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Plant-based diets cause men to fart more and have larger stools, researchers have found – but that seems to be a good thing, because it means these foods are promoting healthy gut bacteria.
Claudia Barber at the Liver and Digestive Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Centre in Barcelona, Spain, and her colleagues compared the effects of a Mediterranean-style diet mostly comprised of plants with a Western-style diet containing fewer fruit and vegetables on the guts of 18 healthy men aged between 18 and 38. Each participant was randomly assigned to follow one of the diets for two weeks, then after a break, they switched to the other diet for two weeks.
The men did a similar number of poos per day on the two diets, but each one was about double the size while they were on the plant diet. The men collected and weighed their own stools using digital scales and found they produced about 200 grams per day on the plant diet, compared with 100 grams on the Western diet.
This is because eating plants promotes certain types of bacteria in our guts that make food for themselves by fermenting plant fibre, says Rosemary Stanton at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
[...] The findings suggest that flatulence associated with eating more plants should be welcomed, says Stanton. "Our Western idea that farting is a sign of something being wrong is totally false," she says. In most cases, "farting is a sign of a healthy diet and a healthy colon", she says.
[Journal Reference]: Differential Effects of Western and Mediterranean-Type Diets on Gut Microbiota:
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snospar on Tuesday September 07 2021, @02:28PM (9 children)
Better out than in.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @03:02PM (3 children)
Beans, Beans, they're good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart the better you feel. So eat your beans with every meal.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:09PM (2 children)
Except in America, "beans" come with Bacon Bits(tm) and Honey Treacle(tm) with Crispy Curlio(tm) fries.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:53PM
God Bless America!
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday September 08 2021, @01:50AM
Not the ones I get. Big ol' bag of dry beans, cook up a cup in the Instant Pot on an as-needed basis. Unless someone's bred in porcine myocyte genes into the beans themselves, this is nothing but the legume.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:49PM (1 child)
> Better out than in.
New slogan for In-N-Out
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:27PM
Sounds like they're hedging their bets. I'm 100% for out - it's not just better, it's the One True Way and all who disagree should be forced to sit in a roomful of 13 year old boys.
(Score: 3, Funny) by stretch611 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:32PM
Scientific fact proven by South Park...
https://youtu.be/cNYoqYYEc7E [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/y_S10WXz5aM?t=30 [youtu.be]
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:21PM (1 child)
but muh Toxic Masculinity
(Score: 2) by Farmer Tim on Tuesday September 07 2021, @11:19PM
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Tuesday September 07 2021, @02:37PM (34 children)
Where on earth do these folks get these premises? This sounds like something the Queen of England might have said, maybe. It's pretty clear. Anything that makes the kids laugh can't be all that bad.
200 grams of extra poo with the same amount of intake sounds almost implausible. If one poos about 12 hours after eating something, that's a whole lot of extra mass that has to come from somewhere in a fairly short amount of time. When something ferments, it doesn't just ferment out of thin air. Though, it may produce a little bit of extra air.
(Score: 2, Informative) by NPC-131072 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @03:00PM (1 child)
Hello fren,
100 grams extra. Your miscalculation makes this story seem like an even bigger load of shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:44PM
Funny how you started showing up more after the sock puppet cleanup, guess you were just a troll sock puppet so you didn't get swept up. Oh well, there is a certain trainwreck entertainment factor!
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday September 07 2021, @03:07PM (7 children)
The pipeline length of your digestive system is (under normal conditions) roughly 48h.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Tuesday September 07 2021, @03:40PM (3 children)
I must have a shorter tract then. I ate some corn last night, and I'm pooping it up today.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:32PM (2 children)
Ah, found the problem. Poop should go down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:12PM
In Australia, poop goes up.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:39PM
Oh man, I should see a doctor about this.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:35PM (2 children)
We're measuring length in hours now? Somebody page George Lucas
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Funny) by edIII on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:58PM (1 child)
It makes perfect sense. Just like how I made the Chipotle Run in less than 29 minutes.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:23PM
Is that how long it takes to pass though or come back up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @03:38PM (1 child)
Not found in summary, and it would seem very odd to compare two diets matched by mass rather than calories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:32PM
It was said that climate change was accelerated by the belching of cattle.
Should carbon-rich plant foods be offset by the harmful greenhouse gas leaving one's rectum?
At least in an office, air conditioning can filter out harmful gasses but working from home i fear for indoor plants and. pets sharing the airspace.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:21PM (7 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:14PM
So is water, shithead. Care to learn why CO2 is the most problematic? Or rather post this same inanity again and again.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:24PM (2 children)
If you're emitting metric tons of it I think you are no linger in the farts=good category!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:04PM
Americans only emit US customary tons, never metric tons. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:08PM
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:15PM (2 children)
And using too much TP is depleting Canadian forests [theguardian.com]. Which diet will help us save the trees?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:30PM
I'd be happy to send the TP back to Canada after using it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:19PM
D'oh just replant the forests? Then you can label the subsequent batches of TP: "From renewable and sustainable sources!".
That's how it works doesn't it? Palm oil, soybean oil, whatever vegetable oil. Those square miles of soybeans/canola/palm oil etc weren't around tens of thousands of years ago. What was there? In many cases - old growth forests. Palm oil is only evil because some brown people thousands of miles away are doing the burning and chopping down the first time AND the USA sells soybean oil not palm oil (otherwise there'd be bigger fuss about Brazil's soybean oil too).
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:39PM (1 child)
Some hardly smell while others make you wish you were as dead as the rotting corpse the other guy must of eaten.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:07PM
*must have
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:54PM
You are under the misconception that shit is the remains of your food. It's actually mostly gut bacteria and indigestible fibers. Eat more plants, you get more gut bacteria and more indigestible fibers, hence more poop.
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:01PM
It is water. This is why your stool bulks up with a high-fibre diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber#Fecal_weight [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 08 2021, @02:27AM (9 children)
Bacterial reproduction. Stool can be as much as 80% bacteria by weight. It's an indication that what you're eating is not really digestible by means of your own gut, therefore encourages bacteria that can digest it. Also, fiber tends to retain water in the gut. One percent more fiber means you need double the water intake just to stay even. Flatulence is a sign of wasted food from the human POV, not a benefit.
Poor quality dog food (that is, containing a majority of plant-based ingredients and waste fiber) can quite easily double in volume and weight between going in and coming out, with gas apace. Same principle, due to pretty much the same ingredients (given it's mostly made from processing waste from human food). Having dealt with this professionally and at scale for over 50 years, I can attest to every aspect of the problem.
Another issue is that bacteria that digest (ie. ferment) plant fiber commonly produce sugars as waste products, which are absorbed by the gut, sufficient to cause issues in some diabetics, and in some cases, weight gain.
Basically, garbage in, garbage out.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:00AM (8 children)
>Flatulence is a sign of wasted food from the human POV, not a benefit.
Only if you're looking at it as Human versus their gut bacteria, when in fact cultivating a healthy gut ecosystem is at least as important as a farmer cultivating a healthy field. When a healthy field outgasses you don't consider that waste, it's a sign that the soil ecology is healthy and capable of nurturing more complex life, like your crops.
In fact, consider human breast milk - heavily optimized by hundreds of millions of years of evolution... and roughly the half the sugar in it is completely indigestible by human babies. Instead it appears to be there to attract and nurture the gut flora needed to establish healthy digestion.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Reziac on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:29AM (7 children)
That may be, but a "plant based diet" is not what we evolved to eat. If we had, we'd have guts like gorillas..
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:50AM (6 children)
We do, to a large extent. We're optimized for a greater amount of meat, but seemingly still primarily fruit, nuts, and veggies.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 08 2021, @06:03AM (5 children)
See my other post quoting a study of hunter-gatherer intakes; by far the nearest to the evolved norm. +65% animal-sourced calories.
The problem with all the plants you mention is that in the natural state they're seasonal, and the only ones with enough calories and nutrients to notice are nuts. What did we eat the rest of the time?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:37AM (1 child)
Humanity's natural range is in the tropics, where seasons don't exist...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:19AM
Humanity's natural range is savannah (or if Neanderthals are any indication, temperate forest), where plant-sourced food is definitely seasonal if only due to rainfall patterns.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:32AM (2 children)
>What did we eat the rest of the time?
What makes you think your standard of "enough calories to notice" was relevant? We ate plants, probably mostly leaves and stems (aka vegetables), but also any fruit and nuts we could get our hands on. Plants thrive pretty much everywhere 3/4 of the year, and 100% of the year in the climates we did most of our evolving in. In the winter we ate a lot less, just like every other animal - even predators have slim pickings. That's the reason it's so easy to gain weight in the fall, so we can store calories for the lean times. And of course as we learned how to dry and otherwise preserve food we could supplement our diet with food we stored during more bountiful times of the year.
>65% animal-sourced calories.
By calories I might buy that - meat is far more energy dense than most plants.
But that means that by mass and volume, the overwhelming majority of what we ate was plants.
Consider:
Meat contains about 650-1300 calories per pound depending on fat content (avg~ 980)
Vegetables contain 65-195 calories per pound (avg, 130)
Fruit contains 135-420 calories (~280)
Lets call it around 200 calories per pound for a roughly equal mix of fruits and vegetables
So that 35% vegetable calories diet translates to .35*(980/200) = 1.7x as many pounds of plants as of meat. Which means a diet that's +63% plants by mass. And even more by volume, since plants then to be rather
Of course, wild meat was mostly a lot leaner than today's fast-growing farmed meat, but the change in plants has been even more dramatic, so if anything your hunter-gatherer's were probably eating 70-80% plants by mass.
Meat's a great calorie source, but only a relatively small fraction of the bulk our intestines evolved to deal with.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:25AM (1 child)
So, on days when *your* hunter-gatherers couldn't get meat, they ate 10 pounds of mostly indigestible material to reach the 2000 calories required by an active outdoor lifestyle. Try that and get back to me. I'd particularly recommend lamb's quarter and acorns. Have your kidney transplant standing by. ;)
Wild meat is not fat-free by any means, or even low fat. The muscle is leaner to very lean due to less or no marbling, but the *carcass* is not lean. Most carry significant fat under the skin, and sometimes internally. Last time I helped someone butcher a deer, we must have peeled ten pounds of fat off its lardy ass. Bear carcasses can be as much as half fat by weight, and seal 40%. Mouse and beaver can be fairly plump. Some fish are high fat (eg. salmon). Waterfowl sequester fat in their livers. Not to mention primitives consume the brain, which is mostly fat.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:02PM
Just pointing out the implications of your own numbers. Not that you need a full caloric intake every day, it's the averages that matter - our bodies are actually pretty good at storing energy.
Yeah, plant eaters need to eat a lot of plants. But there's a heck of a lot more than calories in them, and our bodies have evolved to make use of those vitamins and other essential nutrients. As well as having co-evolved with symbiotic bacteria that thrive in the resulting roughage-rich omnivores processing stream. Bacteria which we then digest in turn.
There's a lot more to eating than just calories. And keep in mind we've been an apex omnivore for a *very* long time, we're one of the the last creatures in any habitat to go hungry.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @02:41PM (12 children)
This info was brought to you by the medical journal, "Duh!"
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:40PM (11 children)
I vote to remove the "Redundant" mod from Slashdot. What is the point? We are all discussing the same info contained in the story, and also multiple threads regarding the same exact topics will inevitably appear. You might as well preemptively mark the entire comment section as "Redundant." Besides, it's one of the most subjective mod tags ever to start with.
Just get rid of it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:13PM (1 child)
I got modded down and I am ANGERY about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:36PM
Nobody understands MODERATION like me. Your doing it wrong libtards your ment to vote me UP!11
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:05PM (3 children)
Redundant comments are ones that add nothing to the discussion, but aren't blatantly trolling.
See also somebody replying with the single word "No"
Or somebody regurgitating the same tired meme for the millionth time with no other worthwhile content in the post
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:47PM (2 children)
Soylent is 90% comments regurgitating tired memes and talking points.
Yet, they are not modded redundant.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:12PM
You're exaggerating.
And I didn't say "tired memes and talking points"; I said "tired memes with no other worthwhile content in the post."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:32PM
I come for the 10% complaining about the other 90%. Real quality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:02PM (4 children)
I know more about digestion than the average person, though not by much. If someone asked me if eating more plant based food would make you fart more I wouldn't have had a definitive answer. I guess you're one of the Sigma Males that sees reality in green falling characters which show the Truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:34PM (3 children)
> I know more about digestion than the average person
Credential established. Everyone listen to this guy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:58AM (2 children)
"though not by much"
Since you love to cherry pick quotes it is safe to say you're a republidolt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:11AM (1 child)
Oh so now you're a dipshit. Which is it Einstein? Are you the Internet authority on digestion or just a dipshit talking out the end of his digestive tract.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @08:59PM
lol reading comprehension fail, try again dear buddy
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:17PM
This article was so astonishing to me that it knocked the wind out of me. But not in the way one might think.
Why is it that when I hold a stick, everyone begins to look like a pinata?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday September 07 2021, @04:41PM (1 child)
A real shit job when you daily have to inspect and weigh your own poop.
So how about for older, or middle-aged, men? The test group here is more or less young men. When young I could pretty much eat and do whatever I wanted and would still be fine. As I am now solidly into middle-age not so much anymore.
Also how about women? Does it apply to them to?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:16PM
How bout... you... do your own study? Asswipe.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday September 07 2021, @05:49PM
30-40 years ago dad had intestinal surgery. For a few weeks afterwards he had to eat a low residue diet. I'd moved out by that time so I'm not sure what that involved, but neither mom nor dad seemed to mind.
As the name implies, the whole point was to create as little work as possible for the intestines so they could heal.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @06:56PM (4 children)
It's not that long ago when Kellogg and company took part in the great social engineering project to eliminate beans from America's diet.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/01/cereal-become-part-complete-breakfast/ [todayifoundout.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:17PM (3 children)
Kellogg created cereal because he thought meat caused males to masturbate. He wanted something extremely bland tasting and poor in nutrition so people would be gloomy and not have the energy to masturbate. (Today modern cereal is bascially a sugar-coated multivitamin so at least we added some things back to it). He was very anti-sex and push genital mutational so that sex would be painful so people wouldn't do it. Look up his history. It's crazy and sadly his beliefs still persist in modern food regulatory bodies (which he helped create specifically to promote his ideals).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:27PM (2 children)
Kellogg was only part of the social engineering movement. High society ladies wanted to stop men farting at their society functions, as well.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:05PM (1 child)
Yeah, I'm going to need a citation on *that* one. Plus video recreations, if you have them.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:26PM
That comes from my reading pre-internet. I'm having problems finding citations on the web. Sorry.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:20PM (1 child)
Nothing in this article says why those particular gut bacteria are good, or why we'd desire a gut biome that ferments plant matter.
Missing key details, because the rest of their arguments follow from that...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:39PM
Think of bacteria like people - there's good ones, and there's bad ones. You see?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:22PM (25 children)
There's so many things wrong with this. Lets start with the obvious:
1. The SAD diet, also called the Standard American Diet or sometimes the Western-style Diet, is one of the worst diets you can eat. Nearly anything compared with it will be better. Comparing something to this diet is near worthless.
2. If you eat more fibre (plants) then of course you're going to poop more. Fibre is something you can't digest so it has to come out. We don't magic things away from inside our body.
3. Having things rotting in your gut isn't a good thing. We aren't cows. Our species specific diet is meat and meat completely liquefies in the stomach and is nearly fully absorbed in the small intestines. What do you think is better, something your body fully absorbs or something it struggles to digest? When you stop eating plants and carbs you stop farting and your shit stops stinking. Really, there is zero smell. Everyone dislikes the smell of rotting things. We instinctively avoid rotting things because it makes us sick. Do you really believe we should have things rotting inside us when we don't have to? When food is rotting inside you you do need to get it out quick so it doesn't make you ill, but there's foods we can eat that don't rot inside. Yes they take longer to move through the large intestine, but since they aren't rotting and your body has extracted all the nutrients from it, it's not a bad thing. That mass isn't harmful to you unlike the undigested food moving though. Do you eat kale or corn? Those are excellent for you because they have tons of fibre? Do you look at your shit afterwards? You can clearly see undigested food. How long would you leave wet cut up kale or corn out on a warm table? The food goes bad and you would never eat it. You don't want that same thing happening inside you.
3. Fibre is bad for you. It physically irritates the intestinal lining and hampers the digestion of the things you eat. In modern studies, fibre only looks good because the things people are eating in those studies are crappy foods. When you eat something bad for you, reducing it's digestion and forcing it to move through you quickly is of course good for you. However what's better, eating something harmful while also trying to block its digestion or eating something good for you. If you just eat good things then you don't need to block their digestion thus fibre provides no benefits. It makes no sense that we need to reduce the digestion efficiency of the food we eat. Thus we're eating the wrong foods. If our bodies can fully digest a food we should be eating those foods.
4. Again fibre is bad for you. If you have IBS or are constipated, what's the best solution? Cutting fibre from your diet. Yeah I know main stream media doesn't advertise that, but look into it yourself. Try it out for yourself. No one can sell an anti-fibre pill so no one advertises those solutions. They work and they work well and without any negative side effects.
5. A good gut microbiome? No. Once again the benefit not comes from diversity but because of a reduction of bad things. You can eat things which only promote the good bacteria, you can eat things which prompt bad bacteria, or you can eat things which promote both while trying to cycle out those cells as quickly as possible. Eating fibrous things prompts the 3rd option. The increase diversity sounds is better compared to just promoting the bad bacteria, but both are worse than just promoting the good bacteria. Again, this comes down to eating our species specific diet which only promotes our good bacteria. When all you have is good bacteria, you don't need diversity.
7. A lot of neurotransmitters can be created in our guts. So fucking what? Our brains are dynamic feedback systems. If we have a lot of one transmitter type we reduce our sensitivity to it. If we have too little then our sensitivity increases. Saying you want your gut bacteria to be constantly producing a lot is meaningless because we quickly normalize to that higher level. Would you rather have your body be constantly working to produce, use, then recycle a lot of resources or do you want it to be efficient with its resources? If you can get by with a small levels of transmitters then you should. That's far more efficient in every way. Plus you have the bonus of being able to temporarily increase a food type to bump up the transmitters while you're still sensitive to them. If you're always operating at the higher levels then you can't temporarily bump them up without force feeding yourself a ton of food.
8. Within the realms of intestinal research, it's often said the first years of a baby's life is critical for their gut bacteria. What do babies eat? Milk. Milk with no fibre. If fibre was so critical to our wellbeing and the health of our gut, then milk makes no sense as a starter food. You can't both claim fibre is critical to human health and consuming human milk is the optimal thing for babies.
In summary farting, especially smelly farts, means your body didn't extract all the nutrients it could from the food you ate. We don't need the byproducts of the bacteria which breaks down that food*, so you might as well eat foods which you can entirely digest rather than waste effort eating things you can't and risking damaging yourself.
*Also proved by the people who get their intestines removed. Those people live perfectly healthly lives without guts. Something which shouldn't be possible if the gut bacteria byproducts are so critical to human health.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:39PM (1 child)
This seems like a non-sequitur. By that logic, you'll be arguing that fibre is bad for mammalian herbivores... From mice to elephants, fibre is bad for them and they shouldn't eat it, because their babies don't eat it.
Needless to say, I think your argument as a whole has some holes in it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:33AM
I think it boils down to blah blah blah JO BIDEN IS COMING FOR OUR HAMBURGERS!! guns freedom raaaaaar
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @07:43PM (21 children)
Preeeeetttty sure "our species" evolved around eating plants. Go visit the primitive tribes and watch them try to catch an animal. Not happening.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:16PM (13 children)
TBH, I can't really think of a "primitive" tribe that does not hunt. How far back do we have to go for the "primitives" to forget how bow and arrow and throwing spears work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:48PM (11 children)
Even dedicated predators have ~25% success rate at best. That's nowhere near enough to feed large social animals like humans, especially with our long developmental cycle and long period of relatively uselessness in hunting (young/old age).
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Tuesday September 07 2021, @10:55PM (10 children)
Fortunately animals are packed with nutritious fat and proteine so a 25% success rate is enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @11:10PM (9 children)
Enough to feed one dedicated predator. Not enough to feed many humans.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday September 07 2021, @11:34PM (4 children)
I guess in this case the history of humanity needs to be rewritten, apparently we were never hunters and gatherers.
I do wonder what these people built the bone tools out of. Must've used the bones of their deceased. Also, all those things we found that we considered hunting tools must have had a far more martial, if not to say murderous, reason to exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:08AM (3 children)
Nobody said humans didn't hunt. It's just very difficult. Basically "the hunt" was more often a chance to go out with the lads with a stash of coca leaves and get baked for a couple of days, and bring back a squirrel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:19AM (1 child)
Clearly someone who has never been to the Andes.
Coca leaves don't bake you, they're used to stave off altitude sickness while you're tending to your herd of domesticable llamas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:15AM
Um yeah and my THC habit is for my insomnia/backache/Wellness.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:03AM
Yeah, that's how the average hippie thinks our ancestors lived. Especially when he didn't ever bother to cross-examine his preconceived ideas of the "noble savage" against anthropology reality.
Li'l hint: Try, just TRY, to get a clue before posting. It makes you look less uninformed.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 08 2021, @02:38AM (3 children)
Apparently you are not aware that lions often hunt in groups of 20 or more, and spotted hyenas in groups of up to 80. Yet somehow these large predators manage to get enough nutrition from their 25% hunting success rate (or whatever it may be; hyenas do a lot better than lions).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:27AM (2 children)
I am aware, thank you. Are you aware that human children have a vastly longer developmental cycle than other animals? Our lifespans are much longer as well. The elderly are not much use at chasing down prey, but they still must be fed. We must also eat /regularly/ we cannot gorge and starve in the same manner as many carnivores. Your analogy is a whole lot of wishful thinking and not much reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:19AM (1 child)
Plus our main asset is our incredible memory, comprehension and communication. Our physique is perfect for catching plants.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:21PM
Humans are optimized for exhaustion hunting. While many animals are faster, they can only keep that speed for short sprints. In the long run (literally), humans can outrun almost all land based animals. You don't need any running abilities to harvest plants, and those specific abilities are also of very limited use when running away from predators.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:04AM
Even without weapons humans are still endurance predators who hunt in packs. There are very few animals in the world that can outdistance a physically fit human, and many will die from exhaustion long before a human tires out. Even with bows and spears wounding and then extended pursuit is a common hunting tactic, especially for larger prey.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:09PM (6 children)
Prehistoric humans caught enough animals to drive various megafauna to extinction https://wildlife.org/early-humans-also-drove-megafaunal-extinctions/ [wildlife.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @09:39PM (5 children)
That was when we arrived on continents with no predators and we managed to kill all the slow moving animals. Then what? Lentils.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07 2021, @11:38PM (4 children)
I must have been dreaming about the white tail deer, bear, bison, and fish in North America. Indians of the Plains based their culture around the bison in my dream. Thanks dude for telling me it wasn't real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:13AM (2 children)
Listen monkey, once we figured out guns all bets are off. The original post was harking back to "our species". Humans can't hunt for shit so we did not primarily eat meat. Unless eachother.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 08 2021, @02:42AM (1 child)
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-ratio-of-meat-to-plants-in-hunter-gatherer-society-diets?share=1 [quora.com]
"Based on limited ethnographic data (n = 58 HGH communities) and a single quantitative dietary study, it has been commonly inferred that grouped plant foods provide the dominant energy source in HG diets. In this review, we analyzed 13 known quantitative dietary studies of HG and showed that animal food actually provides the dominant energy source (65%), while grouped plant foods comprise the rest (35%). These data are consistent with the most recent, comprehensive review of the entire ethnographic data (n = 229 HG communities) that showed that the average subsistence dependence on grouped plant foods was 32%, while it was 68% for animal foods."
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:22AM
Credit to REFAAT Seoudy, former Nutrition Specialist (1993-2014) for that tidbit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:23AM
Dude, the Mayans had a god of maize.
Are you saying your native American ancestors didn't eat corn?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:50AM
When you stop eating plants and carbs you stop farting and your shit stops stinking
I pretty much had to stop right there, as this conflicts with my experience. Reducing my meat intake while continuing to eat high fiber vegetable-based foods such as beans and cabbage didn't reduce my farts, but made them stink a lot less. The worst smelling smarts were after meals with *too much meat*.
Aside from that, your anti-fibre screed is against the consensus to the point of being dangerous. As someone with a family history of colon cancer who had hist first colonoscopy 3 years ago (one benign polyp, whew), I'm going to continue to listen to the mainstream science and not parent.
If anything, I'll be adding fiber supplements but I plan to talk to my PC first.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday September 07 2021, @08:25PM (2 children)
As if it wasn't annoying enough that vegans keep telling you that they only eat plants...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @12:16AM (1 child)
The only more annoying thing is non-vegans telling us what vegans would say.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:05AM
Just extrapolating from experience. Since having a cellphone isn't a status symbol anymore ("guess where I call you from!" Your fucking cellphone, because else you wouldn't ask a ridiculous question like that) the "I'm so special" crowd needed something new to show off.
I don't care that you don't eat meat. I really don't.