| Azuren said:The human part is missing how is doesn't readily absorb most plant nutrients. Frugivore is also a fancy way of saying "Not a carnivore". Most frugivores are omnivorous, though, so we could draw the conclusion that humans are most likely omnivorous.
EDIT: Oh, right, and the Frugivore option is also missing insects. Yum. |
Again with the broadly stated, completely unsubsubstantiated, statement that we don't readily absorb most plant nutrients. A) you may be conflating standard absorption with under-absorption. We absorb some things far *too* readily from meat. People suffering from heart disease, stroke, erectile dysfunction, and a raft of neurological issues (often mistaken for Alzheimers) are suffering from our bodies being too good at absorbing cholesterol and saturated fat. Our bodies have no mechanism to get rid of excess cholesterol, as opposed to carnivores and most omnivores which do have an ability to. People suffering from hemochromatosis (overabundance of iron) almost exclusively are omnivores since our bodies are designed to ramp up the absorption of plant-based iron when we're low, and slow down the absorption of plant-based iron when we have too much.
Most studies on absorption look at a single nutrient in isolation, but that's not how it works in the body. There are synergistic effects of eating the rainbow (eating vitamin C improves the uptake of iron, eating black pepper increases the absorption of curcumin, etc.).
You seem to believe that we have trouble getting nutrients from plants in general. The reverse couldn't be true. And traditionally we largely ate largely fruit (though the fruits were different then, as we've heavily cultivated fruit plants in the millenia since). This isn't up for debate, you can look at someone's hair and know the kinds of nutrition they were getting during the months/years it took to grow that hair (similarly to how you can look at the rings of a tree to analyze its history). We're looking at rehydrated fossilized human stool to see what people ate. We're analyzing their hair. We're doing this for different populations around the world. And we do see evidence of heavily plant-based societies, and those that ate more meat, and you're right to say that what they ate was heavily dependent on what was around them. Where your argument goes off the rails is you then assume that the plant-based populations were the less healthy ones, but in fact they appear to have been the longer-living ones. And we see that in the modern era with the Okinawans in Asia, the Tarahumara in Central America, and the Adventist vegans in North America. The longest-living populations ever studied on the planet are the most plant-based.
