Which Foods are Humans Supposed to Eat?

One of the big questions surrounding the topic of diet is — what are humans supposed to naturally eat?

This question of our roots explains a phenomenon like the paleo diet, consisting of meat, cooked vegetables, nuts and raw fruits and vegetables, which assumes that ancient humans were hunting animals, cooking and eating their meat and cooking vegetables, but were not farming grains and processing them into breads, or making other processed foods.

There is of course evidence that certain groups of humans, based on archeological findings, were fashioning tools and hunting down animals to eat them.

You also can observe how different ethnic groups have different digestive processes and different tolerances for various foods and compounds. For example, more fairer-skinned ethnicities break down complex sugars in dairy and alcohol quicker than their darker-skinned contemporaries. This may or may not be due to many millennia of eating a more higher-protein diet of animals, and fermented alcohol-type drinks, that were stored and used as fuel during extreme cold weather, as compared with darker-skinned humans who lived in more tropical climates with more fresh plants available to cultivate and eat.

There is no animal on planet Earth that consumes dairy past the point of being a baby. It seems like dairy would be a very labor-intensive food for ancient humans to produce. It would have required proper raising of livestock, and much resources to contain the animals and breed them.

How about grains and beans, within the scope of the anthropologic roots of humans? Because humans have probably only been cultivating food (farming) for about 8,000 to 10,000 years, and our species is far older than that, we could deduct with high probability that in the beginning times, humans were not growing, refining, or cooking grains or beans. When consumed raw, these foods are simple not appetizing, nutritious or able to be digested effectively — at least not by humans (covered more extensively in a later chapter).

We can reasonable conclude that humans ate fresh fruits, as well as fresh vegetables, nuts and seeds. Fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds grow abundantly in the tropical and even subtropical areas of Africa. It is beyond obvious that, if these plants were sitting there in the nature environment, humans would have sustained themselves on these foods.

In terms of meats, there is evidence that ancient humans did hunt it and eat it, at least in some contexts, historical ages, and geographies. Raw meat is not too appetizing when you really think about it, so eating meat would seem to be more limited to people who could create and cultivate fire, as well as having tools to skin and prepare the animal for roasting. Raw fish & eggs could be an exception to this, because even today this can still be considered delicacy — for that matter, humans may have also eaten raw grubs and other insects.

Going beyond the practicality and the mechanics of what it would take to eat these different foods, let’s take a look at the design of human biology, in comparison with other types of animals:

Let’s look at the four types of vertebrates and compare their digestive systems and the types of foods they eat.
— Group 1: Big cats
— Group 2: Birds, Dogs & Wild Hogs
— Group 3: Deer, Cattle, Sheep, Horses
— Group 4: Primates & Humans

After I learned this information, it became rather obvious to me that humans are biologically suited for eating mostly if not all fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds.

It doesn’t mean we have to eat these foods — it’s more just a question of what we are suited for in terms of biology. This is sort of like making the argument that we are a tropical species, suited for warm weather. A human can still live in a very cold environment — he or she is just living in such as way that is adversarial to what they are suited for.

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