Nutrition
Part 2: Are Animal Products Harmful?
Are animal products harmful or necessary? This article explains why neither pure veganism nor unlimited meat consumption is ideal—it depends on finding the right balance for your metabolism.
Nutrition
Are animal products harmful or necessary? This article explains why neither pure veganism nor unlimited meat consumption is ideal—it depends on finding the right balance for your metabolism.
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In our previous blog post, [source no longer available], which was actually supposed to appear as a newsletter, we explained why it makes sense that humans need animal products to be fully healthy. The background here is also that humans likely became human in the first place because our ancestors began consuming more animal products around 3.5 million years ago.
If this statement triggers you, please read that post first.
Today, we want to explain in more detail why there can be too much of a good thing and why the consumption of animal products seems to be connected with certain illnesses. As an example, we'll address one of the goals of many nutritional efforts: the restoration of metabolic health.
To understand this, we need to take another look at our evolution. Many researchers are concerned with the question of why humans develop diabetes at all. Type 2 diabetes—mind you, that's metabolic syndrome diabetes—does not exist in naturally living humans in the wild.
For many years, it has been discussed that susceptibility to such metabolic imbalances, and Type 2 diabetes is essentially the final stage of this, is a maladaptive remnant of our hunter-gatherer past [source no longer available]. Because you have to imagine:
Accordingly, we still carry old gene variants in us that, for example, restrict sugar uptake into muscle [source no longer available]. This served as a survival strategy in a world where there was no sugar tree and no bread rolls. Additionally, evolution almost certainly selected for the fact that humans can produce relatively large amounts of glucose in the liver themselves—a gluconeogenesis (= new glucose formation) that works at full throttle is useful in a world where there are no bakeries and no cola.
In fact, this becomes the downfall for most of us. A muscle that is evolutionarily conditioned not to take in too much sugar, and a liver that constantly pumps lots of sugar into the bloodstream, combined with the energy overload that comes with our modern food, overwhelm energy metabolism. All of these points—poor glucose uptake into muscle (insulin resistance), elevated gluconeogenesis in the liver, too much fat around the hips (lipotoxicity)—are so-called hallmarks, or cornerstones of modern metabolic imbalances leading to diabetes.
Incidentally, this is not uncommon in nature. Cats, as hypercarnivores, can also become diabetic under domesticated conditions. These animals have glucose-hungry sprint muscles—unfortunately, hypercarnivores only eat meat, so all that glucose for the muscles must be produced in the liver through glucose synthesis from protein. The livers of these animals constantly produce sugar from protein themselves—if you then also give these animals carbohydrates to eat, you get a metabolic catastrophe [source no longer available].
In humans, the whole thing is not so pronounced, simply because we are not carnivores. However, it holds true that larger amounts of animal products in general only work in the context of such an "ancestral diet," that is, a diet where there is no overly large glycemic load in the form of large amounts of sugar and carbohydrates. If you combine beef with bread rolls, eat some fries on the side, and wash it down with cola, it can go badly in the context of an already energy-overloaded diet.
To understand why the modern combination of foods makes us sick, let's look to California, at the Institute of Longevity of the School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where renowned longevity researcher Valter Longo is director. He claims to have discovered something: fasting, which is well known to be healthy and life-extending, can be mimicked by eating almost purely plant-based. According to Longo, this activates longevity genes in us that are normally only activated through fasting or calorie restriction. [source no longer available]
Something crucial is hidden here: We modern, energy-overloaded, and thus metabolically sick people naturally become metabolically healthy when we reactivate these genes—through weight loss, i.e., through calorie restriction, fasting, or… plant-based dietary approaches.
To understand the therapeutic effects of plant-based nutrition, you have to understand that it works like fasting. You let your body "starve" without actually starving. This way, a person can become metabolically healthy again and live longer accordingly. But for the circle to close properly at this point, we need to understand why the removal of animal products in the modern context leads to such nice effects.
The quintessence of health, i.e., essentially the key to longevity, health, and metabolic health, is low insulin. If we manage to keep insulin low, we've discovered a crucial key. This seems to be achievable in two ways:
Under these conditions, the body manages to maintain its metabolic health in each case. The background is: animal products have the property, first, of shifting metabolism more toward anabolism (building up), and second, more toward fat burning in favor of suppressed carbohydrate burning (which makes sense in the context of our evolution, see above).
Both, however, weaken insulin sensitivity, which is why insulin levels will inevitably rise as soon as the glycemic load of the diet increases. If we relieve this "pressure" by removing animal products from our diet, insulin also drops with high carbohydrate intake, and we become metabolically healthy. Aha!
Finally, the question arises: which lifestyle suits us better? One thing is clear: metabolic health is one thing. But comprehensive health requires a bit more—for instance, a fit immune system, good libido, and a healthy, driven brain. This might require substances that are only found in animal products.
To understand this, you should know that this couldn't be more individual. From a genetic perspective, Europeans have experienced changes in diet over the past millennia. While we spent roughly 99.5% of our evolutionary time as hunter-gatherers, since the agricultural revolution, beginning in Anatolia around 10,000 years ago, genes have increasingly established themselves that provide adaptations to plant-based diets.
Agriculture arrived in Central Europe with a southwest-northeast gradient around 7,000 to 4,000 years ago. Therefore, modern European populations carry both hunter-gatherer genes and genes from "early farmers"—the Sardinians are an "original population" of these farmers and are probably among the best adapted to plant-based diet forms. [source no longer available]
Whether someone can live vegan or should better opt for a "paleo diet" depends less on individual health goals and more on whether they can stick with that dietary approach. The fact is that the most natural, unprocessed foods (= without ingredient lists) are not disease-causing from a metabolic perspective, depending on your metabolic type.
But: animal products have an inherent potential to promote metabolic imbalances in the wrong nutritional setting. However, the driving force behind this is "new" plants (or plant parts) from an evolutionary perspective, in the form of high glycemic load and possibly also due to contained antinutrients [source no longer available]. Above all, we should mention grains, i.e., cereals.
Unfortunately, few people manage to form a dynamic picture from a static perspective. Even someone who eats animal products doesn't eat a kilo of steak every day. Conversely, one can eat plant-based and still cleverly supplement with animal products. However you eat: healthy dietary approaches are characterized by making it easy for us to eat less and thus incidentally reduce calorie intake [source no longer available]. So even paleo is sometimes just grain-free veganism supplemented with meat ;-)
