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Food

Meat at a wedding

Our culture and concepts have outpaced our biology, meaning just believing that you shouldn’t eat meat (no matter the reason) is probably sub optimal for your health. I appreciate not eating meat, but I don’t think it’s ideal for health.

Developing stone tools along with  controlling fire initiated a nutritional revolution for our ancestors. Until blades chipped from stone were employed in East Africa some 3.4 million years ago,  our hominid forebears couldn’t slash through an animal’s hide to access nutrient dense meat and organs.

Partly due to the fat and protein rich food available after stone tools came along, our ancestors’ brain and body size increased rapidly, culminating in the emergence of anatomically modern humans about 200,000 years ago.

More recently… About a week ago, I went to a family wedding. This meant I knew many of the people there. It was great catching up with folks I hadn’t seen in many years and meeting their kids for the first time.

Out of all the people there, my vegetarian and vegan relatives seemed to be the least hardy. I wasn’t quizzing people about their diets, I found out they didn’t eat meat because of the special considerations the party givers made.

To go back in time again, the Americas were likely populated during an ice age when sea levels were much lower resulting a pretty big stretch of land between Siberia and Alaska allowing humans and animals to simply walk from Asia to North America.

We forget that 95% of human history happened before the rise of agriculture when we spent most of our history wandering over both land and water.

Why did our ancestors wander so far and wide? Hard to know really, but part of my guess is that they were following and looking for animals to eat.

Our culture and concepts have outpaced our biology, meaning  just believing that you shouldn’t eat meat (no matter the reason) is probably sub optimal for your health. I appreciate not eating meat, but I don’t think it’s ideal for health.