At 05:46 PM 7/20/97 -0400, you wrote:
>It is not argued among paleolithic nutritionists that a high intake of meat
>foods is necessary for health.  Nor is it argued by most modern paleolithic
>nutritionists that man evolved for "injesting <sic> huge amounts of animal
>flesh with occasional vegitable <sic> matter." It is only generally
>asserted (1) that there is a clear need for regular meat intake in humans

When you say there is a clear need for regular meat intake in humans, I
guess you are forgetting that millions have lived healthy lives as
vegetarians.  Oh, yes, there is the problem with vitamin B12, but just an
occassional bug or worm or aphid on vegetable food would fulfill the needs.
 We don't know how much meat early man ate.  We only know that we often
find the remains of the animals he killed and ate.
,
>and (2) the belief that eating large quantities of meat is unhealthy is
>totally unfounded.
>
>The vast, overwhelming bulk of the paleontological data to date shows quite
>clearly that humans have -always- eaten at least some meat.  This goes all
>the way back to the very earliest human ancestor (the australophithicines)
>and continues even back before that to our earlier ancestors, which appear
>to have been small mammals that ate insects and eggs.


But in between those small mammals and the hominids were probably ancestors
that were primarily vegetarian.  Our closest relatives are primarily
vegetarian.  Our teeth are very similar to theirs.  Until we could use and
make tools it was difficult to hunt large animals.  Your contention that
man comes from a long line of ancestors, all of which ate mostly meat is
new to me.  I need to learn a lot about this, I know, but to base our
beliefs about what we should eat on very little evidence and ideas that
seem contrary to popular thought about pre paleolithic man would seem
foolhardy.

>
>There is absolutely -no- evidence in the paleontological record to support
>the contention that humans or their ancestors were ever vegetarian or "near
>vegetarian" in any way. Furthermore, there is great support for the idea
>that humans have always treasured meat and eaten as much as they could get
>their hands on.  Published analyses of hunter/gatherer diets shows a mean
>average intake worldwide of roughly 55% animal food products in the daily
>diet, with considerable variation among individual groups, from as high as
>about 96% of daily intake to as low as maybe 15% or so--but the group
>average stands at over 50%.

Modern hunter gatherers are all Homo sapiens.  That they do and can eat
meat is obvious.  That does not support the idea that all of man's
ancestors were primarily meat eaters and not primarily vegetarian.
Hunter/gatherers are intelligent animals with bodies and minds and cultures
that enable them to hunt many kinds of prey.  Our ancestors did not have
the same advantages.
>
>Meat also happens to be the only food which has been demonstrated
>repeatedly both empirically and in the lab to be the only food -- the
>-only- food -- which humans can subsist on exclusively for very long
>periods of time with no ill effects or signs of malnutrition whatsoever.
>In fact some peoples in the world who eat this way are astonishingly
>healthy, with good lifespans and vanishingly small incidence of heart
>disease, diabetes, or cancer.  None who eat this way are unhealthy.

A few posts ago were some references about the health problems of eskimos.
But besides that, the fact that meat is the only food that man can live on
for a long time does not say that man has always eaten lots of meat.  It
says that it is a good food source, but man may have lived better eating
many kinds of plant foods, with an occasional animal source of food.  The
fact that dogs can thrive on vegetable foods without meat does not say that
their ancestors were plant eaters.
>
>It is certainly the case that man evolved as an omnivore; it appears to
>have been one of our most amazing evolutionary traits, this ability to eat
>so many different foods and survive and even prosper.  No other animal eats
>and thrives on such a highly diverse set of regimens as humans.  And yet
>there is much reason to question whether many foods we have adapted in the
>last few century--or the last few thousand years--are what most humans
>walking around on the planet right now are best adapted to eat.

That's something we can agree on.  Modern processed foods seem to be the
main culprit.  I have problems also with equating modern fruits like
delicious apples, naval oranges, elberta peaches, with wild fruits.  These
fruits have much, much more sugar, less fiber, and less of who knows what
else.  The same goes for our meats.  While there may be more fat or less
fat, the meat generally eaten by early man was certainly far different than
that found on supermarket shelves.
>
>
Paul Getty
Morehead City, NC
[log in to unmask]