Chapter 25 Chapter 23: Gluttonous Meat Eaters, Poor Vegetarians, and Rich Well-Wishers

The hunters and I got up early.There were nine of us, eight hunters and myself as a bystander, in a small forested valley in the rugged hills of East Africa.In the early morning, before dawn, we set off.At dawn the hunters halted on a grassy hillside overlooking a lake.They picked wild berries and leaves for breakfast, and I sat by, munching on a granola-honey biscuit. We don't talk to each other, we can't chat with each other because of the language barrier.I just followed them in silence, taking notes. At breakfast the hunters were attracted by the sound of another tribe moving near us.They got up so they could get a good look at whoever was coming.Later, they simply crossed several ridges, crossed a river bed, and climbed up the high slope of the opposite valley.They could now clearly see and hear each other, a group of smaller monkeys.They were eating in a clump of trees, chattering, and hopping from branch to branch low to the ground.

The hunters quickly estimated the situation, acted immediately, and went straight to the bushes.Some of them immediately climbed up the trunk and chased the monkey, while others stayed under the tree and watched the treetops.A large monkey fell from a tree while escaping and landed on a pile of dead leaves right in front of me.A hunter rushed forward, grabbed the monkey and threw it to the ground until it died. Then, with the other hand, he grabbed a monkey that had been killed by his companions, and made a proud expression in front of me. attitude.The whole thrilling hunting process lasted only a few minutes.The prey were five monkeys.

Now the hunters leaned against the trees and began to feast on their prey.During the eating process, they constantly commented on the piece of meat in their hands, sharing or exchanging better parts.The feast lasted for more than two hours.All around me was the sound of crunching bones and contented muttering.The hunters parted the prey cleanly, with bones and furs, and there was little left in the end.Then they dozed off for an hour.After a full meal and a full rest, they woke up refreshed, and went on their way again, looking for new food. This is behavioral scientist Craig.Craig Stanford in his book "The Hunting Apes" (The Hunting Apes), described the hunters he observed, it was a group of chimpanzees!Although most of their food is wild fruits, they obviously have a soft spot for meat, even if it's just the fat maggots in the fruits.It has been observed that Gobo chimpanzees carry specially treated branches and thin sticks as tools, and go from one anthill to another to catch termites from inside. The longest time they fished for an hour at a stretch, they walked over a distance. kilometers of road.Compared with the forest, on the open grassland, the ant nests and ant mounds are relatively large, which are easy to find and harvest.However, this seems to be not enough for these apes. It would be even better if there is a bloody steak or internal organs.

Baboons are not true herbivores either.During the grouping period of insects, they eat almost nothing except insects, and nothing else can whet their appetites more than this fresh and crispy food.The second place is the rhizomes, fruits and flowers.In third place are leaves and grass. Are apes our dietary role models?Scholars believe that the eating habits of modern chimpanzees are basically the same as our ancestors Australopithecus.Like great apes, australopithecines started out eating mostly fruit and other plant foods.According to calculations, their daily intake of crude fiber can reach 200 grams.It takes a lot of energy for the stomach to digest these things, estimated to be up to 50% of their energy needs.This plant-based diet of human ancestors is often used as evidence that a diet consistent with the characteristics of the modern human species should also be plant-based.But the pace of biological progress did not stop there.

Maybe Australopithecines or their ancestors have come out of the virgin forest more and more often to open areas to look for ants and termites rich in fat and protein.Because of the location of the prey, the tools needed to catch the ants and poke the ant nests are often not available, so they have to take their tools all the time.Whoever can make the most suitable stick and use it most deftly can enjoy the food with the most fat and protein, grow taller, stronger, and leave more children and grandchildren.As they traveled farther and farther into the wilderness more and more often, our ancestors were exposed to more and more new food sources in their new environments.Why not try a lizard, or a little snake?Isotope analysis of tooth fossils shows that more and more hard plants, such as nuts and seeds, appeared in the food of human ancestors 2.5 million years ago.The analysis also showed that between 2.5 and 3 million years ago, Australopithecus ate small mammals that they could catch with their hands.They also depended on this animal, because during the Ice Age, the tropical rainforest shrank, and they had to live often in open grasslands, where there were not so many fruits to eat.

Certain populations of Australopithecus, such as the stout Australopithecus species, specialized in eating the more cellulose-rich, tougher grassland plants that abounded around them.These foods have low nutritional value.In order to adapt to this kind of food, their teeth have become thick and powerful, and their digestive system is relatively developed.But none of this helped in the end, and they died out, while their meat-eating relatives survived. Since sticks and other implements have proven to be useful in many situations, our ancestors took to using them even more.Groups of australopithecines with clubs occasionally come across stray young antelope without their mothers to protect them.They surrounded the antelope, caught it and ate it.Occasionally they also come across the carcasses of larger animals that either died of natural causes or were the prey of the felines that lived around them.Australopithecus shouted loudly, waved its stick to drive vultures and jackals away, rushed to the corpse, tore off some flesh from it, and ran quickly to the nearest bush.If any feline came back and disturbed their meal, they were ready to drop their prey, climb the trees, and hide among the branches.Anthropologist Marvin.Marvin Harris paints a vivid picture of how, based on what we know today, this probably happened often.

A line of carnivorous australopithecus evolved into habilis.It is speculated that they were not real hunters, but gatherers, mainly looking for animal carcasses as a source of meat.As time went on, the strategies they used to deceive their competitors became more and more sophisticated.About 2.3 million years ago, Homo habilis first invented tools made of stone, which could scrape the flesh from the bone more cleanly.Homo habilis also likes to crack open the skulls and larger bones of its prey with heavy stones to get the nutritious marrow and brains (see Chapter 24). Hungry capable people must also be constantly alert to feline beasts.It would be terrible for a leopard to find out that a few weak two-legged animals were sitting on their own and eating the rest of their lunch.For capable people, the only option is to run and climb the nearest tree to hide.For these able beings with long arms and dexterous hands suitable for climbing, this is the best way.Another possibility is to fight the enemy with a few brave companions, shouting and brandishing clubs.If so, some of our ancestors must have become a delicacy for other carnivores themselves.But this offensive strategy sometimes succeeds, though not always, but certainly with increasing rates of success.It is easy to think of continuing to develop and intensify the method, if one has ever seen such a dangerous beast retreat in the face of such bluff.Surveys from Uganda show that locals continued to use this method until modern times to drive lions and leopards away from their prey and obtain meat with little effort.

Since 2.5 million years ago, humans or their ancestors have gone to great lengths and dangers to find sources of meat.Until the most recent stage of man's development, animal protein and animal fat have been coveted among all races.Humans tend to eat more animal foods if they can, and more plant foods if they have to.Renowned anthropologist Mark.Marc Cohen sums up this relationship aptly. Thorough vegetarians certainly don't want to hear these words, they would rather move out of the myth.Until entering the living environment of gathering and hunting, the diet of human ancestors has always been plant-based, which can be regarded as a diet in line with the characteristics of the human species. Today's German Vegetarian Bible says so.Although this is a correct statement today, what I would like to ask the author is, what kind of plants did our ancestors rely on to survive and reproduce healthily during the European Ice Age?This secret weapon of survival is not explained in the award-winning book Vegetarian Nutrition.

Dietary nutrition in line with the characteristics of the human species can be deduced from the dietary patterns of human ancestors.Vegetarian authorities Leitzmann and Hahn continue in the book.This is undoubtedly a correct assertion, the question is just, how far should we go back in the footsteps of our ancestors, to single-celled organisms in the chaos?Or should enough be enough by two or three million years ago? Expert surveys in the early and mid-nineteenth century documented the diet and nutrition of humans still living in a primitive hunter-gatherer pattern, a pattern that is likely to be followed by our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years and down to the stone tools The late period, that is, 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.Our genes are almost indistinguishable from those of primitive people who lived in the Stone Age.After millions of years of natural selection, their genes adapted to the living conditions and food sources at that time.Since our genes are unlikely to have changed in the last 20,000 years, the food of our ancestors must perfectly match our metabolic mechanisms even today.For humans on earth today, their diet can be said to be in line with the characteristics of the human species.

Anthropological maps record the dietary and nutritional habits of various peoples living on the earth.The newly published map captures the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer tribes that were still in the Stone Age society until the early or mid-20th century.According to this extensive and detailed record, none of the primitive peoples who inhabited our planet lived entirely or chiefly on plants.On the contrary, the vast majority mainly feed on animals, especially meat and fish, and the proportion of animal food is 56%︱65%.The proportion of plant foods is relatively low (see appendix below).There are forty-six nationalities, ie 20% of them, even completely.Or basically live on animal food!These peoples live in the coldest regions of the globe and cannot grow edible plants at all.

Percentage of animals and plants in hunter-gatherers' diet Among the 229 tribes who lived in modern times and were engaged in hunting and gathering, 73% of them mainly ate animals, and animal food accounted for 56%︱65%.Most hunter-gatherers (58% of the total) had diets with a higher proportion of animal food than 66%: forty-six primitive tribes (20% of the total), even subsisted essentially or completely on meat and fish, ie animal food 86%︱100%. Conversely, none of the primitive tribes were primarily, or exclusively, plant-eating.Only eight ethnic groups (4%) had two-thirds of their diets based on plant foods.The Kham people living in Southwest Africa had the highest proportion of plants in their diet, with plant and animal food accounting for 67% and 33%, respectively.About 14 percent of Stone Age tribes had diets with 56 to 65 percent plants. How should humans explain this hunger for meat?Scientists have a more unified view on this, and the reason behind it is the best way to obtain food: hunting animals and their meat can obtain the most nutrients and energy with the same physical effort.Wild fruits, berries, vegetables and roots provide less energy.That is to say, the time and energy invested in collecting and processing plant foods are out of proportion to the nutritional value they provide.And the best return on investment comes from hunting and eating large game: the larger the prey, the higher the fat content and the more energy it stores.No matter where it is, the fattest meat of animals is always the most sought-after, which is not without reason.If there is more than enough meat hunted, the lean meat without oil and water will even be thrown aside.This instinctive behavior of favoring oil has been severely suppressed since the invention of the nutritional advisory body, but it has had little effect.Fighting against genetics, after all, it is impossible to go too far. The nutritional quality of our ancestors' diets improved qualitatively with the consumption of meat and other animal foods in large quantities.Highly unsaturated long-chain Omega︱tri fatty acids, vitamin B12 and vitamin A can only be obtained through animal foods, while the supply of iron, zinc, different B vitamins and all essential amino acids can also be obtained through animal foods. has been simplified and optimized.All pure herbivores must manufacture these substances themselves, or shortages will occur.This has major implications for both animals and people.Therefore, vegetarians, especially vegans who do not accept any food or clothing with animal ingredients, are at a disadvantage in the supply of a series of nutrients. New nutritional research has once again shown that vegetarians, especially vegans, have a significantly greater tendency to blood clots than meat-eaters.The reason is insufficient intake of highly unsaturated Omega︱3 fatty acids.In addition, the content of homocysteine ​​in the blood of vegetarians is also significantly higher, firstly because the supply of vitamin B12 is insufficient, and the concentration of vitamin B12 in the blood caused by this is too low.Insufficient supply of the above two substances will bring a series of health risks.The offspring of vegetarians suffer especially hard. For example, children of vegan mothers weighed less on average, had smaller head circumferences, and were shorter in stature.Small babies are prone to those health crises later in life, as we saw in Chapter 9.Premature babies born to vegetarian mothers often have underdeveloped brains or visual impairments.A survey recently showed that underdevelopment among children in rural areas of Egypt, Kenya and Mexico is not due to a lack of protein, but to insufficient supplies of iron, zinc, calcium and vitamin B12.The best way to get these nutrients is through meat and dairy products. The history of human evolution tells us a principle: All mammals need the same essential amino acids, highly unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins and minerals to maintain body functions.Therefore, the body stores these substances accordingly.If a certain animal eats the flesh of another animal in addition to eating plants, the intake of these nutrients is greatly increased, and its nutritional quality is thus improved.Other people's flesh can more directly guarantee the supply of materials needed for life.The carnivorous strategy frees some animals from having to make all these nutrients themselves, as they used to. Pure herbivores also require the same nutrients as carnivores, but they are self-sufficient.Cows just eat grass or hay, sometimes even old newspapers, they don't need anything more, and it's almost impossible to get so much of the valuable nutrients in milk and beef out of such crude food. It's a miracle.How do they do it?The answer is, by the unusually developed and complex digestive organs.Cows have many different forestas and stomachs, and countless bacteria that aid in digestion.Such complicated digestion and metabolic functions consume a huge amount of energy.We can use a computer as an analogy to imagine that if this computer program must constantly control and monitor so many functions, it may take up hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk capacity.Imagine how much main memory this program needs, and other functions when it works will be useless! So it is easy to understand why cattle are not so smart.Apart from devoting themselves to eating, digesting and metabolizing all day long, they have no time to take care of it.There is no room in their brains for other functions.In addition, its hard disk is too small compared with the huge workload.This is not surprising, because the cow lacks the most important substances for brain growth in the process of growing up.And these substances needed for brain development, carnivorous animals obtain a large and ready supply from food (see Chapter 24). And look no further than our vegan cousins.Orangutans and gorillas specialize in rough, fibrous but nutrient-poor plants.In order to meet their own energy needs, a large amount of food must be eaten.Like our ancestors, they need a strong and active gastrointestinal system in order to digest these foods.Their brains have rather limited hard drives and main memory, and are mostly used to run digestion programs.Perhaps because of this, the social behavior of orangutans and gorillas is relatively inactive and lacks communication with each other. In contrast, chimpanzees get a higher standard of nutrition: ripe fruit with sugar, plus occasional meat.Their food is much more nutrient and energy dense than that of gorillas.Therefore, chimpanzees may reduce the burden on the gastrointestinal system, or even simplify the gastrointestinal system, and provide better conditions for the development of intelligence.Their lifestyle is more active and sociable. We also see this correlation in early australopithecines who were completely vegetarian.Apart from eating and digesting, they have little energy for other activities.The group behavior of the ancestors of human beings was inevitably relatively passive and monotonous. We have already said that eating meat and other animal foods means delegating to other animals the task of producing the nutrients needed for life.In this way, carnivorous and omnivorous animals like humans do not have to manufacture these substances themselves, thereby freeing themselves from labor that consumes energy and energy.Therefore, it is possible for human beings to gradually simplify their complex digestive system and use the released energy for other more meaningful activities. This development is very directly reflected in the ape man, the earliest human family we know represents the early australopithecus, with a relatively flat skull, a nose and mouth similar to that of an ape, and strong jaws and teeth suitable for grinding hard solids. of plant foods.The later australopithecus and the earliest ape-man ate more animal food, and their body structure changed relatively.Teeth and jaws shrunk, and the ever-growing brain bulged the skull. This trend is more obvious in Homo erectus and the ancient humans that appeared later.American primate expert Erwin.Simons (Elwyn Simons) pointed out: The average size of their teeth is shrinking, and the face is getting smaller and smaller.The reason for this phenomenon is that they eat more and more meat and other animal foods, and cook their food with fire.Both reduce the burden on chewing and other digestive organs and improve the supply of nutrients.At the same time, the intelligence of our ancestors continued to develop, their ability to understand the interrelationships of things and build complex social organizations and structures continued to increase.We evolved into humans because our ancestors discovered that meat was a treasure trove of nutrients and ate it until now.What can really be called a diet in line with the characteristics of the human species?This can also be deduced from the current state of human anatomy and physiology, write vegetarian authorities Leitzman and Hahn in their book promoting a vegetarian career.This is undoubtedly a correct conclusion.Vegetarians like to emphasize various human phenomena that are characteristic of our species, such as the length ratio of the intestines, molar teeth, and the fact that humans swallow food instead of swallowing it whole like carnivores.There are other typical herbivorous features in us, humans have sweat glands, human saliva has enzymes that break down starch, humans cannot make their own vitamin C.This last point is typical of all pure herbivores. But in this discussion, we should at least fully understand and observe these realities in detail.A new analysis of human digestive organs shows that humans are a species between pure herbivores and pure carnivores.Our stomach is relatively small and can secrete gastric acid.The work of the digestive system is concentrated in the small intestine, and the large intestine is shorter and less active.This structure shows that our digestive system adapts to a diet concentrated in energy and nutrients, and the small intestine can complete the digestive task alone.Foods consisting of fruits, nuts, seeds of plants and meat, offal and fish of animals can provide this high nutritional quality.Our digestive system is no longer used to bulky, fibrous, rough plants.At this point, optimistic lettuce-only parents should perhaps be mindful of what to feed their children. A host of other characteristics should not be overlooked either.Over hundreds of thousands of years, the body's own ability to manufacture many of the nutrients needed for life has been lost due to the constant intake of meat and other animal foods, because the body no longer manufactures the substances needed for this process , or do not have to be actively manufactured, while the relative primitive gene is eliminated due to weakening demand.For example, taurine, an amino acid needed by the human body, does not exist in any plants. Pure carnivores, such as cats, cannot synthesize it by themselves, while the human body can only synthesize a small amount, and the efficiency is not high.Humans, like cats, cannot synthesize vitamin B12 by themselves, and the part produced by bacteria in the intestine cannot be absorbed by the human body, or cannot be absorbed enough.Like felines, humans cannot manufacture vitamin A on their own, and the possibility of synthesizing it from carotene contained in plants is limited.Vitamin A deficiency is very common in areas of the world where plant foods are the mainstay.In addition, as we have mentioned many times, the human body cannot extend enough polyunsaturated fatty acid chains to convert them into long-chain highly unsaturated fatty acids. After long-term evolution, human beings have finally developed into a typical omnivorous animal focusing on animal food, and have reproduced eugenically.Therefore, it is not surprising that no human group living in a primitive natural form has voluntarily given up eating meat and other animals.Not eating meat has never brought us a survival advantage, but only a disadvantage, until humans began to grow crops, develop agriculture, and raise livestock.Livestock must also be fed. If the harvest is not good or the stockpile is almost exhausted, feeding the livestock will become a burden. People may collapse from hunger before the livestock grow up enough to be slaughtered. Eating meat has always been expensive.If the natural conditions are not good or the harvest fails, it is inevitable for everyone to become vegetarian.Today, this is still the fundamental reason why millions of people live on a vegetarian diet because of economic conditions and as a last resort.In some societies this manifests itself in particular ethical religions.In different cultures, there are such meat fasting regulations mainly in the form of religious beliefs, precisely to protect limited resources.Anthropologist Marvin.Harris confirmed this through research. On the contrary, most of the vegetarians in western industrialized countries are voluntary. They live affluently and have no worries about food and clothing, but they give up eating meat out of belief or some kind of philosophy.These include individuals and groups close to Eastern Hindu or Buddhist teachings, as well as certain Western denominations such as Seventh-day Adventists and Penitentiaries.These can be classified as traditional vegetarians.Another common motivation for adopting a vegetarian diet is health considerations.Advocates believe that vegetarianism improves physical and mental functioning and promotes health. Since the 1960s, a new group of vegetarians has emerged in western developed countries.They often do not take the dietary rules of a certain traditional sect as a criterion, but mix dietary beliefs and life philosophies from different origins, trying to create a new and their own philosophy of life.In Europe, after a series of unrest and successive meat scandals, people have become sensitive to the way livestock is raised, and this new vegetarian trend has become more and more popular.Already 3% of Germans are vegetarians.In addition, we are meeting more and more semi-vegetarians who do not eat red meat but eat fish and poultry. The difference between this new vegetarian way of life and diet and the past is not only in answering whether to eat, and how much animal food should be eaten?this problem.They are also at odds with many other social norms.Their consumption behavior is often based on philosophical or religious tenets, and neovegans want to make themselves and the world a better place.As such, they also reject certain plant-based lifestyles and promotions. Mention should also be made of the environmentalists who advocate, and often practice, the abandonment of meat.They hope to protect the ecological environment for sustainable development, and oppose the waste of resources and harmful living materials.One of its main arguments is the premiumization loss, the theory that seven units of food energy must be invested in the form of feed to produce animal food to produce one unit of energy from animal products.The same ratio also appears in the input-output ratio of animal protein. The exploitation of developing countries is also an important argument for anti-meat eaters, and it carries a strong emotional tone.People in developing countries grow large amounts of fodder for export to the Western world, rather than to produce the food they need.Adherents of this theory believe that people in developed countries can reduce hunger in the world by reducing their meat consumption.A diet with a high proportion of animal raw materials that is more common in Western countries is impossible to achieve in the world. The current status quo is realized on the basis of sacrificing the interests of developing countries.So writes Germany's vegetarian authority. Should we in the future emphasize the flaws of the above argument more: the vegetarian creed is based on a biological fallacy, and that human beings cannot survive and reproduce healthily on a diet entirely, or substantially, of plant foods.Even well-meaning ecological arguments seem more like naive assumptions than based on realistic economic calculations.Therefore, experts from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, USA and the International Water Resources Management Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka, have come to completely different conclusions. A large number of computer model calculations have shown that giving up the popular dogma of eating meat cannot effectively solve hunger in third world countries. The problem is not a viable path.Their conclusion is clear: the reduction in meat consumption in developed countries has virtually no effect on securing food supplies in developing countries. The well-known World Watch Institute in Washington DC and the World Population Foundation in Germany also indicated in their analysis that it is not feasible to solve the problem of population expansion in the world by not eating meat.Historical facts have proved that the expansion of meat production relies on grazing cattle and sheep and other livestock.The grasslands used for grazing have a dry climate, not suitable for growing grain, and cover an area twice that of cultivated land.Grazing cattle and sheep not only provides meat and milk, but also forms the basis of livelihood for millions of people living in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, western China and parts of India.The only way for these lands to contribute to the world's food production is to continue to use them, and only as pastoral areas.Meat and milk from cattle and sheep provide a source of food for a large portion of the world's population. The long-term strategy proposed by these experts to solve the hunger problem in the third world is to control birth first, and then strengthen investment in economics, agricultural research and infrastructure construction.It is important to create jobs and alleviate poverty and social oppression in these countries. Our meat-loving ancestors who lived in the Stone Age gradually discovered that eating meat can bring benefits to survival, rather than disadvantages, over a long period of one or two million years.If this food is harmful to their health, they will not be able to survive in competition with other animals.However, the amount of meat eaten by hunters and gatherers living a primitive and natural life may surprise even the most meat-eating friends