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I don't get it. You want all the benefits of eating meat without actually eating meat? I understand people have moral objections to the meat industry, but if yo

I don't get it. You want all the benefits of eating meat without actually eating meat? I understand people have moral objections to the meat industry, but if you are doing it for health reasons you might as well just eat real meat. Research has shown quite conclusively that pre-historic humans survived on a diet rich in animal products, particularly animal fat.

uptown 14y ago
The article spells it out pretty clearly: "Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China." "Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)." The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.
- mberning 14y ago
  Ok, so rather than feeding people the genuine article let's feed them some laboratory created faux-meat. That sounds like a great way to be healthy. I don't disagree that we need to find more sustainable ways to feed ourselves, but we also need to be feeding ourselves quality food that matches our biological needs. Not whatever is most conveniently and cheaply produced.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    You're making the assumption that the laboratory meet will somehow automatically be worse, and that it is whatever "is most conveniently and cheaply produced". I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it. But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances: - Consider custom-adapted marbling. - Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal? - New types of "meat"? Yes please. - Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that. While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.
  - Retric 14y ago
    There is not enough farm land to provide 7 billion people a western diet including 1500+ calories from beef every day. The only way to get close to that is to replace most farm land with solar panels supplement that with a lot of nuclear and wind energy and then factory farm plant matter using LED lighting in buildings and feed that to cows in another building. Is it possible, sure but economics just a question of what your willing to sacrifice for what you want. And significant quantities of fake meat is probably a much better option for everyone involved.
- jonknee 14y ago
  > The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth. For beef, sure. But chickens are very quick to produce (2 months).
- gbog 14y ago
  I couldn't read the article because the font size is too small and the left "share bar" gets over the text when magnified. Anyway, to reply to the "statisfy China" thing, let me tell to the author of this "invention" that he is solving a solved problem: China has a long track record of feeding its numerous populace with doufu (tofu) instead of meat. I was very impressed the first time I saw a countryside market. They were selling big doufu pieces in different street shops, and only one butcher was selling a few pieces of hanging meat. The trick is to actually use little pieces of pork in a doufu-based dish, and many spices, like the delicious Mapo doufu. Even when eating meat-based Chinese dishes, like Huiguorou, you will eat much less meat than in a classic Western course. So, in fact, the solution to the possible future problem of Chinese people eating too much meat is not to feed them with that chicken ersatz, it is to avoid Westernization to go that far. I have a few proposals in this direction that should be common sense: - Stop using hamburgers as the logo for food in games, apps and other places. Only a very tiny part of the world regularly eat these nocive things. - Stop displaying actors eating snacks in movies. (We already stopped showing them smoking, except for the villains). Going at any time to the fridge and eating something out of it is a very recent and nocive habit that should not be shown as the normal "American Dream" life in successful mainstream movies. - Stop this cliché about disgusting intestine-based dishes or other "un-noble" parts. I am no vegetarian, but I think animal we kill for food should be eaten to the last piece of eatable tissue. In China, we (yes, me too) eat tendon, kidneys, fish tripes and heads, duck tongues, pig feet, everything, and cooked in hundres of different manners. It is healthy: eating meat or fish becomes a pleasure by its diversity, not by its volume.
mintplant 14y ago
Out of curiosity, what was the average life expectancy of said humans?
- maw 14y ago
  That's a good point. You really cut to the heart of the matter—no oversimplification here!—and I applaud you. None of our distant ancestors suffered from poor hygiene. Not was there ever famine, and they never fought among themselves. Life was pretty much perfect back then, if we disregard that fatty and meaty diet.
- altrego99 14y ago
  18 years. Obviously then they did not die of old age. I wonder then, how did the mechanism of dieing of senility evolve?
eslachance 14y ago
I really wish people would stop comparing our current 100-year lifespan with pre-historic humans where someone my age (31 years old) would have been considered an elder (if even still alive!). "Fake" meat tastes and looks like the real thing, but it has none of its downsides (look up "Forks over Knives" for some decent documentary on that. take with a grain of salt).
- mberning 14y ago
  Wrong. You are simply misinformed. Infant mortality skews the average lifespan severely. Take out infant mortality and people lived long and robust lives, without the help of modern medicine.
  - uptown 14y ago
    So you're suggesting we compare how old people live by ignoring all those people that died? In 500 years if the average life-span is 200 years will we ignore the people that died during this era in their 70's?
    - jhales 14y ago
      no, it's a common misunderstanding of the lifespan metric. mberning is pointing out that the 'maximum' lifespan hasn't really changed. The change has primarily come from infant mortality so one possibility is once infant mortality is eliminated we would no longer see gains in life span.
    - mberning 14y ago
      So on one hand you are saying that a pre-historic diet leads to an early death, but you also want to count deaths that have nothing to do with said diet? Not so fast. Infant mortality has everything to do with medical care and very little to do with the diet. That's why infant deaths should be thrown out when talking about the diet. If I have 3 people, one died at age 0, one died at age 50 and one died at age 60, the average lifespan is about 36.5. Clearly misleading. I don't think people realize just how high infant mortality was prior to the advent of modern medicine.
bunderbunder 14y ago
I can't say I know if vegetarianism is more or less healthy than being an omnivore, but I feel pretty confident in saying that we won't find the key to health in slavishly attempting to copy the habits of people who weren't anywhere near as healthy as we are. Pre-historic humans, for example, had a life expectancy of about 30.
- Spearchucker 14y ago
  That number (30) was mostly due to infant mortality rates. It's a very misleading metric.
  - gadders 14y ago
    I've always wondered what the number would be if you eliminated everyone who died before, say, the age of 5.
- pitt1980 14y ago
  One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
Sodaware 14y ago
Aside from moral reasons, it will be interesting to see if creating fake meat is more energy efficient than existing farming methods.
- amalag 14y ago
  According to the Water Education Foundation, it takes 2,464 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef in California. In contrast, only 25 gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of wheat.
JonnieCache 14y ago
Beef produces 130 kilocalories/square metre/year. Chicken produces 190 kilocalories/square metre/year. Rice produces 1250 kilocalories/square metre/year. I assume soy is similar. There are many other similar calculations to be made regarding demands placed on the land. With 7 billion people and counting, they're important numbers. Source: http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1991/land.html http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1991/land.html
- geogra4 14y ago
  Exactly. Vegetarian diets are the most efficient use of natural resources.
- wklauss 14y ago
  If you only take into account caloric production yes, meat is not very efficient. But there is a reason humans started to eat and domesticate animals. They provide us with fur, an other byproducts (fertilizer, etc...) I understand the need to find some substitute with 7 billion people in the planet, but i think grown-in-a-lab meat will probably be a better alternative in the near future.
  - djKianoosh 14y ago
    When people fly airplanes across the world, do they not look out the window and see what I see? LOTS of unused land. As in, most of the planet. There's plenty more room out there for everything we need. Only political borders (placed by us humans) prevent us from using all available land/resources to provide for all of humanity.
- mildavw 14y ago
  It seems like collectively changing our diet is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Our population will continue to grow exponentially as it has for the last several million years no matter what we eat. If somehow we avoid a massive die-off as has happened with other species due to, say, rapid climate change, a meteor, or a super virus, and actually survive to the point where the acreage of food producing land has a significant effect, then our population will be so large that one or two generations of growth will overwhelm the efficiency gains we make due to diet. Put another way, if food producing acreage is the limiting factor for humans then as omnivores we may grow for 150,000 generations, as herbivores we may make it to 150,005 generations. Either way, growth will have to stop and we will have wiped out massive numbers of other species.
cleary 14y ago
I've also gathered some conclusive evidence: I don't eat meats, and I haven't died (not even once!). But seriously, the fact that 10,000 years ago human-type creatures ate a lot of meat should be like number 76 on your list of arguments in the sustainability of diets debate.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mberning 14y ago
  Sorry, I'm greedy when it comes to my own wellbeing. Do I really care how sustainable my diet is if I have to suffer for 20-30 years with ailments the can be chalked up due to the deficiency of the diet itself?
SwellJoe 14y ago
"Research has shown quite conclusively that pre-historic humans survived on a diet rich in animal products, particularly animal fat." No, it really hasn't. It just hasn't. This is one of those crazy truisms that becomes difficult to even debunk because it has no science behind it...but the people pushing it do so with such gusto and such complete confidence that people simply believe their unfounded assertions. It's a tiny sect of science deniers that selectively choose evidence and ignore everything that conflicts with their particular preference. The "paleo diet" is based entirely on a fictional retelling of human history, and it's about time it stopped being promoted as "research" or "conclusive". Just the most recent article on the subject, but there have been dozens or hundreds of others: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/hu...
- mberning 14y ago
  Yes, it has, and a blog post linking to a paper about neanderthals does not count as proof of your assertion. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any neanderthals walking around lately, so the fact that they may have subsisted on plants doesn't say much about homo sapiens.
  - SwellJoe 14y ago
    "Yes, it has" is not a very good citation. The evidence of human diets spans millennia, including pre-humans and early human populations. There are a very few bits of evidence of isolated populations eating what could be called a "paleo diet" by modern definitions (with a lot more bugs and grubs and nasty stuff like brains and organs from rats), but on the whole, humans have always been omnivores, eating anything remotely edible within their grasp, including mammals, reptiles, plants, fish, insects, fungus...if an alien landed during early human times, they'd have probably tried to eat it, too. But, most populations in most places were eating plenty of plant matter, including grains, and some of the oldest food evidence we have includes grains. The idea that the early human diet was nearly all meat is a highly selective reading of the evidence; picking and choosing from only those populations in those locations where meat was the only available food source. I don't want to attack your deeply felt beliefs, as you seem to have a personal investment in the paleo cult, but it's simply not borne out by science. Also, I strongly recommend not taking ones anthropology lessons from fad diet book authors. Citations: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.ht... http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/humans-feasting-on-grains-for-at-least-100000-years/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/... And a fun discussion of the woo factor of the "paleo diet": http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet Note that I'm not arguing that people should be consuming a bunch of white bread and refined sugar. Knowing the paleo diet is based on junk science doesn't mean I think the modern first world diet is sane.

uptown 14y ago

The article spells it out pretty clearly: "Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China." "Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)." The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.

mberning 14y ago
Ok, so rather than feeding people the genuine article let's feed them some laboratory created faux-meat. That sounds like a great way to be healthy. I don't disagree that we need to find more sustainable ways to feed ourselves, but we also need to be feeding ourselves quality food that matches our biological needs. Not whatever is most conveniently and cheaply produced.
- vidarh 14y ago
  You're making the assumption that the laboratory meet will somehow automatically be worse, and that it is whatever "is most conveniently and cheaply produced". I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it. But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances: - Consider custom-adapted marbling. - Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal? - New types of "meat"? Yes please. - Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that. While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.
- Retric 14y ago
  There is not enough farm land to provide 7 billion people a western diet including 1500+ calories from beef every day. The only way to get close to that is to replace most farm land with solar panels supplement that with a lot of nuclear and wind energy and then factory farm plant matter using LED lighting in buildings and feed that to cows in another building. Is it possible, sure but economics just a question of what your willing to sacrifice for what you want. And significant quantities of fake meat is probably a much better option for everyone involved.
jonknee 14y ago
> The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth. For beef, sure. But chickens are very quick to produce (2 months).
gbog 14y ago
I couldn't read the article because the font size is too small and the left "share bar" gets over the text when magnified. Anyway, to reply to the "statisfy China" thing, let me tell to the author of this "invention" that he is solving a solved problem: China has a long track record of feeding its numerous populace with doufu (tofu) instead of meat. I was very impressed the first time I saw a countryside market. They were selling big doufu pieces in different street shops, and only one butcher was selling a few pieces of hanging meat. The trick is to actually use little pieces of pork in a doufu-based dish, and many spices, like the delicious Mapo doufu. Even when eating meat-based Chinese dishes, like Huiguorou, you will eat much less meat than in a classic Western course. So, in fact, the solution to the possible future problem of Chinese people eating too much meat is not to feed them with that chicken ersatz, it is to avoid Westernization to go that far. I have a few proposals in this direction that should be common sense: - Stop using hamburgers as the logo for food in games, apps and other places. Only a very tiny part of the world regularly eat these nocive things. - Stop displaying actors eating snacks in movies. (We already stopped showing them smoking, except for the villains). Going at any time to the fridge and eating something out of it is a very recent and nocive habit that should not be shown as the normal "American Dream" life in successful mainstream movies. - Stop this cliché about disgusting intestine-based dishes or other "un-noble" parts. I am no vegetarian, but I think animal we kill for food should be eaten to the last piece of eatable tissue. In China, we (yes, me too) eat tendon, kidneys, fish tripes and heads, duck tongues, pig feet, everything, and cooked in hundres of different manners. It is healthy: eating meat or fish becomes a pleasure by its diversity, not by its volume.

mintplant 14y ago

Out of curiosity, what was the average life expectancy of said humans?

maw 14y ago
That's a good point. You really cut to the heart of the matter—no oversimplification here!—and I applaud you. None of our distant ancestors suffered from poor hygiene. Not was there ever famine, and they never fought among themselves. Life was pretty much perfect back then, if we disregard that fatty and meaty diet.
altrego99 14y ago
18 years. Obviously then they did not die of old age. I wonder then, how did the mechanism of dieing of senility evolve?

eslachance 14y ago

I really wish people would stop comparing our current 100-year lifespan with pre-historic humans where someone my age (31 years old) would have been considered an elder (if even still alive!). "Fake" meat tastes and looks like the real thing, but it has none of its downsides (look up "Forks over Knives" for some decent documentary on that. take with a grain of salt).

mberning 14y ago
Wrong. You are simply misinformed. Infant mortality skews the average lifespan severely. Take out infant mortality and people lived long and robust lives, without the help of modern medicine.
- uptown 14y ago
  So you're suggesting we compare how old people live by ignoring all those people that died? In 500 years if the average life-span is 200 years will we ignore the people that died during this era in their 70's?
  - jhales 14y ago
    no, it's a common misunderstanding of the lifespan metric. mberning is pointing out that the 'maximum' lifespan hasn't really changed. The change has primarily come from infant mortality so one possibility is once infant mortality is eliminated we would no longer see gains in life span.
  - mberning 14y ago
    So on one hand you are saying that a pre-historic diet leads to an early death, but you also want to count deaths that have nothing to do with said diet? Not so fast. Infant mortality has everything to do with medical care and very little to do with the diet. That's why infant deaths should be thrown out when talking about the diet. If I have 3 people, one died at age 0, one died at age 50 and one died at age 60, the average lifespan is about 36.5. Clearly misleading. I don't think people realize just how high infant mortality was prior to the advent of modern medicine.

bunderbunder 14y ago

I can't say I know if vegetarianism is more or less healthy than being an omnivore, but I feel pretty confident in saying that we won't find the key to health in slavishly attempting to copy the habits of people who weren't anywhere near as healthy as we are. Pre-historic humans, for example, had a life expectancy of about 30.

Spearchucker 14y ago
That number (30) was mostly due to infant mortality rates. It's a very misleading metric.
- gadders 14y ago
  I've always wondered what the number would be if you eliminated everyone who died before, say, the age of 5.
pitt1980 14y ago
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...

Sodaware 14y ago

Aside from moral reasons, it will be interesting to see if creating fake meat is more energy efficient than existing farming methods.

amalag 14y ago
According to the Water Education Foundation, it takes 2,464 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef in California. In contrast, only 25 gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of wheat.

JonnieCache 14y ago

Beef produces 130 kilocalories/square metre/year. Chicken produces 190 kilocalories/square metre/year. Rice produces 1250 kilocalories/square metre/year. I assume soy is similar. There are many other similar calculations to be made regarding demands placed on the land. With 7 billion people and counting, they're important numbers. Source: http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1991/land.html http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1991/land.html

geogra4 14y ago
Exactly. Vegetarian diets are the most efficient use of natural resources.
wklauss 14y ago
If you only take into account caloric production yes, meat is not very efficient. But there is a reason humans started to eat and domesticate animals. They provide us with fur, an other byproducts (fertilizer, etc...) I understand the need to find some substitute with 7 billion people in the planet, but i think grown-in-a-lab meat will probably be a better alternative in the near future.
- djKianoosh 14y ago
  When people fly airplanes across the world, do they not look out the window and see what I see? LOTS of unused land. As in, most of the planet. There's plenty more room out there for everything we need. Only political borders (placed by us humans) prevent us from using all available land/resources to provide for all of humanity.
mildavw 14y ago
It seems like collectively changing our diet is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Our population will continue to grow exponentially as it has for the last several million years no matter what we eat. If somehow we avoid a massive die-off as has happened with other species due to, say, rapid climate change, a meteor, or a super virus, and actually survive to the point where the acreage of food producing land has a significant effect, then our population will be so large that one or two generations of growth will overwhelm the efficiency gains we make due to diet. Put another way, if food producing acreage is the limiting factor for humans then as omnivores we may grow for 150,000 generations, as herbivores we may make it to 150,005 generations. Either way, growth will have to stop and we will have wiped out massive numbers of other species.

cleary 14y ago

I've also gathered some conclusive evidence: I don't eat meats, and I haven't died (not even once!). But seriously, the fact that 10,000 years ago human-type creatures ate a lot of meat should be like number 76 on your list of arguments in the sustainability of diets debate.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mberning 14y ago
Sorry, I'm greedy when it comes to my own wellbeing. Do I really care how sustainable my diet is if I have to suffer for 20-30 years with ailments the can be chalked up due to the deficiency of the diet itself?

SwellJoe 14y ago

"Research has shown quite conclusively that pre-historic humans survived on a diet rich in animal products, particularly animal fat." No, it really hasn't. It just hasn't. This is one of those crazy truisms that becomes difficult to even debunk because it has no science behind it...but the people pushing it do so with such gusto and such complete confidence that people simply believe their unfounded assertions. It's a tiny sect of science deniers that selectively choose evidence and ignore everything that conflicts with their particular preference. The "paleo diet" is based entirely on a fictional retelling of human history, and it's about time it stopped being promoted as "research" or "conclusive". Just the most recent article on the subject, but there have been dozens or hundreds of others: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/hu...

mberning 14y ago
Yes, it has, and a blog post linking to a paper about neanderthals does not count as proof of your assertion. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any neanderthals walking around lately, so the fact that they may have subsisted on plants doesn't say much about homo sapiens.
- SwellJoe 14y ago
  "Yes, it has" is not a very good citation. The evidence of human diets spans millennia, including pre-humans and early human populations. There are a very few bits of evidence of isolated populations eating what could be called a "paleo diet" by modern definitions (with a lot more bugs and grubs and nasty stuff like brains and organs from rats), but on the whole, humans have always been omnivores, eating anything remotely edible within their grasp, including mammals, reptiles, plants, fish, insects, fungus...if an alien landed during early human times, they'd have probably tried to eat it, too. But, most populations in most places were eating plenty of plant matter, including grains, and some of the oldest food evidence we have includes grains. The idea that the early human diet was nearly all meat is a highly selective reading of the evidence; picking and choosing from only those populations in those locations where meat was the only available food source. I don't want to attack your deeply felt beliefs, as you seem to have a personal investment in the paleo cult, but it's simply not borne out by science. Also, I strongly recommend not taking ones anthropology lessons from fad diet book authors. Citations: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.ht... http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/humans-feasting-on-grains-for-at-least-100000-years/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/... And a fun discussion of the woo factor of the "paleo diet": http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet Note that I'm not arguing that people should be consuming a bunch of white bread and refined sugar. Knowing the paleo diet is based on junk science doesn't mean I think the modern first world diet is sane.