mice were fed three types of red meat – pork, beef and mutton
I assume most mice don’t regularly eat large livestock.
Are mice evolved to eat red meat? The article doesn’t really say.
However, there were limitations to the study. As well as it being a mice model […]
Yes, mice eat red meat.
Mice are omnivores and are opportunistic eaters. They’ll eat whatever they can find.
Mice do not eat that much meat of other mammals.
Giving an over abundance of it, for a long time, will shock the mouse.
Humans historically, also didn’t eat much meat up until very recently. More recent research suggests our ancient human ancestors were eating far more plants than meat
EDIT: For example:
Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia
Primates in general are designed to eat red meat. Chimps, our closest cousin, go on regular hunts against other primates, and eat them
My point is that it was way more rare than what people’s diets look like today. Not zero but not dominant. Wide reliance on plants is even true before modern agriculture. For example:
Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia
I myself am a victim of the modern diet, and lack of exercise. I almost died of high cholesterol and other related factors, before I started to eat better and be physically active.
I’m a firm believer in a varied diet, and that most people should have a less meaty intake.
Just, we are designed to be hunters and eat red meat
My parents fed me red meat for almost every dinner I can recall growing up. I’m early 30s and my cholesterol is very high. I was able to drop my cholesterol significantly in one month by changing my diet to mostly vegan with chicken and fish once or twice a week. Switched my morning eggs out to egg whites. Cooked in avocado oil instead of butter.
This is just not true in the bigger picture of human evolution. That paper focuses on humans in North Africa 15,000–13,000 years ago which is a very tiny snapshot in time and geography.
Eating meat is a major part of what separated archaic humans from other primates; it is theorized that the calories from meat is part of what helped us grow our larger brains. Homo Erectus was hunting large game maybe up to 2 million years ago, well before Homo Sapiens even existed. They hunted to the point of wiping out many large herbivores of that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Subsistence
Since common modern human tapeworms began to diverge from those of other predators roughly 1.7 million years ago (specifically the pork tapeworm, beef tapeworm, and Asian tapeworm), not only was H. erectus consuming meat regularly enough for speciation to occur in these parasites, but meat was probably consumed raw more often than not.[80]
Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here’s another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed
we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121
I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it
yes, of course we ate lots of plants as well, that was never disputed. We were hunters and gatherers. The point is meat has absolutely been a significant part of our diets for millions of years (the exact ratio depending on the environment humans found themselves in). it is well documented by many direct lines of evidence as i laid out above.
I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did).
it didn’t just “happen” like once in a while. we are/were probably the best hunters ever seen on planet earth. we basically wiped out global megafauna over the last 1.5 million years.
I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it
what exactly do you mean by “very different picture”? that’s an extremely vague statement that could mean almost anything.
It depends on the populations.
Steppe populations from modern Ukraine easy through to the Urals lived mainly on meat and dairy 5000 years ago (even if they didn’t yet have the lactose tolerance adaptation).
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In the animal study, mice were fed three types of red meat – pork, beef and mutton – every day for two weeks. Then, the researchers triggered colitis (a model for IBD) using a chemical called dextran sulfate sodium (DSS).
They definitely aren’t evolved to eat dextran sulfate sodium.
Was the first thing I thought of. “Standard diets,” vs non-standard pretty quickly calls into question how much we need to account for the divergence from typical. If I go to India (I’m from the USA), there will be meals that aren’t standard for me that might cause distress that are nonetheless fine for the local population.
Are mice evolved to eat red meat?
They haven’t. So haven’t we. 😄
Humans been eating big game ever since we figured how to hunt it.
In fact Homo Erectus beat us to it by a couple million years.
You mean a few million years of evolution couldn’t completely redesign our digestive system? Weak bruh.
We haven’t been eating like this for a few million years, humans mostly subsisted off of whatever they could get. Eating red meat every day, or even every week, is very modern.
Fair, but our guts have already evolved to not being able to eat rotten meat. They’re apples and oranges, but still a relevant point.
Dietary evolution happens really fast, comparatively speaking.
Homo primates (archaic humans like Homo Erectus) have been hunting prolifically for about 2 million years. That’s part of what makes us Homo; the large calorie surplus from big game hunting allowed our brains to grow larger.
More modern research does not suggest this made up most of the consumption for humans even before agriculture. For instance,
Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups
afaik it’s inconclusive, and just as likely that big game was rare and supplemented by many other forms of hunting and gathering. It’s a lot easier to spear a fish or steal some eggs than to spend a whole day tracking down an elk until it collapsed from exhaustion.
That’s part of what makes us Homo.
Go on 🤭
Look I’m all for the idea that we eat too much meat currently and all, but are mice really good analogs for humans in this instance? I’m not a scientist of any sort, so I really don’t know, but it seems to me like a creature that doesn’t naturally eat, like, any red meat would be a bad analog here.
Humans also don’t generally eat poison. But the mice in this study were poisoned with DSS after eating meat. Maybe meat is not the real culprit here…
Honey I don’t know bout you but it’s Friday night this human is absolutely gonna be enjoying some poison!
They will eat anything… It is a rodent.
That’s it! Uninviting all the mice from the next BBQ.
They do terrible, terrible things to the guest bathroom
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What if I eat the red meat without stuffing it into a mouse first?
Need a new study for that.
Where’s that old Twitter bot that would append in mice to reports of these bullshit studies?
Does the Lemmy post title not have “in mice” in it for you? I added it to the title of the post to clarify this. It should show as
Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in study on mice
Whereas the original title of the article was:
Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease
Well… I guess we’re just not going to bother taking into account that red meat isn’t part of a mouse’s diet? And that maybe they’re going to react poorly when force fed things they generally don’t eat? This type of bullshit science needs to be called out for what it is.
Next, maybe we should see how well whales react if we feed them 3,000lbs of french fries.
That’s fine, we already know how to cure any disease in mice.
Anecdotally, I’ve had way less stomach issues since shifting largely to white meat and a mostly plant based diet.
I didn’t know we had so many PhD level gastroenterologists on Lemmy, I’m glad we’ve attracted such an educated community and we’re not filled with reactionary nerds who vaguely remember their freshman zoology class.
