Before 1850: all milk was raw, drunk by the gallon, and considered medicine.
Before 1900: everyone ate eggs, beef, and butter without a single thought about cholesterol.
Before 1910: every household used salt to preserve meat and fish through the winter.
Before 1920: everything was cooked in tallow, lard, dripping, and butter.
Before 1950: there was no obesity epidemic, no diabetes epidemic, no childhood ADHD diagnosis on every street.
Now consider the timeline.
The seed oils arrived. The margarine arrived. The breakfast cereal arrived. The low-fat yoghurts arrived. The packaged convenience food arrived. The supermarket aisles filled up with products that had no equivalent on a 1900 dinner table.
And the experts are still trying to convince you that chronic disease is caused by the foods that fed humanity for the entire stretch of recorded history.
Not the new arrivals. The old reliables.
Have a think about who benefits from that conclusion.
Before 1900: everyone ate eggs, beef, and butter without a single thought about cholesterol.
Before 1910: every household used salt to preserve meat and fish through the winter.
Before 1920: everything was cooked in tallow, lard, dripping, and butter.
Before 1950: there was no obesity epidemic, no diabetes epidemic, no childhood ADHD diagnosis on every street.
Now consider the timeline.
The seed oils arrived. The margarine arrived. The breakfast cereal arrived. The low-fat yoghurts arrived. The packaged convenience food arrived. The supermarket aisles filled up with products that had no equivalent on a 1900 dinner table.
And the experts are still trying to convince you that chronic disease is caused by the foods that fed humanity for the entire stretch of recorded history.
Not the new arrivals. The old reliables.
Have a think about who benefits from that conclusion.
People love to say humans are omnivores like it settles the argument. Have a bit of everything, balance is key, the spectrum is wide, who's to say really.
Fine. Let's not say. Let's open the bonnet and look at the engine.
Two diets. Same human. Let's check the equipment.
Stomach acid:
Human pH 1.5. Lower than most carnivorous birds. Equivalent to scavengers. Strong enough to dissolve raw bone fragments and kill the bacteria on flesh several days dead.
True herbivores: pH 4 to 6. Designed for plant fermentation. Couldn't kill a salmonella infection on its best day.
Gut length:
Human: short. Roughly 4.5 times body length. Ideal for digesting concentrated, easily absorbed animal foods.
Herbivores: 10 to 12 times body length. Built for slow plant fermentation in vast hindgut chambers we do not possess.
Teeth:
Forward-facing eyes for hunting, canines for tearing, incisors for biting flesh.
Herbivores: side-mounted eyes, flat molars, no canines, jaw moves laterally to grind cellulose.
Brain:
Built on long-chain omega-3s, cholesterol, and saturated fat. Available in concentration only from animal sources.
Tripled in size during the Pleistocene, the exact period our ancestors became apex predators.
Required nutrients:
B12, retinol, K2, heme iron, taurine, creatine, carnosine, EPA, DHA. None available in plants. All available in animals.
Historical record:
Every traditional culture, in every climate, on every continent, ate animals. The variation was in which ones.
Vegan civilisations: zero. Across ten thousand years of recorded human history. Not one.
The conclusion writes itself.
We are facultative carnivores. We can stretch. We cannot pretend.
Fine. Let's not say. Let's open the bonnet and look at the engine.
Two diets. Same human. Let's check the equipment.
Stomach acid:
Human pH 1.5. Lower than most carnivorous birds. Equivalent to scavengers. Strong enough to dissolve raw bone fragments and kill the bacteria on flesh several days dead.
True herbivores: pH 4 to 6. Designed for plant fermentation. Couldn't kill a salmonella infection on its best day.
Gut length:
Human: short. Roughly 4.5 times body length. Ideal for digesting concentrated, easily absorbed animal foods.
Herbivores: 10 to 12 times body length. Built for slow plant fermentation in vast hindgut chambers we do not possess.
Teeth:
Forward-facing eyes for hunting, canines for tearing, incisors for biting flesh.
Herbivores: side-mounted eyes, flat molars, no canines, jaw moves laterally to grind cellulose.
Brain:
Built on long-chain omega-3s, cholesterol, and saturated fat. Available in concentration only from animal sources.
Tripled in size during the Pleistocene, the exact period our ancestors became apex predators.
Required nutrients:
B12, retinol, K2, heme iron, taurine, creatine, carnosine, EPA, DHA. None available in plants. All available in animals.
Historical record:
Every traditional culture, in every climate, on every continent, ate animals. The variation was in which ones.
Vegan civilisations: zero. Across ten thousand years of recorded human history. Not one.
The conclusion writes itself.
We are facultative carnivores. We can stretch. We cannot pretend.