Are humans evolved to eat meat or vegetables?
LARGE DAILY servings of woolly mammoth meat and sabre-toothed tiger liver. Lashings of seal blubber, bison brain and bone marrow. Armfuls of fibrous wild vegetables, nuts and fruits. Use breads, grains and cereals sparingly. No, you won’t find these recommendations on the back of your breakfast cereal packet any time soon, but if a handful of researchers had their way, you’d be seeing the modern-day equivalent: government-sanctioned exhortations to eat plenty of meat and fat – preferably from wild animals – and to drastically reduce the consumption of grains and cereals. Fruit and vegetables would continue as a healthy option. That diet, they claim, is closest to the one our bodies have adapted to through aeons of evolution as hunter-gatherers. And it will protect us better from the diseases of affluence, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The Food Pyramid, the icon the U.S. government plasters on every flat surface in a effort to inspire Americans to eat less meat a
