Animal Based Diet
TLDR: The animal-based diet consists of mostly animal based foods…
What is the animal-based diet?
The animal-based diet is a diet that has gained a lot of attention lately. The diet is unique. It breaks a lot of the common beliefs about diet and brings a new perspective to what it is “healthy”. The animal-based diet falls under the spectrum of the ancestral eating diets. These diets were designed to mimic the eating habits of our ancestors from the paleolithic period. There are three diets that fall under this spectrum: the paleolithic diet (paleo), the animal-based diet, and the carnivore diet. The paleolithic diet (paleo) consists of the most natural form of meat, organs, grains, seeds, nuts, dairy, honey, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. It is the modern diet but organic and minimally processed. The animal-based diet omits vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, and dairy (optional). This a more restrictive but not as restrictive as the carnivore diet. The carnivore diet goes even further by omitting fruit. Think of it as paleo being the least restrictive and carnivore being the most restrictive.
Each diet has a different perspective of what our ancestors ate during the paleolithic period. As it is impossible to go back and observe what our ancestors ate, we rely on fossils, mass graves, remnants of tools, and observation of modern hunter gatherer societies to hypothesize what their diet consisted of. The animal-based diet takes a unique perspective on what our ancestors ate and that will be the primary focus of this newsletter. Research is not concise on what was actually consumed during the paleolithic period and the efficacy of a modern animal-based diet. Since the research is NOT concise, I will have to give my own interpretation from my findings. I caution you, as the reader, that this article is going to be a lot of my opinion.
Starting out, I think it is important to understand what it is that people ate during the paleolithic time period. The paleolithic period happened from 2 million to 45 thousand years ago, and is defined as the time period “from manufacture of the first stone tools to shortly before the development of agriculture”. This is the time where hunter gatherer societies started to flourish. Before this time our diets largely consisted of vegetables of insects. As a result of a more nutrient rich diet, humans developed larger brains, grew taller, and worked closer as groups. This time period laid the genetic foundation for modern humans. It is believed, by proponents of ancestral diets, that the closer we eat to the people of this time period, the “healthier” we will be. The evidence for this is supported by anecdotal evidence of individuals that followed this diet. They claim that they have seen improvements in autoimmune disorders and other biometric measure of health. There are no gold standard interventional studies (double blind, randomized, control group, and a test group>30) comparing the entire animal-based diet to other diets. If you know of one, please send it my way. Most of the evidence supporting it is either anecdotal, observational, or a correlation. I’ll get back to this later, but let’s proceed with what people actually ate during the paleolithic period.
Our ancestors, what did they actually eat?
The reason there is a spectrum of ancestral diets is because there is no clear answer to what people ate during this period. It is safe to assume that the foods were minimally processed and were gathered from their immediate environment. Other than that, we have to rely on inconsistent evidence to support any claim. The animal-based diet is structured around a couple basic ideas: meat and other animal products were the primary component of our ancestors’ diets, many vegetables weren’t meant to be eaten by humans and are toxic for consumption, and dairy is not toxic to humans.
Much of the evidence used to support the foundation for the animal-based diet comes from observations of a modern hunter-gatherer society called the Hadza. The Hadza are a tribe in Africa that aren’t influenced greatly by modern society. While many of their neighboring tribes have begun to trade and grow crops, the Hadza remain true to their culture and rely on hunting and gathering from their environment for sustenance. The Hadza are surrounded by a diverse array of wild game and plants. With this diverse environment, their society glorifies hunting. They prefer to eat meat, have many rituals surrounding hunting, and the value of man is even placed on his ability to hunt. From observations of these people and other supporting evidence, the creators of the animal-based diet concluded that our ancestors likely ate meat, organs, eggs, honey, fruit, and sometimes dairy.
However, this is rather inconsistent with their observation from this tribe. Although the Hadza valued hunting and eating meat extremely highly, animal-based food only made up 20% of their diet by weight. The other 80% came from roots, berries, seeds, and nuts that they gathered from their environment. Even after adjusting for caloric density, it is estimated about 65% of their calories came from plants. This is far from what the animal-based diet would have you believe. You are also led to believe that these hunters killed large game animals all of the time to consume high quantities of organs. This is also not true as many hunters rarely kill a large game animal. Some of the most successful hunters will kill less than one large game animal a year. Some of the more unsuccessful hunters could go their entire lives without a large game kill. Instead, they mostly killed small game animals that were just enough to satiate themselves.
While out hunting for small game, hunters would also gather enough plants to help satiate themselves. They regularly consumed ten different plants. The edible portion of four these was the roots, 5 was the berries, and one was a large fruit. The creators of the animal-based diet would lead you to believe that plants have toxins in them that make them harder to digest. This causes bloating and should not be consumed. Instead, we should eat like our ancestors. In actuality, the Hadza consumed roots as a large portion of their diet. Using the same inductive reason that is used to prove the animal-based diet is what our ancestors ate, you can disprove it as well. I believe that the main support for the idea that plants are toxic to humans comes from autoimmune disorders like celiac. Celiac disease is a chronic digestive intolerance to gluten. The cause of many other autoimmune disorders is unknown, but some hypothesize that is from plants. However, this is NOT proven.
Autoimmune disorders aren’t the only complications we can have with food. Many people are allergic or intolerant to specific food. Lactose (a carbohydrate found in milk) intolerance is super common amongst adults with over 68% of the world population having some extent of lactose intolerance. Children are born with the lactase enzyme that allows them to breakdown lactose, but they usually lose it by adulthood. This is believed to be because humans didn’t consume other mammal’s milk until after the development of agriculture and had no need to keep the lactase enzyme. It is a relatively modern adaptation to be able to consume lactose as an adult. Therefore, if our paleolithic ancestors consumed milk they did not consume milk on a regular basis because they completely lacked the enzymes to process it as an adult.
Our modern “ancestral” diet…
Though it is still not clear what our ancestors actually ate, it is clear that it is not the animal-based diet. Especially, the modern take on the diet. Even if our ancestors consumed primarily meat, organs, and other animal byproducts, could we mimic that diet today? The meat consumed by our ancestors would be relatively lean compared to what is commonly available today. On average, wild game carries about 4% bodyfat while modern farm-raised animals have on average 25-30% bodyfat. The animal-based diet highly values fat composition (ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fats) in animal meats compared to other sources. However, modern farm-raised animals also have a different fat composition compared to their wild game counterpart. These factors alone would make it difficult to for us mass replicate the animal-based diet our ancestors supposedly. It would require a diet that largely consists of wild game and would put a massive stress on our environment if a large portion of our society followed this diet.
One of possibly the most critical points I saved for last… We are all different. All of our ancestors came from different places with different genetic mutations that allowed them to be more adapted to their environment. This variation in genetic adaptation is especially true when it comes to diets. The genetic descendants of Denmark are going to be adapted to different diets than the genetic descendants of western Africa. Therefore, eating like YOUR ancestors did will look different for everyone.
My opinion
If you haven’t noticed, I’m not the biggest fan of this diet, but only for the reasons I listed above. I see this diet as a fad diet that is propagated by media influencers like Liver King. It makes claims of being something that it is not. The animal-based diet wants you to believe that it is the secret to gains, or the key to your digestive problems because it is what we were meant to be eating. It is what our ancestors ate. In actuality, this does not seem to be true. Our ancestors likely consumed many different varieties of vegetables, seeds, and grains as a stable part of their diet depending on their geographical location. Most importantly, all of our ancestors are from different places and would have consumed different diets.
The animal-based diet needs to be seen for what it is. Even the name is misleading. The animal-based diet is a high fat and protein diet that comes from modern farm-raised (sometimes wild) meat, organs, eggs, fruit, honey, and dairy. It has no connection to how our ancestors ate. If you are following this diet and it works for you, great. If you have some digestive problems with processed foods, this might be a good diet to try. It has potential to help you especially in populations with autoimmune disorders. Don’t be fooled by the snake oil salesman. It isn’t a “cure all” diet that is meant for everyone, but who knows, maybe the animal-based diet will bring out the “primal” in you.
Bonus: Alcohol is not part of a well-balanced animal-based diet.
References:
#91—Eating An Animal Based Diet With Dr. Paul Saladino. (2021, October 19). https://open.spotify.com/episode/2AgOIM9czxZPmflRZEnnlL
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Definition & Facts for Lactose Intolerance | NIDDK. (n.d.). National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Retrieved September 2, 2022, from https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/lactose-intolerance/definition-facts
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Lapuente, M., Estruch, R., Shahbaz, M., & Casas, R. (2019). Relation of Fruits and Vegetables with Major Cardiometabolic Risk Factors, Markers of Oxidation, and Inflammation. Nutrients, 11(10), E2381. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11102381
Serafini, M., & Peluso, I. (2016). Functional Foods for Health: The Interrelated Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Role of Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Spices and Cocoa in Humans. Current Pharmaceutical Design, 22(44), 6701–6715. https://doi.org/10.2174/1381612823666161123094235
Shepon, A., Eshel, G., Noor, E., & Milo, R. (2018). The opportunity cost of animal based diets exceeds all food losses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(15), 3804–3809. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Thompson, H. (2012, December 28). An Evolutionary Whodunit: How Did Humans Develop Lactose Tolerance? NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an-evolutionary-whodunit-how-did-humans-develop-lactose-tolerance
