Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I very much doubt it.

Meat is an ancient food. We've evolved as hunter-gatheres, with most of our calories coming from hunting. It would be very surprising if we were not well-adapted to eating a lot of meat. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes which eat a lot of meat, like the Hadza, have excellent health.

Something like Beyond Meat is novel; it may well be OK, but I'd certainly exercise a lot of caution before trusting it.

Another way to look at the question, while incomplete, is just to look at the breakdown of the nutrients. Per cronometer.com, here's specimen A:

https://imgur.com/a/uEWhL7E

and specimen B:

https://imgur.com/a/zcAXeya

Which of those looks healthier to you?

To me, they look pretty similar, except for A has a lot more PUFA, and a lot less vitamin B. There is a lot of controversy about PUFA, but my belief is too much of it is one of the main causes of disease in people eating "Western-style" diets.

So I'd guess specimen B is healthier; that's the cow burger.

(Tangentially, is there a good website to easily share pngs? Imgur compression is pretty brutal for text stuff.)

This conversation needs to be higher up. It's strange how much unbridled enthusiasm there is for fake meat within the first page of comments here.

I would agree, strongly, with your assessment of PUFAs. They are even harder to eliminate from ones diet than sugar. They are in most of what one eats that they aren't making from base ingredients.

"Hunter-Gatherers"

There is a great deal of misinformation about hunter-gather diets: https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/what-can-hunter-gatherers... or https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-ha... (I didn't invest much effort in finding illustrative links, there are many more, and academic research).

Walking around constantly and digging up/harvesting edible plants, insects, fungi, possibly carrion, and the occasional meat (including organs) is much more likely.

Most of our ancestors' calories didn't come from hunting in most areas. Those that did had lifestyles so different from a modern one that it makes no sense to compare them.

Those articles seem to be advocating against the idea (popular in the paleo community) that carbs are unhealthy or wouldn't have been part of our ancestral diets. I agree that idea seems mistaken, and agree that fruit, tubers, and honey are all foods we've likely been eating since aproximately forever.

But I don't think it's true we weren't also eating a lot of animals, and in many cases, getting most of our calories from animals.

Separately, the existence of modern hunter-gatherer groups like the Hadza that eat a lot of meat and are healthy suggests eating meat is healthy.

(Of course, you have to be careful, since there are potentially large differences between the Hadza's nose-to-tail fresh, wild kills, and what you might get at the supermarket. Meat is a broad category.)

The hunter-gatherer argument also fails an important sniff test for me. Evolutionarily-driven arguments fail to take into account that what may have been sufficient outcomes to drive selection (e.g. survival to/through reproductive prime) do not meet our current values and standards of acceptability. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. tend to strike after people are done reproducing but long before what we consider reasonable life expectancy.

Evolution can continue to exert pressure after you've passed reproductive age, if you stick around and help raise your offspring, which humans generally do.

You also hint at traditional societies having much shorter lifespans than modern ones; it's true they have much higher rates of infant and childhood mortality, but lifespans for people who make it past childhood are very similar.

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/

I agree evolutionary arguments in and of themselves will never be convincing (since there will always necessarily be a large amount of conjecture), but they are not being made in isolation: they providing an explanation for the observed fact that people living in modern societies are suffering a rising epidemic of degenerative diseases, and people living in traditional societies are not.

See also: the fantastic book "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price.

How anyone thinks some corporate processed meat is healthy than natural animal meat/fats that we have eaten since forever, makes me feel like I am living in crazy land.

People are probably so sick right now that they can't taste the difference, nor is their mind healthy enough to comprehend how ludicrous the proposition is.

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