That's true of some traditional cultures, and the Weston Price Foundation also diminishes the nutritional value of veggies.

If you look at the paleolithic evidence, however, even at the height of carniovry, paleolithic people ate meat at the ratio of 35% to 65% (meat to veggie). Paleolithic people ate plenty of raw veggies, especially greens, of which there was huge variety.

capo don't worry bout it i'm in your boat too. im one year younger than you but im definitely still in puberty, im a guy. i believe our bodies are always changing and growing so be positive, just think what you will look like in 10 years or so. don't look for results right away, skull changes happen gradually, like over years. i can almost promise you you're skull will change from now until you are age 30, 40, 50 and so on. like you, i will probably never have as beautiful a facial structure i could've had if my mom and me (during my birth thru age 17) ate the proper way, but there is still time to repair and we are always changing and growing. like i said im definitely still in puberty so i know i can still repair my bone structure and have it form the right way, and yours will keep on growing and changing as long as you stick with the proper foods. mark my words capo, by 30 or so your cheek bones will be so high and beautifully protruding you will look like a native, and so will all of us as long as we stick to it! good wishes for everyone

also, go back and read Forefather's post, it is so inspiring. his face is developing and repairing and he's only been eating this way for about 6 months. SEEE!!!!! we can repair our bone structures haha
i need to ask another question though. what is everyone's views about cooked meat? i eat lots of ground beef, really high fat content, and im afraid to eat it even rare in the middle, i usually cook it to dark dark brown. is cooked meat really really that bad? i cannot imagine the natives didn't at least cook the meat sometimes, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. i dunno throw me your opinions

Meatzrus, I think I've always had high cheekbones; they don't protrude as far out as many Native Americans' cheek bones. I don't really have that skill to judge 'beautiful' facial structures from 'unhealthy' or 'weak' facial structures. Usually, the media portrays high cheekbones, emaciated cheeks, small/straight nose, big upper and lower lips, so it's kind of hard to determine what is better: what the media portrays as beautiful or some other natural sense.

But to be honest, I've never really paid that much attention to my facial structure; it's not something that bothers me either way. My mom always said I had wide nostrils and I have dimples and kind of 'big' 'protruding, fleshy' cheekbones/cheek structure, and I can't tell if thats good or bad.

The media today probably wouldn't portray a native Eskimo as beautiful (probably because they lack sunken-out cheeks), but nevertheless, how do you tell what is 'beautiful' especially with facial bone structure?

Like this picture for example:


FIG. 104. Above, two Maori girls in New Zealand and below, two white girls in Peru. Note the facial change in the girls at the right compared with their older sisters.

In regard to the bottom sisters, I think the one on the right is prettier than the one on the left; how does that work?

My own personal opinion is that our species has been cooking for as long as we've existed as a species (the emergence of Homo sapiens was 200-300k years ago, and there is evidence for controlled use of fire dating back to at least 600k - these dates are ones I remember from my college anthropology classes that I took a few years ago, so my dates may be off in light of new findings since then). So I don't think that all cooking is bad.

I do think, however, that it's probably a good idea to eat at least some stuff raw. If you look at traditional cultures, they usually have at least one raw meat dish that is very popular, and I think that this has persisted for a reason. I actually think that part of the reason that humans were able to become so big-brained is BECAUSE of cooking. It makes more calorie-dense food options available (like starchy tubers) and it also destroys a lot of antinutrients found in plants and makes them more digestible.

Here is a paper that talks about brain size as related to the size of the GI tract: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid...ipt=sci_arttext Our big brains and short GI tracts REQUIRE that we eat calorically dense food, and I believe that cooking was probably key in this. So eat your cooked meat, but chow down on a really rare steak or some sashimi every once in awhile.

im asking for some more help guys, ha. if anyone feels like they can help me out with this problem just post a comment. im having a little trouble with this way of eating. im a teenage guy, & im trying to build muscle and maintain my muscle tone, mainly building more muscle though. it's very hard for me to keep eating big meals all thruout the day and it's going to get even harder keeping the calories up because i might let go of dairy. it gives me congestion problems, even raw dairy, so im going to stop dairy in a few days. that leaves me with ground beef burgers, steaks, lots of fish, pork, and some chicken. it's very very difficult, not complaining it truly is for me, to keep the calories up just eating meat. i can eat a few ground beef burgers a day, a fish fillet, maybe a pork chop or 2, but how else can i add calories? a whole sweet potato is only 100 calories, that's not going to get me anywhere. i need to be bringing in like 3000+ calories, im thin as it is and im trying to gain lots & lots of muscle mass. i know there is a way to achieve this, im not asking for people to sympathize with me, only give me some advice.
what other foods can i be eating? so to summarize again, im only eating ground beef burgers, steaks, lots of fish, pork chops, some chicken drumsticks but barely chicken i like the other meats better, there really is nothing else for the meat section. eggs don't agree with me. it was going well because with raw dairy i can definitely bring in lots of calories, as a couple glasses of milk brings in about 300 calories and just a tablespoon of butter is 100, so it's very simple to get in enough calories with dairy, but as im getting rid of dairy it's going to be hard to keep my calories up.
again, im not looking to complain, i need advice on keep my calories up as high as possible. thanks guys

If you want more calories, get chuck meat (ground 80% lean) and make that your staple. Goose is expensive, but very fatty, and roasts are easy to cook in a crockpot all day and they last for a few days to a week.

I'm don't have problems staying too thin; more like, I don't want to get fat, so I can't relate on a physical level with you meatzyrus.

And no one answered my question on why people with stronger bone structure are more beautiful than the kind of people hollywood projects on the boobtube every day. Perhaps some people are just born prettier/uglier than their siblings.

Although it may feel objective, in fact, beauty is a subjective thing. The old adage "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is accurate.

Pemmican?

Don't know if I can be much help, I usually only eat about 1300-1500 calories. (I am very sedantary, lol. Need to change that >_<)

Add fat to your meals, with oils or drippings, choose the fattier cuts of meat and don't trim the fat off. That adds up really fast.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy that at all

Vegetables in their domesticated edible forms today were introduced through agriculture- the wild varieties are MUCH less digestible, and thus were most likely not eaten in large quantities. I mean seriously, do you think there was just one big vegetable garden for them to get their X amount of servings per day? NO. MEAT and FATS were THE staples of our paleolithic evolution. Sure, one can get the relatively same nutrient content if they go out of their way to ferment their grains and veggies, etc., but why not just get it straight from the animal that already digested the nutrients into bioavailable forms? Not to mention the benefits that come from a carnivorous diet that you simply cannot have eating past a certain amount of carbs. For example (this is for you meatzrus): carbohydrate metabolism produces lactic acid (not so good for your muscles- the main contributor to soreness), while fat metabolism produces carbon dioxide, and water- MUCH cleaner burning fuel, and much less 'abrasive' on the muscles you just worked. There is also evidence that VLC to NO carb ketogenic diets spare muscle protein by interfering with muscle catabolism (in other words, your muscles get eaten away less)

Overall, what veggies that were consumed were eaten opportunistically and primarily in times of starvation and uncertainty (scarce game in winter, for example). When game was abundant, there was really no reason to search the wild forests through all the wild grasses, poisonous leaves, and bitter fruits for something somewhat edible.

Also, who can forget the bone isotope analysis of the woman (nevermind the MORE carnivorous men) found in Great Britain from 8,000 years ago who's bone analysis almost matched that of a lion

If you want to include plant foods, fine, each to his own, but the fact of the matter is that they were not a consistent staple until the upper paleolithic (proto-neolithic). ALL truly balanced diets should be centered around animal fats and foods of some kind, whether plants are included or not.

Meatzrus: that is great that your are weight-lifting- the growth hormone and testosterone release will definitely have an impact on your overall bone structure- just be sure to eat shortly after workout, and get plenty of sleep (and go to bed, early, too). Getting sunlight can help set your circadian rhythm to do this.

Whoa dude, not so fast- you can 'repair' your bone structure to a degree, but the basic foundation is set in stone. For example: if you have a skinny long head, you will always have a skinny long head, the difference this diet will bring about at our age is that your cheekbones may become more defined, thicker feeling skull, heavier jaw, etc. But the skinny long foundation will always remain- it won't morph into a big round native head.

Cooking is fine, just don't overcook it (medium rare maximum). I wouldn't depend on ground beef so much since you have to cook it past this- get thick, fatty steaks, and sear for a minute or so per side. Our ancestors most likely ate SOME cooked, MOST raw, so if your meat is rare (raw on the inside, cooked on the outside) you will get about that proportion of cooked to raw.

I'll post some pictures in a bit to realistically demonstrate the degree of change that can happen (it's a difference, but it's not a HUGE difference- most people don't notice it consciously in every-day passing)

Edit: Alright here they are

Before: Vegetarian (near-vegan), I only ate an egg or two on occasion. Note how I look tired, kind of fatigued out (It's somewhat hard to tell since my eyes are blocked out). I was also skinny (133 at about 5' 11"). I had just transitioned into regular 'paleo' at this time.



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After:

Carnivore for just short of three months in this pic. Note how my face looks a little more 'defined' and sort of heavier set (even when considering the lighting differences). I still have the basic head shape that I will always have, but it's just changed on a micro level. Also note the better weight around my face- I gained around 30 pounds (am now between 165-170, and have now started growing taller on carnivore and am closer to 6 feet now), and even though my eyes are covered, you can tell the muscles around my eyes are more "lively" and not so sagging. In short, I'm not ugly anymore The difference is also somewhat emphasized by the fact that in the bottom pic I'm clean shaven, and the first one I have some facial hair (which would make my jaw look bigger than it really was- though you can't tell that much with the light etc.). Oh yeah, I've also noticed an acceleration in my facial hair development since going carnivore- my facial hair used to be solely on the bottomside of my chin, and it stayed that way all through vegetarian, but as soon as I switched to carnivore, it began to fill out higher up on my cheeks and face.

I believe my cheekbones may be a little better now, since I have been on carnivore for a bit over six months at this point (three months more than this pic). But who knows, this is all subjective, I never measured or anything.

I'll never have a super broad ultra defined native head (even when considering racial differences), but that's ok, because I'm doing as much as I realistically can at the position I'm in. Thank god we're not completely done growing, and still have a window of time to make a change.

Aside from all the other advantages to carnivore, the thing I am most pleased with is my weight gain and strength and energy increase- I was always the 'skinny shrimp'- and vegetarian only worsened this condition. Now I am much stronger, heavier, and 'thicker' in my build (I haven't built much mass yet, it takes about half a year to a year before that phase, and I have only been doing free weights for about a month or two- I did bodyweights before that; but I am much denser than before). I used to struggle to lift my little brother and sister off the ground, now it's like no big deal, even though they are both a little heavier than before. It's not so good when my teenage testosterone mode kicks in- I break more chairs and stuff now- but heh what can I say I'm a 17 year old male, and the fact my hormones are back in gear after being in a slumber on vegetarian is really good to know.

The idea that humans are carnivorous instead of omnivorous is idealistic, IMO. If you read actual studies of hunter-gatherer populations (both extant and in fossil records), you will find that they utilized many many plant foods in addition to their animal foods. Humans are opportunistic critters, and they will eat anything that is available to them in the environment that doesn't make them immediately sick.

For preliminary reading, I would suggest Loren Cordain, but really any study done on a fossil hominid site will give you useful information re: plant foods.

True, but they only utilized them because they lived in an uncertain world- not because they needed any magical nutrients only available in plants. It's not like they sat down around the campfire every night with some swiss chard, carrots, and a bag of pistachios- most of these food items were considerably more dangerous to consume when they were wild, and thus used sparingly. Agriculture is what made them safer to consume in large (nutritionally significant) quantities.

Carnivore, omnivore, whatever- these are simply our means of categorizing, and different people give different definitions for each category. Some say dogs are omnivores, some say carnivores, some say we're carnivores, some say this, other say that, blah blah. Whatever group you want to throw us into, the FACT of the matter is that we are primarily geared towards animal foods, "omnivore" or not- in fact, we don't even need plant foods for great health, and the consumption of plant foods is actually unhealthy in high amounts. The only real reason to consume plants in my mind is either for a) variety, or b) medicinal purposes, as there is no nutritional necessity for them.

Our biology is not very well adapted to digesting plants- all the intestinal cell damage done by fiber, the toxic waste products from the bacteria that feed off fiber, anti-nutrients that interfere with absorption of what precious little is there anyways- unless you use neolithic methods of neutralization and fermentation, plants are nutritionally poor. And then there are the problems associated with the unnaturally high levels of insulin required to deal with those carbs. Even if plant foods were consumed, it was only in small, seasonal amounts- it's not like they were constantly being bombarded with high insulin shock all year round- they were most likely on a vlc to zero carb ketogenic metabolism a majority of the time. I also question how often opportunistic starvation scenarios actually occured- we were the most successful hunters, after all, killing off all of the world's mega-fauna (also partly due to a change in climate, but we were the primary factor). Also, we can't have needed plant foods when we crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas- you can't follow fruits and veggies over an ice bridge, after all, only animals that live off of moss or fish or who knows what.

I have read some Loren Cordain- he hits some good points, but with regards to fat content for paleolithic subsistence, I'm not impressed at all. He conforms the truth (consciously or not) to fit the false politically correct mold of low-fat, pro-high veggies- he turns true paleolithic eating into a neolithic poser diet, void of the healthy amounts of fat one needs in order to obtain good health, and way too high in carbohydrates and plant foods.

Just giving the carnivore perspective

thanks forefather and callyn for your very informational posts, i always learn alot from you guys. what is your guys opinions on fruits, particularly berries? i am fortunate enough to have a store near me that carries organic berries yearround of all types at good prices. the Inuits eat/ate cranberries, and im not trying to base my whole life around what one group ate or didn't eat, im curious what you guys think of berries. do you think sugar=sugar no matter where it comes from?