> And eating meat's fine (from a health perspective, if not ethical necessarily). We've been eating it for a couple of millions of years.
The current theory is that we developed sweating and bipedal walking to be endurance hunters, i.e. running after a prey animal until it is too exhausted to run any further. Tool use and development were also driven in part by hunting (spears, atlatl, bow and arrow, skinning knives etc.). Overall humans are omnivores, as evidenced by tooth layout. Some populations still manage to live on primarily meat-based diets (Inuit), albeit with some difficulties.
The main issue is the amount of meat: Hunting was difficult and dangerous, limiting how much meat we got. Being able to eat meat every day for almost every meal is a recent development and is a major difference to prehistorical diets. Plus, factory-farmed meat is significantly different from free-range animals w.r.t fat, hormone and antibiotics content.
I always find it baffling appealing to the fact that "eating meat is lindy" - i.e. something stone age humans and us did for hundreds of thousands of years, hence healthy, at least it won't kill you.
Because it ignores the fact that average life expectancy was significantly less than it is today - why would you want to take stone age humans as health role models? In fact average life expectancy almost doubled globally from high 40s to high 70s only very recently - well after we stopped eating meat all the time.
In 1924 the President of the United States’s son died. A man with access to the best medicine and doctors of the time during an insdustrialized age was not able to save his 16 year old son. He died from a bacterial infection…on his toe…that he got from playing on the White House lawn barefoot. In 1924 they were not able to save him from such a “simple” ailment. We underestimate the advancements in modern medicine and how easy it was to die historically. You could be the fittest, strongest vegetarian in 300BC and bad piece of bread could end you. Correlating meat consumption with life expectancy is just foolish.
I would assume the early diets would be feast and starve. You kill an animal and the entire tribe gets to feast for a few days, then you don't eat a whole lot until you kill another animal. Salt eventually flattened this out by being a preservative.
I'm sure there were gathering of berries and plants to fill in between the feast. I mean they were called hunter / gatherers.
> Plus, factory-farmed meat is significantly different from free-range animals w.r.t fat, hormone and antibiotics content.
A version of that argument applies to most things you would buy at a grocery store, e.g. modern apples are a lot sweeter than what our ancestors would've been accustomed to.
Yes. Curiously, it seems the Mediterranean diet helps you live longer, unless you are poor. The hypothesis is that poor people just eat a shitty version of the Mediterranean diet (think cheap fruit and veg, with less fresh) because they can't afford the decent one and so don't get the benefits. I think many of the studies are but sufficiently fine grained to pick out the nuances.
The current theory is that we developed sweating and bipedal walking to be endurance hunters, i.e. running after a prey animal until it is too exhausted to run any further. Tool use and development were also driven in part by hunting (spears, atlatl, bow and arrow, skinning knives etc.). Overall humans are omnivores, as evidenced by tooth layout. Some populations still manage to live on primarily meat-based diets (Inuit), albeit with some difficulties.
The main issue is the amount of meat: Hunting was difficult and dangerous, limiting how much meat we got. Being able to eat meat every day for almost every meal is a recent development and is a major difference to prehistorical diets. Plus, factory-farmed meat is significantly different from free-range animals w.r.t fat, hormone and antibiotics content.