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humans are obligate carnivores (hackertalks.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/carnivore@discuss.online
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I know, I KNOW, we are omnivores (you, me, maybe not our llm friends, but most of us)... but that doesn't quite line up with biological necessity.

I would argue we are facultative omnivores, but obligate carnivores. We can eat plants for efficiency (famines and whatnot), but they are not necessary for life. Meat, however, is necessary - at the very least we would have b vitamin deficiencies without meat, and babies wouldn't develop into healthy humans without it.

People will argue, and i love you all for it, that maybe this applies historically but in the modern food environment we can engineer our way out of this obligation - sure, that's true, but when speaking of our species appropriate and native diet - we would still be obligate carnivores

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[–] 7 points 23 hours ago (16 children)

Obligate implies exclusive sustenance on a specific diet, like the big cats, that can not sustain themselves with any other source of calories.

Human beings are capable of sustaining themselves with almost anything available in nature, hence the classification as omnivores. The generalist diet of the human species is an adaption for survival; it's harder to die of famine if nearly everything in the landscape can be turned into food.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 23 hours ago (15 children)

    i'm open to a better way to express the need to eat some meat, but being opportunistic to plants. Omnivore implies its totally optional either or, which isn't right.

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  • [–] 4 points 18 hours ago (14 children)

    In evolutionary terms, I risk we can see it the other way around.

    Our ancestors started as herbivores, being tree dwellers, and only later changed into the role of scavenger and after that predator, making the consumption of other animals a viable and reliable food source.

    The species evolved into the role of the omnivore, capable of eating nearly anything to survive, and it proved to be a winning strategy.

    If the concern is the apport of B12, eggs are a source for it and it would be an easy enough one for early humans to get it.

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  • [–] 3 points 15 hours ago (10 children)

    I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

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  • [–] 3 points 14 hours ago (9 children)

    Where was I unclear in my point?

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  • [–] 3 points 14 hours ago* (8 children)

    I think you're saying that it's easy to get B12 in the wild without meat, as if humans didn't spend millions of years eating only meat when meat was available.

    Not sure what I was missing in the earlier read

    Most eggs are tiny, for example

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago (7 children)

    What I am stating is that B12 can be obtained from other sources besides meat and that such sources - one of which is eggs - could be accessed by early humans.

    The inclusion of meat in the diet of our ancestors has been demonstrated to be linked with the rapid increase of brain volume; meat is calorie and nutritionally dense, there is no denial of that.

    But it is not something to overlook that humans descend from tree dwellers, which were most probably exclusive herbivores. For many more millions of years than meat, as a food stuff, has been part of the diet.

    Thus, stating that humans are obligate carnivores makes no sense. Humans evolved to be omnivores, from herbivores.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago (6 children)

    Right. I think we kept some of the ability to detoxify some plants from the herbivorous apes we descended from, but then we spent millions of years scavenging (probably eating a lot of brains as we could smash skulls of lion kills open with a rock), then hunting, following migratory grass eaters

    Plants became emergency food. We're not as good at detoxifying them as a gorilla is

    Hunter gatherers universally (outside the wet tropics where fruit is plentiful year around) eat meat when meat is available, and only use plants when the hunt fails

    We classify animals as obligate carnivores when we see them in wild eating only meat. When we have found humans in the wild they eat only meat. If you study pre-agriculture bones you find they had a practically all meat diet.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

    Before agricultural and sedentary life became dominant, it is a well known fact humans were hunter-gatherers, with hunting providing the larger portion of their calories. Herbivores were plentiful and large; a single kill provided a good amount of food for a group for some time. Such a life style forced the following of herds.

    Detoxify strikes me as an odd choice word. It's been the quest, and a very successful one, for farmers since the taming of the first crops to selectively improve them to obtain better and safer results at each season. There is an honorable mention with cassava, which is inherently toxic due to the presence of cyanide in the tuber, but can nonetheless be safely consumed through careful preparation.

    Cooking, through the original use of fire, enabled the species to make better use of all food. Cooking facilitates digestion and the absorbtion of nutrients. Nearly all of the food consumed on the planet is cooked; unless someone is eating their food completely raw, the concer with toxicity is very low and, in my understanding, irrelevant for what we have been discussing.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

    Note that there isn't much to gather in Europe during the last glaciation of the current ice age, or even in winter in general

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

    Which is prior to the rise of the first fixed settlements, from which agriculture started. During that period, humans survived off the land, hunting and gathering what they could. It is an established fact. Nonetheless, there have been findings supporting that prior to domestication, humans already gathered and consumed wild grains and other foods sourced from plants.

    I am not a survival expert but I am aware there are food sources available throughout the entire year, for those who know it.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    And they didn't eat those things except as flavourings for their meat, medicines, or emergency food when the hunt failed

    No one ate much plant matter except for the week when local fruit fruited until they settled into villages around farms when agriculture reached western Europe 4000 years ago. My ancestors are from that region, grain intolerance is common in that population as we haven't had it long. Cabbage is fine as we had that before we started farming it

    Things are like that all over the world, people got agriculture 10kya (kiloyears ago) in Egypt through 200 years ago for the first contacted indigenous Australians, to not yet for some uncontacted tribes.

    The less time since introduction of high dosage of plants and the poisons they carry on introduction of agriculture the less will those populations handle those plants. And none of us handle them as well as a herbivore. At best you use extra vitamins and iron to detoxify the plants you eat, at worst you're intolerant.

    The only food reliably available in snowy conditions is meat

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 child)

    The wild grains would have been very different from today's, though, and the plants would have been too. Far less appetizing, I'd imagine. There is carbon/nitrogen isotope testing that shows that our distant predecessors also subsisted off roots and tubers.

    I don't have a point to make, just wondering out loud.

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  • [–] 3 points 31 minutes ago

    The wild grains would have been very different from today's, though, and the plants would have been too.

    Yes, for most of them. Today's carrots are very different from the original crops, as an easy example. Even the predominant colour wasn't as such until a couple of centuries ago.

    Far less appetizing, I'd imagine.

    Can we agree that is at best very subjective to answer?

    It doesn't require much effort to find everyday food items that have changed wildly in its palatability over the course of one or two generations. Not processed foods; basic food items.

    There is carbon/nitrogen isotope testing that shows that our distant predecessors also subsisted off roots and tubers.

    And we still do. Our ancestors got that right. Potatoes, kassava and taro are good examples of that.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 7 hours ago (2 children)

    Our ancestors started as herbivores, being tree dwellers, and only later changed into the role of scavenger and after that predator, making the consumption of other animals a viable and reliable food source.

    Frugivores, but yes... in the intervening couple million years we lost the ability to survive without meat, we adapted to our new food environment. Humans are clearly not frugivores anymore.

    The species evolved into the role of the omnivore, capable of eating nearly anything to survive, and it proved to be a winning strategy.

    My point is we still need some meat to survive, we are obligated... so we are baseline obligate carnivores, and then opportunistic on other food sources. We can't eat nearly anything, grass for instance - happily there are animals that can eat grass, which we can eat.

    If the concern is the apport of B12, eggs are a source for it and it would be an easy enough one for early humans to get it.

    Eating eggs would be carnivorous behavior, no?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    There are more non-fruit bearing than there are fruit bearing trees. It's a safe assumption to consider early ancestors, prior to becoming land dwellers, had the largest portion of their diet based from leaves.

    That's a keen observation. Prior to shifting from herbivores to scavengers, the apport of B12 would probably be obtained from specialized intestinal biome. Since evolution always comes with trade-offs, that was a loss in the long term.

    I refuse the insistence with humans being obligate carnivores. Prior to becoming active predators, humans widened and improved their diet by including what they could scavenge from the landscape, including meat sourced from dead animals or abandoned predator kills. That is actively developing and evolving into omnivorous capabilty.

    Eggs are not meat. Eggs are an animal product, granted, but it's not from its consumption we derive the notion of being carnivore.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    It’s a safe assumption to consider early ancestors, prior to becoming land dwellers, had the largest portion of their diet based from leaves.

    That is quite the assumption, modern frugivore apes only eat leaves when fruit is scarce

    I refuse the insistence with humans being obligate carnivores

    Fair enough, i'm open to better terminology. Must eat some meat needs a term that isn't overloaded.

    Eggs are not meat. Eggs are an animal product, granted, but it’s not from its consumption we derive the notion of being carnivore.

    Eggs are not carnivorous food?

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