Man the Hunter

The Protein Power LifePlan
by Michael R. Eades, M.D., Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.

— Edward Jenner (1749-1823)

In our living room on the coffee table sits one of our most prized possessions, a fifteen-to-twenty-thousand-year-old cave-bear skull that we got from Russia. From back of the head to snout the skull measures almost two feet in length and sports canine teeth that are three inches long. The entire animal would have been about seven to eight feet tall and weighed close to a thousand pounds. Examination of this skull shows a huge ridge running along the top, where the muscles that worked the jaws were connected. From here they ran along the face and attached to bony protrusions (called the mandibular ramis) on the lower jaw. The larger the mandibular ramus, the greater the mass of the muscle attached to it and the greater the closing force of the jaws. The mandibular rami of our cave bear are about the size of a child's hand, and when you compare them to the size of the rami of a human jaw, or even a dog's jaw, which are both about the size of a dime, you can imagine the crushing strength in the jaws of this creature.

Cave bears used to roam the fields and forests of prehistoric Europe, until they were hunted to extinction by early man. As we gaze at our skull and envision the eight-foot, thousand-pound beast with the three-inch teeth, the four-inch claws, and the jaw strength to snap a man in two, we can begin to appreciate how great our primeval ancestors' need for meat must have been. To think of this creature, snarling and gnashing its teeth, slashing with giant claws, charging and roaring, it almost defies imagination that people just like us went after them with not much more than sharpened sticks. But they did, and did it so well that cave bears are no more. And we are still here and carry in our genes this same need for meat that drove our forebears to brave tooth and claw to get it.

Despite these facts, we still regularly receive letters that question exactly what kind of diet our ancient ancestors actually ate. Although in anthropological scientific circles, there's absolutely no debate about it - every respected authority will confirm that we were hunters - many people still believe in the “dangers” of meat eating in light of our supposed vegetarian past. We've had at least twenty people send us copies of the same table published in an anti-meat book from the 1970s showing how sundry parts of our anatomy or physiology are more like those of herbivores than of carnivores, thus “proving” our vegetarian inclinations. We are, of course, neither. We're omnivores, able to subsist on meat and plants - hence the intermediate size of our intestinal tracts. Recently we received a newsletter clipping quoting a well-known doctor on the subject of our vegetarian past, as well as an e-mail from a Protein Power devotee in Italy whose physician had forbidden him to eat meat because it was “a silent poison.” We even had one indignant reader tell us in no uncertain terms that she was abandoning our program unless we could answer to her satisfaction the questions that were raised by the quote, boldly circled in red, in her church bulletin, which she enclosed. The little blurb pronounced with great authority that the human body was designed to eat only food of plant origin and that meat “putrefies” in the human colon, becoming a poison. The physician from the (as always) prestigious medical school who had made this statement was someone totally unknown to us, and after a diligent search, we discovered he had been dead for over a hundred years. Such are the myths and misconceptions about what we humans were designed to eat.

Our meat-eating heritage - a topic we thought we'd covered sufficiently in our previous book - is an inescapable fact. But to be certain that this time we leave no room for doubt, we will delve back into the issue more deeply and lay out the facts of the matter so that you'll be armed with the truth and prepared to defend your nutritional choice with authority.

You'll hear it said, usually by those espousing vegetarianism for ideological reasons, that primitive tribes that eat a mainly plant-based diet enjoy better health. For instance, such authorities frequently cite the lower-than-the-average-American cholesterol levels of a typical male of the !Kung tribe (a commonly studied, contemporary chiefly vegetarian hunter-gatherer society) as proof of the health benefits of meatless living. While it's true that some predominantly vegetarian hunter-gatherer groups (a minority of such groups, as we shall see later) have low rates of the “chronic diseases of affluence,” it doesn't necessarily follow that this good fortune is a result of their diet. Consider the Masai, for example. The Masai, another intensively studied group of African pastoralists who subsist mainly on meat, milk, and the blood of the cattle they herd, are famous and famously studied because of their incredibly low cholesterol and blood pressure levels even into advanced age despite their enormous intake of fat. Here we've got two totally diverse diets - the !Kung and the Masai - and the followers of both have a low incidence of chronic diseases. Obviously there are other factors at play in the development of these diseases besides just diet, so let's take a closer look at the issue.

Anthropologists have known for decades that the health of humanity took a turn for the worse when our ancestors abandoned their hunter-gatherer means of subsistence in favor of the farm somewhere between eight-thousand and ten-thousand years ago. The fossil record leaves little doubt that compared to their farming successors, the hunters were more robust, had greater bone density, decreased infant mortality, a longer life span, a lower incidence of infectious diseases and iron-deficiency anemia, fewer enamel defects, and little or no tooth decay.

Humans have followed a Paleolithic diet for a few million years and a “modern” agricultural diet for only a few thousand years. The not too gentle forces of natural selection have spent millennia shaping and molding our evolving line, weeding out those offshoots and mutations that didn't thrive on the available fare, reinforcing those traits that improved our survival, until we emerged as modern humans some one-hundred-thousand years or so ago. Since our modern form and physiology today is the same as that of these one-hundred-thousand-year-old ancestors, it stands to reason that we should function best on the diet they - and we, their descendants - were designed to eat, not necessarily the “prudent” diet recommended by modern nutritionists, which is often composed primarily of foods that weren't even in existence for the vast majority of our time on earth. It is by turning to the vast amount of anthropological data that we can determine what our ancestors ate for the three to four million years that we have been recognizable as humans.

About the Author

Michael R. Eades, M.D., and Mary Dan Eades, M.D. pioneered the field of metabolic medicine. They are on the faculty of Colorado State University in the Department of Health and Exercise Science. They are the authors of Protein Power/i>, which sold over 3 million copies and spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Protein Power Lifeplan. Michael R. Eades, M.D. received his engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University and his medical degree from the University of Arkansas. Along with his wife, he has been in the exclusive private practice of bariatric (weight loss) and nutritional medicine for the last 10 years.

More by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Mary Dan Eades, M.D. received her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry as well as her medical degree from the University of Arkansas. She joined her husband in the exclusive practice of bariatric and nutritional medicine in 1992, having previously practiced family and general medicine.

More by Mary Dan Eades, M.D.