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humans are obligate carnivores (hackertalks.com)
submitted 13 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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[–] 1 point 3 hours ago* (2 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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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    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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