A DIET FOR THE 21st CENTURY?
Food and nutrition fads come and go all the time. We often hear folks excited about learnings they've had around what to eat and what to avoid, when and how. And they often report that by following some regimen they've discovered a better way to live. They tell us that shifting their food intake in one way or another has resulted in better sleep or more energy, clearer skin or fewer aches and pains, or any number of other things ranging from improved libido to reversing terminal cancer. And if you can find someone able to spell out the reasoning behind this diet and nutrition renaissance you'll be in for a real treat.
The best character on the scene at the moment, and someone I just love watching, is the frequently-shirtless "KALE IS BULLSHIT" guy, Dr. Paul Saladino. I love him. I love him not just because he's a recovering raw vegan (and has the word salad in his name) who is also a strong advocate for replacing all the beets, spinach, peanuts, oats, and olive oil in your life with heart, brain, testicle, tallow, and blood. That would be enough. But in addition to all that he's also a trained medical doctor.
Just as with this anti-kale bro, the logic most popular across many trending diets (or, rather, "strategies for reversing chronic illness and cultivating mindfulness while combating the evils of Western medicine and pharmaceutical paradigms") asks us to consider what humans are "supposed to eat." Folks begin with an Edenic vision of what humans are and the context within which we evolved and then speak in these terms, talking about foods that are "evolutionarily-consistent." Then these folks (non-anthropologists with no background in history, archaeology, non-human biology, primatology, paleobotany, or any domain that might help us understand our distant past) extrapolate from their own imaginations and intuitions what ancestral humans ate (or sometimes just folks currently living outside the agriculture paradigm now eat.)
They take their wildly oversimplified and wonky worldview and fill the many gaps they manufacture with more curious logic and sciency-sounding, pseudo-technical language. It's a weirdly cherry-picked concatenation derived from a cute but entirely fictional naturalistic harmony. They wallpaper over their gross misinterpretation of evolution and biology with what they feel is a defensible premise, like "plants don't wish to be eaten."
Dr. Saladino, for example, reasons loudly on social media (from the produce section at Whole Foods) that roots, tubers, shoots, bark, stems, leaves, flowers, and seeds are all essential to a plant and as such are packed with phytochemicals naturally designed to dissuade you and other creatures from consuming them. Further still, as a result, he asserts those bits are intrinsically trying to kill you. From there, Saladino and others resolve that the only suitable consumables derived from plants, logically, must be their fruit: those are the bits the plant "naturally offers us."
By this logic of plant defence and the simple rule of observing what is "naturally meant to be," Dr. Saladino and friends happily defend their opposition to eating mushrooms, millet, and seaweed (oh, and also shellfish.) Your omnivorous opportunist cousins and ancestors, and those common ancestors from which we all came, apparently, didn't spend millions of years eating these highly abundant sources of nutrition and many aren't continuing to do so now, or something... And yet, amazingly, these same folks turn from this premise they established to argue that kombucha, kefir, yogurt, and parmesan cheese (which are all brand new, of course) are perfectly obvious, ideal, and fall within a diet said to be composed of "evolutionarily-consistent" foods. It's brilliant to watch. I love it.
But you might wonder why how this plant-based principle (that plants don't wish to be eaten and are full of things toxic to you) emerged? How did this become particularly potent reasoning when the same is deemed perfectly useless nonsense when looking at other organisms? For instance, you might have noticed that elk and bison also don't wish to be killed and eaten. If you go and ask them, rabbits and guinea fowl are also pretty adamant about not having their own muscles and organs, or those of their offspring or neighbours, carved up and eaten by you or anyone else. And I would happily argue that we can be far more confident about this than we can about the desires and inner emotional lives of parsnips or chanterelles. (This makes me want to ask Dr. Saladino if he infers from the existence of volcanoes and deposits of uranium that the Earth is not hospitable to life?) Similarly, why are certain plant-based chemicals (like progoitrin found in kale) said to be particularly problematic in high dosages while the constituents of organ meats (such as the vitamin A or copper abundant in liver, say) are deemed perfectly benign? Surely he knows that, in high dosage, these common elements cause toxicity, organ failure, and death.
Of course, no one should attempt to live on kale alone. True. But I've also never met or heard of any radical raw vegan even attempting to do so. Our vegetarian relatives, such as the mountain gorilla (with no grocery stores or international imports), have a ton of variety in their diet. These close cousins of our typically consume a dozen or more staple food plants and also have around another hundred or so species they consume less frequently. Our closest of cousins, the chimps, tend to have a largely plant-based diet of fruits and leaves. However, we are certain no ideal chimp diet exists. We know that different chimps consume different foods depending on what's available within the region they're in. So, if there are no fig trees around, for instance – surprise – chimps will not be eating figs. And if there are no duikers or baby red colobus monkeys in the neighbourhood then chimps won't be consuming mammal meat. And it will surprise no one to learn that studies of chimpanzee diets find different individuals living in the same region or community nevertheless surviving on different foods. One individual may depend exclusively on plants, mostly figs, while another will venture to consume some meat. That said, virtually all chimps eat meat only rarely. On average, chimps will eat meat closer to once every other month or so (not anything like daily, weekly, or even monthly.) Other individuals will broaden their overwhelmingly plant-based diet with bees, termites, ants, and even rotten wood and dirt.
This picture of a diet dominated by plants seems to be a best-guess for what our ancestors' food intake would have been like – with most surviving on a diet closer to that of a deer or antelope than a cheetah or mountain lion. As a result, I'm really not sure what an evolutionary or ancestral diet dominated by organ meats could possibly be based on.
If you really want to get into the research, folks all over the planet have worked on this topic for decades. And when you go looking you'll find that these researchers (people who know what their talking about) don't come away with anything like what Dr. Saladino and others offer. For example, a recent news release from the University of Utah, titled "A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors’ Diets," explains that:
In four new studies of carbon isotopes in fossilized tooth enamel from scores of human ancestors and baboons in Africa from 4 million to 10,000 years ago, a team of two dozen researchers found a surprise increase in the consumption of grasses and sedges...
These researchers tell us that while there was some meat in our own and our ancestors' diets (and virtually any beast like us at all) we all largely consumed trees, bushes, and shrubs, along with their leaves and fruits, as well as many vegetables, grasses, and grains. Common foods were things like water chestnut, papyrus, sawgrass, bermuda grass, salt bush, alfalfa, wheat, oats, barley, rice, sorghum, millet, and other non-grassy herbs and the like. In drier areas, we and our bipedal relatives also survived on tropical succulents like cactus and agave. Further, we know that those ancient tropical primate grass-eaters, such as Theropithecus baboons and our relatives Paranthropus, all went extinct while our human ancestors appear to have consumed an increasingly grass-based diet. Nobody knows why.
Still, that won't stop folks from attempting to baffle you with their sciency prognostications and their own battery of studies. Sadly, for all Dr. Saladino's studies, he doesn’t manage to offer good ones, if those even exist; instead, he presents research that only looks at tiny populations, ones that would be unacceptable in any medical, psychological, or behavioural study. And then these studies tend to pair this with time periods so short that they couldn't tell us much even if they weren't so limited in size. And then, like so many health and nutrition studies, these commonly fail to eliminate confounding factors or contend with tremendous numbers of unknowns. As a result of all of this, we come away from even a mountain of such studies learning little, if anything.
Overall, the aim of promoting a diet dominated by animal protein appears to be to live better. But is that what's happening? Is there even the faintest sign of that? And could a haute bourgeoisie diet such as this even be procured by almost any of the population? No chance. So, while proposed as a healthful alternative to the status quo (corn, beans, nuts, rice, and wheat), it's just about the farthest thing from that. If this was a diet for the 21st century, how, pray tell, would you replace butter with buffalo tallow and clams with moose testicles, getting them into every corner store, or just some tiny proportion of them? Right. You don't. Meaning: this diet isn't for humans but just a self-proclaimed elite who order all their grass-fed grass-finished bison livers and artisanal powdered piglet brains at a premium from online boutiques.
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RESOURCES
"Diet of Theropithecus from 4 to 1 Ma in Kenya" - Cerling et al.
"Exploring the contribution and significance of animal protein in the diet of bonobos..." - Oelze et al.
"Carnivore MD" - Saladino
"Isotopic evidence of early hominin diets" - Sponheimer et al.
"A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets" - Wood
"Diet of Australopithecus afarensis from the Pliocene Hadar Formation, Ethiopia" - Wynn et al.
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