Eating Meat Helped Early Humans Reproduce

PolygamousRanchKid writes "If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. 'Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,' said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. 'This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.' She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat."

Re:Vegan mums today.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I know a child of a vegan mother who's not that bright; obviously, you're wrong.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[Dragon Bait]

Gee, I know a child of a vegan mother who's not that bright; obviously, you're wrong.

Why was this post marked "redundant" ... especially when it was one of the first? It's a nice, short, sarcastic jab at substituting anecdotal evidence for scientific study.

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Re:Vegan mums today.

[aplusjimages]

I'm sure if he knows the mothers then they would let him know if they have any health related problems. Plus it doesn't take a doctor to tell if a kid is malnourished. It's always interesting when there's an article posted about veganism and all the haters come out trying to say it's an unhealthy diet. I've been vegan for 12 years and I'm a very healthy person and I don't take any supplements. My wife is pregnant with our first child and her doctor says she's totally fine to be vegan and have the baby. Not sure why people get so offended by vegans.

Re:Malnutrition

[icebraining]

As far as we know, Man wasn't made to be anything. It just adapted to the conditions, but that doesn't mean we're bound to those adaptions, or we wouldn't be using /. either.

Not that I am a vegan (I don't even know any vegans), but this pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo about the purposes we were "made for" is ridiculous and annoyingly common even among non-theists.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[aurispector]

Because people are happier using anecdote to support their opinions than they are changing their opinions when confronted by facts.

It's all about feelings.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[jkflying]

I find if I don't label people 'cunts' they're usually quite friendly.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[Opportunist]

As long as they don't yack into my meat lover's pizza, I don't mind them.

It's always the same. You go to a restaurant, order something and you may rest assured some militant Vegan is in the audience, coming over and asking whether you know where that meat comes from and what the animal had to endure... my standard answer is something akin to this:

Yes, the cow never saw a green leaf, it was raised on silo food, wedged in between its peers, with its horns and hooves cut and mutilated so they can't harm each other despite the constant stress of being so close to each other with no way to turn around and nowhere to lay down but in their own filth, being shot up with antibiotics every other day 'cause else they'd be swarming with disease. Then they get pushed towards the transport, with cattle prods because they don't know how to move, they never set one foot in front of the other so they have no idea what is expected to them, then they're wedged into a transport, without any food or water, often for days, the stress even killing already some, before they're again pushed with electric shocks towards the killing floor where they get wedged into a small box where they get a bolt to the brain stem. If they're lucky, sometimes they just use a large hammer to bash in their head, and even the bolt doesn't really kill them, there's still brain waves when the next step comes where they get cut open and cut in half, technically while still alive.

Can I fuckin' eat now or do I have to go on with the less savory parts?

Re:Malnutrition

[am 2k]

Milk is vegan, if the animal you obtain it from, consents to give it to you [...]

But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.

That's highly subjective -- How do you define "consent" when it comes to animals without speech? Modern cows certainly don't look like they're objecting to that part of their treatment (it even saves their lives, actually). If you're saying they only do that because they were bred that way (which is correct)... Well, the same can be said for human females.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[drinkypoo]

I find if I don't label people 'cunts' they're usually quite friendly.

How odd, I find that if people are quite friendly, I don't usually label them as a "cunt". Indeed, they often have to go out of their way to get into mine before I will do that. And I've lost track of how many times I've had to hear from a complete stranger about how eating meat is bad, because I grew up in Santa Cruz which was at the time full of dippy hippies (and which is now too gentrified for me to afford, so I probably preferred it the old way -- Vegans > Valleys.)

Re:Vegan mums today.

[aplusjimages]

In my situation it's always the other way around. The only time I tell people I'm vegan is when they want to go somewhere to eat. Which in the USA is a lot of the time. All of the aggression comes from the other side though, not mine. But I have noticed that over the years the aggression has turned more into a curiosity and more people like to ask me about the diet. Some of the time they want me to bring them some vegan food to try. But online its a totally different story. Aggression and name calling always starts with the non-vegans. Everyone's got some story about how a vegetarian made them feel bad about themselves. So you met one asshat, I meet a lot of non-vegans that are turds on a regular basis, but I don't assume it's because they eat meat and I don't lump all non-vegans with that person. I bet that person you worked with isn't even vegetarian any more if they are that aggressive with their believes.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[AthanasiusKircher]

well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.

Or perhaps the moral is that we generally eat food that was previously alive. Where we draw lines about exploiting that "life" is usually based on arbitrary divisions projecting human feelings and morals onto things that have a very different experience of the world.

For most of the vegans I know who have a problem eating honey, I think the carrot really represents a conundrum. It is really a greater problem to exploit the work of bees than it is to rip a living organism out of the ground and kill it completely to consume it? Some people say that the bees still have a nervous system that can feel pain or something and harming or exploiting them is a problem... but have you never had a garden and stepped on a plant, or tore a leaf, or made some sort of other damage or barrier or whatever to the plant's growth? The plant will respond (albeit more slowly). It is a living thing, and it has systems designed to react to the environment, as all animals do.

The line is always arbitrary. For most people in my experience, it's primarily about "cute and cuddly" things more than anything else... and I'm not sure that's a good thing to build a moral philosophy on.

Re:Vegan mums today.

[cayenne8]

Yeah....but, bottom line here is.

Dead animals taste good!!!