"The Perfect Human Diet" — my thoughts

Thoughts in response to the doco on the Perfect Human Diet

I watched the documentary, The Perfect Human Diet, freely available here on YouTube.

From my perspective its producer (Journalist C.J Hunt) makes some false logical leaps and assumptions, which I felt to share my thoughts on in the comments. I am sharing those comments here, including the timestamps, as I know diet is of interest to many of my readers.

I’m currently writing a book on Real Health, which will incorporate these ideas, but in a more comprehensive and elaborate way. By the way … Subscribers to my SubStack will receive a free ebook edition of that book once published (end of 2024 / early 2025).

---

@Tonic, thank you for this important reporting and documentary. I have a few thoughts/questions to share:

You start out by highlighting the issue of chronic obesity. Yet, what evidence is there that obesity is primarily a result of not eating meat as the main source of daily energy intake? It seems to me it's due to a combination of: lack of natural light exposure, excess artificial blue light exposure, and eating fake machine food—highly refined, highly toxic, and devoid of micronutrients. So why such a focus on obesity as the lead-up to your premise that we need to eat a lot more meat than we do?

I'm sure most obese people eat loads of low-quality meat and low-grade animal products, and relatively little natural whole food (and likely barely any fruit, veg, herbs, etc. in their natural state), along with lots of ultra-processed fake "food", and drinks loaded with sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup. I am not aware of any evidence that the "invisible epidemic" you refer to is due to people eating too little meat and animal products.

I am not against people eating meat, etc., but it's misleading to suggest this is the defining factor in the current epidemic of chronic degenerative disease in the United States. Along with bad lighting, it's the introduction of refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, refined carbs (low-grade refined grain), and later ultra-refined and processed chemical-laced fake "food".

C.J. Hunt, did you suffer from obesity when you were eating a vegetarian diet, or a fruitarian diet?

Another issue that needs addressing is that the global population explosion was made possible by agriculture, and especially the introduction of whole grains agriculture provided us with. As you know, that was roughly 8 to 10k years ago. With ~8 billion people, are we able to feed humanity on loads of wild-caught game and fish, etc.? I doubt it. So will we need to cull a large swath of modernites for the diet you suggest to be globally possible? Quite likely. Alternatively, we need to adjust “the perfect diet” to something that is appropriate at this point in time. Also, obesity and chronic degenerative disease was not an issue over most of the ensuing 10K years of agriculture. Obesity and most chronic degenerative disease is a modern (post-industrialism) issue.

22:20 - Yes, it's true that our natural state is not "vegetarian", but that's not equivalent to the proposition we need to eat mostly meat. It takes very little animal products to get sufficient B12.

23:30 - Sounds like Banting's issue wasn't that he was eating too little meat, but that he was likely eating way too much sugar (toxic crap), beer (useless calories), refined and non-soured bread is useless gut filler, potatoes (a modern introduction to the western diet, and not something I eat, but it's safe to say Ireland wasn’t riddled with obese people when they lived mostly on potatoes, so hardly the primary culprit). It sounds to me like Banting moved to a diet of little or no refined foods. I'd suggest that's what made the difference, not the increase in meat.

27:00 - I agree, demonising fat was an error, as real fat was never an issue (fake fat is though). As far as I know, the demonising of cholesterol was only ramped up after it was discovered statin drugs reduced cholesterol.

41:00 - Exactly. Post-industrial refined carbs / processed foods. Bingo, there's a key issue. It's not the absence of meat, but the presence of fake "food".

45:00 - So the lesson here is to ensure we get plenty of protein. Our Stone Age ancestors primarily sourced this from meat. But today we have a range of options for complete protein. Lucky us. Yet most modernised people are now eating ultra-refined and processed fake-food, which are based on machine oils and isolates from carb-rich plant products.

50:00 - The agricultural revolution most reduced the diversity of our plant products, not animal products. There's vastly more selection of wild plants than wild animals, and vastly wider variation of nutrients in the plant kingdom over the animal kingdom. Meat is pretty much meat, of a few categories: dark/red-meat mammals, lighter-meat mammals, fish, molluscs. After the agricultural revolution we continued to eat wild game for a long time, and our farmed animals still ate their natural diet up until relatively recently. We continued to eat wild seafood. But suddenly we had storable bulk starches available, and we didn't suddenly devolve in our intelligence. The devolution of intelligence is primarily a post-industrialisation issue.

1:01 - Of course they got most of their protein from animals. But in terms of our brain development, is the key factor the source or the amount of protein (and fats)? And of course a purely vegetarian diet didn't exist, as it is an ideological concept, as is veganism. But can people today be robustly healthy on a primarily plant-based diet? Absolutely. Again, the obesity and chronic degenerative disease issue you start out with in the documentary is not an animal-based / plant-based argument.

1:06 - Sure, the brain shrunk, but did that correlate to a drop in intelligence? It seems a lot of high intelligence output occurred in the last few hundred years, presumably at the point of max brain size reduction.

1:08 - I doubt any of this meat is natural. It's all been fed on the demonised grains you've established were not good for humans. Why is a steak from a grain, soy and seed oil fed cow now classed as "human food"? That's not what our ancient ancestors ate. What's more, look at the diversity of plants (and their unique spectrums of phytonutrients) even in the highly limited selection one finds in a supermarket. Compare that to the cow, sheep, chicken and pig meat you identified in the supermarket. You identified a LOT more plant "human foods" than animal "human foods" in the supermarket.

1:10:24 - "Eat the whole orange, not the juice". Bingo. Juice is a refinement. Whole orange is a whole food. Although if it was sprayed with crap-loads of chemicals, it's a post-industrialism degraded whole food.

1:10:50 - Whole grains were traditionally prepared (soaking, fermenting, etc.) very differently to the crap promoted as "whole grains" in this ultra-refined and processed fake-foods you're both standing in front of. Those boxes of ultra-refined and processed breakfast products (all fake-food) are not representative of traditional whole grains. They've added isolated grain fibre (husks and germs) back into a formula of ultra-processed grain. It's all fake and highly toxic.

1:11:36 - Same story with this fake-"bread". It is all ultra-refined and processed and highly toxic, and totally devoid of nutrients. But not because it's grain, but because the grain wasn't organic, whole, soaked, fermented. (BTW, I eat almost no grain, so I'm not saying this as an avid grain promoter … just as someone that respects the wisdom of flexibility and balance over ideological rigidity).

1:14:50 - This is fake-food, ultra-refined and processed, highly toxic. But not because of an absence of meat or animal products, but because there is NOTHING natural about it.

1:16:40 - "When we started eating meat the brain doubled in size ... a compact source of food ... which was proteins and fats ... very nutrient dense". Exactly. Real fat, and whole state protein. BTW, Spirulina is also very nutrient dense. As is chlorella. As are nuts. The question is, can we achieve that high protein and high fat from plants too? Absolutely. Today, it's a choice. Go either way. But plant foods are not the issue here. As stated above, it's that our food is ultra-refined and processed, highly toxic, fake-food. Fake meat (fed on soy, seed oil, grain), fake "whole grain" BS breakfast products, etc. Eat REAL FOOD. Doesn't matter if it comes from animals or plants. Just eat REAL FOOD. And, safely, get plenty of REAL LIGHT (sunlight) exposure. That's our primary "nutrient". REAL food is secondary.