Moreover, while eating meat in general requires smaller digestive tracts, the validity of this association is limited. At roughly 400 to 600 calories and 10 to 20 grams of protein per 100 grams, nuts and seeds are low-volume, high-nutritional-density foods for which small stomachs suffice. Top them off with peanuts and some honey, and you can do well as a plump, small-stomach, obligatory plant-eater.
Want more numerical specificity? Suppose we explore replacing modern beef with various plant-based alternatives, and calculate how much of each plant food we’d need to fully match the calories and protein in the beef. For each plant, we get two answers — one for replacing all the energy, and another for all the protein. From these two answers, we use the more exacting one, the one that requires more mass.
To test whether plants can match the nutritional value of meat, I compared 59 plant foods to beef. Of those, seven — almonds, kidney beans, peanuts, pistachios, chickpeas, lentils, and soy — require replacement masses that are in fact smaller than that of the beef they replace, on average requiring 800 grams to replace a kilogram of beef. Six more — barley, hazelnuts, oats, walnuts, buckwheat, and spelt — require only slightly higher masses (20 percent higher on average) than the beef mass they replace for the exact full energy–protein replacement.
The notion that our diet requires meat thus confronts roaring headwinds. While Pleistocene forebears of these nuts and legumes differed markedly from their modern counterparts, the message is clear: If more than 2 in 10 plant items are just as energy- and protein-dense as game meat, early plant-eating hominins could have invested relatively modest efforts in gathering plant-based diets with no less protein and energy, and no more bulk than large game eating would have provided, with none of the serious risks inherent in big-game hunting. This is why I find this argument unpersuasive.
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