Why should meat be included in a healthy diet?

Meat’s always been included in a healthy diet. Meat is what humans evolved as a primary source of protein, and we’re not just talking about rib-eye steaks and tenderloin but also eggs and nuetes and small animals as well as large animals, we’re talking about insects, which was part of that protein offering for 2-1/2 million years, we took in in order to stay alive and build muscle and have the energy that we have to get to where we are today.

So meat is 100% apart of a healthy diet, in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to name a society or a group of people that ever survived without some form of animal protein.

If you look at the size of the human brain, it EXPLODED (figuratively). It grew quite rapidly around two million years ago, and most scientists agree that was the advent of humans, homo-habilis, homo-erectus, eating meat! Eating animals and that nutrition shaped the way our brains could develop in a very profound way

If you look at sources of bio-available nutrients, animal foods are clearly far and away the best of those. A lot of times plant based advocates will tout nutrients in plants but if you just look at the facts regarding the bio-availability and the presence of nutrients, animal foods are clearly the winner for those.

And that would suggest why the human brain grew so rapidly! Once we had access to these incredibly rich sources of bio-available nutrients of all sorts, eating animals became this key to sort of unlock our continued evolution as humans and it continues to be a huge part of what makes us healthy today.

We are uniquely adapted to digest and process meat. We have transporters in the gut that are uniquely designed to take up di and tri-peptides that are coming from meat. If we look at it, we were primates, we evolved as a primate and there are primates that have been eating fruit for 25 million years or more and their brain hasn’t developed, and so something had to have changed, and the discovery of either first and maybe possibly savaging meat and then eventually learning how to organize and hunt drove much of that evolution and we haven’t changed, there hasn’t been enough time to turn back into herbivores which some people are trying to do now which is kind of crazy.

Source: Sisson, Mark, guest. Saladino, Paul, guest. Baker, Shawn, guest. “Part 47 – The Great Meat Debate w/ Mark Sisson, Dr. Paul Saladino, & Dr. Shawn Baker” Peak Human, 18 July 2019. https://www.peak-human.com/home/the-great-meat-debate-with-mark-sisson-dr-paul-saladino-and-dr-shawn-baker