One of the things I noticed while working on family farms is that meat is not as abundant on many farms as it is in our grocery stores.

Farms provide us with a surplus of any food you want, but this is not how an isolated farm works. Along with limited meat, you cannot rely on the chickens to always produce enough eggs for everyone year-round depending on the farm.

What you do rely on is dairy including fresh raw milk, yogurt and cheese for times when you are not milking, seasonal fruits both raw and dried, seasonal vegetables (sometimes fermented in cold climates) and stored grain. My sister verified this as well after working on organic farms in New Zealand for six months.

This is simply how many small diversified farms work because butchering doesn’t happen every day and the supply is limited. Also, refrigerators and freezers are a relatively new invention for meat, which meant it traditionally had to be consumed or dried immediately.

Forks Over Knives

I often get asked about the documentary Forks Over Knives, a documentary giving evidence for a plant-based diet, and that the consumption of animal products is to blame for numerous health disorders.

According to the movie “In World War II, the Germans occupied Norway. Among the first things they did was confiscate all the livestock and farm animals to provide supplies for their own troops. So the Norwegians were forced to eat mainly plant-based foods.” During this time, mortality dropped from 30 to 24 deaths per 10,000.

While the movie will have you believe it had to do with a plant-based diet, fish intake actually went up 200%, while sugar and margarine plummeted. In the U.S., we saw a period of heart disease skyrocketing from 1920-1960. The consumption of animal fats declined, but the consumption of hydrogenated and industrially processed vegetable oils increased dramatically.

In Norway, closer inspection from the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 1947. Volume 5, issue 4, found that dairy consumption went up during this time, not down. While meat intake did go down during this time, the average Norwegian man was eating 3/4 of a pound of fish per day.

A paper titled Food rationing during World War two: a special case of sustainable consumption? found that Norwegians relied on herring, potatoes, wild greens, wild berries, and wild mushrooms – other words – close to a coastal hunter-gatherer diet that explained their improved health, not a plant-based diet.

Depending on what literature you have read, you will find that meat and dairy are either the cause of disease and a plant-based diet should be practiced, or that meat and dairy prevents disease and grains are the cause.

What we do know is that when we switched to the Neolithic era of agriculture, diseases became rampant, and not just from sanitation practices. Over time, these practices were perfected and many ingenious creations occurred through fermentation like sourdough bread, yogurt, kefir, beer, kombucha, kvass, sauerkraut, and kimchi.

Meat, Plant and Dairy Consumption of Traditional Agricultural Societies

The default diet I experienced on farms was also one of the patterns with many of the agricultural societies in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and The Blue Zones: Nine Lessons For Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. The exception being those who lived by the sea.

The following examples for agricultural societies are from observational literature, and unfortunately, in my opinion, do not always tell the whole story. If I could fly to all of these places and spend a year recording all of the meals, habits, and health I would. This could obviously be an exhaustive list, but I wanted to highlight five from past and present research.

Hunza Health Secrets for Long Life and Happiness

Hunzakuts eat mainly grain (including wheat, barley, buckwheat and small grains like millet); leafy green salads with apricot kernel oil and grape vinegar and other raw vegetables, potatoes and other root vegetables, peas and beans, chickpeas and other pulses, fresh raw milk, buttermilk, cheese and yogurt (mainly from goat or yak), clarified butter and cheese, fruit, chiefly apricots and mulberries, fresh and sun-dried, meat on rare occasions, and wine made from grapes.

In regards to meat “livestock is not abundant because animals such as cows, sheep, and goats must be fed, and the food is scarce as pastor land is limited. Therefore, meat is scarce, too, and is served only at some special occasions, usually during holidays and weddings.” During early spring when supplies were low, there would be famine, with long periods of fasting.

Another Look at the Hunza Diet: Not Shangri La

According to John Clark, author of Hunza, Lost Kingdom of the Himalayas who lived with the Hunzas for 20 months: “I wish to express my regrets to those travelers whose impressions have been contradicted by my experience. On my first trip through Hunza, I acquired almost all the misconceptions they did: The Healthy Hunzas, the Democratic Court, The Land Where There Are No Poor, and the rest—and only long-continued living in Hunza revealed the actual situations. I take no pleasure in either debunking or confirming a statement, but it has been necessary clearly to state the truth as I experienced it.”

According to the author:

Late in May, the flocks move up to summer pasture land at 12,000 to 15,000 feet, with a few men and boys from each community to herd. The herders gather the flocks into stone-walled corrals every night, where they milk both sheep and goats, and churn butter. They consume all the buttermilk, cottage cheese, and fresh milk they want, which is excellent for them but does not improve the vitamin- and mineral-deficient diet of the majority of villagers. Each family owns so few animals that they can butcher but one or two a year, which they do at Tumushuling time in December. As one sheep lasts a family about a week, this means that the average Hunza gets meat for one or two weeks per year. Since visitors always come in the summertime, this also explains the ridiculous tale that Hunzas are vegetarians by preference. One of the stories is true—they certainly eat the whole sheep! Brains, lungs, heart, tripe, everything but hide, windpipe, and genitalia! They clean a bone to a polish that would put a western dog to shame, and in conclusion, they always crack the bones and suck the marrow. As their diet is deficient in oils and vitamin D, all Hunzas have soft teeth, and fully half of them have the barrel chests and rheumatic knees of sub-clinical rickets.

So if the dairy is excellent for them but does not improve the vitamin and mineral deficient diet of the majority of the villagers, wouldn’t it stand that more meat and less grains would improve their health? 

Much like the Neolithic farmers who had plenty of sun and were still vitamin D deficient, we see the Hunzas with the same affliction. The observation has been made that skin color became lighter as humans moved out of Africa and into northern latitudes to optimize vitamin D production. But there is a problem with this climate theory; why did the Inuits maintain their darker tone?

The reason is theorized to be because northern Europeans switched vitamin D rich organ meats and fish for low-fat vitamin D deficient grain, while the Inuit maintained a vitamin D rich fish-based diet without grains.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

For nearly 10 years, Weston Price and his wife traveled to hundreds of cities and 14 countries in search of the secret to healthy, isolated populations and recorded it in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He observed perfect dental arches, minimal tooth decay, high immunity to tuberculosis and overall excellent health in those groups of people who ate their indigenous foods.

Dr. Price found when these people were introduced to white flour, white sugar, refined vegetable oils and canned goods, signs of degeneration quickly became quite evident. Dental caries, deformed jaw structures, crooked teeth, arthritis and a low immunity to tuberculosis became rampant amongst them.

How many people go to the dentist for cavities, braces and root canals, and assume that’s normal? Our teeth should be straight and cavity free, and that’s from our diet. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is a fascinating read and is the inspiration for the non-profit Weston A. Price Foundation.

The non-profit has been extremely influential in spreading the word about grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, raw milk, fermenting vegetables, bone broth and making Kombucha.

While I agree with the majority of their research, the meat dominant stance doesn’t exactly line up with Weston Price’s research. For example, in his letter to his nieces and nephews, he states “the basic foods should be entire grains such as whole wheat, rye or oats, whole wheat and rye bread, wheat and oat cereals, oat-cakes, dairy products including milk and cheese, which should be used liberally, and marine foods.”

As you can see, there is no mention of meat and is very grain heavy. Perhaps they saw the value in his research, but the error in part of his analysis. Let’s look at a few of the cultures studied.

The Isolated Swiss

The nutrition of the people of the Loetschental Valley, particularly of the growing boys and girls, consists largely of a slice of whole rye bread and a piece of summer-made cheese (as large as the slice of bread) where are eaten with fresh milk of goats or cows. Meat is eaten about once a week.

The people of Visperterminen own land on the lower part of the mountain and maintain the vineyards that supply wine for the country. The vineyards afforded them the additional nutrition of wine and of fruit minerals and vitamins which the two groups studied at Loetschental did not have. Here the nutrition also consisted of rye, almost exclusively as the cereal; of dairy products; of meat about once a week; and also some potatoes. Limited green foods were eaten during the summer.

The general custom is to have a sheep dressed and distributed to a group of families, thus providing each family with a ration of meat for one day a week, usually Sunday. The bones and scraps were utilized for making soups to be served during the week.

The children have goat’s milk in the summer when the cows are away in the higher pastures near the snow line. I have been unable to locate any other research on the traditional people of the Loetschental Valley which has now become a resort for tourists. It is one of the few I have seen that appears to be the outlier of what appears to be a dairy and grain dominated diet without the negative health effects.

The only conclusion I can reach is that the raw dairy and bone broth (which would also extend protein) is extraordinarily high in vitamins and minerals and prevents deficiency, and there is no wheat in their diet. Which cheese is considered to have one of the highest contents of vitamin D? Swiss.

The Isolated Gaelics

The basic foods of the islanders are fish and oat products with a little barley. Oat grain is the one cereal which develops fairly readily, and it provides porridge and oatcakes which many homes are eaten in some form regularly with each meal.

The fishing about the Outer Hebrides is especially favorable, including lobsters, crabs, oysters, and clams. An important and highly relished part of the diet has been baked cod’s head stuffed with chopped cod’s liver and oatmeal. Fish eggs and organs were also highly cherished.

The women were found fishing and working from six in the morning to ten at night. There is no meat mentioned, however, I’m not convinced this was always the case and believe there must have been livestock at times.I will note that like the Swiss, there is no wheat in their diet and oats may be guilty today by grain association.

The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest

The Blue Zones shows the lifestyle and dietary habits of the world’s longest-lived people in Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan and Ikaria, Greece. It’s a very enjoyable read for anyone and does a really impressive job of showing the well-rounded patterns of purpose, community and relationships with health.

Sardinia

The classic Sardinian diet consists of whole-grain bread, goat’s milk, red wine, beans, garden vegetables, fruits, and, in some parts of the island, mastic oil. They traditionally eat pecorino cheese made from grass-fed sheep, and meat is largely reserved for Sundays and special occasions.

There is interesting information on the medicinal qualities of their goat’s milk due to certain plants the goats consume in Sardinia. Personal farms and gardens are a mainstay of many Sardinians, with many older men still walking the steep hills with their sheep for 6 miles.

Sardinia has a history of 1,000 centenarians, the longest-lived in Italy and possibly the world. For some reason, there is no mention of how much fish they eat, which being in the Mediterranean seems like a major oversight but appears to be due to their location in the mountains.

What the author didn’t mention in the synopsis was that pork, lamb, and goat are the main meat, and they like lard, lot’s of it. It does seem to be confirmed that they eat meat once to twice a week by multiple sources.

According to Sarah Wilson who visited Sardinia with National Geographic, “the longevity phenomena seems to have come to an abrupt halt, even reversed. It’s almost like as soon as money came to the island (which it did about 50 years ago) the locals went from famine to feast, taking on the health consequences that come with abundance. Young Sardinians are incredibly overweight. And Sardinia has one of the highest incidences of celiac disease, I’m guessing from eating so much bread and pasta where the gluten content has shifted due to the more processed wheat strains available today.”

Okinawa

I have included Okinawa because they are constantly highlighted for some of the best health as a population on the planet, and it doesn’t appear that their diet has changed for thousands of years. Although, I’ve seen conflicting evidence of just how much meat and fish Okinawans eat.

The Blue Zones claim older Okinawans have eaten a plant-based diet most of their lives, consisting of stir-fry vegetables, sweet potatoes, goya, mugwort, turmeric, ginger and pork for infrequent ceremonial occasions and taken only in small amounts.

First, there is no mention of grain which is false. Second, I haven’t read any evidence showing that pork is only consumed for ceremonial occasions.

An article from the Weston Price Foundation claims that “the main meat of the diet is pork, and not the lean cuts only. Okinawan cuisine, according to gerontologist Kazuhiko Taira, “is very healthy and very, very greasy,” in a 1996 article that appeared in Health Magazine. And the whole pig is eaten-everything from “tails to nails. While it’s certainly true that Okinawans regularly eat some soy, the evidence indicates they also enjoy a lot of fish and pork in their diet. The monounsaturated fat those centenarians ate over the course of their long lives was not canola oil but good old-fashioned lard. Yes, lard is primarily monounsaturated fat.”

The Okinawa Factor claims “Okinawan elders eat an average of seven servings of vegetables and fruit, seven servings of grain and two servings of soy products. They consume omega-3-rich fish several times a week and minimal dairy products and meat (amounting to 1 ounce of pork or poultry a day). Who is telling the truth? That’s what I’d like to know.

SUMMARY

From the Paleolithic period, through the agricultural age and into the modern age, there is something we can learn from every time period. What is relevant today for many of us living in urban environments is how we can protect ourselves from a chemical world that hasn’t ever existed in the history of the Earth.

Our challenge now it to reduce chemical exposure by choosing organic and grass-fed methods, using safe cleaners and personal care products in our house, keeping mold out, and filtering our water systems. With these healthy practices, we can achieve optimal health in challenging times with varying percentages of plant and animal foods.

Have you ever wondered how much meat and plants our hunter-gatherers consumed? Or our farming ancestors?

I started researching the diets of many hunters and farmers and wasn’t expecting to find so many contradicting books and studies as to how much meat was consumed. It is unfortunate that personal biases and agendas cloud observational studies, which makes me skeptical of many things I don’t observe myself.

The Health of the Farmers vs. The Hunter-Gatherers

According to the book Neolithic by Susan Foster McCarter, “Like most people, you may have always assumed that hunter-gatherers were usually hungry, tired and sick; and that things were much better once people began producing their food and living in permanent villages.

In fact, the opposite is true: hunter-gatherers were extremely healthy and Neolithic farmers were not. Paleopathologists tell us that foragers had excellent teeth, they were rarely malnourished, they were taller than most people today, and they didn’t suffer from endemic or epidemic diseases.” We know this because the evidence is in the skeletal remains. The skeletons of early Neolithic farmers show scurvy (vitamin C deficiencies), rickets (vitamin D deficiencies), poor dental health, bone infections and a stature roughly 6 inches shorter than the hunter-gatherers.

So despite an abundance of food, people were often hungry and malnourished. Why? Because the diet shifted to a grain-based diet of porridge and unleavened bread.

Let’s take a look at the meat-eating habits of our hunter-gatherers, and move our way through history to the agricultural changes of introducing grains, lower meat consumption and the effects on our health.

How Much Meat and Plants Did Hunter-Gatherers Eat?

When we look at our genealogy – with the genus homo existing for 2 million years and the modern human debated to be 160,000 to 340,000 to 400,000 years ago – as hunter-gatherers and agriculture starting roughly 10,000 years ago – the human diet is heavily favored for the hunter-gatherer way of eating. 

We no longer hunt and gather, we shop. If you have any friends that hunt – or if you hunt – you know that hunting is not always successful. During my time in Colorado, many of our neighbors would hunt the entire winter without getting an elk.

During the Paleolithic period, we can assume that there were unsuccessful hunts that probably consisted of fasting for many hours or days, and gathering nuts, seeds, berries, mushrooms, greens and insects would have filled the gaps.

A research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified 300 species of edible plants, including seeds, fruits, nuts, leaves, stems, roots and tubers (with the use of fire), mainly form the migration route out of Africa from 780,000 years ago.

Of course, if they were by the ocean, marine foods would be in abundance and a more reliable supply of animal protein. But there were also days of massive feasts of meat, especially with the coveted woolly mammoth.

In fact, it has been said that the bow was such a technological leap forward that it could have led to an increase in meat consumption and population growth rates, eventually reducing game populations in certain areas and hastening the adoption of agriculture.

Information on hunter-gatherer societies is more difficult to obtain to find accurate day to day dietary habits. The ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers includes hundreds of cultures, but only about 50 groups have been studied. From the Ethnographic Atlas used by Dr. Cordain, he suggests prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups, allowing for regional variation, generally received around 50% of their nutrition from wild game and fish, while modern hunter-gatherer societies obtain 56-65% of their nutritional intake from fish and hunted game.

This study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition estimates hunter-gatherer animal food sources constituting between 45-65% of their total energy intake. Most hunting societies typically used the whole carcass which included organ meats, fat (high caloric energy), and bone marrow.

This study shows a cross-cultural examination of longevity among hunter-gathers and gives us insight on this topic. For example, the Ache were full-time, mobile tropical forest hunter-gatherers until the 1970s.

The Hiwi are neotropical savanna foragers of Venezuela. At the time of the study, almost their entire diet was wild foods, with 68 percent of calories coming from meat and 27 percent from roots, fruits, and an arboreal legume (5 percent as agricultural fruits, squash and store bought goods). The !Kung are estimated to contribute 33% from animal foods and 67% from plant foods, with fifty percent (by weight) of their plant-based diet coming from the mongongo nut, which is available throughout the year in massive quantities.

The Gainj are forager horticulturalists with a diet consisting of sweet potatoes, yams, and taro in the central highland forests of northern Papua New Guinea where meat is fairly rare. Typically, those closer to the equator consume more plants and less protein while those at higher latitudes, consume fewer plants and more animals. In other words, availability is what determines the percentage of animal and plant foods, much like in agricultural societies.

To see how important that the meat and fish supply was high, we can look at the innovate strategies our later ancestors employed for more successful hunts.

We see the earliest evidence of stone, bone, and iron being used for arrow making, bows and axes, poison on the tips of arrows for taking down large game – and therefore more meat. Large nets and harpoons for fishing were used by both men and women for catching seafood. There is evidence of the deliberate use of fire to encourage new growth for animals to eat, and the cleaver and other processing tools for butchering large amounts of meat.

This study also mentions that before effective hunting, males could have relied on honey and plant foods. But if you read on page 65, we are shown that there were wooden spears next to horse bones dated 400,000 years. Stone tools and cut marks on bones dating back more than 2 million years are also evidence that animal carcasses were butchered at the beginning of the genus homo. Well, that’s interesting. We were meat-eaters from at exactly the start of the genus homo, and the modern human.

How Long Did Hunter-Gatherer’s Live?

How long did hunter-gatherers live? Past research will have you believe that they had short lives, and rarely made it past 40 and therefore the modern diseases didn’t show up due to age. It turns out, modern research has found conflicting results. The average ages of hunter-gatherers have always been grossly misrepresented due to infant mortality, skewing the numbers to appear much lower than they are.

The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers according to the previously mentioned study is 72 with a range of 68–78 years. Illnesses account for 70 percent, violence and accidents for 20 percent, and degenerative diseases for 9 percent of all deaths in our sample. Illnesses largely include infectious and gastrointestinal disease, although less than half of all deaths in the sample are from a contact-related disease. Heart attacks and strokes appear rare and do not account for these old-age deaths which tend to occur when sleeping.

Few risk factors for cardiovascular disease exist among active members of small-scale societies. Obesity is rare, hypertension is low, cholesterol and triglyceride levels are low, and maximal oxygen uptake is high.

Overall, degenerative disease accounts for 6–24 percent. There are also no studies or mention of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or other forms of dementia. This would line up with modern diseases stemming from sedentary lifestyles, processed foods, vegetable oils, sugar and chemical exposure and ingestion; not meat.

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