Hi,

I learned about the paleo diet just yesterday and spend a few hours reading up on this topic. Up until yesterday I have followed Dr. Schnitzers diet which says that whole grain products, uncooked vegetables, berries, nuts and mineral water was the way to go. He argues that we don't have the teeth of a carnivore.

Since our teeth are not made to tear flesh apart humans are not meat eaters and therefore should restrain form eating meat.

Could anybody please comment on this ?
Thank you very much.

People tear flesh apart all the time. Perhaps his point was that people don't use their teeth to catch and kill animals, the same way carnivores don't use tools to catch and kill animals.

Well, to start with we are omnivores, so of course we don't have the teeth of a carnivore. We also don't have the teeth of a herbivore either. By that logic, we shouldn't eat anything that has to be chewed, which eliminates the whole grain products, uncooked vegetables, berries, and nuts. I'm not sure I could survive for long on the nutrients in mineral water.

Exactly!! That is what he said. So, isn't he right? Our teeth look very different from a dog's, which is a true meat eater. When man made tools to kill game (like bow and arrow) I doubt that their body could adapt to eating a lot of meat that fast. Once the idea of bow and arrow was there it was easy for everybody to make and use them. That might have taken only a few days or weeks. Before that they couldn't kill a fast animal (by throwing rocks?).

Yes I have never seen a dog make pancakes in the forest.


I think this entire diet is a question of how long people were using bow and arrow and other sorts of weapons to kill wild animals. They might have only used them for 2 weeks and drew pictures in caves. Does that make us meat eaters? Maybe they didn't eat meat. They only defended themselves. What do those drawings proove? When we visualize a caveman those documentaties of BBC come to our minds. But can we be sure that they show an authentic picture. Even scientists can only guess.

I read that cavemen ate their meat raw before fire was found. But how can scientists be so sure ? I don't think our teeth are made for tearing raw meat apart. Just look in the mirror.

Why does the paleo diet allow deep sea fish ? How could a stone age man possibly have caugth fish that live 300 meters below the surface of the sea ?
Why are shrimp allowed. And if the stone man found fire why shouldn't he have cooked potatoes? There is no proof he didn't.


http://www.dr-schnitzer.de/acne.html

Quote:

Most toxins in the blood come from the last section of the bowel

It is the digestive system, which takes the food in from environment, assimilates it, and metabolizes it into its own energy and substances of the body. After having passed the wall of the bowel, the substances pass to the lymphatic system and reach the circulating blood, for transport to where they are needed for immediate consumption or storage. From the main part of the bowel, the blood is not directly returning into the main stream; first it passes to the liver which filters out and neutralizes toxins. Only from the last end of the bowel the blood is directly returning into the main stream of the blood.
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This has been developed, approved and successful during an evolution of millions of years. Taking a man-appropriate native nutrition the human digestive system is genetically programmed for, there remains no toxic substances in the last section of the bowel, which would need a detoxification by the liver. This human origin nutrition was a frugivorous one. This was proved by Dr. Richard Lehne's "comparing dentition anatomy": Man's dentition is constructed to chew seeds, roots, soft leaves and fruits.
.
To compare with a typical omnivorous (=everything, vegetables and meat eater's) dentition, e.g. the wild boar is equipped with: Man's dentition should look like that, if man's genetic nutrition programming would be for vegetables and meat.


In the recent past: Dramatic change of feeding habits

During the last decades feeding habits of man changed dramatically, mainly in the so called highly civilized countries. Man's food now contains a lot of animal products, which are similarly inappropriate for the frugivorous man as for the herbivorous cattle.

If the herbivorous cattle are fed by animal products, this can result in a degeneration of the brain. BSE, a liquefaction of the brain of cattle, the first time was found in England, after parts from sheep were fed to cows, by scientists' arguments "to improve their protein supply, to increase production of milk and meat". Conclusions might be drawn from this fact to the growing number of Morbus Alzheimer (a degeneration of the human brain) with an increasing percentage of younger Alzheimer patients in a population, parallel to the increasing intake of man-inappropriate animal food (meat etc., recommended by scientists with similar arguments: "to increase protein supply").

In addition, the main part of "modern food" is more or less denatured, by heat and extraction, and refined. Even "native" vegetable foodstuffs contain pesticides, and nitrates from chemical fertilizers or from not aerobic composted animal dung. In the human bowel, these nitrates react with amines (metabolized products from animal protein), so becoming carcinogenic nitrosamines. Nitrosamines are the main cause of intestinal cancer. Intestinal cancer is one of the most widespread types of cancer of all.


http://www.dr-schnitzer.de/overweight.html

Man's original genetic frugivorous food program still is functional

According to man's genetic programming, man is not carnivorous (= meat eater like lion or dog), nor omnivorous (all-and-everything-eater like the wild boar). That's one of the reasons, why people become ill and obese with the common inappropriate, denaturated, processed civilization food.
As proven by the "Comparing Dentition Anatomy" (Dr. Richard Lehne), the natural genetic food program of man is a frugivorous one: Seeds, especially grass seeds, soft leaves, soft roots, and fruits were the human origin nutrition. Later man cultivated from the wild plants the cereals, root vegetables, leafy salads, nuts and fruits. This genetic program of man still is functional. A healthy, man-appropriate nutrition is the best "reduction diet".
As soon as overweight and obese people (as well as underweight people) return to a „civilized origin nutrition“, they can eat until satisfied, and overweight starts to drop (underweight people gain weight), until at last the weight normalizes without ever going hungry. Then the obesity (or underweight) is cured, the body's weight is normalized and stabilized, and it's easy to maintain this ideal weight for good. At the same time a strong natural health rises, and a high immunity against infections; vigor increases, digestion, the heart and kidney functions normalize, and the brain works better and easier.

Diabetes
http://www.doc-schnitzer.com/diabetes-secrets-expl.html

The only omnivore is the wild pig. I don't think we are meat eaters.
According to our teeth we are herbivores.

Here is some very interesting reading material:

http://www.dr-schnitzer.de/medicusquovadis-e.html

Perhaps then you can explain to us why our digestive systems most closely resemble carnivore digestive systems and are completely different from herbivore digestive systems.

Along those lines, you might want to have a look through this thread: http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthre...ved+eating+meat

Human teeth are designed for both tearing (incisors and canines) and grinding (molars) indcating that we are omnivores, not strictly one way or the other.
Tooth structure isn't the only thing that determines whether or not an animal will eat meat or vegetable matter, although I might note that it requires molars to chew meat (once a piece is torn off with the incisors and canines) as much as it does to chew seeds and berries. Take whales, for instance. Many of them don't have teeth, but have instead baleen which are designed to filter out crill...a protein source.
As Hellistile pointed out, consider also the design of our intestinal tract. We definitely don't have more than one stomach or chew cud like cows and other ruminants who survive strictly on vegetation. Our nutritional requirements also most closely resemble those of the carnivore (essential fatty acids are hard to come by through strict vegetarian sources as are complete proteins; two things that humans MUST have and MUST obtain through dietary sources).
There are also countless indications that before man was a hunter, he was a scavanger, eating the parts of the animal left over that other animals could not get to such as the brains (skulls broken open) and bone marrow (bones broken in half) (interestingly, the parts highest in essential fatty acids) as well as countless indications that man was a hunter (spear heads, arrow heads, tool marks (not tooth marks) on bones and bones dug up near ancient dwellings).
As for greater health among cultures that don't eat meat, that is untrue also. Paleantologists have shown that as cultures moved away from eating meat and into more agriculture, stature declined, dental caries and disease increased. Skeletons and teeth can give important clues as to the health of the deceased.

We HAVE to be omnivorous because it is virtually impossible to get enough food energy out of wild plants alone.

You'd have to eat something like several POUNDS of leaves and stems and uncultivated fruits to get enough calories to survive on. We don't have the vast intestinal capacity that apes have, to process that kind of bulk. It it also very hard to gather that much. A small family group would need to gather, then eat 50-60 pounds of wild vegetation PER DAY to survive. Very difficult.

Figure how many calories in the average head of broccoli (NOT found in nature by the way?) How many calories in a red pepper (also NOT found in nature?) Add it up, and you'd have to ingest MASSIVE amounts of plants just to subsist. Provided you didn't eat any toxic plants. And about 70% of the plant you find are toxic.

If you included some wild, non-cultivated tubers and roots -- which are usually toxic unless processed in some way -- you could reduce the poundage somewhat.

You cannot feed on wild grains. Our teeth are not equipped to grind them. By your reasoning, we cannot be natural grain eaters. We do not have gnawing teeth of rats. Nor the flat grinding teeth of a horse. The only way to eat grains is to pound and grind them with rocks. Go to Whole Foods market, buy a bag of wheat berries out of the barrel and try to eat them. Your teeth will break in five minutes.

Try to eat a wild walnut with your teeth. Or a hazelnut, or a Brazil nut. Gotta use a rock to crack it. (How is that different from using a rock to crack open the bones of a buffalo?)

Go out into your backyard, or your nearby forest or desert, and pick your dinner. Go ahead. Most of what's there is inedible. Most of the plants are outright toxic.

Go visit some of the 'wild foraging' sites on the web. Most have DIRE warnings all over the place that the vast majority of plants are downright deadly to eat, unless you know the few species you CAN eat.


The ONLY way to consistently get 2000 calories a day, is to include calorie-dense animal foods in your diet. To my knowledge there has NEVER been a free-living society that subsisted ONLY on wild plant foods. You simply can't do it. They either supplement with animal foods OR they grow a few select crop plants -- which are usually VERY different from those found in nature.

Sure, today you can theoretically get enough calories on a purely 'vegan' diet -- but ONLY if you include (1) mutant plants that do NOT exist in nature, and in fact will not survive without human tending (2) you process them in some way, involving mechanical crushing, or fermentation, or soaking or enzymatic treatment.

Now, tell me ONE wild animal that is toxic to eat. Maybe a tree frog? Okay, you might not like the tast of raccoon, or hippo. But the meat is not at all toxic. How many plants are toxic?

We had to be omivores, or we wouldn't have survived.

If we were made for being vegetarian we wouldn't have opposable thumbs for grabbing our prey would we? Our hands grab very efficiently without having to use our heads/teeth. Vegetation does not move. Standing up on two feet also comes in handy for scouting for prey and seeing something that might want to eat us as well. Meat in part, made us what we are.

Totally untrue.

We have an omnivores dental formula, because well we are pretty much omnivorous. Although we lean towards being carnivorous, we are default omnivores and can survive on any kind of diet. However, it is unquestionably obvious when the whole animal is considered that humans thrive on a primarily animal flesh/product diet.

We have two incisors, 1 canine, and 2 premolars, and 3 molars. The function of the incisor is to cut (flesh mostly) like a scissor or knife. The function of the canine is to work like a fork or spear, to stab and tear off bits of flesh. The premolar is a combination of a canine and a molar, it both tears apart flesh like the canine but it also has a grinding function like the molar. Our molars are for grinding roughage and vegetation so they may be utilized by the body.

True grazing herbivores have predominantly molar type teeth. They do not have the quantity of carnivorous teeth that we do.

Anyway, it's important to remember that things like musculature, shape of the head, and teeth are all tools for giving an animal access to food. They do give valuable clues as to the nature of their diet, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the most valuable tool a human has is his brain. While form of the animal can predict other creatures diets with reasonable accuracy, since it is their lone and exclusive tool, our bodies are only supplementary to our brain. A better indicator of what diet we thrive on is our digestive system, which is far more biased toward carnivorism than herbivorism.

The human's intestinal tract is very short, more like carnivores and unlike a herbivores. Carnivores have short intestinal tracts because meat carries parasites and bacteria, waste of which must be rapidly excreted to prevent disease. Plus flesh food is in a form that is readily accessible to animals (the structures of a rat isn't all that different from a cat, for example) and does not require lengthy digestive processes (relative to fiber at least). Herbivores have much longer intestinal tracts and multiple "sacks" to catch roughage (i.e. caecum). The function of this is to retain hard to digest fiber and bulk so it may be fermented by bacteria, producing energy for the organism. If humans had to depend on that sort of diet composed of grasses and leaves, they would soon die. We could never produce enough energy from microbiobal fermentation exclusively to support our existence.

Well what about fruit and grain you may be thinking. Humans can eat the sugars and starches and live on that. It's important to remember that the highly sugared fruits and grain foods that exist today are the result of human interference with nature. Thousands of years of agriculture has produced these highly sweet fruits and refined grains. In their natural state, grains cannot be consumed because they are mostly non-starchy bulk. Modern fruit has been the result of cross breeding which favors abnormally high concentrations of sweetness.

Let's think about this for a second. If you looked at a truly unmodernized primitive human, what would his diet look like? In a natural environment, where humans are surrounded by only what occurs naturally, they would find a) leaves, roots, grasses, b) scant nuts and berries and fruit from the trees and bushes, c) animals. There would be no highly sweet fruits, there would be no soft bowl of rice. The sweet fruit, when found (most plant fruits are not that high in energy) would not exist in any bounty and could not fuel the expansion of human societies. Furthermore, we could not yet extract and refine the grains enough to make them a decent source of energy... that didn't enter the picture until like 10,000 years ago. What did we do before that?

Now a primarily herbivorous animal (like earlier primates, grazing animals, etc) could easily feast on the naturally occurring leaves, roots, and grasses and totally sustain his existence due to the nature of his digestive system. They retain all that hard to digest bulk, ferment it, and it supplies them enough energy. If a human did that, he would die. Fiber gives us about 1.6 calories per ingested calorie, and there is no way we can retain enough of it long enough or in a quantity enough to fuel us.

The only way a human can get enough energy to sustain himself in a totally natural environment is by hunting and consuming flesh food. Flesh food is designed to overwhelmingly make up the energy we consume. Nuts, fruit, berries, and roughage are only supplementary to the natural human diet.

I think my teeth resembles my cats way more than it does a deer.



The first number represents incisors, the second canines (both of which are exclusively for meat eating and serve absolutely no function for the exclusive plant eater), the second represents premolar (crushing teeth, useful to all orientations of animal), and the last represents molars. The first number is upper second is lower set.

As you can see, humans have a dental formula similar to both meat eaters and plant eaters.

It's plainly obvious. In nature, divorced of modern society and refining practices, a human has two options. 1) consume animals and live, 2) pretend to be herbivorous and starve. We simply cannot get enough energy from the abundant bulk, and fruits/nuts/berries are too scarce to ever fuel us effectively.

Just wanted to say, that was an excellent post. You put it so much better than I did .

Healthman,

I was just re watching my 2001:Space Oddyssey dvd...
Those apes were dying out trying to subsist off of vegetation that was disappearing, but that monolith got them to eat some good ol' wild tapir.

Touch the Monolith Healthman, touch it now!

No need to look in the mirror; I tear raw meat apart every single day. I'm really very serious. I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's so hard to do.

If we weren't able to do it, we still wouldn't be able to do it. There is only evolutionary pressure when there is a selective advantage to having teeth that can tear meat. If everyone can tear meat just fine, then there's no selective advantage, so no change would take place.

I think Dr. Schnitzer's work doesn't make sense to us because he lacks an evolutionary argument.