The demise of “Nutcracker Man”

This discusses two rare fossils that indicate some of our ancestors lived on "grasses and sedges" with distinct teeth and facial features and tracing elements in bones.

Even with fire, that wouldn't have put them on the road to where we wound up. We needed more bio-available nutrition or our brains would not have doubled in size when we turned to hunting.

Which is why we are omnivores, with a lot of room for adjustment in either direction.

Why we are not cows and deer

Quite simply:

I have the teeth of an omnivore

I have the digestive enzymes of an omnivore

I have the alimentary canal of an omnivore

So I respect my body by eating an omnivorous diet.

It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.

We are not deer, nor are we gorillas. ( Gorillas are vegetarians, with huge bellies to digest that fibrous material.) Chimps eat a lot of meat.....

So many reasons why I call veganism a Belief System, not an eating plan. There is not a scrap of biological OR anthropological OR historical support for it.

As I tell them when confronted online as a carnivore: the science isn't there.

I read that deer will eat every but of meat they can find. But it's mostly carrion, as they aren't equipped for hunting.

I was surprised when I read that.

WereBear, I agree with the belief system theory. It's a cult, almost a cult religion. There are 7 essential nutrients that vegans can't get, so they have to take nutritional supplements get them. That tells me it's the wrong way to eat.

And if you aren't a vegan, and you call yourself a vegetarian, you really aren't. If you eat lacto/ovo or any animal product at all, you are an omnivore.

Bob

Bob, i would believe it.

My ducks eat chicken!! I was shocked to see them partake in an old rotisserie. Total shocker. Always thought ducks were vegetarian. Clearly not.

And that's if ALL the supplements actually work. They have a 5 year cushion for B-12 storage and then the mental changes make it more difficult to make good decisions. Like realizing vegan isn't working for them.

Which seems unlikely to improve as I'm seeing research which indicates nutrition is more synergistic than just popping a pill. Like needing fat with the food to obtain fat soluble vitamins. Whole foods have what we need to make use of it.

Reading Unprocessed, with its focus on mental health, demonstrates the malnutrition effects can show up in mood and thinking, first. The brain gets the first 25% of our fuels.

Bob, also a personal note of thanks for telling me about Naked Whey. Switching to my homemade versions made it stark about how much my morning smoothie wasn't food. Now, it is.

Think about it . . . Ducks in the wild eat many things from fish to crustaceans to insects. Yes, many feed on aquatic plants and grains, but ducks have a varied diet and are opportunists based on availability just like humans used to be.

Exactly.

I did think about it and realized my short thinking. 😂

Don't feel bad, Ms. Arielle.

I was able to lose track of the fact that chocolate was a PLANT.

Just didn't want anyone thinking you were a quack.


Sorry . . . . . couldn't resist . . . . but probably should have.

One of the first steps to customize my food was reading Dr. Jack Kruse's Epi-Paleo Diet. I blended that with Mark Sisson's Primal for a sweet spot I could never quite live up to. But it's just as well I couldn't get into Mark's Big A$$ salad.

Now, I can perhaps do a zero carb winter. But with the approach of spring (ha! I spy a rationalization) I have some romaine and sardines and I'll have a keto ceasar salad. It wasn't all lettuce, I'm discovering. I should have cut my own romaine and skipped the baby greens. And fiber issues may yet sink even this plan. I'm keeping the leaf portions low.

It's so nice to have a balanced way to assess plant foods that had been baffling me. No one ever talked about oxalate, apparently, until three years ago. When I was busy with other things But it's connected in the literature with autoimmune, and the toxic part has been known since the 1840s. Only kidney treatment even mentions it, and often, dismisses it as "diet."

I'll try such a form of "spring greens" and then let them go, for a new, seasonal treat. I might do better having more carbs in such seasons, since botanical fruits are so much easier for me to digest.

In fact, my holiday-foolish approach was probably when I started going downhill. Raw vegetable relish trays, stuffed potatoes with butter and cheese, and carrots in onion dip which I treated like CANDY.

Only rib-eye should be treated like candy.

I watched a former vegan video from someone who said her East Indian heritage had kept her going on vegan longer than anyone else, since vegetarianism has a long history there. She has the enzymes I lack.

With my new interest in oxalate, that might be enough motivation to get me over the hump of letting my body have a zero carb stretch to clear the excess. Which might be a original reason for so many religions having fasting days of various kinds. My carnivore experiment worked well, until I had signs of oxalate dumping with zero plants and thought I was doing something wrong.

Now I have a new reason to try it NEXT winter. (Because this one is close enough to over, right?) I've been hard-core carnivore for enough stretches to know the zest that brings! And be healthy enough to handle it, frankly.

No. I do not actually turn into a bear. Unless you try to take away my chocolate. I've cut down and I'm at peace with the compromises necessary to try this new Toxic Superfoods, plan.

This just in:



Another vegan myth busted

I don't complicate things too much.

I eat like an omnivore, and use this general formula:

Twice as much fat as protein, and fewer than 20 net carbs per day.

Plus I minimize ultra-processed food as much as possible

Oh, and about three 4oz glasses of red wine per week.

I weigh every day, and if I notice a gain trend for more than a few days, I cut back.

Following specific diets is just more complicated than I want to deal with. But that's just me, it's OK for others.

You can blast me with all the propaganda for and against veganism, and what our ancestors ate, my body is that of an omnivore so I eat an omnivorous diet, and through experimentation, I found that eating a low carb keto diet took 65 pounds off me and kept it off.

Plus my doc says my innards are about 20 years younger than my actual age. That says it's the right thing for me.

But if there was one diet that worked for everyone, we'd only need one diet book.

Bob