Two million years ago, fire and hunting tools gave early humans access to nutrient-dense animal parts like blood, fat, and organs. This nutritional shift drove the explosive growth in human brain and body size. The speaker argues whole-animal foods, not processed bread, should anchor modern diets.
What were we eating 300,000 years ago that we should be replicating now? Not the what, but the how. Should humans eat bread? Should adult humans consume dairy? Those questions are actually silly. Do you mean Wonder Bread, or do you mean a loaf of wild, slow, long-fermented sourdough bread? They're completely different foods. At 2 million years ago, we see our biggest jump in body and brain size, and it correlates with 2 major technological innovations. One is fire, which is very powerful, but the other is hunting technology. And for the first time ever, we could take animals down at will. And because we were the hunter, we had first access to the entirety of that animal, the most nutrient-dense bioavailable parts, the blood, the fat, and the organs. It is when we introduced the entire animal into our diets that we see the most massive explosion in body and brain size that we've ever seen in our evolutionary past. And I am confident it's because of that massive influx of incredibly bioavailable nutrient-dense foods. Whole animal should be the basis of our diets, 100%.
