Comment by echelon
9 months ago
> lots of variety of veggies and fruits, little meat
This is wrong. Our bodies evolved to rend flesh and eat meat. They are optimized by millions of years of evolution to process and run on meat.
The biochemical pathways of carb-heavy diets put more oxidative stress on the body.
This is wrong. Our bodies evolved to eat a diverse omnivorous diet and complex carbs + the antioxidants present in vegetables and fruits are anti-oxidative.
This is wrong.
Humans have eaten complex carbs only for the last 10k years since agricultural revolution. Before that, outside of a small part of Africa, there physically wasn't enough carbs available to say that they made any substantial amount of our diet.
Most ancenstral carbs were uber high in fiber, and very low in glucose (starch) and fructose.
I've taken courses in primitive wilderness survival, and one of the staple foods was grass seed.
Also lots of roots are edible with cooking, and it looks like we've been cooking for about a million years. Then there's wild rice, cattails, beans, berries, all sorts of stuff.
I agree that most wild plants are high in fiber and low in sugar, but there are are a lot of complex carbs to be had, if you have fire.
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>Our bodies evolved to eat a diverse omnivorous diet and complex carbs
Evolved to eats omnivorous diets yes no doubts, but to thrive on omnivorous diets, perhaps no. Most people I know thrive on meats and do worse otherwise.
Vegetables aren't "carb-heavy". And we don't need to recreate blindly the circumstances evolution had to adapt us to. E.g., our bodies evolved when the population was much smaller, but I don't think you want to argue for mass extinction.
>Our bodies evolved to rend flesh and eat meat.
is that why we have flat molars? for eating meat?
(spoilers: no, the flat molars are not for eating meat)
And our canines?
My genes gave me pretty big ones.
sharp canines for meat, flat molars for plants.
>They are optimized by millions of years of evolution to process and run on meat.
We are omnivores, we are optimized to eat everything
podcast science is a bit low-brow for hn brother