty acids found in meat and poultry may be beneficial to human metabolism

23 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
It'd be pretty amazing, given that we're omnivores, if our omnivore diet was NOT beneficial to us. All things in moderation of course, and in our evolutionary past meat was a much smaller part of our diet than it is today.
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  That’s just factually incorrect meat has been the majority of our diet up until the neolithic
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    Look at the diet of Chimpanzees or modern hunter-gatherers. Meat after a successful hunt is more of a treat, not the main part of the diet.
- stefantalpalaru 2y ago
  [dead]
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago. Sapiens-Sapiens continued this omnivore tradition from the 250ky divergence from neandertal and denisovian It wasn’t until 50ky ago that the concept of foraging and farming for non-ungulate protein became needed with the collapse of megafauna There are volumes and volumes of anthropological and biological support for humans being biologically and ecologically tied to living with and consuming large herbivores. Any nomadic pastoralist community demonstrates this be default with blood and milk being staples, fresh liver as “treats” and fresh cow dung being used as building material. Vegetarianism, irrespective of how you view things “ethically” diverges significantly with what the human body expects to consume. Can you survive on rice and beans? Kinda - but the centuries of refinements that have been required to make what we call staple grains, consumable by humans has been absolutely wild to the extent that are staple grains look nothing like their origins, which means they certainly don’t align with human biology. Golden Rice is a perfect example of how we’ve had to dope and nutrient augment what are considered “basic” staples because they do not provide the necessary vitamins and minerals that you need for sustaining life - in a way that the body efficiently processes them into amino-acids and etc…that we run on Pasture fed cattle in the other hand, produce be default safe meat that has the nutrient and vitamin profile, at an uptake rate by our biological system, that surpasses all other possible nutrient transfer mechanisms that we are aware of.
- tdb7893 2y ago
  "Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago" I'm pretty skeptical that this specific type of meat was a majority of the diet by itself and I can't find anything to actually back that up. I struggle to find anything to back up most of what you said but the start was what jumped out at me the most.
  - sigmoid10 2y ago
    This metastudy seems to confirm everything the other commenter said: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 It seems early hominids gradually went from omnivores to almost exclusive carnivores with a strong preference for megafauna - up until their prey's decline and their subsequent return to other primary nutrient sources. While exact diets are hard to reconstruct and subject of debate, there seems to be little doubt that humans hunted said megafauna to extinction, which also had a significant effect on human evolution in many ways. The development of our larger brain needed lots of energy for example and hunting provided 10x more energy per hour of effort than gathering plant based nutrients. Larger brains generally seem to trend with consumption of more energy dense foods. Our ability to store much more fat and fast for longer times than other primates also seems to have developed from the need to hunt primarily large animals dispersed over wide areas.
    - AndrewKemendo 2y ago
      Thank you. I have some other references in my papers but this was a good reference.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Just look at your teeth. We are built to be omnivores.
  - himinlomax 2y ago
    Our teeth says we are built to eat cooked food.
metalman 2y ago
the only human population that is provably subsisting on a meat diet are the Inuit and they like all other artic meat eaters,dont eat a lot of the meat,its the fat that is needed most,to the point that even when starving,a creature will not eat seal meat,if the hide and fat layer are gone as there is a higher energy penalty in eating frozen meat than can be recoverd. Meat was important,but all of the archiological evidence points to it bieng only a small portion of total diet,BUT,there was no replacement for hides,and the siniews used to sew them,especialy into foot wear its a rabbit hole I will resist disertating now
- caeril 2y ago
  Good point. If you move the goalposts such that the word "meat" is specifically defined as only lean skeletal muscle tissue with the fat trimmed away with surgical precision, you can win the argument. Sure, if you speak to actual carnivores, they will make it clear that fat, offal, sinews, marrow, etc are all critical parts of their diet, but if you just employ selective redefinition that has no bearing on actual reality, the argument stands strong in your own mental vacuum. I remember doing the same thing as a thirteen year old at local Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments. Winning debates by stretching dictionaries is a solid move, even if it doesn't get you very far at the nonlocal level. It's always critically important that our Straw Men are constructed perfectly, to avoid pesky and annoying limitations of the real world.
LWArcher 2y ago
[dead]

23 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

It'd be pretty amazing, given that we're omnivores, if our omnivore diet was NOT beneficial to us. All things in moderation of course, and in our evolutionary past meat was a much smaller part of our diet than it is today.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago
That’s just factually incorrect meat has been the majority of our diet up until the neolithic
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Look at the diet of Chimpanzees or modern hunter-gatherers. Meat after a successful hunt is more of a treat, not the main part of the diet.
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago. Sapiens-Sapiens continued this omnivore tradition from the 250ky divergence from neandertal and denisovian It wasn’t until 50ky ago that the concept of foraging and farming for non-ungulate protein became needed with the collapse of megafauna There are volumes and volumes of anthropological and biological support for humans being biologically and ecologically tied to living with and consuming large herbivores. Any nomadic pastoralist community demonstrates this be default with blood and milk being staples, fresh liver as “treats” and fresh cow dung being used as building material. Vegetarianism, irrespective of how you view things “ethically” diverges significantly with what the human body expects to consume. Can you survive on rice and beans? Kinda - but the centuries of refinements that have been required to make what we call staple grains, consumable by humans has been absolutely wild to the extent that are staple grains look nothing like their origins, which means they certainly don’t align with human biology. Golden Rice is a perfect example of how we’ve had to dope and nutrient augment what are considered “basic” staples because they do not provide the necessary vitamins and minerals that you need for sustaining life - in a way that the body efficiently processes them into amino-acids and etc…that we run on Pasture fed cattle in the other hand, produce be default safe meat that has the nutrient and vitamin profile, at an uptake rate by our biological system, that surpasses all other possible nutrient transfer mechanisms that we are aware of.

tdb7893 2y ago
"Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago" I'm pretty skeptical that this specific type of meat was a majority of the diet by itself and I can't find anything to actually back that up. I struggle to find anything to back up most of what you said but the start was what jumped out at me the most.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  This metastudy seems to confirm everything the other commenter said: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247 It seems early hominids gradually went from omnivores to almost exclusive carnivores with a strong preference for megafauna - up until their prey's decline and their subsequent return to other primary nutrient sources. While exact diets are hard to reconstruct and subject of debate, there seems to be little doubt that humans hunted said megafauna to extinction, which also had a significant effect on human evolution in many ways. The development of our larger brain needed lots of energy for example and hunting provided 10x more energy per hour of effort than gathering plant based nutrients. Larger brains generally seem to trend with consumption of more energy dense foods. Our ability to store much more fat and fast for longer times than other primates also seems to have developed from the need to hunt primarily large animals dispersed over wide areas.
  - AndrewKemendo 2y ago
    Thank you. I have some other references in my papers but this was a good reference.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Just look at your teeth. We are built to be omnivores.
- himinlomax 2y ago
  Our teeth says we are built to eat cooked food.

metalman 2y ago

the only human population that is provably subsisting on a meat diet are the Inuit and they like all other artic meat eaters,dont eat a lot of the meat,its the fat that is needed most,to the point that even when starving,a creature will not eat seal meat,if the hide and fat layer are gone as there is a higher energy penalty in eating frozen meat than can be recoverd. Meat was important,but all of the archiological evidence points to it bieng only a small portion of total diet,BUT,there was no replacement for hides,and the siniews used to sew them,especialy into foot wear its a rabbit hole I will resist disertating now

caeril 2y ago
Good point. If you move the goalposts such that the word "meat" is specifically defined as only lean skeletal muscle tissue with the fat trimmed away with surgical precision, you can win the argument. Sure, if you speak to actual carnivores, they will make it clear that fat, offal, sinews, marrow, etc are all critical parts of their diet, but if you just employ selective redefinition that has no bearing on actual reality, the argument stands strong in your own mental vacuum. I remember doing the same thing as a thirteen year old at local Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments. Winning debates by stretching dictionaries is a solid move, even if it doesn't get you very far at the nonlocal level. It's always critically important that our Straw Men are constructed perfectly, to avoid pesky and annoying limitations of the real world.

LWArcher 2y ago

[dead]