Running and Brain Size - How We Evolved to Eat Raw Protein & Fat

One of the more common questions my clients ask me is: "What makes you believe that eating raw meat and unpasteurized dairy (fat) is the way humans should eat?"

Well, to understand the theory of what humans should eat, one must understand human origins, and most importantly, how our diet evolved. So first, know that the way modern humans prepare food is relatively new. And when I mean prepare, I am not talking about the processed food revolution of the past 60 or 70 years. I'm talking about the first significant and supposedly greatest advancement in food preparation, which of course is cooking with fire.

To answer the aforementioned question, three more questions arise:
  1.  How did we prepare and eat food before we had fire?
  2. Was the post-cooking period in history a significant enough amount of time to allow our digestive systems to evolve so that we could deal with cooking easily and effectively?
Let's do the math.

As I said before, humans have been eating this processed-food diet for approximately 60-70 years, and prior to that we had been eating some sort of natural, agricultural-based diet starting around 10,000 years ago (The Neolithic period). Humans on a whole, in the form they are now (Homosapiens), have been around for an estimated 150 thousand to 260 thousand years. So, for the first 120 thousand years (The Paleolithic period), we evolved to be hunter gatherers using only the simplest stone, wood, and bone tools with the limited use of fire, created by lightning, for protection and heat. There is some evidence we eventually started cooking stem and root tubers, but whether we used fire to cook our meat is still up for debate.

One aspect of human evolution that may support the theory that Paleolithic man ate a primarily raw diet is how ancient humans hunted. The common perception of the Stone Age man is a hair pre-modern man hunting in small packs with spears and bows, killing game in some grandiose and melodramatic way, like the Tatanka (Buffalo) hunting scene out of Dances With Wolves. The men then bring back the kill to the celebratory cheers and adulation of the women and children of their tribe. In real life it went much differently than the movies depict, as usual. Experts now report that our first evolutionary increase in intelligence is intimately connected to how we hunted and the eating of raw flesh and particularly fat.

How...?

Well, intelligence is all about brain size, and brain size is all about nutrition, specifically protein and fat. So how do small, soft, relatively week flesh bags (humans) take down massive and dangerous wild animals for the food they need to evolve their large brain size? Most people would say: spears and bows.

Here the interesting part...

To invent tools to plan and stategicly hunt large sources of game, Stone Age man needed to evolve a bigger brain, but to evolve a bigger brain he needed to consume large amounts of protein and fat, i.e big game first. It's kinda the chicken or the egg conundrum. In reality, our brains got bigger, and because of that we started using using tools and strategy...

So how did man hunt large game without tools or weapons, keeping in mind how frail he is compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? It would seem impossible except for one unexpected evolutionary advantage. The way we breathe. Yeah, I know, you're saying, "I don't think my breathing is that special or an advantage. I mean, 'in and out' right? Not rocket science."

Well, yes and no... Yes, all mammals do breathe just like you, in and out, but you have the distinction, as do all humans, that your breathing and your diaphragm are not connected to your gate like most animal's gate and breathing are.  What does this mean? That we humans can run and breathe independent of each other. If you trained and decided to do so, you could run fast and breathe slow or run slow and breathe fast. For most mammals, each inhale and exhale is synchronized to their gate, as their hind legs are linked to their diaphragm. They have to breathe fast to run fast. How is this an advantage for us? Unlike most animals, we can regulate the way we breathe. This allows us be more efficient breathers over longer distances.

The result: we are the long distant champs of the wild.

This is how we hunted big game before we had the weapons to do so. We ran them down until they could not run anymore.

Yup, we ran things to death.

Running has been with us as long as we've been human, maybe longer. No melodramatic movie scene showing the superior intelligence and weaponry of man over the beasts. More like the entire tribe taking part in a ritualistic marathon hunting experience.

The question is how does Stone Age man running down his prey have anything to do with not cooking their prey? Put yourself in his place. You are part of a small hunting party of the best runners followed by the weaker runners of the tribe, the elderly and women carrying small children. You pick up the trail of your prey and you start tracking it with your hunting party. After about 20 miles, your prey stops due to exhaustion and it's yours. The slower runners catch up and there you are, the whole tribe.

Do you try and carry your 1500 pound (or more) kill home, 20 or more miles in the hot sun understanding that meat is your life blood and that it will probably take twice as long to get it back as it did to find it? Will you chance the meat spoiling, being stolen by predators, or your tribe being attacked? Of course not.

In reality, what would actually happen is the elderly, women and children (who are usually the slower runners) would catch up to the kill and they would skin it, gut it, and eat it right there. The whole tribe would gorge themselves on all the meat they could, and cut and hang the rest up to dry for sun-dried jerky.

For 200 thousand years or more of human history, this is how humans "hunted" and survived. But that was quite a while ago, right? Not really. We've been eating the cooked farm based diet for about 12 thousand years and that is just a drop in the bucket in genetic evolutionary terms. It takes about 50 thousand years for the smallest of genetic changes to happen, like hair or eye color. To deal with this new style of food we would have to change our entire digestive tract and pancreas. It's obvious the human digestive tract has not had enough time to evolve properly to fully digest and deal with this new style of eating - cooked foods! Don't even get me started on how foreign and unprepared our digestive system is for processed (eh-hem hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup), crazy franken-foods and pesticide-infused (GMO) foods we've been creating lately, nor the pesticides we started using around 70 years ago.

What does all of this mean?

Humans have been doing two things to stay healthy, long before we were even classified as humans, and should continue doing so if we want to stay healthy: running and eating raw animals. But of course sanitation and antiseptics help too.

If you'd like to educate yourself on why and how to eat closer to your human ancestors, check out The Weston Price Foundation: http://www.westonaprice.org.

We were all Born to Run and eat Primal. It's our way.
Here are two books and a video that really explain my points, and also the upside of barefoot running. Great video. Check it out. I'm a fan.





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Thank You,
Sifu Marcus Lovemore

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