[Kevin] (0:03 - 0:31)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Nutrition for Noobs. If you're just joining us, we're the podcast that takes the complexity of nutrition and breaks it down for noobs like me.

So I am your chief executive noob, Kevin Harries.

[Michelle] And I'm the other noob? What am I?

[Kevin] You're not the noob. You're the... Hey, okay, podcast over.

We need to talk a little bit. You are the expert. You are the nutrition.

[Michelle] (0:31 - 0:44)
Oh, that's terrifying. No, yeah. I'm...

I am Michelle Pierce Hamilton. I'm an enthusiastic human nutritionist. Tea Sommelier, healing arts practitioner.

And I'm just delighted to be here. Thank you so much, Kevin.

[Kevin] (0:45 - 0:54)
And she's absolutely not a noob. There's only room for one noob on this here podcast, Missy. And that's me.

[Michelle] (0:54 - 0:56)
I'm the deep, deep nerd.

[Kevin] (0:56 - 2:56)
You're the... Sure. Okay.

So you're the... I don't know. I can't make an acronym out of that.

You're the... Anyways, so thank you for joining us. And if this is your first podcast, welcome, we're a lot of fun, I'd like to think.

If you are just joining us, you can listen to these episodes in any order you want, but it might be good to go back and listen to one or two earlier ones just to set some of the baseline of the information that we have for you. So today we're going to be looking up our family tree. So as we talked about way, way, way, way, way back, and I think episode two, it was, we were talking about humans and genetically, not genetically, but anthropologically, humans have been around for a really long time.

And we started as hunters and gatherers, which brings us to a good question. Were we hunters or were we gatherers? Or were we somewhere in between and a little bit of both?

Because I think we started off as nomadic peoples, then we settled down and we became farmers in small communities, and now we create podcasts. So the question today is really about genetically or physically speaking, were ancient humans hunters, i.e. carnivores, gatherers, i.e. herbivores, or a mix of both? Because this has an impact on our health today and what we eat and what we are genetically predisposed to eat and get the nutrients from the types of food.

So the question is, it's a tough question, but what does the evidence tell us and can we even know what these ancient people were like? So, Michelle, start us off. I don't even know where to begin, to be honest, so I hope you do.

[Michelle] (2:57 - 3:45)
Well, you know what? Let me start by just setting up that I'm a nutritionist. I attend a lot of scientific symposiums.

I have a few certifications, but I'm not an anthropologist. I've never studied archaeology or any of those historical sciences. But we do often, in my field, have to look backward at humanity in order to understand why things are the way they are and how the human body operates.

And it's so interesting. This is such a widely debated subject. So I was definitely raised through my schooling, I think you were too, through elementary school and secondary school, that we are as humans, we are omnivores.

[Kevin] (3:45 - 3:46)
Yes.

[Michelle] (3:46 - 5:49)
That we are, by our design, able to digest both plants as well as animal foods. And then there was this, as you've said it, this notion that we were hunters and gatherers. I think the conversation for many decades just sort of stopped there.

And there was, I mean, I don't know what the anthropologists were doing, but it wasn't until, I'm going to say, 2018, I think was the first time that I was at a scientific symposium where there were a whole bunch of very highly educated people who are in these fields who got up and presented a different perspective. And then it comes up again and again and again more as these disease rates are discussed and the fact that our health care systems are not equipped to handle the sick care that we're faced with in North America. And I'm talking mainly about the United States and Canadian health care systems collapsing under the rates of chronic disease, et cetera.

And so I think more people have been looking more critically at the question and inviting more of these people at the table. Because what's interesting, Kevin, and this is sort of my preface to the whole conversation, what I find so interesting, like just in my little peon corner of the world, where I've got a little shingle out that's saying that I can help people with, you know, their diet and their lifestyle and help them get healthier. Every time I dive into the evidence and go, OK, let's pretend that I don't know anything.

And I always do that because the science, I often say it changes so quickly. And that's not even the right way to say it. It's we learn more like that.

That science, it progresses, progresses at a rate that we learn something deeper or we learn something broader that we didn't know before. That is a missing piece to why we see people plateau and why, you know, certain people struggle losing weight and other people don't. They may be identical twins and things like that.

Right.

[Kevin] (5:50 - 5:50)
Right.

[Michelle] (5:50 - 8:43)
And so I dive in and pretending I don't know anything just in case, you know, there's been some new study, you know, so I'll go look through PubMed, I'll look through Google Scholar, I'll look, you know, through other search engines and try to bring up articles. And then fortunately, as a nutritionist, I have access to resources and I'll check out nutritionfacts.org, etc. And what I found researching, one time I remember I had a person who, you know, had, you know, a high risk for a heart disease.

They had diabetes and those types of conditions. And then I had a different client at the same time I was researching with a very rare autoimmune condition. And at the same time, I was helping somebody that had an aggressive and fairly rare form of stage 2B cancer.

And I was researching all three of these people at the same time. And this was the big aha moment for me. Every time I researched every single one of those people and I have a different book for each client and I make all these, you know, gracious notes about everything, about their condition and contraindications, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, what the ideal thing.

But the foods, the foods to reverse the condition or lessen the symptoms or aid in the recovery, whatever language you want to use for each one of those people. And in many of those cases, by the way, there is literature from other people who are professionals that sometimes reversal is possible. I'm not allowed to say that in my profession, but I'm just citing what I've read in these articles.

They were all the same foods. They were all reduce your consumption of animal based products in order to lower your saturated fat exposures, lower heme iron, lower IGF-1, stop the production of TMAO, basically reducing inflammation throughout the whole body, proliferate the body with healthier gut bacteria. Like I can go on and on and on and on.

And it was always eat more plants, eat less animal food. And my mind was blown by that because I was expecting them to be far more individualized. I was expecting it to be more of, well, if you have this condition, then you should eat more of this.

If you have this condition, you should eat more of that. And that's not what I found. It was such a mind blowing realization for me.

I think on some level, we always knew that it was good for us no matter what to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. I didn't realize that the human body is the human body. It has an anatomy and a physiology that works most optimally when it is fed certain things and it starts to work less optimally when other things are introduced in the diet.

It can tolerate things very well. We're built, as I've said before, to be complex adaptive systems. We can do an awful lot to our body before it goes uncle.

[Kevin] (8:45 - 8:49)
We're very adaptable. I mean, humans have always been adaptable.

[Michelle] (8:49 - 8:50)
We are.

[Kevin] (8:50 - 8:51)
Yeah, it makes sense.

[Michelle] (8:51 - 9:22)
And that's why we've been able to be nomadic and move out of northern Africa and spread throughout the world and adapt to different conditions. But that foundation, that foundation of our anatomy and physiology is fairly static. So that's where I want to start from.

I had that aha moment. And then let's go to 2018. I'm in these symposiums and I'm like, what?

Everybody's everybody's talking about this now. All of a sudden I'm and it was so interesting. So I'm going to share a bit about what I learned.

[Kevin] (9:22 - 9:23)
Sure.

[Michelle] (9:24 - 9:40)
And so a brief history of humans. The first thing that was kind of interesting. What's your image, Kevin, of the Roman gladiator?

Like, did you ever watch any of the like Cleopatra or any of those old movies? Right.

[Kevin] (9:40 - 9:42)
Of course, Ben-Hur.

[Michelle] (9:43 - 9:56)
Yeah. So so Roman gladiators, and we're talking first and second century A.D., their term for them at the time, they were actually nicknamed the barley men. Did you know that?

[Kevin] (9:56 - 9:58)
I had no idea. As in the grain barley.

[Michelle] (9:59 - 10:38)
Yes, in the grain barley. So the Archeology Institute of America published a series of scientific abstracts on a study of 22 gladiators. And this is from the ancient Roman city of Ephesus that is now Turkey.

And in 20 out of 22 of the remains that they examined, two of them appeared to have higher animal protein and lower in beans and grains. And they think that possibly two of those specimens originated from other geographical parts of the Roman Empire.

[Kevin] (10:39 - 10:39)
OK.

[Michelle] (10:40 - 11:13)
So gladiators, just to give you some context, they were largely prisoners of war or they were slaves or they were condemned offenders for some reason, but also extraordinarily sometimes apparently they were volunteers. But basically, they were trained for professional fighting. And so they were designed for weight gain, strength, agility, and to be able to survive like this absolutely brutal ring, this fight to the death.

[Kevin] (11:13 - 11:13)
Right.

[Michelle] (11:14 - 12:00)
And so this Archeology Institute of America, through bone analysis, they confirmed that the gladiators, in order to achieve that strength and agility, etc., were given a diet that was primarily vegetarian. So it was rich in simple carbohydrates such as mainly barley, wheat, beans, and then fortified with plant ash, presumably to add additional calcium and magnesium. I don't know how they knew that, but I'm not an archaeologist.

So very, very interesting, the people who, you know, in ancient Rome that we have this image of them being the strongest and the toughest and being able to do this fight to the death, that they were vegetarians.

[Kevin] (12:00 - 12:43)
So I think there's two fascinating things about this. The first one is the fact that we can actually look back and see what people ate like 2,000 years ago. Like that's astounding just on its own.

But then, yeah, I agree that I think that the image that I have of gladiators are, you know, they'd go and fight the lion. And then once they killed the lion, they'd eat it because they eat all this protein and they, you know, they have the muscle gain. And so they'd eat a lot of meat.

So it's very surprising that in, you know, 20 out of 22 of them, they were mostly plant based and vegetarian. So that's astounding. That's eye opening.

[Michelle] (12:44 - 12:48)
And given it's a very, it's a very small sample size, but I mean, it was just very interesting. And I think.

[Kevin] (12:49 - 13:00)
Well, you can't go study the bones of every dead person out there. Like I'm sure that I'm sure studying one of those gladiator bones, you know, took like years and years and years and bazillions of dollars.

[Michelle] (13:00 - 14:57)
Well, and there's more. And I think this is the reason why I was starting to see around that time. I think it was the advancement of technology that's been occurring that is enabling them to study things in a way that they couldn't study before.

And they were, they were making conclusions. So one of the things one of the archaeologists said was that, you know, we used to have this image that, you know, we found all these tools and we assumed that all of these tools were for consumption of animals because they would find like small animal bones, but they wouldn't find remains of plants that they were eating because the plants wouldn't decompose. So they thought that that was, you know, really not a valid argument on its own.

You have to look at a much broader picture and you have to look at more factors. So the other thing I want to just qualify is that, you know, this little gladiator study doesn't doesn't speak to their health. It doesn't speak to their longevity.

I mean, by nature of them, you know, being who they were, they often didn't live past their 20s. But I think it's an interesting anecdote to start with because I think one of the first perceptions is that if you don't eat a lot of animal food, aka protein, as we talked about in the last episode, that you're not going to be strong. You're not going to build this, you know, lean muscle mass.

And what we now know with even population studies today, that that's absolutely not true. And that these diets of simple carbohydrates that come from leafy greens and grains and beans, et cetera, is the very diet that promotes lean muscle mass and the kind that supports the body with strength and agility and efficient use of energy and efficient storage in our energy cells. So that's really cool.

Now, there was another. Where did I see this come up?

[Kevin] (14:57 - 14:59)
If the gladiators can do it, anyone can do it.

[Michelle] (15:00 - 17:38)
So, I mean, you can look all over the place. Kevin, this is all over the Internet. You don't have to be diving into studies if you find that difficult to consume.

I found this article, a reference of another specimen that they found. And the whole bunch of research sprang from a 2013 discovery of an early homo jawbone in Ethiopia. And it dated 2.8 million years ago. So 400,000 years older than the previous known oldest specimen that they had been studying called, you know, homo sapien. We've all heard that. But they found this jawbone like really close to where they had found Lucy.

If you remember, Lucy was this human primate specimen that they had found that had they found the whole like her whole body because she fell from her death from a tree. So this was like from the same time frame. That's the same specimen.

But they had a whole intact jawbone. So anyway, long and the short of it was they found all of this stuff and they analyzed all kinds of fossils from the same site, et cetera. And what they determined was that Lucy and her mates, I guess, were mainly grass grazers 2.8 million years ago. And some animals had moved to, you know, different areas. But for whatever reason, they had maintained eating mostly woodland, woodland diet. So this is significant.

So primarily plant eating and the long and the short of it is that these primates 2.8 million years ago, they were eating maybe some insects, maybe some birds and things like that woodland. But that was not their staple diet. That was not an everyday thing that they found from like analyzing.

I don't know. I don't even know what this means. Stable carbon isotopes in their teeth.

And they were able to do CT scans and like all of these tests to determine conclusively what their diet had consisted of and what they had been eating. And they ate meat very, very rarely. And they mainly persisted on grasslands.

So it comes back to what you and I talked about in the first episode. We're innately very, very lazy.

[Kevin] (17:38 - 17:40)
Yes, me especially.

[Michelle] (17:41 - 18:08)
And our ancestors lived in a very dangerous survival of the fittest environment. So we are physiologically designed to seek the most calorie density with the least amount of effort. So whatever we could reach for would be the easiest.

That would be what we would eat the most of. We might come across these things. There might be a bird that died of natural cause or a rodent that died of a natural cause.

We wouldn't be crouching in the forest.

[Kevin] (18:08 - 18:09)
Actively seeking them out.

[Michelle] (18:10 - 18:15)
Not when we can just reach over and eat some berries and some greens and we can be quite satisfied.

[Kevin] (18:15 - 18:17)
And feel full afterwards, yeah.

[Michelle] (18:17 - 18:21)
And have the energy to run away from something that's chasing you, right?

[Kevin] (18:21 - 18:22)
Exactly.

[Michelle] (18:22 - 18:30)
Or to climb a tree to get away from a predator or whatever, right? And so I think that that's just very logical to me as well.

[Kevin] (18:30 - 18:31)
Mm-hmm.

[Michelle] (18:31 - 18:56)
So not to say that we were strict vegans or anything like that. That's ridiculous. But, you know, of course, it makes so much sense to me that would have been our natural diet.

And I'm going to segue this into the next thing I want to talk about. That evidence is substantiated by our very physiology. So are you ready to go anatomy and physiology, Kev?

[Kevin] (18:56 - 18:59)
Let's go anatomy and physiology, Michelle.

[Michelle] (19:00 - 19:23)
Okay, so let's go anatomy and physiology. And a lot of the content I'm going to share with you, I got from an amazing presentation that I saw from Dr. Milton Mills. And, you know, he goes very, very deep.

It's a very, very long lecture, so I'm keeping it really short. Just some of the salient points. We're not trying to go so deep into this nutrition for noobs thing.

[Kevin] (19:27 - 19:28)
We can't handle that much.

[Michelle] (19:28 - 20:06)
Yeah, we're just going to stick to some high level stuff that's super easy for everyone to understand. And then maybe there's something in here that you go, I didn't think of it that way. It's really interesting.

So let's start with the human digestive tract. The human digestive tract is about nine times our body length, which is consistent with the digestive tract of herbivores in the animal kingdom. Versus carnivores in the animal kingdom have a digestive tract that is only three times its body length.

It's very, very short.

[Kevin] (20:06 - 20:07)
Oh, I had no idea.

[Michelle] (20:08 - 20:32)
So our digestive tract, so the very mechanism by which we assimilate nutrients and extract it from our food is very similar to almost identical, actually, to herbivores and very, very, very different from carnivores. And this is the reason, have you ever heard of somebody at some point in your life telling you that you should learn food combining?

[Kevin] (20:33 - 20:33)
Yes.

[Michelle] (20:34 - 21:52)
Okay, so that's because we know that, so for example, you shouldn't have fruit and meat in the same meal because meat takes a very, very long time to digest and break down in the human digestive tract and fruit digests very quickly. So if you have animal protein in there and then you eat some fruit afterwards, by the time the animal protein makes it through the digestive tract, the fruit will have putrefied and it will actually start to produce toxin in the digestive tract, which is not beneficial for us, right? So it makes a lot of sense when you consider a carnivore's digestive tract is very, very short.

So it doesn't spend a lot of time in there. So when we have high rates of Crohn's disease and colitis and all kinds of inflammatory bowel disease, when we see people have these very, very meat-dense diets because they're spending, they're just cramming a whole bunch of very slow to digest, very slow transit time, very dense animal proteins, and then they themselves will get stuck and putrefy and not having enough fiber from plant food to move it through, that's one of the things that contributes to those conditions.

[Kevin] (21:53 - 21:53)
Okay.

[Michelle] (21:54 - 22:01)
Okay, but let's go back to the mouth. I just, I have to make that digestive parallel first because it's kind of paramount.

[Kevin] (22:02 - 22:02)
Right.

[Michelle] (22:03 - 22:52)
So let's take a look at the jaw. The jaw of a carnivore is hinged and it's stable because carnivores don't chew. Have you ever watched your cat or your dog eat?

They swallow things in very large chunks, swallow them almost whole. They don't, they don't sit there and chew versus chewing is very, very important for humans. What's very important for herbivores, our jaw moves from side to side and it can also move forward for us to do that chewing action.

The teeth of a carnivore is designed for ripping and tearing and cutting versus herbivores have molars that are designed for chewing and grinding. Even what we call canines, like our canines are not like fangs and sharp and designed to rip and tear flesh, right?

[Kevin] (22:53 - 22:57)
A very little tiny piece of flesh. Is there little tiny canines?

[Michelle] (22:58 - 24:39)
Very tiny canines. They're not, they're maybe designed to tear the flesh of a piece of fruit, but not to cut through the skin of an animal. We have a very weak bite strength of humans as do herbivores, a bite strength of about 135 to 150 pounds per square inch versus carnivores have an extremely powerful bite strength of 300 to a thousand pounds per square inch.

The carnivore saliva doesn't contain any enzymes. The herbivore saliva has amylase. So we have salivary amylase because our digestion actually begins in our mouth with salivary amylase to break down, you guessed it, carbohydrates.

Our esophagus is narrow and it's muscular and we can only swallow a bolus of well-chewed food and people who don't chew their food well often end up choking and having difficulty, right? That's why your mom or your grandma always told you, chew your food, chew your food, chew Chew your food 20 times, yeah, exactly. And chewing your food also sends off a mechanism, a signal between our brain and our gut to tell our digestive organs that something's coming and to start secreting enzymes, right?

So there's a whole bunch of reasons why we chew. But the esophagus, so our esophagus has to have this chewed bolus in order for the food to travel. But the esophagus of a carnivore is very wide and it's distendable and you can swallow like chunks of flesh and bone.

[Kevin] (24:39 - 24:44)
Because they can't chew as well because of their jaw. OK, it's all coming together, I see.

[Michelle] (24:45 - 24:58)
Yeah. And so we also, we can purse our lips and like an herbivore can in order to create a vacuum to suck up water. But carnivores have to lap water with their tongue.

[Kevin] (24:59 - 25:00)
Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michelle] (25:00 - 25:04)
All these things are very interesting. It's like, wow, I never thought of it that way, right?

[Kevin] (25:04 - 25:17)
Of course, like I've noticed it a million times, but I haven't noticed it at all until just now when you pointed out. And it's like, yeah, that makes complete sense that a cat laps water and a cat chews with their mouth open.

[Michelle] (25:18 - 25:19)
Well, some humans do that too, but.

[Kevin] (25:20 - 25:57)
Well, not exactly, but we won't go into that. Stop talking about me. No, but and pieces fall out.

And also I've seen like sometimes my cat would eat, like just hoover down some piece of food. And I'm amazed that they can, that she can do that. But of course, this makes sense if she has a huge esophagus, like I would die if I tried to eat a proportionately big piece that she's able to eat.

But that makes sense now if they if they're made to eat larger chunks because they can't chew it down to smaller, finer pieces.

[Michelle] (25:57 - 26:04)
You know, Otis, my everyone who knows me knows that Otis, my Jack Russell pug, is the absolute love of my life.

[Kevin] (26:04 - 26:05)
Oh, yes.

[Michelle] (26:05 - 26:35)
But, you know, it's so it's so funny how I always feel so inclined. Like we feed Otis like really bougie dog food, right? Like his his diet is very, very, very expensive.

And I'm always like, even the soft stuff, I'm always like cutting it up into little pieces because I'm thinking, oh, I want I want him to have be able to swallow it. And both Rob and I very instinctively do that. And then, you know, he'll go over to the bowl and it'll be gone in like two seconds.

It'll be like, did you even taste that?

[Kevin] (26:35 - 26:37)
Like, hey, the pieces were too small.

[Michelle] (26:37 - 26:41)
But we probably could just dump the whole chunk in there and he wouldn't care.

[Kevin] (26:42 - 26:42)
Of course.

[Michelle] (26:42 - 26:46)
But it's it's our like we sort of personify him.

[Kevin] (26:46 - 27:11)
Of course, we all personify our animals. And so you treat them like a child. And it's like, oh, I need to cut up the meat for my child because my child needs to take tiny little and meanwhile, the dog.

That'll sound good in the podcast. Yeah. Sorry.

My apologies for anyone who is wearing earphones and suddenly had that on their morning commute or something. They did not need that.

[Michelle] (27:11 - 27:16)
That reminds me of one of those like old fashioned radio shows. Remember when you said they had all the sound effects?

[Kevin] (27:18 - 27:21)
OK, get me started. Do not get me started.

[Michelle] (27:22 - 28:26)
So back to the GI tract, upper GI tract. So a carnivore has, as I said, a very short intestine designed for a very low fiber diet. Herbivores have a very long intestine designed for a high fiber diet in order to extract nutrients from those fibers.

And then carnivores have primarily protein and fat digesting enzymes. And herbivores have a variable mix of enzymes for carbohydrate, fat and protein and an unlimited capacity to digest and absorb carbohydrates. So we are because we are carbohydrate burning organisms.

It is our body's preferred source of fuel. It is our brain's only source of fuel. So carnivores have extremely large stomachs.

OK, get this, Kevin, a carnivore stomach can withstand consuming 30 percent of its body weight in one meal. Well, because they're not going to eat every day or every.

[Kevin] (28:27 - 28:30)
Feast or famine. Yeah. It's like the snake that eats once a month.

[Michelle] (28:30 - 29:47)
Yeah, exactly. So we can't do that. However, we can know we can.

We have very small stomachs. We the human stomach or the consistent with the herbivore stomach in the animal kingdom can eat an average of three point three three percent of its own body weight per day, as opposed to 30 percent. Right.

So that's pretty telling. And then in the wild, a carnivore eats every seven to 10 days and maybe seven to 10 days between its next kill, which is why it can consume so much. But herbivores must eat ideally multiple times per day in order to meet its daily energy intake and energy requirement.

So I found that to be very, very interesting. I'm not saying anybody has to be exclusively 100 percent plant based or plant forward. I'm just saying to be predominantly plant plant based in what you're eating.

And then that will be your ticket to your best health. Enjoy your fish and enjoy small amounts of chicken or good quality chicken, good quality steak, whatever you enjoy. But small, small amounts.

Don't let them push the vegetables and the grains and the beans off of your plate.

[Kevin] (29:47 - 29:53)
The 64 inch porterhouse steak with a side of fries and.

[Michelle] (29:54 - 29:59)
Keep the main thing the main thing. So if you know what the body's primary.