Nutrition
Why Does Humanity Eat Meat?
Meat consumption was crucial to human evolution and still offers health benefits today. A critical examination of scientific narratives and dubious methods in popular science media.
Nutrition
Meat consumption was crucial to human evolution and still offers health benefits today. A critical examination of scientific narratives and dubious methods in popular science media.
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What's going wrong in today's public discourse can be clearly demonstrated with a current example.
We follow Scientific American, which is regarded «as one of the oldest and most respected popular science magazines in the world».
It belongs to the reputable Springer Nature publishing house, where we also published our book. It seems trustworthy.
But recently we stumbled across a peculiar article titled:
Does Humanity Have to Eat Meat?
Meat-eating may not have made us human after all, say paleoanthropologists
Immediately problematic. Because the question of whether humans should still eat meat today is linked here with a claim that challenges one of anthropology's core tenets.
That principle states: Homo sapiens exists because an ancestral species (Australopithecus) increasingly integrated animal products into its diet and thus enabled the emergence of the genus Homo 2–3 million years ago in the first place.
This is supported by decades of research that clearly demonstrates what changed in us humans following the established consumption of animal products.
Undoubtedly, multiple fortunate factors played a role. But the fact remains: even the most intelligent chimpanzee—we share a common ancestor!—rarely reaches the intellectual level of a small child. It therefore took a drastic, comprehensive change to make this possible.
So this is perfectly legitimate: asking whether and how much meat humans should eat today, in the age of the XXL schnitzel. What's not legitimate is dismissing facts out of hand to support one's own thesis.
And that's exactly what the entire article does—it argues past the core question it's trying to answer.
The author doesn't even manage to bridge the enormous gap between the question of whether we need XXL schnitzels today and the question of meat consumption's importance in our evolutionary history.
Strange for such a high-quality magazine. It only makes sense when you read to the end.
There we learn that the article originally appeared in the German magazine Spektrum der Wissenschaft and doesn't necessarily represent the views of the magazine.
Germany again. The land of moral crusaders.
In Spektrum der Wissenschaft itself, the piece was part of a theme week titled «Eat Meat Responsibly—Is That Possible?», which concluded with the article «Protein Revolution: The Future of Meat Consumption», which discusses «shifting the production of protein-rich foods from agriculture to factories».
Too transparent. Why? Why is serious scientific education increasingly becoming a kind of educational campaign that—believing in some sort of superior ethical mission—resorts to dubious methods?
Yet this isn't necessary. There are numerous health and ecological reasons why we don't need XXL schnitzels. We don't need to compare ourselves with a Cro-Magnon from 30,000 years ago or invoke the worst dystopian scenarios to make that point.
Still, there are countless reasons why moderate consumption of animals and animal products is valuable for health. This simply can't be replicated so easily in a laboratory—what hubris, serving the financial interests of industrial mega-corporations!
Learn more about this topic in our current Instagram post and Instagram Reel on creatine (which is found only in meat).
