Most animals have a fairly simple diet, carnivores eat only meat their whole life, cows eat exclusively grass etc. So why are human bodies so picky and need a balance of protein, fat, carbs etc from different sources to perform well?
In: Biology
**Simply put, because we’ve changed our own environment the most. (Also animals care.)**
A dog is still eating meat, but *you’ll see the difference* if you feed dogs cheaper grade food full of fillers. They literally won’t live as long. If you want your dog to live a long, healthy life, you want to give them expensive vet-grade food, not cheap crap. We think of ourselves and our ‘balanced diet’ from the perspective on one who can *feel* an unbalanced diet, so we’re more strict on ourselves. And in countries where cattle can’t be grassfed year-round, they are absolutely given supplementary grain-fed while barned in winter – *and it’s still* not as healthy as being grassfed all year-round in more temperate climates. And you’re looking at animals as a collective, not the livelihood of each individual cow, deer, dog. So when they’re fine enough as a whole, we don’t think about it. We *do* think of *ourselves* in the individual.
But humans? We’ve bred our crops for size and yield. We’ve processed our food for shelf-life and flavour. Our food is now REALLY good at hitting that dopamine – fat, sugar, salt, proteins – as easily as possible, as cheaply as possible, for as much of the year as possible. Sugary foods that used to be seasonal and rare (honey, fruit) are now available all the time. We want to eat these things as much as we can because historically, sugar was valuable and hard to get. Now it’s the cheapest thing there is, it’s everywhere, it’s easy to get – but our bodies are running old software and haven’t gotten the memo. Same thing for the amount of meat we eat – it’s *good diet* to eat meat! But a lot of us eat *way too much* of it.
**Humans have to make a deliberate decision to get a balanced diet because we’ve spend generations making an *indulgent* one more attainable.**
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