S. Canaday said: Has there ever been a population in human history that has thrived for more than 50+ years on a high meat diet?.... we already know the Massaii and Inuits have been quite unhealthy. Type II diabetes, stroke/cancer/heart disease is right around the corner.
whilst I largely agree with your conclusions about our diet I don't find your arguments particularly compelling, particularly when you use words like "healthy" and "unhealthy" in the way you have here. consider these three things...
1. you posit that, "type II diabetes, stroke, cancer, and heart disease are "right around the corner." which means that these people do not yet have these diseases to any great extent, but you can see into the future and confidently predict that, despite the fact that they do not eat the diet that produces these diseases, they will nevertheless contract those diseases anyway. which doesn't seem either logically sound or remotely possible. if the Inuit have not developed Type II diabetes from eating raw seal meat for the past 40,000 years there doesn't appear to be any logical reason to suppose that they are going to get it.
2. we might suppose that because the Inuit live in the arctic their diet is plant free. but I observe that large numbers of birds migrate to the arctic to breed. we do not have to be particularly knowledgeable about bird diets to observe that these birds are not building boats and going out fishing for salmon and haddock, they are not fishing for seals through holes in the ice and they are not weaving nets to trap polar bears. birds are foragers that eat grass, seeds, plants, roots, tubers and so forth. and if tens of thousands of birds of a wide variety of species can find enough plants to make it worth their while going back year after year for thousands of years to rear their families we can similarly suppose that the Inuit can find these same plants, roots, tubers and grasses too. it is undoubtedly a high meat diet, but it is not a plant-free diet.
3. when western Europeans went through their age of exploration in the 15th - 18th centuries, one of the reasons that Europeans colonised and overran various places, both north and South America, Australia, India, Africa and so forth, is that they took with them various germs that killed the resident natives in huge numbers. the aborigines in these various places did not have these germs, so had not developed antibodies against them, so had no defence against tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, mumps and so forth, and were killed off by these diseases in large numbers. and we are not just talking ancient history here, as recently as 1880 a large population of North American Indians died in Saskatchewan from tuberculosis they caught from workers building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. these infectious diseases require populations of sufficient size to sustain them and are therefore known as "crowd diseases" and they are, in large part, transmitted to us from our domesticated animals. human tuberculosis, for example, is a version of a disease we originally caught from cattle, smallpox is a version of cowpox, influenza originated in pigs and ducks, measles is a version of rinderpest we caught from cattle. north American Indians did not have tuberculosis because they had no domestic animals. in time, we have developed vaccines against these diseases and tuberculosis is now largely a thing of the past. but it does cause me to ask who are the "healthy" people in this equation: the folk who developed a vaccine against a disease they caught from animals they live with, or the folk who never had those diseases in the first place?
if your definition of healthy is, "can run 50 miles before lunch," then your notions of healthy are irrelevant to 99% of the world's population, but if your definition of healthy is "disease free," then the Inuit are probably the healthiest people on earth.
cheers.
