First you must understand that we are the only category of animal that does not adhere to a species-specific diet. Why? Keep reading…
Consider any other animal species, and you’ll find that they have a “diet” that is specific to their needs. One caveat to this would be our domesticated K9’s and felines – we’ve started to act as if these descendants of wolves and big cats need fresh table food much like what is marketed for humans! This adds more nutritional confusion as these animals have never had these foods in their ancestral diet. Dogs and cats don’t need carbs, veggies, or fruits – never have.
Why So Much Confusion About The Optimum Human Diet?
Yes, you are confused. Your information you have to make decisions about your diet comes from the marketplace (ads, commercials, advertised studies promoting certain foods,) and the marketplace does not inherently care about your health – it cares about profit. It’s not an evil plot or conspiracy, it’s simply demand.
Even the research many like to cite is mostly sponsored by organizations that desire profit, including research that is funded by big pharma which is used in medical school education. Most of what you have been told or taught comes from nutritional epidemiology studies which are now known to be completely flawed.
The over 800 studies the World Health Organization touts that prove meat is bad or a possible carcinogen are literally based on questionnaires that ask people about their eating habits. Interestingly, most of these studies consider eating a hamburger or slice of pizza “red meat consumption.” These two types of food have more grains/bread than meat. Moreover the ingredients in making the bread were not accounted for either. Have you ever seen the ingredients in a burger franchise bun?
Your physician is not trained in nutrition or nutritional intervention. Medical doctors are the highest trained in diagnosing and treating pathology.
Basically, modern medicine practitioners have 3 things to offer – medication, injection and surgery. This is not bad, it’s just not what’s needed to achieve and maintain optimum human health through diet. These 3 things come into play when you lose your health. For chronic disorders, the approach involves symptom management, not addressing the cause. Being that 90% of all chronic disease is related to diet, you’d think physicians would have such training, but that is not the case.
“The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease. ~ ”
Thomas A. Edison
For example, type 2 diabetes is a dietary disease. In medicine, practitioners are taught that this is a “progressive disease” for which there is no known cure. Medication management is designed to control insulin and blood sugar levels. Yet everyday, people are reversing their type 2 diabetes (restoring normal hemoglobin A1c levels) by engaging in dietary change – generally a low to very low carbohydrate approach. This makes sense – it’s a dietary disease so you fix it with diet!
Unfortunately, we in mainstream medicine are pinned into adhering to regulations set forth by governing bodies. These governing bodies have relationships with other such bodies – i.e. AMA with the USDA. When doing any nutritional counseling for Medicare patients, I have to document using the expression “per USDA guidelines.” These guidelines are what brought us to our current state of chronic illness in our country and around the world!
Myplate.gov gives you dietary guidelines and is basically a culmination of special interests that have worked deals with our government: the sugar industry, the grain industry, etc. It has nothing to do with research that is not sponsored for free of conflict of interest.
Just looking at this plate shows that the US government wants us to eat about 70% plant-based and 30% animal-based foods. Interestingly, plant-based proteins are being promoted so you’re looking at a good 80% plant-based and 20% animal-based diet – The EXACT OPPOSITE of our healthier ancestors who had no heart disease, no cavities, no stroke, no diabetes, no cancer, no Alzheimers, and no auto-immune disease. They also had straight teeth with no cavities3, larger brains, and lived just as long if not longer!
Human Dietary Fact
For over 2 million years, humans ate mostly meat!1
Red meat is a nutrient dense food that is an important source of complete protein with all essential amino acids, highly bioavailable iron, zinc, selenium, and B vitamins, especially vitamin B12 in the diet. Some of these including iron and zinc are among the most common nutrient shortages around the globe.
Note that our brain size increased as we developed through our hunter-gatherer stages eating meat until we settled and developed agriculture about 10K years ago.
In fact, our brains have been shrinking since we settled and as meat consumption has decreased!2
Want to talk about fad diets? Veganism has only been around since the ’40’s, and Vegetarianism started in the mid 1800’s, These approaches that eliminate all or most animal-based foods yield a host of nutritional deficiencies as our species developed on animal-based nutrition for the greater part of 2 million years. These ideologies are not based sound nutritional principles, but they have a lot of support from the plant-based industry!
The Standard American Diet or the way we’re eating now is actually considered a fad when you consider it’s only been around about .01% of our entire existence on earth!
To take a step back from social media, sponsored media, dogma, and institutional-based nutrition education is a good way to see what’s true. At this time in history, we’ve essentially reversed the way we ate as early humans to get us to this point! This begs the question, “why change?!”
We did not change our diet based on problems with our predecessors. We changed our diet based on the market-place and profit. Simple as that. There is much more profit margin in grains than there is in beef or dairy. Moreover, the largest investor in plant-based initiatives and the largest farm land owner in the US is Bill Gates.
In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling more than $690m.4 With his known talent for creating monopolies, you can all but guarantee you’ll see more and more advertising and sponsored research to support plant-based eating! At no point in human evolutionary history did we eat mostly plants.
Diet & Life Expectancy
Hong Kong takes the prize as of this writing with an average life expectancy of 85.29 years! Life expectancy in the US is currently 79.11 years.5 Interestingly, Hong Kong also ranks number 1 in meat consumption!6
India, a largely vegetarian country, has a life expectancy of 69.75 on average.
Is There a Problem with Meat?
Yes – we’re simply not eating enough as meat has been unfortunately vilified over the last 60 years. In fact, red meat consumption in the US has been on the decline since the 70s as chronic disease (heart disease, atheroscelorosis, diabetes, stroke, Alzheirmers, and auto-immune disease have been on the rise.)
Meat is not the problem, and it never has been since our species developed on earth! If meat was a problem, we would not have survived as a species, because that’s mostly what we ate for 2 million years.
The Actual Cause of Most Chronic Disease
To the contrary, as obesity and diabetes rates continue to skyrocket while consumption of red meat is dropping, we see a dramatic rise in the level of seed oil consumption. Vegetable and seed oils are not healthy fats as you are led to believe. They are highly processed, inflammatory substances that are not natural to our biology. In fact, they are implicated in many of our modern diseases.7 Don’t expect them to go away anytime soon as their consumption has dramatically increased in the last several decades. This 100 Billion Dollar industry is not about to stop what they’re doing.
When you finish reading The Optimum Human Diet, be sure to watch this video about all the oils you thought were healthy!
In essence, we went from zero grams of PUFA (Polyunsaturate Fatty Acid) or vegetable oil consumption in 1865 to 80 grams a day now! That is the single greatest change to nutrition in ALL of history!
In my evidence-based opinion, vegetable and seed oils are the number 1 harmful substance to our health!
Heart attacks were rare until 1912 when the first well documented one happened and was published by James Herrick, a physician in Chicago.8 Interestingly, It was 1911 when P&G hit the market with Crisco!9 This artificial fat (made from crystallized cottonseed) was meant to replace lard, butter and tallow which was all we used up until the early 1900’s when there was no chronic disease. Heart disease remained on the rise, and in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack which brought a lot of attention and fear to this new cause of death.
Of course, animal fats/saturated fats were being blamed on this new disease, and the answer was to use vegetable and seed oils instead. Profits sored as deaths from heart disease increased.
The American Heart Association was given 1.7 million dollars by P&G to promote these oils as heart healthy. They did – they still do, and Heart disease is our #1 Cause of Death.
But what about elevated cholesterol and its association with heart disease? There is no association or causation. In fact, the problem of increasing rates of cardiovascular disease is more linked to the presence of linoleic acid that adulterates cholesterol which leads to disease. Omega-6 seed and vegetable oils (linoleic acid) are a large part of our diet now, and the stats speak for themselves – our conventional diet is killing us10.
So what are we to do? It’s fairly simple (but not easy.) It’s time to return to eating normal food – the kinds of foods that our ancestors ate during a time when there was no chronic disease, our brains were bigger, there were no cavities, no obesity, no diabetes, no auto-immune issues. The primary food of our ancestors was animal-based protein and fat. Even modern day hunter gatherer societies still revere meat as their primary and preferred source of nutrition with all else being supplementary until the next kill.
The optimum human diet is animal-based protein first, fat second, and maybe a little fruit or raw honey as optional 3rd.
For a very simple, powerful, well-studied, and comprehensive overview of human nutrition, visit Dr. Zoe Harcombe, PhD at https://www.zoeharcombe.com/. For more answers in a well organized format, visit https://www.lowcarbhealthmd.com/
References:
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate-meat-and-little-else-study/
- https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brain-has-been-getting-smaller-since-the-stone-age
- https://www.gaia.com/article/cavemen-didnt-have-cavities-why-do-we
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland
- https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
- https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/countries-that-eat-the-most-meat/
- https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/are-vegetable-and-seed-oils-bad#omega
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3143862/
- https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1811.html
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6196963/