Our body is adapted to eating meat not to eating meat exclusively!!!
Eating meat or even raw meat is far from being a problem
But “exclusively animal products” may be a problem, as “regular” meat does not have all necessary vitamins and proteins and in excess can damage human health:
there appears to be a limit on how much protein the human liver can safely cope with: Too much overwhelms the liver’s waste-disposal system, leading to protein poisoning — nausea, diarrhea, wasting, and death. [1]
But then, how some populations have lived millennia on a high protein diet? There some examples, like the diets centered around milk, meat, and blood among the East African pastoralists [1] and the most known case, of populations that live near the Artic, like the Innuits or Inuk
About Artic populations, they managed to adapt to a diet rich in proteins by eating a lot of parts that other people do not, like animal liver, that contains a lot of Vitamin C:
Liver is a great source of vitamins. Things like raw caribou liver, seal brains, and muktuk aren't your average person's food, they were essentially parts of a healthy (traditional) Inuit diet, providing plenty of Vitamin C. They don't cook it, so that's why vitamins are still preserved.Also, they do eat plants like seaweed and berries if they find some. [2]
In fact, although they do not cultivate vegetables, they can collect them: [3]
- Berries including crowberry and cloudberry
- Herbaceous plants such as grasses and fireweed
- Tubers and stems including mousefood, roots of various tundra plants which are cached by voles in burrows.
- Roots such as tuberous spring beauty and sweet vetch
- Seaweed [3]
But they also developed some changes in their organism that helped them to cope with a high protein diet, so any other humans that may try to replicate their diet will not be able to follow them for long, as happened in some real cases of castaway people that had to pass some time living among Artic people, or people who did that on purpose, like Mr. Stefansson, who lived among the Copper Eskimo. [1].
According to researches, there may be a:
natural “protein ceiling.” Protein accounts for no more than 35 to 40 percent of their total calories, which suggests to him that’s all the protein humans can comfortably handle. [1]
Backing to folks in the North, how can they break this barrier and still be healthy? They body and genetics adapted to it:
Arctic people had plenty of protein but little carbohydrate, so they often relied on gluconeogenesis. Not only did they have bigger livers to handle the additional work but their urine volumes were also typically larger to get rid of the extra urea.
And eating their fat from wild animals is pretty different from raised cattle, as the first ones are much healthier. Lots of their food, like fish, has high level of omega-3, that improves health.
Image: Caribou meat from hunt. Greenland [3]
This leads us to:
the Inuit paradox, if you will. In the Nunavik villages in northern Quebec, adults over 40 get almost half their calories from native foods, says Dewailly, and they don’t die of heart attacks at nearly the same rates as other Canadians or Americans. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours, he says. As someone who looks for links between diet and cardiovascular health, he’s intrigued by that reduced risk. [1]
Thus, no one can live by eating exclusively animal products, not even Artic people or African tribes. The issue in not only the quantity of proteins, but their quality too.
Just a reminder: humans are still natural omnivores, neither obliged carnivores nor vegetarians.
