> There is not such thing as hypercarnivore humans that eat only meat and water.
Rubbish. I'm not trying to be rude. This is an ignorant idea that needs to stop being parroted. Plenty of people can and do subsist on meat and water. Skeletal muscle from cattle alone has everything one needs to thrive. A normal and healthy human can eat nothing but meat (possibly not even water directly) and remain healthy.
Go talk to some "carnivores." Yes, there are crazies as there are with every single group of humans, including vegans. You will find that there are individuals who have eaten solely meat for years and have not suffered a single issue that most non-carnivores believe will happen.
> Skeletal muscle from cattle alone has everything one needs to thrive. A normal and healthy human can eat nothing but meat and remain healthy.
Red meat don't has two essential omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that we need to survive. If they are frying their meat in vegetable oil to avoid that, sorry, but they aren't eating just meat. They are eating plants also
I'd be happy to agree that I'm doubtful this is the best way to get your nutrients, but what omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are you talking about? Red meat definitely does contain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids generally. This is one of the reasons to prefer grass vs grain fed beef - the former has a much better omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.
> The error is to consider them as ESSENTIAL. Which obviously they arent.
Not, the error is dismissing all proven facts in nutrition and thinking that we know better.
When something is called an essential nutrient, we need to include it in our diet if we want to remain alive. Is a simple as this.
Lets forget about the special fatty acids that we need and go with an easier example. Your bold claim that "Skeletal muscle from cattle alone has everything one needs to thrive" would led us directly to die by scurvy.
Muscle is not a reliable source of ascorbic acid, and we need it to manage correctly our urea metabolism. So we need to add a source of Vitamin C, that comes typically in fruits. Yes, can be found also in liver of some animals, but liver is not skeletal muscle, so your previous claim is incorrect.
About the omega-3 and omega-6; a source of fatty acids on this types are needed to avoid:
stunted grow
damage in the nervous system and mental disease
Premature death of cells in chilling weather. Freeze damage.
Feminisation in males by absence of testosterone (related with the former point)
Being much more prone to die by heart attack
Looks pretty serious stuff to me. Even if your diet is based in lard, either you include some omega-3 and omega-6 or you will have fat deficiencies at middle term, and the brain is fat.
> Muscle is not a reliable source of ascorbic acid, and we need it to manage correctly our urea metabolism.
Let's be clear, firstly... I think we should stick to talking about the skeletal muscle of animals that our ancestors primarily adapted towards, which would be large ruminants (aka red meat with legs). I can't comment on a hypothetical animal that lacks vitamin C in its tissue.
What you're saying simply isn't true. There is enough vitamin C in meat, and the idea that you need to eat liver to get enough of any vitamin is largely mythical. But let's stick with vitamin C.
The human body needs very little vitamin C, and orders of magnitude less so on a diet of meat. Vitamin C and glucose both depend on the insulin pathway to enter cells, thus they "compete" to do so. With even a modest amount of exogenous carbs, glucose out-competes vitamin C for update because it has a greater affinity for the GLUT-1 receptor. Thus, one would need a lot more vitamin C on such a diet. Without exogenous carbohydrates, skeletal muscle provides plenty of vitamin C.
We all know that hard tack was once a staple on sailing ships, and that those who subsisted on hard tack too long were prone to scurvy. What people either forget or weren't taught is that not all sailors were eating hard tack on any given ship; the captain and his officers were more likely to be eating dried or cured meat, meaning the prevalence of scurvy was far greater among the regular crewmen who were receiving the lesser food.
> Your bold claim that "Skeletal muscle from cattle alone has everything one needs to thrive" would led us directly to die by scurvy.
Completely false. It takes as little as a month to develop scurvy, yet there are many people who have been eating meat exclusively for years and none of them have scurvy. When should they expect to get scurvy? After a year? 5 years? 10 years? I myself have experience with this and, well, it's been far, far longer than a month... still no scurvy. I don't eat liver. Never have and have no desire to start doing so.
> Muscle is not a reliable source of ascorbic acid
Again, not correct. A meat based diet requires substantially less vitamin C.
> So we need to add a source of Vitamin C, that comes typically in fruits.
No, you don't need to add fruit if you're eating a diet solely of meat.
> Yes, can be found also in liver of some animals
Yet many carnivorous animals, including humans historically, don't bother with the liver under most circumstances. Liver can have benefits, but eating liver too often or in too great a quantity can lead to types of poisoning and electrolyte imbalance.
> but liver is not skeletal muscle, so your previous claim is incorrect.
Yeah, it's not, which is why carnivorous animals consume mostly skeletal muscle and don't just eat the liver, despite how some think that liver is a cornucopia of health. Liver is not a cure for anything, except perhaps carbohydrate-induced scurvy.
> so your previous claim is incorrect.
Not really. It's quite correct. You really should reevaluate your view of vitamin C in the human diet.
As far as I am aware, no studies have been performed to determine how much vitamin C (ascorbate, specifically) is destroyed when cooking something like a steak. There are studies on vegetables, but cooking meat is a different dynamic and I don't think one can be inferred from the other directly.
My best guess is that, given that most people don't want their steak totally well-done (an oxymoron really), so enough aspartate survives. The more you heat your steak and for longer, the more the aspartate breaks down. Besides a few frankly questionable incidences like the notable James Blunt (which we don't actually know the cause of), the vast majority of carnivore dieters cook their meat and don't report scurvy. Out of the currently 47k members of the r/carnivore subreddit, none have made any posts saying they got scurvy. Yes, that's a very imperfect metric, but it's better than nothing. If vitamin C was a big deal, I think there'd be many more reports of serious issues. In the ketogenic diet community, countless people complain of side effects such as "keto flu", so I don't think people who are trying to eat mainly meat are all faking that they don't have scurvy.
As I said elsewhere, I have eaten mostly meat for years and have been eating 99% meat for most of this last year. Still no scurvy. My gums don't bleed and my teeth don't wiggle. In fact my gums bled more when I was eating closer to a standard diet. Now they don't bleed at all and they're rather firm.
Also, there's the possibility of eating meat raw or mostly raw. This of course depends on the meat. Beef is typically very safe to eat in a raw state given that it has either been butchered in a way specifically to be eaten raw or seared on the outside where bacteria colonize (aka "blue steak"). I have switched to just searing my steaks, leaving the majority of the center raw, and I'm not going back. This preserves the ascorbate and also the taurine. But I actually prefer the taste and texture.
The reason that beef has very diminished risk profile in contrast to something like chicken is that cows are given feed that isn't contaminated or prone to parasites, and modern regulation has made it so that meat plants must eliminate the 5 or so major forms of deadly bacteria from their process. Even raw ground beef is fairly low risk these days, though I don't recommend it.
By the way, I'm not actually here to advocate for a meat-only diet. I make sure not to command anyone. Life as a modern human is about being able to enjoy other things besides meat. What I take issue with is fake news discouraging people from even considering having meat more than a few times a week, of which there is an overabundance.
Rubbish. I'm not trying to be rude. This is an ignorant idea that needs to stop being parroted. Plenty of people can and do subsist on meat and water. Skeletal muscle from cattle alone has everything one needs to thrive. A normal and healthy human can eat nothing but meat (possibly not even water directly) and remain healthy.
Go talk to some "carnivores." Yes, there are crazies as there are with every single group of humans, including vegans. You will find that there are individuals who have eaten solely meat for years and have not suffered a single issue that most non-carnivores believe will happen.