Jul 3, 20194 min read

Miki Ben-Dor, PhD on The Humans Eating Fatty Meat For All of History

Updated: Jul 4, 2019

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Alright we have a special episode today. We’re lucky to hear all about Miki’s new paper looking at the complete story of our dietary past and humans being high-trophic level carnivores. He gave me a sneak peak at this awesome 40 page paper he’s submitting for review.

Miki Ben-Dor got an undergraduate and masters degree in economics and then went back to school later in life to study paleoanthropology. He’s now Post doctoral fellow at the department of archeology of Tel Aviv University. You can find some great presentations on youtube and his paper “Man the Fat Hunter” published in 2011.

Love the work he’s done - he’s hit it from all angles and it all lines up. We ate meat for all of human history. Ok here’s a bit of business to take care of - Let’s see how concise we can make this. Get your own grass finished meat at Nose to tail.org. Support the show on Patreon at patreon.com / peak human. Preorder the film at FoodLies.org. Watch highlights from the film on the Food Lies youtube. Get daily content on the Food Lies instagram, twitter, and facebook. SIgn up for the newsletter on Sapien.org. Get on the waiting list if your a health coach, doctor, or other healthcare practitioner at sapien.org. I think there’s too many things at this point. Maybe just pick 1 of these and go for it.

I really appreciate it. At this point we’re a community powered company. We’re scrambling around here at SAPIEN trying to make this all happen without outside money or influence. Really love this tribe. We can’t go back to the glory days thrusting spears at wooly mammoth and gorging on fatty meat, but we can still try to bring the community together and spread the word and focus on our own health and people around us.

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SHOW NOTES

Miki completed his undergrad and masters in economics and switched later in life into paleo anthropology
His research is largely focused on the reconstruction of the human diet and the relationship between plant vs animal foods and the proportion of each as far back as 2 million years ago
If we want to understand human evolution we have to go much further back than just modern hunter gatherers
Gut morphology similar to carnivores
When we compare humans to chimpanzees, Miki has calculated that to be 77% smaller colon and about 60% longer small intestine which is exactly the direction of carnivores
The size of our stomachs is another cue
Gut pH is very convincing too since herbivores have a more basic stomach pH whereas omnivores have more acidic and carnivores have very acidic stomachs and scavengers have the most acidic, humans are most similar to scavengers
The size and number of human adipocytes is closely related to carnivores vs herbivores
One of the main differences between their diets and today’s diets is bone marrow, Miki believes our ancestors ate a lot of bone marrow and had the ability to break bones which appeared broken to get the marrow
Liver is also the first thing that humans would go for when they killed their prey
The evolution of the Savannah vs forest and how this changed the diet
It’s easier to hunt larger animals than smaller animals
Humans ate plants for all of history, there is no question that we ate them, the only question is how much
Hypercarnivore is defined as a carnivore that eats 70-80% of energy from animals and the rest from plants
If you want to be safe, eat 80% from fat and meat
Using the Hadza to reconstruct the human diet is completely inaccurate
You also can’t use modern hunter gatherers to see what our ancestors ate
Everytime we find plant matter in human remains, everyone celebrates but it doesn’t tell us anything about how much they ate
Isotopic discoveries are more reliable than archeology and definitely shows that we are mostly carnivorous
Humans do not want to spend energy gathering plants when they can spend that energy hunting animals
Humans have higher fat reserves than other animals which allowed us to get through periods of starvation and we can afford to because we don’t chase or escape we don’t need to be fast
All large carnivores eat large animals and are hypercarnivores
Miki thinks we spread across the globe because we can hunt animals of any size, with plants you have to use trial and error and adjust to them
Wherever humans went, these large animals decreased and that humans could have been the reason for the decrease in megafauna
Domesticating plant foods and animals was about 10,000 years ago
As we approach agriculture revolution we started eating more plant foods but our stature also decreased and our brain size decreased
Fat was prized for all of history and plants are fallback foods
He tried to find evidence for plants in the human diet and couldn’t, all his evidence showed was that humans were carnivores
Papers showing mixed diets are misleading and these scientists are not reporting proper evidence