Ray Audette wrote:
> IMHO to think that we can improve on millions of years of evolution with
> a handful of supplement pills is arrogant.

I agree, but of course in the present context that is a straw
man.  If we consider millions of years of evolution as the
backdrop, rather than the 100,000 years of the last glaciation,
it is very plausible to believe that populations of humans have
become *differentially* adapted to *different* conditions.  In
the case of the Inuit, there is already evidence of such
adaptation from molecular genetics.

If we also consider things such as Karsten Andersen's cholesterol
(and for that matter Stefansson's, which was also considerably
higher than that of, say, the Samburu) and JoAnn Betten's
diverticulitis, we have to consider some explanations.  One
explanation is that JoAnn and Andersen have a genetic inheritance
that creates some difficulties for them, faced with an all-meat
diet.  Another hypothesis is that their systems were somehow
damaged by civilized diet in a way that made them maladapted to
all-meat diet.  *Either way* we have reason to say that some
people will not thrive on an all-meat diet.

Furthermore, it may not be arrogant but it is surely misguided to
believe that a diet of steaks and chops is good nutrition because
the Inuit did well on wild game, abundant fish, organs, bones,
sinews, blubber, etc.  That is, to summarize the Inuit diet as
"all-meat" and then use that as a premise to infer the benefits
of *any* all-meat diet is dubious reasoning, even without
considering the confounding variable of unique genetic
adaptation.

> Just as predicting the
> weather through computer modeling will produce conflicting results using
> the same data and computer each time the program is run, trying to
> predict results of suplements in the much more complicated and more
> chaotic biochemical reactions of any living thing is not something a
> fractal mathmatician would bet on.

Unfortunately, exactly the same caveats apply to human nutrition
under conditions of differential adaptation.  You can't predict
how a !Kung would do on a traditional Inuit diet; you'd have to
try it and see.  Who would have predicted that Stefansson's
cholesterol would go down in the 1928 experiment while Andersen's
averaged around 400?  Nobody; there was no basis for such a
prediction.

For most of the millions of years of human evolution, humans were
omnivores, eating plenty of meat *and* vegetation.  During
glaciation, conditions for some populations changed radically.
Some populations died out; some adapted; some didn't have to
adapt.  The latter groups were probably the most populous, for
the simple reason that they were *not* being weeded out by those
selection pressures.  When the glaciation ended, agriculture
began, and a different set of selection pressures kicked in.
Adaptation to those pressures is still underway, and far from
complete, which is in a sense why we are all here on this list.
But it's known that *some* people do quite well on a high-carb,
high-grain diet.  That is, some populations have already had
meaningful adaptation.

Bottom line:  Even though Neanderthin doesn't prescribe an
all-meat diet, it fails to recognize that (a) different all-meat
diets differ widely in their nutritional properties; and (b)
there is reason to believe that not all people are equally well
adapted to an all-meat diet.

Todd Moody
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