🥩 The Natural human Diet - Substack
🥩 Hello Meatlings,
Meat is the foundation of a species-appropriate diet for humans.
When you eat a species-appropriate diet, you give yourself the best chance to live a long and healthy life.
Here are some fun facts about the natural human diet, highlighting work done by Bill Schindler PhD and Jessica Thompson PhD:
Our ancestors started eating meat 3.5 million years ago and hunted 2 million years ago; fatty bone marrow was a critical food resource for early hominins.
Every single plant on this earth has toxins, and removing or neutralizing them before they are consumed is essential.
Our digestive tracts are incredibly inefficient and are half the size they should be for a similar-sized primate; we don’t have gizzards, crops, or rumens to digest grains, hence the need to ferment, soak, and cook.
We are one of the weakest species on the planet and are not like other carnivores: we are not strong or fast, and we don’t have claws or fangs, but we can make tools to hunt, trap, and break the animal down. The earliest stone tool is 3.3 million years old.
Plants hoard their nutrients and must be appropriately processed to obtain the best nutrition from them (fermentation, nixtamalization, cooking, etc., have been practiced for the last 15,000 years).
Animals are essentially food factories; their biologically equipped digestive tract allows them to transform into their bodies nutrients from plants that are normally inaccessible to humans. For example, reindeer eat inedible lichen and transform that lichen into incredibly nutrient-dense, bioavailable food: meat and organs.
The Father of Primal Eating, Mark Sisson, once said: “We are all predisposed to disease if we mismanage our genes.” Our genes have coexisted with eating animals for millions of years.