Comment by inglor_cz
15 hours ago
People in certain regions always ate a lot of meat. For example, the Inuit don't really have anything else to eat. Nothing edible grows that far North. And they are neither obese nor suffer from classical diseases of civilization, until they start eating highly processed modern food.
The Maasai are also known to eat a lot of meat and dairy.
I'm sure you can eat a diet fairly high in meat and dairy and be healthy, IF you are lean enough and exercise enough. However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans. And, the meat they did eat was not the same because it was wild, not farmed.
But, humans have been eating unsaturated fat from nuts, seeds, and meat for millennia. Unsaturated fat is not the devil. We have very strong evidence that a diet high in meat, particularly farmed red meat, is both carcinogenic and causes heart disease. When you look at high processed diets across the globe today, you'll notice they have similarities:
1. Extreme consumption of fatty, farmed meats
2. Very little fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other foods high in fiber
3. Processed shelf-stable goods
4. Extreme portion sizes
When people look at the Mediterranean diet, it's not just that they eat much more food high in unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat. They also eat less and move much more.
> However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans.
Incorrect, your points are otherwise true. Inuit diet was close to 100% animal products, way more than anyone but carnivore diet people today eat.
The Inuit don't really have any choice, nothing of nutritional value grows up there. They also prefer fat to lean meat, no surprise in conditions of the Far North. Also, during the Polar Night, they didn't move that much.
I agree that the fact that this meat and fat is wild may be the root cause of the differences between their and our health outcomes. That indicates, though, that we may have something in our forms of meat and dairy that potentially harms us - and that if we identify what, we may be able to get rid of that specific problem.