greenshots:
Meat is full of natural glutamate and aspartate. These amino acids are excitatory and stimulate the sympathetic nervous system
Perhaps this happens in people with compromised health, leaky guts, or toxic bodies, but that is not what happens to healthy individuals. Healthy people do not exit a steakhouse feeling excited and stimulated. Healthy people feel happy, satiated and tired. For instance, the only time Steve Jobs's wife, Lisa, ever remembered Jobs being "relaxed" in his life was the one time he ate meat.
“It was the first time, I’d felt with him, so relaxed and content, over those trays of meat; the excess, the permission and warmth after the cold salads, meant a once inaccessible space had opened. He was less rigid with himself, even human under the great ceilings with the little chairs with the meat and me."
(p260-261, from Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster, 2011)
That's how people usually feel when they eat meat. There's nothing "excitatory" about those amino acids when consumed by a healthy individual.
greenshots:
We know that cavemen sure weren't gorging on meat everyday, it was an added bonus
Greenshots, I do appreciate your opinion, and I thank you for your responses. However, the best evidence suggests that that's pretty much false. Yes, human hunter-gatherers had very diverse diets, but on average they were meat-heavy omnivores.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/71/3/682
Plants were only seasonally available in many inhabited regions throughout the planet. To say that meat was a "bonus" for these hominids is pretty ludicrous. During the Winter hominid survival depended on meat consumption — often large megafauna that could provide many, many meals. And the whole reason hominids migrated away from the Equatorial regions was to follow animal migrations across land bridges and ice sheets (i.e. to follow the meat).
Furthermore, hominids evolved to have “meat‐adaptive” genes to process fat an animal tissues.
"
The chimpanzee life span is shorter than that of humans, which is consistent with a faster schedule of aging. We consider aspects of diet that may have selected for genes that allowed the evolution of longer human life spans with slower aging. Diet has changed remarkably during human evolution. All direct human ancestors are believed to have been largely herbivorous. Chimpanzees eat more meat than other great apes, but in captivity are sensitive to hypercholesterolemia and vascular disease. We argue that this dietary shift to increased regular consumption of fatty animal tissues in the course of hominid evolution was mediated by selection for “meat‐adaptive” genes. This selection conferred resistance to disease risks associated with meat eating also increased life expectancy. One candidate gene is apolipoprotein E (apoE), with the E3 allele evolved in the genus Homo that reduces the risks for Alzheimer’s and vascular disease, as well as influencing inflammation, infection, and neuronal growth. Other evolved genes mediate lipid metabolism and host defense. The timing of the evolution of apoE and other candidates for meat‐adaptive genes is discussed in relation to key events in human evolution."
See:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/381662
And the evolution to a meat-eating diet coincided with a surge in lifespan and intelligence:
See:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223144712.htm
Furthermore, as I explained before, getting nutrition from plants is rather difficult. Plants do not have B12, nor do they have true Vitamin A.
And even the healthiest humans are poor converters of beta carotene into Vitamin A (retinol) — with vegetarians being the worst converters of beta carotene to Vitamin A [
Source]. The most nutrient-dense sources of energy are animal-based — particularly organ meats. There is no debate about that. And we can't forget that eggs and meats are the best source of choline, which is essential for the liver, but is also high in sulfur. Anyone who needed large quantities of "supplements" before corporations existed would have had to get those large quantities of nutrients
from high sulfur animal sources.
The whole point of eating a grass-fed, plant-eating animal is that you are — for all practical purposes — consuming all of the "veggies" that the herbivore consumed, over its lifetime, and concentrated in its easy-to-digest fats and organs.
So, any idea that all our "healthy" CBS ancestors needed to lower their meat consumption and pop lots of B12 pills is a little ridiculous. If that were true, the CBS mutations wouldn't be as prevalent as they are. Our ancestors clearly got most of their vitamins from animals — particularly organ meats. Of course, one doesn't need to eat organ meats every day — nor should they. You can eat liver once or twice a week to obtain a lot of nutrition. That's what we evolved to do.
But, I think we both agree that a "sick" CBS individual
might need to do a low-sulfur biohack when sensitivities arise and all else fails. Though, it would seem that fixing gut flora and healing the gut would be key in that situation and perhaps a specialized nutrient-dense diet might be worth trying first (i.e. SCD or GAPS diet).
greenshots:
Then other tribes like Eskimos survived on 80% fat and virtually no fruits or vegetables. They were the parasympathetic people and when you understand the nervous systems, that makes alotta sense why they'd need all that meat and fat
As far as I can tell, there is zero hard evidence that they were "parasympathetic" people. It appears you're simply extrapolating an unproven theory onto an entire population without any evidence to support it. More likely high-lattitude hominids just consumed and developed the right gut flora for the diet that was available for their regions.
I'll fully admit that some people may have food sensitivities — likely due to gut flora imbalances or leaky guts — but that's very different from being genetically hardwired to only dine in a specific region of the planet. Humans are very adaptive when they are healthy. To give you an example, almost all Asians have the proper gut flora to digest seaweed, while most Caucasians don't. This isn't a genetic trait. Asians simply acquire the proper flora from eating raw seaweed — where the bacteria are known to proliferate — and then they pass it down in their family microbiomes. If you want to better digest seaweed, the best thing you can do is go down to the ocean eat a little raw seaweed to get the right bacteria in your gut.
In no way am I advocating that everyone should, or needs to, eat 50% protein. A balance is very important since plants help us detox our bodies. I'm just pointing out that high sulfur/protein diets obviously didn't kill off the CBS mutation — the mutation is too prevalent and too many humans with CBS mutations lived in seasonal zones where plants weren't always available year round.