Veganism/Vegetarianism

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You're right, the 7% claim is a bit strange considering that chimp DNA only differs by 6.4% from human DNA (according to Matthew Hahn's research. I think the earlier 99% claim turned out to be wrong). Perhaps John Hawks was speaking in terms of functional DNA sequences, without including junk DNA in his estimation.

Speaking of chimps, they are a great example of how much we've adapted to a high protein diet. Our last common ancestor likely lived on a diet that was much closer to that of chimpanzees. Since then, we've lost the ability to process many things that are on a chimp's daily menu, such as cellulose-rich raw leaves and tree bark. If you are correct that our digestive system underwent very little changes in recent dekamillennia, we are still best adapted to a protein-rich paleolithic low carb diet.

Which was basically my point. We are definitely omnivores with a strong preference for meat, despite the largely herbivore / frugivore diet of our distant ancestors 5 million years ago. Almost 2 million years of living on a meat-rich diet are certainly enough to cause drastic digestive system changes. Which is evident in the anatomical differences between Homo habilis to H. erectus, which include a smaller ribcage size and a narrower torso, and therefore likely a smaller stomach and bowel size. Not to mention the remarkable increase in brain size due to the new high calorie diet.



The Daily Mail article was simply the first hit in a Google search for "homo erectus wiped out elephants". I don't remember where I originally read this. Here is a link to the abstract of the research paper, if you want a more reliable source:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... a._400_kyr)_Levant

An elephant corpse has plenty of food for 20-30 people. As long as you don't run out of elephants and have a reliable way of driving them towards a pit fall trap (fire), there is not much need to supplement your diet with larger amounts of nuts and vegetables. Maybe a handful of berries after a trunk steak for your vitamin C and antioxidant needs (we still have the urge to eat a sweet dessert after a hearty meal). I could imagine that H. erectus ate a lot more meat than later hunter-gatherers, who had to switch to smaller, faster prey animals after elephant/mammoth-sized game was nearly wiped out.



I'm quite good at digesting things like steak tartare, mett (minced raw pork) and bloody T-bone steaks The main reason to cook meat is to reduce the infection risk and preserve it. It can also improve the taste, although I wouldn't say that in case of beef steaks. Non-human primates also eat small amounts of raw meat. And you already mentioned fish. Sushi is the best thing that ever came out of Japan



I fully agree with this. I'd like to think that my diet is a lot healthier than your example. I mostly eat poultry, fish, shellfish, and lactose-free dairy products, with moderate amounts of low fiber vegetables and fruit without skins (fiber doesn't sit well with my Crohn's). Occasionally some wholemeal toast or white rice. Only when my Crohn's acts up, I live almost entirely on meat, soup and vitamin C pills. Ketosis works great The human body doesn't really need carbs.

Sh*t vegans say to omnivores:

Source: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/2 ... ous-vegan/

So much anger I wonder how "I can no longer tolerate your soy products in the house" would go down. I think a grilled chicken leg would do wonders for that person's crappy mood. It might also make him or her realize the difference between eating a chicken and child abuse

This is the other side of the coin (also intolerant, but less preachy and a lot funnier):



http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/w ... mmate2.jpg

I'm vegan. Not to make other people feel bad, but to feel better about myself.

I can't imagine any other way. It works for me. It's just such a shame that general acceptance of vegans is rare. I don't like militant opinions anywhere, so I think it's unfair to reduce vegans to those who say "s**t" to those who are not.

I think veganism generally is an awesome concept and one of the few things that make sense to me. I have become generally disgusted by the food that I used to eat. Diary products seem ok to me, but meat... I don't know... I can't see how I should ever eat meat again. It's weird that people believe I could still desire meat. I don't know... Meat scares me. It really scares the s**t out of me.

(When I add a disclaimer like this to a post of mine I am not only talking to the person I am responding to but also to anyone that might be reading).


hmnnn...






Should both stop relying on anecdotes.

I live in the Internet and sometimes I emerge to the real world. I have in the past dealt a lot with "spiritual people" on-line. Which I am thankful for because I would not have become basically an atheist if it wasn't for them. My only physical closeness with vegans was when two relatives decided it was hip and cool and they did it without any counseling and thus almost died. Veganism is very rare here and I suspect that the extreme height make giving up protein a lot harder than other places

I also find it paradoxical that people that have had close encounters with farm animals are less likely to go crazy over the idea of eating them. As I mentioned, when I was young we were still in the era in which you raised chickens yourself if you wanted to have eggs even if you lived in your city. So I had pet hens which makes it funny when people that have never had a close encounter with a chicken BSOD when they figure out it was alive food.

In times of plenty, though, it is a low-risk, convenient source of nutrition. You wouldn't even have to stand up. Look, I was raised in the country, and young men start popping squirrels out of trees with bee-bee guns when they are as young as 8, sometimes younger. It's something that our youth take to very naturally. The same goes for fishing.

But I also know that young men take very naturally to going after big game, and they find the pursuit of it very exciting. It is an important part of male bonding, and there is always a sense of adventure in it. A young man taking a real part in his first hunt is going through a rite of passage. This is an important part of our society, and it has been since we were swinging in the trees.

I think it's all very obvious, though. I just have to watch the behavior of modern humans and extrapolate it into a more rugged environment. Sure, battles between primitive humans might have had significantly more fatalities than a football game would, but the same principle is at work. Young men like to be heroes. They like to be warriors. It's more important to them than sex.

And, if you understand it this way, it was really a wonderful sort of existence, bloodshed and all.

I am seriously thinking that you have missed my point altogether. I think the reason we're not communicating here is that you don't seem to have comprehended what my views on the topic are. I am a carnivore. I am an eater of meat. I eat meat dinner and meat breakfast, supplemented by occasional bites of green vegetable. I consume very little starch compared to meat. My dinners are giant steaks and pork chops, and there is fat, fat and more fat. For a concept of the kind of diet my genetics are suited to, my mother prepares a plate for my father, a plate for herself, and a child-sized plate for their pet dog, all in the same proportions. Their diet and the dog's diet are identical full stop.

I have the same genes and similar attitudes. I am built like a wolf. I walk like a wolf. I consider myself to be more canine than human. You ain't talking to a vegan. My concept of "the good life" is actually pretty roughneck. Because of that, I realize why it's really quite peaceful. It's peaceful in the most naked meaning of "peace." I am not saying that our ancestors lived in some foo-foo garden society where everybody got along and chewed leaves. I am saying that their existence was brutal and savage, and they lived that way because they happened to like it. The very brutality of their lives was part of what bound their societies together and formed the bonds of brotherhood.

I think that I can, for the same reason I can tell that a cat is a predator by watching it pounce at a squeak-toy. We have a lot of vestigial behaviors that are probably leftover from ten thousand years ago, and I think we can learn a lot about our ancestors by examining these vestigial behaviors. Even homophobia might be a remnant of a society where women depended deeply upon the physical strength of certain men who were excluded from male society in spite of being perfectly healthy, and the harassment and exclusion we see today might have been a way of making sure "squaw man" did his job. Everything in the make-up of modern Man is descended from a similar animal.

Mothers have always told those kinds of stories to their children.

But they bled the same color blood that we do.

Whereas I don't think we've really changed as much as we like to believe we have. We are never all that far removed from the naked ape. Everything about primitive Man that was vile or beautiful is in us, somewhere.

If you mean, 'high protein by comparison to chimpanzees,' then I agree with you. If you mean,'more than half of kcal from meat,' I disagree. We split from chimpanzees considerably more than a decamillenium ago, and have had plenty of time to evolve *more* meat processing ability than a chimpanzee.


Again, I suspect we might be arguing based on degree. The difference in robustness is not necessarily due entirely to reduction in gut processing ability, and reduction in gut processing ability is not necessarily due entirely to shifting to a greater dependence on meat; cooking our food was a revolutionary change that freed up kcal from plant sources as well as animal sources. There has been some interesting research lately that implies foraging for shelfish and other littoral species played an important part in the early development of the species, specifically from a cave in South Africa.

It's an interesting hypothesis, amongst a wide variety of competing hypotheses. One population of proto-humans wiping out one population of archaeo-elephants does not necessarily make for the origin of the entire species, however, especially given the significant load of evidence suggesting that the species originated considerably further south.

Elephants are not sessile animals. They range significantly because they require huge volumes of food to stay alive. Killing one (or a dozen) would have provided enough meat for the tribe for a day or two, and then any leftovers would be inedible - after which, the rest of the elephant herd would be many miles away. The tribe could pack up and follow them, but until they caught up (or found other elephants), they'd have to subsist on other sources of calories. Unlike true predators, humans have difficulty going for a week without any source of energy; we tend to be weakened after a paltry few days without food.


You get more calories out of it if it's cooked, and if you're not eating veal (ie, if you're eating adult wild animals that started running a few minutes after birth), the raw form is bound to be pretty darn tough. Just like raw veggies are.


Depends on your activities. Carbs are good when energy is needed quickly; if I'm going to be at the dojo for more than an hour and a half, chomping a relatively high-carb energy bar allows me to train harder, longer; my brother does triathalons, and eats nasty glucose gels because they allow him to keep going. I normally don't like fruit juice, but after training or when I'm doing some other long-period cardio like cross-country skiing, fruit juice tastes like the food of the gods.
The human body doesn't really 'need' protein from animals, either, as many relatively healthy vegetarians show. The whole point of being an omnivore is being able to adapt to a wide range of dietary paradigms.

You've mentioned fiber and Crohn's several times; my understanding of Crohn's was that it's exacerbated by gluten, as opposed to fiber. It sounds like your experience has been different?

Personally, I deliberately take fiber supplements to keep my gut happy. To each gut its own, I guess.

@ William Delaney: I think you've been reading too much evo-psych nonsense.

My reading material would probably bore you.

i've said this before on the forum here, but this book has been debunked numerous times. his assertions are questionable to say the least.

CrazyCatLord, I think that I failed miserably at explaining where I was coming from, here, and I think that I ought to try simply explicating where I am beginning in my thought processes. Firstly, the idea was not to directly contradict your notions, and I very much enjoyed reading about your ideas on prehistoric weaponry. It does give rise to the idea that we have badly underestimated our ancestors and their level of ingenuity, which perhaps we ought to be somewhat ashamed of. My own interests tend to come in at a different angle.

A simple-minded motiff I have always found to be offensive--I do assume your thought processes to be more sophisticated than any caricature I might portray--is the picture, "primitive man did x because it helps him do y" The assumption there is that, when an animal engages in a behavior, the animal is actively thinking about how to get from Point A to Point B. This would paint us a picture of an animal thinking through how they are going to do so-and-so and "spread their genes." It paints us a picture of a calculating, figuring animal carefully planning out how he is going to chart the course of human destiny to the present and ultimately take on the universe. It's fairy-land nonsense.

When an animal engages in any behavior, it really boils down to more fundamental drives. For example, let's examine the possible role of vasopressin in promoting sexual segregation. Someone who goes by the more naive motiff I described above would try to explain sexual segregation by saying something like, "well, obviously, primitive man realized that men were needed in one place, and women were needed elsewhere. How smart they were to realize that." However, if you examine what vasopressin does to male eutherians around the world, it's easy to see why men, in a primitive society, would want to avoid the distraction of women sometimes, especially if their mating instincts were stronger.

One of the effects of vasopressin is to illicit agonistic behavior between males. In many species, would-be suitors routinely get into fairly hideous fights over a desired mate, and this can happen even between males that have a long history between each other. Therefore, men living in primitive societies would gravitate toward single-sexed groups, outside of structured mating, simply because it is less hazardous to their health, mental and otherwise.

However, if you were to watch a good documentary on the mating habits of humpback whales, you would notice that the defeated suitors, after a fight over a female, will spend a while caressing each other, which is interesting to me partly because it is a vaguely homoromantic behavior. When the presence of the female is removed, the lingering effects of the various hormones in their limbic systems, including vasopressin, seem to cause more pro-social behavior. Now, this would make sense for them to do if they were thinking it out: obviously, the remaining males have better chances next go-round if they are cooperating with each other amiably. This pro-social behavior is, for them, just a hormonal effect, regardless of how it may or may not help them in the long-run.

Well, we could juxtapose this with the male bonding that occurs during sports. Although two guys playing a game of "hoops" are clearly engaged in agonistic behavior toward one another during the sport, this behavior does the opposite of what would logically be the case, which is to build up friendship between the competitors. This is the peculiar thing about vasopressin, actually. In fact, certain receptors for it are associated with acts of generosity, which is another pro-social behavior.

Now, this is why I was saying that prehistoric tribespeople having violent clashes between one another does not necessarily indicate a "cruel" existence. If it was vasopressin at work, here, our ancestors had these violent clashes as a means of testing themselves against one another. Weaker or slower males might have gotten killed in these clashes, but we are not talking about an environment in which people are expected to live past their 30s. Your neighbor might have just put a spear through your buddy, but you'll probably love him like a brother by your next inter-tribal gathering. Or you might swindle him in a barter instead. Whatever suits you.

However, what do our ancestors gain from this strange behavior? If you were to ask one of them, they would tell you simply, through broken teeth, "because we like it, and the guys over on the other side of the hill are a bunch of jerks." On the other hand, there are various reasons why this behavior is important! For one thing, by preserving boundaries and divisions between neighboring tribes throughout most of the year, a culture can slow down the spreading of epidemics. If people living under primitive conditions were to congregate in a single mass, a single epidemic would wipe all of them out. On the other hand, if they only congregated in large groups during weather that was not favorable to the spread of epidemics, this would slow down an epidemic!

But our ancestors are not thinking all of this through. There was no prehistoric mastermind who planned all of this out. One wasn't needed. Cultures that didn't follow this pattern were simply wiped out by the odd epidemic, and the remainder just kept on doing what came naturally to them. They didn't have a concept in their minds that their way of life was simply more sanitary, under the circumstances. Therefore, war actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, in some ways. It is just as well that we stick to NFL now that we have such things as antibiotics.

So the point is, perhaps the simplest explanation for why our ancestors liked eating meat is fairly simple and straightforward: they liked going out hunting. The very pursuit of game brought them pleasure. Throwing a rock at a passing bird brought them pleasure, and seeing it fall out of the sky gave them a sense of heroic achievement. The mechanical reasons why this lifestyle worked better are N/A as far as understanding their personal motives.

And that's really the whole concept I was trying to get across.

I'm vegan. I love the way it makes sense to me too.

I don't see dairy as something okay though. I'm not as grossed out by touching it... I am a cashier at a grocery store and touching hot dogs and ground cow disgusts me, but handling cheese isn't quite as terrible. I know enough about the dairy industry and love cows too much to eat dairy again. I've accidentally eaten dairy a few times, it was very mentally upsetting to me. Eating meat however would make me physically sick. I have been vegan for 4 years and I assume eating another animal would kill me.

I love cooking and I know how to cook so many great vegan things, I can't see how I would -desire- to eat meat either.

@LKL: I don't have much time to argue today and I concede on most points, so I'll only address this:

Many people with Crohn's have food intolerances which can worsen their symptoms, but I personally have no problem with gluten. The cause of Crohn's disease is still unclear, but some evidence points to a bacterial or fungal invasion of the intestinal tissue. Crude fiber scrapes off the top layer of the mucus intestinal lining, and if the mucosa wears too thin, this can lead to infections. (For healthy people this is quite beneficial though, since it reduces mucosal plaque and makes it easier to absorb nutrients).

In my case, the intestinal tissue in the affected area (the ileum) lays bare and is partially necrotic due to frequent inflammation. Too much fiber could further damage the tissue. It also increases the volume of the chyme, which is problematic when my ileum is inflamed and stenotic so that food barely passes through. The stenosis was so severe at the time of my last colonoscopy that the endoscope didn't fit through the ileum, and my gastroenterologist had to send me to the hospital for an enteroclysis instead. It has gotten better since then, after I lived mostly off soup for a while to get around surgery, but I still don't dare to eat much fiber.

@WilliamWDelaney (there is no point in quoting your post in full since it's on the same page of this thread):

I didn't suggest that our distant ancestors carefully planned all details of their survival strategies. When I say something like "they did x because it helped them to achieve y", what I really mean is "populations who did x for whatever reason, either because it simply made them feel good or because it was part of their culture and they had been raised to do it, were naturally selected for because x led to y and y increased their survival chances."

As for friendly versus violent competition, I think we've been talking about different things here. You are talking about competition within tribes or societies, whereas I was talking about wars and feuds between them. Of course humans cooperate within their social circle because they depend on one another, but the competition between cooperative groups used to be violent and brutal. Even in our civilized times, people say things like "we should just drop a bomb on [insert random Middle Eastern country] and turn it into a parking lot". This shows that even humans capable of cooperating on a nation scale can be extremely hostile towards their perceived enemies.

Owwwww.
By all means, eat whatever makes that gut happy .
It seems so strange - I deliberately eat yogurt and fiber to increase the flora of my gut and slow things down (I know fiber usually does the opposite), but it sounds like that would about kill you.

Except that some of our close hominid relatives (leave alone other eutherians)probbably didn't have gender segregation.


Is guys bonding with each other in, say, a bout of martial arts different or similar to women bonding in a bout of martial arts? Or a woman and a man bonding in a bout of martial arts? And before you say that 'he wouldn't be able to do it because of sexual tension,' let me offer to hit you in the face a few times while you stand staring at my boobs. Believe me, you'll stop thinking of me strictly in female terms very quickly.

polio: spreads in warm weather.
influenza: spreads in cold weather.
cholera: spreads in wet weather.
etc.

since you're basically describing the evolution of anything here, I agree with this general statement though I disagree with the specifics. The problem with your specifics is that what is adaptive in one environment is maladaptive in another, and humans have specifically evolved to have large portions of our behavior picked up by learning rather than hard-wired by genetics.

The biblical ideal is vegetarianism. Kashrut was the compromise.