science

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[–] limer@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Primates in general are designed to eat red meat. Chimps, our closest cousin, go on regular hunts against other primates, and eat them

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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml [S] 9 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

My point is that it was way more rare than what people's diets look like today. Not zero but not dominant. Wide reliance on plants is even true before modern agriculture. For example:

Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

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[–] limer@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I myself am a victim of the modern diet, and lack of exercise. I almost died of high cholesterol and other related factors, before I started to eat better and be physically active.

I’m a firm believer in a varied diet, and that most people should have a less meaty intake.

Just, we are designed to be hunters and eat red meat

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[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

My parents fed me red meat for almost every dinner I can recall growing up. I’m early 30s and my cholesterol is very high. I was able to drop my cholesterol significantly in one month by changing my diet to mostly vegan with chicken and fish once or twice a week. Switched my morning eggs out to egg whites. Cooked in avocado oil instead of butter.

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[–] limer@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I tend to eat very little red meat now, maybe once a month. I used to eat it every day

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[–] JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That’s very impressive. Dietary factors generally account for a very small proportion of blood LDL. Your diet must have been very poor and you likely have some known genetic mutations which greatly exacerbate the issue.

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 point 1 year ago

This isn't quite accurate, dietary interventions can have huge impact on LDL.

Seed Oils (Industrial oils from processing plant seeds, or vegetable oils) - are known to dramatically lower LDL... Oreo Cookie Treatment Lowers LDL Cholesterol More Than High-Intensity Statin therapy in a Lean Mass Hyper-Responder on a Ketogenic Diet: A Curious Crossover Experiment

Ketogenic ABF Can increase LDL from the population average considerably in a few months

A long term standard western diet can increase LDL through glycation and oxidation damage to circulating LDL, preventing the liver from reusing that LDL and producing more LDL (so there is a build up of usable LDL and damaged LDL showing up as elevated LDL)

All that being said, LDL, and more generally Cholesterol - IS NOT A DISEASE. You would die if you didn't have any, the body will produce it on demand if its not consumed in the diet. The link between LDL (undamaged) and heart disease (the lipid heart hypothesis) is not based on repeatable science, and isn't holding up with modern scrutiny

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[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Interesting personal assumptions but my diet was quite healthy aside from the daily eggs and meat consumption. As I mentioned in my comment, I replaced my dietary proteins from red meat often to red meat seldom and replaced it with plant proteins. When you consume high cholesterol foods, you’re likely going to have high blood LDL. That’s just physics. The study you linked even says this (as well as the fact that more and better studies are needed for more precise conclusions).

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[–] JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago*

When you consume high cholesterol foods, you’re likely going to have high blood LDL. That’s just physics.

No, that’s not how it works. Please read the paper I cited. That’s like saying we can breathe water because H2O has O in it. Human bodies are very complex. A strict diet can reduce LDL by around 8-15%. Nowhere near the dramatic decline you indicated. LDL is mostly determined by genetics, with 40-60% heritable. Other causes are related to genetic mutations, excess weight, and metabolic issues like diabetes. Less important factors include menopause, age, hypothyroidism, and certain medications. You likely had a comorbidity. From the paper:

Conclusions: In typical British diets replacing 60% of saturated fats by other fats and avoiding 60% of dietary cholesterol would reduce blood total cholesterol by about 0.8 mmol/l (that is, by 10-15%), with four fifths of this reduction being in low density lipoprotein cholesterol.

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 1 year ago

When you consume high cholesterol foods, you’re likely going to have high blood LDL.

It's not a dose independent response, if you eat only cholesterol (like only egg yolks for a month), you will find adding even more egg yolks does not increase the LDL, the excess gets processed into other nutrients or excreted. The feedback mechanisms in regulating LDL are very good, its just a optimization that food cholesterol can be used for circulating LDL, if you didn't eat any cholesterol at all your body would still make LDL.

More generally Cholesterol, and specifically LDL, is not a disease.

artificially lowering LDL is not actually good for your health. Its far more impactful to measure atherosclerotic risk directly with plaque imaging (CAC for example).

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[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

This is just not true in the bigger picture of human evolution. That paper focuses on humans in North Africa 15,000–13,000 years ago which is a very tiny snapshot in time and geography.

Eating meat is a major part of what separated archaic humans from other primates; it is theorized that the calories from meat is part of what helped us grow our larger brains. Homo Habilis was eating meat 2.6 million years ago, well before Homo Sapiens even existed. Homo Erectus hunted to the point of wiping out many large herbivores over a 1.5 million year time period. They are meat regularly enough for tapeworms to speciate specifically for us as hosts.

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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml [S] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here's another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed

we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121

I am not saying that hunting didn't happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it

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[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

If a species is straight up annihilating multiple species merely through predation, it's not statistically possible for it to be a small amount of meat. A wide variety of plants eaten, as pointed out in that paper, doesn't mean it was mostly a plant diet - if anything, that means it's likely humans primarily only ate plants while traveling during a hunt.

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 1 year ago

primarily only ate plants while traveling during a hunt.

Or when meat was scarce!

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[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

yes, of course we ate lots of plants as well, that was never disputed. We were hunters and gatherers. The point is meat has absolutely been a significant part of our diets for millions of years (the exact ratio depending on the environment humans found themselves in). it is well documented by many direct lines of evidence as i laid out above.

I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did).

it didn't just "happen" like once in a while. we are/were probably the best hunters ever seen on planet earth. we basically wiped out global megafauna over the last 1.5 million years.

I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it

what exactly do you mean by "very different picture"? that's an extremely vague statement that could mean almost anything.

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[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 5 points 1 year ago

It depends on the populations.

Steppe populations from modern Ukraine easy through to the Urals lived mainly on meat and dairy 5000 years ago (even if they didn’t yet have the lactose tolerance adaptation).

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[–] xep@discuss.online 7 points 1 year ago

Isotopic testing shows that early humans primarily subsisted on herbivores and small game, including fish. Please refer to this study for Europe.

Early modern humans also appear to have regularly hunted large herbivores (55–57), but there is also evidence for the use of small game, including fish at some of these sites (15, 16).

Or this study, also from Nature, again studying the first modern humans and late Neandertals in Europe:

based on stable isotopes, the mammoth seems to contribute the major part of the dietary protein of humans in a time range between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago and across wide areas spanning from SW France11 to the Crimean Peninsula53 (Fig. 6, Supplementary Fig. 5–8).

It is inaccurate to state that humans did not eat much meat prior to modern times.