I know, I KNOW, we are omnivores (you, me, maybe not our llm friends, but most of us)… but that doesn’t quite line up with biological necessity.
I would argue we are facultative omnivores, but obligate carnivores. We can eat plants for efficiency (famines and whatnot), but they are not necessary for life. Meat, however, is necessary - at the very least we would have b vitamin deficiencies without meat, and babies wouldn’t develop into healthy humans without it.
People will argue, and i love you all for it, that maybe this applies historically but in the modern food environment we can engineer our way out of this obligation - sure, that’s true, but when speaking of our species appropriate and native diet - we would still be obligate carnivores
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You can argue anything, but that’s not what the words you’re using mean, they aren’t medically true, and I can only hope somebody snaps you out of your delusions before the self harm goes too far.
What medical concerns did Jet raise in this post?
The words Jet uses are used with the correct meaning: We are at the very least meso-carnivores, since we require meat in our diet, but can also consume plants. Since bio-availability of plant nutrition is low, it does appear that we aren’t particularly well adapted to eating them. But we need not depend solely on animal sources, so we aren’t exactly obligate carnivores, by definition.
Hence Jet’s question.
For real. Like, I don’t care if someone wants to get scurvy but they shouldn’t be able to misinform others.
You are yourself misinformed, I’m afraid. It’s not possible to get scurvy this way. It’d be something interesting for you to read about on a weekend, perhaps.
someone wants to get scurvy
If you want to get scurvy, you have to avoid meat. Despite the myth - fresh meat has vitamin c in it, it has been a historic CURE for scurvy. In a glucose free diet there is less competition for the glut4 transporter, which will take up the vitamin c… plus meat provides essential material the body would use vitamin c to produce… in a animal based diet there is less demand for vitamin c overall.
There is no documented case of someone contracting scurvy on a animal based diet, just consider the inuit who survive in the arctic circle without access to fresh fruit.
Obligate implies exclusive sustenance on a specific diet, like the big cats, that can not sustain themselves with any other source of calories.
Human beings are capable of sustaining themselves with almost anything available in nature, hence the classification as omnivores. The generalist diet of the human species is an adaption for survival; it’s harder to die of famine if nearly everything in the landscape can be turned into food.
i’m open to a better way to express the need to eat some meat, but being opportunistic to plants. Omnivore implies its totally optional either or, which isn’t right.
In evolutionary terms, I risk we can see it the other way around.
Our ancestors started as herbivores, being tree dwellers, and only later changed into the role of scavenger and after that predator, making the consumption of other animals a viable and reliable food source.
The species evolved into the role of the omnivore, capable of eating nearly anything to survive, and it proved to be a winning strategy.
If the concern is the apport of B12, eggs are a source for it and it would be an easy enough one for early humans to get it.
Our ancestors started as herbivores, being tree dwellers, and only later changed into the role of scavenger and after that predator, making the consumption of other animals a viable and reliable food source.
Frugivores, but yes… in the intervening couple million years we lost the ability to survive without meat, we adapted to our new food environment. Humans are clearly not frugivores anymore.
The species evolved into the role of the omnivore, capable of eating nearly anything to survive, and it proved to be a winning strategy.
My point is we still need some meat to survive, we are obligated… so we are baseline obligate carnivores, and then opportunistic on other food sources. We can’t eat nearly anything, grass for instance - happily there are animals that can eat grass, which we can eat.
If the concern is the apport of B12, eggs are a source for it and it would be an easy enough one for early humans to get it.
Eating eggs would be carnivorous behavior, no?
There are more non-fruit bearing than there are fruit bearing trees. It’s a safe assumption to consider early ancestors, prior to becoming land dwellers, had the largest portion of their diet based from leaves.
That’s a keen observation. Prior to shifting from herbivores to scavengers, the apport of B12 would probably be obtained from specialized intestinal biome. Since evolution always comes with trade-offs, that was a loss in the long term.
I refuse the insistence with humans being obligate carnivores. Prior to becoming active predators, humans widened and improved their diet by including what they could scavenge from the landscape, including meat sourced from dead animals or abandoned predator kills. That is actively developing and evolving into omnivorous capabilty.
Eggs are not meat. Eggs are an animal product, granted, but it’s not from its consumption we derive the notion of being carnivore.
It’s a safe assumption to consider early ancestors, prior to becoming land dwellers, had the largest portion of their diet based from leaves.
That is quite the assumption, modern frugivore apes only eat leaves when fruit is scarce
I refuse the insistence with humans being obligate carnivores
Fair enough, i’m open to better terminology. Must eat some meat needs a term that isn’t overloaded.
Eggs are not meat. Eggs are an animal product, granted, but it’s not from its consumption we derive the notion of being carnivore.
Eggs are not carnivorous food?
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
Where was I unclear in my point?
I think you’re saying that it’s easy to get B12 in the wild without meat, as if humans didn’t spend millions of years eating only meat when meat was available.
Not sure what I was missing in the earlier read
Most eggs are tiny, for example
What I am stating is that B12 can be obtained from other sources besides meat and that such sources - one of which is eggs - could be accessed by early humans.
The inclusion of meat in the diet of our ancestors has been demonstrated to be linked with the rapid increase of brain volume; meat is calorie and nutritionally dense, there is no denial of that.
But it is not something to overlook that humans descend from tree dwellers, which were most probably exclusive herbivores. For many more millions of years than meat, as a food stuff, has been part of the diet.
Thus, stating that humans are obligate carnivores makes no sense. Humans evolved to be omnivores, from herbivores.
Right. I think we kept some of the ability to detoxify some plants from the herbivorous apes we descended from, but then we spent millions of years scavenging (probably eating a lot of brains as we could smash skulls of lion kills open with a rock), then hunting, following migratory grass eaters
Plants became emergency food. We’re not as good at detoxifying them as a gorilla is
Hunter gatherers universally (outside the wet tropics where fruit is plentiful year around) eat meat when meat is available, and only use plants when the hunt fails
We classify animals as obligate carnivores when we see them in wild eating only meat. When we have found humans in the wild they eat only meat. If you study pre-agriculture bones you find they had a practically all meat diet.
as a thought experiment when designing a whole food plant based diet (including the necessary supplements) - imported foods are required… i.e. its not possible to live on whole plant based foods (even with supplements) eating in one geographic area
