Throughout history, whenever human beings lived closely together under conditions of high population density, we ate plant based diets. The main reason for that is pretty simple: Conversion of calories from one layer of the trophic pyramid to the next is inefficient. For every 100 calories of feed, cows produce 1 calorie in beef. For every 100 grams of protein fed to cattle, you get 4 grams of protein in the form of beef.
If the whole world wanted to eat the diet that Americans eat, it wouldn’t be possible, we simply don’t have the physical space on our planet. That’s why throughout history, almost every civilization had grains as their staple crop. Americans spray dangerous pesticides like glyphosate on their crops that kill your gut bacteria, so many Americans who suffered from various health problems have stopped eating grain.
Often, that does lead them to feel better for a while. But for whatever reason, they never bother asking themselves why their grandparents had no issue eating grain, whereas it makes them sick. And rather than figuring out how to get food produced from healthy grains produced with few pesticides like rye, they decide to stop eating grain altogether.
Instead of looking towards healthy ancestral diets, Americans look towards the furthest corners of the planet, to find people who live on a diet that appeals to them: Few plants, mostly meat. Meat is very affordable to modern Americans, because of a giant system of subsidies for the grains fed to the animals they eat:
Meat and other animals products are made artificially affordable through the use of these subsidies.
Americans will try to defend the diet that is made affordable to them through various subsidies, by pointing at various tribes where people only eat meat. However, almost all these tribes have a few things in common with each other, that they don’t have in common with Americans:
-Low population density
-Genetic adaptations to their diet
-Consumption of fermented meat
-Consumption of wild animals not exposed to antibiotics, with a high rate of microbial diversity
-Consumption of a wide range of organs
-Unique climate, with freezing temperatures that affects the growth rate of pathogenic bacteria
And so the outcome seen in Americans will be different from what we see in remote hunter-gatherer tribes.
Your gut microbiome is influenced by what you eat. This is probably not new information for you. However, what you may be unaware of, is that every species also has a population microbiome. Your own gut microbiome, is influenced by the people you interact with. Compared to the other great apes, our own gut microbiome has very little diversity.
Sometimes in nature, we witness something called a state-shift. As an example, when we remove enough fish from the ocean, jellyfish take over. However, once we stop fishing, the fish don’t return, because the high number of jellyfish have now caused a state-shift in the ecosystem. You can flip an ecosystem from one stable state (fish dominated) into another alternative stable state (jellyfish dominated).
Similarly, human beings house an ecosystem in our own gut, where various bacteria have to figure out how to adapt to their environment, an environment that is in turn created by various other bacteria. Our gut microbiome seems to give rise to various alternative stable states too. Different groups of bacteria work together, to create the kind of conditions under which they can thrive. Other groups of bacteria create other conditions and so the gut microbiome can flip between different relatively stable states.
Unfortunately, not all of these stable states will be in your favor. There are anti-inflammatory stable states, with bacteria that get along well with your own human cells and organs. On the other hand, there are also various pro-inflammatory stable states, that can lead to inflammatory bowel disease and other illnesses.
When you engage in various strange dietary experiments, you’re going to be causing changes to the composition of your gut microbiome. In particular, we see that when you eat a diet high in meat and low in plant foods, you end up favoring the proliferation of various Clostridium species. This is seen in humans too.
On the other hand, a diet high in fiber protects against Clostridium infections. Those with the 20% highest amount of soluble dietary fiber in their diet have a 91% decreased risk of carrying Clostridium Difficile compared to those with the lowest amount of dietary fiber.
In recent years, we’ve seen a growing number of Clostridium Difficile infections in people. This bacteria spreads from person to person, if you live in the household of someone infected, your own risk of getting it is 12 times higher. In 2015, this bacteria killed 15,000 people. A single Clostridium Difficile infection increases your risk of further infections in the future.
As the diversity and health of the human gut microbiome declines, the risk of getting infected increases. However, it’s also a population level problem, it’s not just a matter of your own individual gut health. After all, to be infected, you need to be exposed to someone who carries it. If everyone around you is eating healthy food high in dietary fiber, you’re less likely to be exposed to these bacteria than if everyone around you is on some keto/carnivore/zerocarb fad diet they learned about on social media.
Between 1999 and 2004, deaths from this bacteria increased four-fold in the United States. Between 1999 and 2012, deaths from the bacteria increased from 793, to 7,739 in the United States a tenfold increase. And as I mentioned earlier, in 2015 deaths were estimated at 15,000 people. Some of the increase is due to aging, but most of it has to be caused by other factors. In 2020, the estimate was that this bacteria killed 20,000 Americans.
What are the factors responsible for this? Well Americans have fallen in love with their low-carb high animal protein diets, they think they are becoming obese because they eat grains, which almost every other culture on Earth regularly consumes without suffering real problems. Americans have destroyed their gut health with their fad diets and as a consequence they are now starting to suffer growing deaths from these pathogenic bacteria that are spreading from one person to another. You might not notice the problem yourself if you’re still young, but you’re also spreading these bacteria to people in your own household.
This is the important thing to understand: People in a good state of health, with a healthy plant-based diet, high in fiber and fermented foods, spread healthy benevolent bacteria to their peers. People in a poor state of health, with highly reduced gut microbial diversity, are spreading dangerous pathogen bacteria to their peers.
You can’t just say “well if you don’t want to get infected you need to change your diet”, because’it’s not just a matter of individual health, it’s a population-wide problem. Although it can damage your gut at any age, the elderly are at particularly high risk from this bacteria regardless of what they do, as gut microbiome diversity declines with age anyway.
Let’s take a look at one of the main ambassadors of the Carnivore diet, Mikhaila Peterson. Mikhaila only eats beef. In February 2019, she found out she had a Clostridium Difficile infection. She then began eating poop. Yes, she had to take an oral fecal matter transplant, in an attempt to cure her gut health. Of course it didn’t work, because she kept eating this retarded carnivore diet. And in the meantime, her gut that has turned into a proper host for Clostridium Difficile will continue to spread the bacteria to others in her environment.
For an individual, the gut microbiome changes that cause these problems are often reversible. Start eating a lot of dietary fiber (wholegrain bread, plenty of vegetables, etc) and your own gut will tend to recover. However, a lot of people follow American low-carb fad diets and then have children. If the bacteria are very rare in your own gut, you often don’t pass them on to your children. In other words, we’re witnessing a decrease in gut microbial diversity, because Americans simply can’t pass on the right bacteria to their children.
And let’s go back to what I originally told you, the alternative stable state. As Americans descend down their path of trying to be on top of the trophic pyramid, consuming vast amounts of meat that are only affordable to them because they are the world’s richest people who can afford to feed their cattle soybeans imported from Brazil and utilizing a disproportionately large share of our planet’s photosynthetic capacity, they’re going to be causing changes to their gut that are very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
A vegan or vegetarian diet promotes a healthy gut microbiome. Unfortunately, Americans are settling on the opposite, with inevitably catastrophic consequences. In the United States, Crohn’s disease is growing by 3.4% every year and ulcerative colitis is growing by 2.8% per year. The situation seems worst in the United States, where inflammatory bowel disease in children under 5 is growing by 7% per year. And what’s the big risk factor? Animal protein.
So this is essentially what’s happening. Americans want to eat high fat high animal protein diets. These diets work pretty well if your goal is to build a lot of muscle. However, these diets don’t work well to maintain healthy gut microbiomes. Instead, they encourage the spread and evolution of dangerous bacteria that damage your gut and kill people.
Keep in mind, there is always a big delay in these issues. The impact of the rising popularity of Keto and low-carb diets will take decades to reveal its complete impact. It can take years to kill off your healthy gut bacteria and it takes decades before we see the impact of children born to mothers following these fad diets.
I’ll end by ask you a simple question:
I can show you plenty of vegan and vegetarian centenarians. In India, vegetarianism has been widespread for millennia. However, how many centenarians can you show me who only eat meat and who have followed this diet for decades?
The keto diet is a fad diet, that became very popular in 2017. However, it doesn’t really provide people with lasting health, so they are now moving onto the next fad diet, the carnivore diet:
All of these dietary fads have no real history in any human culinary tradition. Your ancestors did not survive off a diet of coconut oil, avocado’s, cheese and pork lard. Your ancestors, whether you like it or not, probably ate most grains. If for whatever reason your body can’t thrive on grain, then that’s just a symptoms that you’re dealing with a deeper problem.
So my recommendation is as following:
-Eat more carbohydrates
-Eat more grains
-Eat more gluten
-Eat less meat
-Eat less dairy
Everything that online dipshits parroting each other are telling you is wrong and you can tell that it’s wrong by the very simple fact that your great-grandmother would not have followed any of these fad diets, she ate normal food.
I already know that Americans and culturally Americanized Europeans are not going to figure this out until it’s too late. They’re going to persist in their fad diets. For the first few years, it seems to work well. It’s very easy to build muscle on a high protein diet. Allergies, digestion problems seem to go down, because your body is exposed to less nutritional diversity, with less things that can upset your gut. However, just as walking less is not a solution to sore legs, eating less diverse food is not a solution to gut problems: The less you ask of your body, the less it’s going to give.
pescetarianism
Good idea.
I followed the low-carb diet or about two years and combined it with intervall fasting. I lost a good amount of weight, but as you wrote the gut problems stayed. Now I am just eating more carbs again, but I kept the intervall fasting routine. Even with bread and some chocolate in the evening hours my weight is somewhat stable, no jojo.
The question is, unless you ferment your food yourself, how are we supposed to get healthy fermented food. Or grains that are not shit load full of glyphosate?
Have you been listening to Huberman Lab?
https://hubermanlab.com/dr-justin-sonnenburg-how-to-build-maintain-and-repair-gut-health/
(note, there is a lot of dispute over the Mediterranean diet due to questions over the initial research, Dr. Sonnenberg does not address this)
Anyone against eating meat is on the side of Satan as the Bible teach3s eating meat. The problem in America is too many immigrants not 3ating meat. As you said there is more land to raise meat with less people. So ship the immigrants (and their anchor baby spawn) out and use more land to raise cows.
Thanks for this essay. I wonder if in addition to the weird food fads, the fact that so many of the “meals” consumed in the USA are wrapped in plastic and microwaved for up to 5 minutes, contributes its own bit of badness. In my last office job, people thought nothing of daily plastic-packaged lunches and snacks nuked for five minutes or longer. There was A LOT of chronic illness in my former workplace. Even among the relatively young.
Another aspect to consider is that in western consumer societies, you are eating sick animals. The force-fed cows, pigs & chickens on factory farms are grossly overweight, get no exercise, and eat food grown in pesticide-laden monocultures: soybeans, maize, sorghum, etc. Eating a supermarket chicken is like eating the human equivalent of an obese and unhealthy person you might see waddling down the street.
The meat of a wild deer or bird has different fats and oils from an active life grazing on diverse herbs and shrubs, along with associated insects. This ensures good nutrition with a broad range of minerals and organic compounds, which these animals evolved to thrive on.
Of course wealthy “paleo-people” will pay more for free-range and organic meats, and even wild-caught food (compare wild with farmed salmon and you will notice the difference immediately). But this is always the case, and individually the rich exploit this planet more than the masses.
The problem remains, and human overpopulation and planetary exploitation is the major issue. Gaia will resolve things in her own manner, of course.
>Another aspect to consider is that in western consumer societies, you are eating sick animals.
Yep, this is very true. It’s not smart to eat something that has to lead a miserable life for you to eat it.
Alright, so what’s the solution? Move to a country where grains aren’t spiked with glyphosate?
Intrestingly asians eats lots of carbs and even fermented meat, at least in SEA, and theyre famously slender and healthy. I have heard though that in more expensive chinese restaurants, in China that is, dont serve rice, since if you can afford it you rather eat meat, seafood or vegetables. Would be interesting to know the health statuses of rice eaters contra meat eaters in Asia.
“slender and healthy”
Depends HOW you define healthy. Russians use the word healthy to mean someone like Dereck Chisora “bolshoy zdorovy negr”.
I read the autobiography of an American who was shot down while bombing Vietnam. He said something like “the Vietnamese women used to ogle us big Americans, as most Vietnamese were dwarfish and feeble from malnutrition”
I think he said he was about 1.8m and 75kg which is not that humongous.
He weighed much less than that when they finally released him, cause they starved him, although what do people who fly bombing missions expect when captured by those who they have bombed, kindness?
He showed no remorse for flying his bombing missions, he didn’t really impress me.
Don’t get me wrong, I judge no-one by how big or small they are, I rate people on their character, and maybe brains, and how interesting they are, or looks (females).
20 000 deaths from this new bacteria, is that a lot out ~ 300 000 000 USonians?
I have had it with all these “cause of death” statistics. Surely a lot of people die from a combination of things?
I love your covid analysis.
This is almost all laughably untrue.
Covid analysis is spot on
However, this was largely wrongheaded with one huge hole of ignorance.
The largest change in the western diet of the last 150 years which is when our epidemic of chronic disease started exploding was the switch from animal fats (tallow, butter) to seed oils. Seed oils are largely made of Linoleic acid from 25% to as high as 75%. No animal fats are above 3% except for monogastric industrially fed like pigs and fowl that are fed seed oils and seed oil production waste.
Consumed Linoleic acid is incorporated into your cell membranes displacing saturated and mono unsaturated fat. It takes years to get it out. The 500 pounders in scootering in walmart are almost entirely full of Omega 6 fat as both stored fat and their cell walls. This is the cause of Chronic disease and Severe Covid. Linoleic Omega 6 gums up the mitochondrial cardiolipin causing a cellular energy crisis leading to cancer and other chronic disease. All Linoleic acid is highly prone to peroxidation during production, shelf time, and in the body. Its oxidation products like HNE are proven toxic and cancer causing agents.
Every packaged food you purchase has seed oils in it. Every restaurant from Mcdonalds to a 5 star will cook your food in it because it is so cheap.
Seed oils did not exist before 1850 1900 so if you did eat as your great great grandfathers as you suggest, you would have the same freedom from the chronic disease.
You are correct that Carb consumption cannot explain the historical facts we see, but seed oils can.
However if you are diabetic or prediabetic as 60 70% of Americans are; switching to no/low carb diet is far superior than insulin dosing the allopathic doctors are offering. So, the decision to go Keto and then red meat carnivore has been far less difficult then jumping direct to the root cause seed oils.
Fighting the Govt, agriculture, Food giants, Dieticians, Vegans, environmentalists all at once would be a long uncertain battle. Since 1000s are dying every day from seed oils, it is quicker to get out a ruminant meat and organs, dairy, honey, fruit message like Dr Paul Saladino as the accurate long term solution
been grain free low carb high fat paleo for 15 years.
Doing better now than when I started.
“Didnt ask why grandpa could eat grains”
WRONG we know
1) grains have NEVER been good for individual humans, only for population density. Pre agricultural humans that survived the dangers of childhood lived long healthy lives free of most tooth decay, arthritis, etc, reaching ages in the 70s, 80s even older and still functioning. Once agriculture came along, childhood got safer, but 40yos were old age cripples. Averages are a funny thing…
2) No one ate the wheat we eat now before they GMOd it. Modern Dwarf wheat, GMOd using mutagens to create an addictive, appetite boosting, opiate receptor binding, schozophrenia inducing gut disrupting toxic…but easy to grow cheaply, and then, as you mention, they covered it in glyphosate.
Grains are plant babies, specifically, grass plant babies. Grass cant grow big enough, spiky enough, or tough enough to avoid its children being eaten, so it puts toxins in there to fuck with animals that eat it, as a rule. Yes there are worse and better grains, modern wheat is pretty much the worst.
Humans evolved without much or any grain consumption, just fine, for 99% of our evolutionary history, and only ate them for the last little eye blink of 5KY to 10kY. Our microbiome is being fucked up by many things, going gluten free isnt one of them
Most tribes have something akin to staple foods. I know for example that the Penan of Malaysia have a root they eat almost daily. Moreover it is more than probable that grains were used before humans started to cultivate it (8000 BC).
The human body is not very efficient to use protein for energy and even today carbs are cheaper than proteins or fats. I think it was even more so in the past.
You need about 1.5 g/kg of protein and about 1 g/kg for muscle gain and hormonal function. For the rest of your caloric need you use carbs.
It is about efficient use of resources. Running on expensive stuff makes no sense if your body works just as well with cheaper energy.
root.
Root.
Notice nowhere in the word root, is the word “grain”.
No humans evolved eating grains, other than very recently, too recently to do anything except make a few minor mutations that mean we die LESS than we otherwise would eating grains, but still a lot.
You don’t HAVE to be low carb high fat paleo to be ancestral, but you do have to be good levels of animal fat and whole animal animal product, lowish carb relative to modern people, low *refined* carbs and sugars, and especially, mostly grain free and getting what carbs you eat from healthy sources humans have eaten for a long time, or the few modern sources that aren’t shit (which include the aforementioned root vegetables)
Plenty of evolutionary tribes round the world ate fatty meat, greens and root vegetables. quite a few ate less of the vegetables, more of the meat, with the average being more than half the calories from animal sources
the idea that grains are good because empires of slaves fed their slaves grains is something I thought this blog author would see past, since he is generally a pretty switched on fella
The abundance of carbs due to cultivation lead to a shortage of proteins and probably also fats due to population growth in early civilizations.
Are grains at fault because they are so effective?
That’s one way of looking at it, dump enough carbs in a system for population growth the diet quality and life quality of the population will suffer, unless and until other food osurces catch up, if they ever can, but it’s more than that. They are, as I said, plant babies, and contain various toxic and anti-nutrient (nutrient absorption disrupting) substances to protect themselves, when compared to something more evolutionarily precedented, like, say, a sweet potato.
There has been a R/K breeding strategy battle raging forever, one example is the tiny, weak, sick, but numerous R selected grain eating chinese vs the huge, strong, healthy, much less numerous meat eating mongols: The Mongols tended to win, and conquered huge swathes of land, but eventually the peoples they bred into took their genetics and returned to too much cheap grain eating, with predictable results.
Good times (population boom) ->(poorly fed) weak men-> Heard times (weak die off, those able to feed themelves well surive)
->Strong men, and similar systemic cycles.
Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Taking away all the microbiome stuff and going macro, food is energy, too much energy in the wrong place is pollution, and this applies to the human body. Energy concentrates up the food chain, with animals accumulating the most nutrition in their bodies from a wide area but also the most pollution. Therefore consuming a diet mostly made up of animals will give you a lot of nutrition but also a lot of toxins. In a wild state there aren’t too many toxins to worry about, but in our current environment it’s a different story. My guess is those consuming a meat only diet will be healthy for a time but will constantly increasing their cancer risk (Cancer is just want we call competitive overgrowth of a part of the system to the detriment of whole system when it occurs in the human body, it occurs at all scales and is a result of too much energy throughput in a system.)
From this eating a modern plant based diet will lessen cancer risk, but will come at the cost of less dense nutrition. This is fine if you can grow your plants in fertile soil and eat a great diversity of them, but also (and this is important) live in a climate that isn’t too cold. If you look at the great vegetarian civilisations of history, they always occured within the tropics or subtropics. They also only occur in large river valleys or certain highland areas where huge mountain ranges capture a whole load of energy and send it down hill. In fact, almost all agricultural civilisations are founded in these areas, as these sorts of energy-concentrating river valleys are needed for big yields. The noted exceptions are island societies (such as the greeks) who are able to concentrate the energy flows from a sea or coast back into the land.
If the plants are also grown in poor soil (most of the world now) you will also have nutrition deficits that will need to made up for by eating animal products, unless you can get plants from a huge geographic area, which is a luxury of the wealthy. Historically, places with poor soil ate more animals in the diet (Australian aboriginies) to make up for what the plants couldn’t give them.
Grain is a bit of a miracle, as it is incredibly energy dense and able to store for long periods. It’s particularly useful in colder climates for its storage capability, but as noted above the colder the weather,the more animals products you are eating historically. This reaches extremes in the Inuit.
One last thing; the reason we use all the pesticide and herbicide now is an attempt to maintain the yields that we have all come to expect. Soil depletion and an overreliance on chemical fertiliser has led to plants which look great but are very weak internally and would be killed quickly in the wild because we have bred out all their natural defences to maximise yield. Their nutritional density has also plummeted because of micronutrient depletion. Therefore insects see them as a great big target, a weakling needing to be culled. Hence pesticide. Then after harvest nutrient accumulating weeds fly in trying to do a repair job, which they could do if we would let them, would just take years, decades even. We don’t have time for that. Hence herbicide, and more chemical fertiliser.
Nice comment.
This makes a lot of sense.
This is a wonderful comment, pumpkinscone
I lived in Mongolia for seven years. Southernmost permafrost and northernmost deserts. To cold and to dry for agriculture. Traditionally people eat the white stuff (dairy products) in the summer and meat the rest of the year. Very strong and healthy people who get just as old as us. Not sure of your theory. I personally tend towards eating things that are traditional to my climate and area (back in Germany) and otherwise don´t worry to much. I am lucky to have my own garden so supplement bought food with stuff of my own
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7284332/
>Using FAO food balance data to estimate food consumption in Mongolia [5], the Global Burden of Disease study found that out of 195 countries and territories in 2017, Mongolia ranked 1st globally in the fraction of cardiovascular (CVD) mortality attributable to dietary imbalances in both men (62.8%) and women (60.5%) and 12th in the rate of age-standardized all-cause mortality attributable to diet (309 deaths per 100,000) [6].
They don’t look healthy to me.
>Very strong and healthy people who get just as old as us.
I looked up their life expectancy and found:
>In 2019, life expectancy at birth for women in Mongolia was about 74.14 years, while life expectancy at birth for men was about 65.8 years on average.
Kinda gay to have a really long life expectancy tbh
“Dietary inadequacy of 10 of 21 assessed nutrients, including fiber, folate, and vitamin D were >50% prevalent, while protein, zinc, and vitamin B12 inadequacy were low. […] The Urban pattern was positively associated with BMI in multivariate analysis. (4) Conclusions: Results indicate a high prevalence of key dietary inadequacies and overweight among Mongolian adults.”
Clearly references the urban population to be of higher BMI, which you can’t use to counter the argument from the poster before, because he was referencing the traditionally living population. Obviously a diet that makes you fat is going to make you unhealthy. Plus, folate and vitamin D is contained in animal organs (liver) and people who live traditionally should have enough of that from organ meats. Even if not, all they would have to do is supplement it, which would refute the idea that animal foods are unhealthy. It’s more the lack of grains here which is key, and which is somewhat understandable in Mongolia.
Life expectancy is about way more than just diet. The medical system and overall lifestyle also play a big role.
Thanks Holger Lundstrom
I read through the paper and was just going to make the same obversavtion. Of course I was referring to the traditional fare of Mongolians. As one can clearly see from the paper it is the urban population that is extremely unhealthy. But not the rural population. That is so news to me. In Ulaanbaatar people hardly drink milk anymore in the summer but keep eating like they only used to only in the cold season. Furthermore no more fermented horse milk (itself a very healthy drink – cured me of a lung problem) but bad quality beer and wodka. Plus all kinds of sugars. Furthermore people who used to be on the move all the time suddenly lead a sedentary life. As people who were always happy when they didn´t need to move for a change they were happy at first. By now though people are starting to realize something they never had occasion to notice before: movement is good for.
I’m from Germany, so the answer is obviously potatoes.
I think it’s important to remember that we are all different. What works for someone with Chinese ancestors might not work for someone with roots in South America.
And I’m certain we can agree that most of what the Americans is doing is kinda crappy and unhealthy. Which is one of the many little reasons they are in prerevolutinary state, inching ever closer to a civil war.
Not that Europeans are any better, except those who eat potatoes a lot.
Very interesting! Thanks a lot!
Alas … I have a question. At one paragraph you say:
“Keep in mind, there is always a big delay in these issues. The impact of […] will take decades to reveal its complete impact. It can take years to […] and it takes decades before we see […].”
If there is really such a big delay, if it really takes decades until we see the real impact of the wrong diet, how is it possible to verify your statements?
Human life is sensitive to thousands of factors and influences. How do we know which of these factors are responsible for bad health after decades?
Given the complexity of life and diets, how are we able to verify your theory?
“ If there is really such a big delay, if it really takes decades until we see the real impact of the wrong diet, how is it possible to verify your statements?
Human life is sensitive to thousands of factors and influences. How do we know which of these factors are responsible for bad health after decades?
Given the complexity of life and diets, how are we able to verify your theory?”
Reminds me of Rintrah’s thoughts on global climate change. Many of the same questions apply.
I was a strict vegan for 19 years, not for my health, but out of pity for animals. But no, I wasn’t living on fritos; it was a “health food” vegan diet. Then I had a cardiac calcification scan since I was hoping to donate part of my liver. I’m totally calcified. Okay, I can’t prove that my being in the 94th percentile for cardiac calcification for my age/gender is due to having been vegan, but I sure don’t feel I can urge anyone else to be vegan now. I am going to guess that it caused a K2 deficiency. Yeah, yeah, I know about natto; who knew about natto 20+ years ago? Besides, maybe it was some other deficiency. Humans are not physically designed to be vegan. We may decide to be vegan for ethical reasons, but it is not a good thing medically. I presently eat eggs, fish and cheese, along with veggies and grains.
I dunno about skipping meats for me brah, I’m trying to gain weight. I pickle my own pickles and mostly get eggs and fish instead of red meat, hopefully it’ll even out. Lol
I like your ideas tho, please write about nutrition more!
I knew aging and curing meat was a thing but the thought of fermenting it makes me hungry, I love fermented things. However there are also some links between eating a diet rich in fermented veggies and stomach cancer, according to research from China.
Everything in moderation, eh?
Meat is a luxury product, and how much meat you should have in your diet is a luxury question.
The answer for my ancestors – up to my grandparents – was obvious: as much meat as possible!
Which generally meant once a week for average families in the more developed parts of Italy until the 1950s. Before that, or in less developed parts of the country: once, twice a month.
In the poorest areas of Southern Italy until the 1950s, “as much meat as possible” meant once for Easter and once on Christmas day, if at all.
Paleo, keto and other dietary fads are only popular because meat is affordable. As resources and incomes go down, and prices go up, it will soon be down to rice, potatoes and beans anyway.
I hope that at least it will be good for my gut biome.
You’re right, and it amazes me how few people are aware of this. Right now, a person could buy a supply of canned meat to last a decade, intending to eat it at a moderate rate that would still make a 1950s Italian jealous, and the money expended would look small compared to what people routinely flush on cars, never mind God forbid real estate.
David and B are spot on.
Radagast, as I appreciate very much you covid and bitcoin analysis, please listen to Paul Saladino or read his book. Carnivore is not what you think. Alternatively, read The Vegetarian Myth. Because neither veganism is what you think. While upseting to your deeply held beliefs, man up, we need you.
A lot of your data is flawed. There is a simple reason why people who eat less fiber also eat more meat and become sick more often: the Standard Western Diet. For the most part, the problem is the total caloric intake rather than singular foods.
Ketogenic diets are normal in certain populations. There are even some metabolic adaptations to it (humans can actually adapt to a new situation within a few generations). The microbiome basically always takes what it can get and produces what you don’t have.
I don’t think grains are unhealthy. But I also don’t necessarily think meat is unhealthy. Unless either of those are highly processed. The one thing that’s most unhealthy in our society is this: eating too much, and moving too little. This is why people get better on low carb diets (it has more to with the calories than grains).
And yes, the state of subsidies for meat that is made in terrible conditions for the animals is a shame. Less meat, but with a higher quality would be a better way. But even then, you might need subsidies, because the farmers need to be able to survive a bad year too.
Americans are sickly because they eat too much of everything. The number of obese Americans is obscene. Easy junky addictive carbs are a major part of the problem. Americans eat very little fresh fruits and vegetables.
Americans are obese and unhealthy due to eating processed food. A lot of it. Then sitting around watching TV, computer games, etc.