Protein toxicity and the Neanderthal fat factory (don't call me that)

Yes, protein poisoning is a thing. No, it probably won't happen to you, assuming that you have healthy kidneys, but I suppose it could happen to you in a survival situation or if you are a truly fanatical aderant of the carnivore diet. I went looking for any documented cases of protein toxicity among modern people doing a carnivore diet, and I couldn't find any cases at all. I found lots of anecdotal accounts of diet influencers doing stupid things and getting sick, probably for clicks, but I don't see anything in the medical literature. You're probably never going to get protein poisoning. So, why have I written this thing for you to tell you about it? Well, two reasons. One, because it's interesting, both biologically and historically. And two, the existence of protein poisoning may explain an incredible new anthropological discovery in Germany. A case of Neandertols apparently rendering fat out of animals. Oh, about a 100,000 years before there's any evidence of us anatomically modern humans ever doing it. This discovery advances the idea that Neandertols were not just dumb hairy Fred Fllynstones. Neanderls were people, complex people with complex societies and possibly even some level of like mass production. This new paper is just amazeballs. But to understand it, first we need to understand protein poisoning. Also known historically as rabbit starvation. Consider what makes protein different from the other macronutrients. The other things that we need to consume in large quantities regularly in order to survive and thrive. I'm talking about proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Those are the macronutrients. On the elemental level, carbs and fats are made of the same stuff. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. That's it. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen with the energy or the calories being stored in the form of the electrostatic bonds between those atoms. Carbs and fats are just different configurations of the same stuff. With the exception of phospholipids, like the emulsifiers that are in egg yolk, phospholipids are a little more complicated. They have a little phosphate, but most fats are made of the same stuff as carbs. What makes proteins different on the elemental level? Proteins have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The nitrogen makes protein really different from the other macronutrients. And when you digest protein, there's a bunch of toxic nitrogenous waste products that are left over, like ammonia, your liver converts the ammonia into ura. And assuming that your kidneys are ready to rock, you just pee it out and you're fine. But just as your liver and kidneys can only process so much alcohol in an hour, they can only process so much ammonia in an hour, if you eat too much protein in a day, you will experience a buildup of these toxic nitrogen compounds. How much protein is too much? Nobody knows. Apparently, it's probably different for different people, but the experts generally caution against getting any more than like 2 g of protein per day per pound of body weight, which is the upper limit of what even the most committed gym bros try to get. The old gym bro advice is one gram of protein per pound of your body weight. And if you're not getting a whole lot of exercise, you would need even less than that. I get a lot of exercise requiring me to eat a lot of protein and get a lot of sleep. How can you maximize your sleep for muscle recovery? With a mattress from Helix Sleep, sponsor of this video. I sleep on a Helix, a premium king-sized Helix Dusk Lux, selected to match my body and my sleep style and shipped right to my door under vacuum compression in a freaking cardboard box. Helix has 20 unique mattresses to choose from and mattress toppers that you can buy to improve the mattress that you already have. 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In part because, as we discussed, acute protein toxicity basically never happens in people with functioning organs. Because the kind of diet that would result in protein toxicity is a diet that nobody ever eats unless you have no other choice. Unless you are in a survival situation like the Arctic explorer Wilmer Stephenson encountered in the early 20th century. On the many expeditions that he led, Stephenson ate what he called an Eskimo diet. The meat diet that has sustained indigenous people in the far north for millennia. Why didn't he get scurvy without plants to eat? Because the livers of certain Arctic creatures contain just enough vitamin C as long as you eat it raw. Also, real indigenous Arctic people don't just eat meat. They also eat marine algae and some land plants in the summer. But Stephenson didn't know about that. He only knew that he ate an all meat diet while on his expeditions, and he felt great, with the very notable exception of his chronic constipation. Naturally, Stephenson advocated an allmeat diet for the rest of us. Sure, he was kind of a wacky guy. He also advocated for the Soviet project of resettling European Jews in the Russian Far East in order to rehabilitate them. But anyway, Stephenson was so committed to his Eskimo diet idea that he agreed to participate in a year-long all meat diet experiment under the supervision of doctors at Belleview Hospital in New York. Who paid for this study? Why, the Institute of American Meat Packers paid for it, of course. You know, the people right now who are defunding public science, this is the world that they want to drag us back to. But anyway, the study results published in 1929, for whatever they were worth, they showed that Stephenson did pretty well on an all meat diet for a while until they tried cutting back his fat consumption. They fed him only very lean meat and that's when he got sick. Bad diarrhea. He would have died if they hadn't added the fattier meats back into his diet. If you're going to eat only meat, you got to get in some organ meats for micronutrients, and you've got to get in a fair bit of animal fat, as indigenous Arctic people do by eating blubber animals like whales and seals. Why do you need the fat? Well, to get your essential fatty acids, of course, fat is both a macronutrient, a source of calories, and it is also a micronutrient like vitamins. There are two fatty acids, linoleic and alpha linoleic acid, that your body needs in the same way that it needs ascorbic acid, vitamin C. But you don't need that much of them. You could probably get your essential fatty acids by eating meat with only a little bit of fat in it. The main reason that you need lots of fat if you're going to eat an allmeat diet is that you simply need a certain amount of calories in a day, especially in a cold climate where you're going to be burning thousands of calories a day just to maintain your body heat. You need a certain amount of calories. And if almost all of those calories come from protein, you're going to end up accumulating more nitrogen compounds than your body can eliminate. That is protein poisoning. It's also known as rabbit starvation. Imagine you're an early euroamerican settler out on the Oregon Trail or something. It's winter. There's no plants to eat. You've exhausted your meager stores in your little covered wagon. So, what do you do? You trap rabbits to eat or squirrels or some other very lean game animal. Rabbits in the wild have hardly any fat at all on them, particularly in the winter. So, you're getting by. You're surviving the winter on only rabbits or whatever. And you feel okay until you don't. It starts with diarrhea and vomiting. And then, because ammonia can cross the bloodb brain barrier, you get seizures, you go loopy, your kidneys shut down, and then you die. If you've read any history at all, you know that people used to die of diarrhea all the time. And they still do in the developing world. Whether it was settlers on the Oregon Trail or Roman soldiers on winter campaign in Germania, it's possible that some of these diarrheal deaths that history records were not the result of infectious disease. As you would expect, some of them could have been protein poisoning. Protein poisoning is going to happen to you if you try to survive in the far north without indigenous local knowledge. Did pre-scientific people know about like nitrogen elimination? Well, probably not. At least not, you know, directly. But what they had was a tradition of extracting and eating lots of animal fat along with the protein because any ancient Arctic people that didn't have a tradition of eating fat would not have survived. They probably existed. They just died. So we don't know about them. The people who love to eat the blubbery bits are the ones who didn't get protein poisoning and thus they were able to pass their food ways on to subsequent generations. And now we come to this amazing anthropological discovery published in this month's issue of science advances. It's a Dutch-led study of an archaeological site in Germany called Numar Nord 2. It's outside Leipig. What these scientists found there has been described as a Neanderl fat factory from 125,000 years ago. Neanderls, of course, were a group of archaic humans who ranged from Europe to Central Asia. and they interbred a little bit with my modern European ancestors before going extinct some 40,000 years ago. We've historically thought of Neanderls as mere primitives in part because that interpretation kind of harmonized with modern racism. But all kinds of research has come out in recent decades indicating that Neanderls were people much like you and me. They looked different. They had big bony heads, but they had fire, they had clothing, they had tools, they had art, and they had a significant level of social organization, a fact that is apparently on display at Numar Nord. What these scientists found was a site apparently dedicated to largecale fat rendering from animal parts, mostly bones. The the Neandertols apparently kept and broke open bones for the purpose of extracting the greasy marrow inside. It seems that whenever they brought down an animal and they ate all the fresh meat and the fat, they would store the leftover bones at this site and then probably in winter when there was little other food around, they would boil the bones to melt out all the fat. How do you boil bones if you haven't invented pottery yet? Well, we did a whole video about that a few years ago, right? I showed you how you can line a hole in the ground with leaves to make it watertight and then you can drop in hot rocks from the fire to make it boil. Or you can hold water in an animal skin and dangle that over the fire and it won't burn because the water inside is absorbing the heat. In a survival situation, you can boil water in a plastic bottle over a fire without the bottle melting very much. Just don't think about the microlastics. We don't know what vessel these Neanderls in Germany used to boil their bones. The authors of this paper speculate it may have been a container of deer skin or birch bark over the fire. And maybe they couldn't bring the water to a full boil that way, but that's fine. fat renders at subbo boiling temperatures. As you know if you've ever made chicken soup, you also know that if you put your soup in the fridge, the rendered chicken fat will float to the top, solidify, and then you can just lift it off. That's probably what these Neanderls did. It was cold outside. They'd take the deer skin off the fire, let it cool down in the ambient winter temperatures, and then maybe they could just lift off the fat and eat it straight away. Or maybe mix it into a kind of energy bar like the pemkin made by indigenous North Americans a 100,000 years later. We don't know exactly what these Neandertols in Germany did, but we do know that eating this marrow grease from otherwise very lean animals could have kept them from getting protein poisoning. Were the Neanderls aware of that? Maybe on some level, or maybe they just knew that this was a way of squeezing a few more calories out of the animals that they hunted. The study authors operate on the assumption that these ancient people rendered the fat for food. And they are professional anthropologists, unlike me. But I still have to wonder if maybe these Neanderls also would have used their grease for all of the other things that grease is good for as fuel, as a lubricant, as a water sealant, as a topical medicine. I suppose there may have been easier sources of grease for like non-food purposes. It's really hard to get the nutrient-dense marrow out of bones. So maybe that's reason enough to assume that they used it for food. But what's most remarkable about this finding is the intensity of this fat rendering activity. This is not one little family boiling bones for themselves at their winter campsite. This is the bones of at least 172 large animals like forest elephants all boiled on this little lakeside within a very narrow window of space and time suggesting a kind of smallcale industry. Maybe hunters from all over bringing their bones to this one site to be boiled for grease. There may have even been a guy who was like the local grease boiler. That's specialization. That's economics. That's a glint of civilization among Neanderls. A 100,000 years before we have any evidence of us homo sapiens rendering fat from bones. If there's one thing we are learning about the distant human past, it's that so so much stuff happened before we got here. Agriculture, industry, society, people were doing this stuff in little ways so much earlier than we used to think. And that is just awesome to me. We've always been smart. We've always been resourceful and our greatest resource has always been each other. If you have some rendered animal fat, pour one out for the Neanderls of Numar Nord. And for God's sake, try to eat a vegetable.