What carnivore devotees get wrong

I've been vegetarian for about forty-five years, as has my wife, for a bunch of different reasons, and it doesn't seem to have done us much harm. Vegetarianism and veganism weren't common practices back in the '80s, but they are much more mainstream and accepted now. 

That said, the trendy diet du jour is still the carnivore, Paleo or "caveman" diet. It's particularly popular with men, especially middle-aged men, who see it as connected to traditional ideas of physical strength and ruggedness. This is best personified by the American influencer and internet personality Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King. Now, Johnson has since been outed, and his physique turns out to have been mainly created by anabolic steroid use, not consumption of raw meat and internal organs. But the idea of the meat-based "ancestral diet" persists.

Turns out, though, the whole caveman premise is also largely spurious. 

Animal bones and stone tools obviously survive over time while plant matter decomposes quickly. So, the traditional fossil record gives a skewed impression of the Paleolithic diet, "biased towards the hunting record". Modern archaeology, on the other hand, makes use of isotope analysis of nitrogen, carbon, zinc and sulphur, and analysis of dental enamel, bone collagen and plant remains, as well as DNA analysis of food particles left on ancient teeth.

This more modern archaeological analysis shows that Paleolithic humans were more gatherers than hunters, relying more on plant foods like acorns, fruits, oats and nuts, supplement by occasional meat. Plus, there was no single Paleolithic diet: different populations obviously ate what was available to them.

This is backed up by more recent ethnographic evidence from modern hunter-gatherer populations, which mainly eatnplant foods (a much more reliable and more easily acquired source than meat). The closest thing to a carnivorous diet is that of the Inuit of the Arctic, who have no choice but to rely on a diet largely bereft of plants (although even they eat whatever plant foods they can, from lichen to berries). The Inuit, though, have undergone genetic adaptations over the millennia to cope with this excessively meat-based diet, which would be very unhealthy for other humans.

Modern would-be paleoliths are not even eating the same foods as their ancestral models, and typically don't consume brains, internal organs, bone marrow, etc. Human bodies are now genetically adapted to eating modern foods, which generally means an agricultural diet, including dairy. We have more amylase enzymes and have evolved to be able to digest dairy products throughout adulthood (although this varies from population to population), and are better suited to a higher starch diet than our ancient forebears.

So, attempting to "revert" to some semi-mythical Stone Age diet might not be the best for our modern biologies. Cutting out entire food groups is never going to be a good solution, and the ancestral diet was actually incredibly diverse and varied, high in plant fibre, and included many more types of microbes than we typically ingest today. And, anyway, just because our ancestors did something, doesn't mean that's what they WANTED to do; they would probably have loved the reliable access and varied foods we have today.