Why I won’t say no to meat
Homo sapiens has been eating meat for at least… ever, but let's say some 200–300 thousand years. Of course hominids eat meat before the appearance of Homo sapiens (HS), many think that eating meat was in fact one major precursors for brain evolution, that would ultimately lead to HS irruption as species. In 1995 the expensive tissue hypothesis was proposed by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler. This idea basically states that as both gut and brain tissue are composed of metabolically expensive tissue that require a disproportionate amount of energy to function properly, then a big brain is incompatible with a big gut. This basic trade off translate in smaller guts but the same or more energy requirements (as brain got bigger), then the only way to make it work if changing diet to one that provide high level of nutriments, energy but easy to process, that is meat! (see Pobiner, B. 2016, Meat-eating among the earliest humans. American Scientist, 104(2), 110–117.)
In this way our gut, brain and diet has co-evolved with the animals we eat and the technology we used (i.e. fire and cooking had a yuge effect) in what we have called the ecobiont ontology (https://www.researchers.one/article/2019-01-1). Even more, this implies also that for example our gut microbiota also co-evolved in a meat based diet. A second order effect is that gut microbiota has a direct connection to our brain, what is called the gut-brain axis.
Dysbiosis of gut microbiota has been related at least with 50 human pathologies at the moment, include bowel disease, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndromes, and neurological pathologies for example depression; and second order effects by interactions, remains to be understood in depth (see https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/784470v1.full.pdf). Of course a major diet change as No meat, most probable have a deep impact in our health, in our microbiome and our brain. The problem is that organisms has evolved to deal with perturbations, so several interconnected compensatory processes would enter into function so the diet change could provoke a chronic but sub-clinic condition (meaning it would diminish our health but little by little without taking us to the emergency room) and then become silent until damage is too serious.
Anecdotal but informative:
Of course because this silent condition it is very hard to have rigorous statistics about vegan effect on human health, then we should invoke some risk logic into the case and ask: In absence of evidence which would be the safest curse of action, continue with Lindy time proved diet or go with an untested new one? even more, should we recommend or worst, impose this to global human population?
Just consider that agriculture is a very recent phenomena in the species history and that vegetarian or modern vegan diet is only possible (without immediate major bad consequences) because of modern biotechnological improvements on crops. Even promoters of traditional farming as Antonio Turrent admit that even when a diet based on milpa products such as maize, beans, chili, etc. may be (again no data available) nutritious enough for an adult it is not for young kids (i.e. we know egg has kay amino acid for brain develop).
Now to be fair no meat diet is not new either, is the way poor population has to cope with, gabish?
So I’m very skeptical of the “don't eat meat and save the planet” -> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gwHwXEI6nYYEuOdyyUxjXzWZf9XFD-eWGr0J4cANzyg/edit?usp=sharing
