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humans are obligate carnivores (hackertalks.com)
submitted 20 hours 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 facilitative 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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[–] 2 points 14 hours ago (8 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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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (6 children)

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

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

    Where was I unclear in my point?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago* (4 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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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (3 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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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (2 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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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 hours ago

    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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