5d • General discussion
What should Humans Eat?
Most nutrition debates start in the wrong place! They begin with calories, cholesterol, fibre, macros, food labels, government guidelines, or the latest social media argument about plant-based versus carnivore diets. But perhaps the better question is more fundamental:
What kinds of food is the human body actually designed to eat?
That is the central theme of my latest ProLongevity Podcast conversation with Sameer Dossani, a Johannesburg-based health coach whose own health journey forced him to challenge almost everything he once believed about food. You can watch the full episode here: What should we eat? Nutrition Lessons from 2m Years of Human Evolution.
Sameer was not someone who ignored his health, in fact quite the opposite. He spent much of his adult life as a strict vegetarian, and earlier as a passionate vegan. He believed he was doing the right thing ethically, environmentally and nutritionally. But by his early forties, his health was failing. He describes developing features of metabolic syndrome and pre-diabetes, alongside autoimmune problems. That experience led him into the study of human biology, physiology, anthropology and the history of medicine.
- And what he found made him angry! Not because people had deliberately lied to him, necessarily, but because he had been following advice he believed was healthy and yet it appeared to be making him sicker.
When “healthy eating” stops making sense
One of the most striking moments in the podcast is Sameer’s story about eating a large bowl of porridge with banana, blueberries and honey before playing tennis. On paper, that sounds like the perfect “healthy wholegrain” breakfast. But in practice, he describes becoming so hungry by mid-morning that he had to stop playing. He went home and ate another bowl of oats. That was the moment he realised something was wrong with his physiology. That story matters because it captures a problem I see constantly. People are not failing because they are lazy, greedy or ignorant. They are failing because they are trying extremely hard to follow advice that does not work for their biology.
- They eat the porridge.They eat the salads.They avoid fat.They avoid red meat.They choose the “heart healthy” option.They snack every few hours to keep their energy up.
Yet they become hungrier, heavier, more inflamed, more tired and more metabolically unwell.
At ProLongevity, we see this again and again. The question is not simply whether a food has a health halo. The question is what that food does inside your body. That is also why we use tools such as glucose monitoring and personalised coaching to help people understand their own response to food, rather than simply handing them another generic diet sheet. You can read more about that approach here: Health Packages Designed Around You.
The anger of realising you were wrong
There is a personal thread running through this episode that will resonate with many people who have changed their mind about nutrition. Sameer talks about anger. I understand that. For many years, I practised as a conventional community pharmacist. I believed, sincerely, that we were helping people by suppressing blood glucose, lowering cholesterol, treating blood pressure and adding more medication when the numbers did not move in the desired direction. But what if the numbers were only the smoke alarm? What if the fire was metabolic dysfunction? What if the food environment was driving disease, and the pharmaceutical system was often managing the consequences rather than dealing with the cause?
That is not an argument against medicine. Drugs can be essential, sometimes life-saving. But it is an argument against pretending that medication alone can solve chronic diseases driven by diet, lifestyle, insulin resistance, inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction. This is the same philosophy that led me to become known as The Pharmacist Who Gave Up Drugs: not because drugs are never useful, but because the “pill for every ill” model is fundamentally inadequate for modern chronic disease. Sameer’s story is powerful because it follows the same pattern I have seen in many health professionals, researchers and informed patients: conventional advice fails, symptoms accumulate, then a deeper search begins.
The evolutionary question: what are humans adapted to eat?
A major part of the conversation explores human evolution. Sameer argues that to understand nutrition, we need to ask what humans were eating before agriculture, before ultra-processed food, before seed oils, before constant snacking, and before modern dietary guidelines. This is where the discussion gets especially interesting!
He talks about the evidence from anthropology, including nitrogen isotope analysis, a method used to infer where an organism sat in the food chain. In simple terms, the nitrogen signature in bones can help researchers estimate whether an animal was eating plants, herbivores, or other animals higher up the food chain. Sameer’s interpretation is that early humans were not marginal meat eaters. They were highly carnivorous, or at least heavily dependent on animal foods for much of human evolutionary history. This does not mean that every modern human must eat a carnivore diet but it does challenge the assumption that red meat is an alien, dangerous food and that grains, seed oils and ultra-processed plant-based foods are somehow the natural default. If anything, the evolutionary argument points in the opposite direction.
For listeners who want to explore Sameer’s wider work, his own site is here: Sameer Dossani. His content focuses on gut health, food triggers, IBD, ancestral nutrition and personalised approaches rather than generic one-size-fits-all advice.
Agriculture: progress or nutritional compromise?
Another important theme is the agricultural revolution. We often talk about farming as progress and in many ways, it was. It allowed settled communities, population growth, cities, written language, trade and civilisation. But biologically, the story is more complicated.Sameer points out that when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, health markers appear to have worsened in many populations. Brain size, height, skeletal robustness and dental health are all part of that debate. The point is not to romanticise the past. Hunter-gatherer life was not easy. Infection, trauma and childbirth were dangerous. Nobody is suggesting we should return to the Stone Age. But from a nutritional perspective, agriculture may have been a survival strategy rather than an optimal-health strategy. When large fatty animals became scarce, humans adapted. They ate what was available. Grains and starches helped populations survive.
But survival food is not optimal food.
That distinction matters today, because the modern food system has taken agricultural staples and transformed them into something even further removed from evolutionary nutrition: ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, low-nutrient, high-carbohydrate, high-seed-oil products that hijack appetite while failing to nourish the body properly. This is one reason I continue to argue that weight gain is not simply a matter of weak willpower. It is often a symptom of metabolic dysfunction. I explored this same issue in relation to modern weight-loss drugs here: A Guide to Weight Loss Injections: GLP-1s, Side Effects, Food Noise and Metabolic Health.
Species-appropriate nutrition
Sameer repeatedly returns to the idea of a species-appropriate diet. That phrase will be uncomfortable for some people, because it cuts across modern dietary ideology. It challenges vegan assumptions, but also challenges lazy low-carb thinking. It asks us to start with human physiology rather than slogans.
- Humans are not cows.We are not gorillas.We are not machines.We are not calorie calculators.
We are primates with massive brains and relatively tiny guts. Primates with a unique evolutionary history. In the podcast, Sameer and I discuss the striking relationship between gut size and brain size. Compared with other primates, humans have a relatively much smaller gut combines with a much larger brain. That trade-off is hard to explain without considering the role of nutrient-dense, energy-dense, animal-based foods.
Again, this is not an instruction that everyone must eat only meat. But it is a serious challenge to the modern belief that the healthiest diet must always be low-fat, plant-heavy, grain-based and meat-restricted. For readers interested in a practical low-carbohydrate starting point, see: Your Guide to a Keto Diet.
Diet ideology versus clinical humility
One of the things I appreciated most about this conversation is that Sameer is not simply replacing one ideology with another. He was once vegan. He is now a low-carb, keto and carnivore health coach. But the real message is not “join my tribe”. The better message is:
Be willing to challenge your assumptions when your health is failing.
- That applies to vegans.It applies to carnivores.It applies to doctors.It applies to pharmacists.It applies to anyone who has outsourced their thinking to guidelines, food marketing or social media certainty.
Sameer makes the point that many people are trapped by beliefs. Sometimes the belief is ethical. Sometimes it is nutritional. Sometimes it is simply, “I could never change.” But if the current approach is not working, the honest thing to do is ask better questions. That is exactly the mindset behind ProLongevity Essentials: simple, structured, evidence-informed health education for people who want to improve metabolic health without guesswork.
Autoimmune disease, metabolic syndrome and the common root
One of the strongest ProLongevity themes in this episode is the connection between apparently separate diseases. Sameer’s own story includes metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, asthma and vitiligo. He describes how changing diet improved multiple issues, not just one. His asthma improved rapidly, while his skin changes took far longer.That is exactly what we often see clinically. People present with a list of separate diagnoses:
- raised blood glucose
- fatty liver
- hypertension
- reflux
- joint pain
- brain fog
- migraines
- autoimmune symptoms
- skin problems
- poor sleep
- weight gain
- fatigue
The conventional system tends to treat these as separate boxes, but biology is not organised into separate boxes. Metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, mitochondrial stress, nutrient deficiency, poor sleep, ultra-processed food exposure and insulin resistance can show up in different tissues in different ways.
- In one person, the dominant problem is diabetes.In another, it is fatty liver.In another, migraine.In another, reflux or bowel symptoms.In another, autoimmune disease.
The label changes. The underlying terrain may be similar. That is why I keep returning to metabolic health as the central issue. Poor metabolic health increases the risk of many of the diseases people fear most, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and dementia. I have written more about that broader risk picture here: What is Metabolic Syndrome?
What about the microbiome?
Towards the end of the episode, we touch on the microbiome which is another area where social media often becomes unhelpfully simplistic. Some people talk as though the microbiome is everything while others dismiss it almost entirely. Sameer’s position is more balanced: the microbiome matters, but it should not distract us from the basics. If someone is not eating well, sleeping properly, moving, getting daylight and removing the major dietary antagonists, then obsessing about probiotics may be majoring in the minors. That is exactly right. The microbiome is not a magic supplement problem, its an ecosystem. And ecosystems respond to inputs. Change the food environment, and the microbial environment changes too.
Watch the full episode
This is a wide-ranging conversation covering:
- Sameer’s journey from veganism to animal-based nutrition
- metabolic syndrome and autoimmune disease
- why “healthy” advice can fail
- human evolution and ancestral diets
- nitrogen isotope evidence
- why agriculture may have been a survival compromise
- gut size, brain size and human physiology
- diet ideology and cognitive dissonance
- the microbiome
- why root-cause thinking matters
Watch the full episode here:
Final thought
The question “What should we eat?” sounds simple.
It is not.
But perhaps we can make it clearer by starting in the right place.
Not with food marketing.Not with dietary ideology.Not with calories.Not with cholesterol panic.Not with the assumption that the latest guideline must be the final word.
But with biology.
What kind of organism are we?What foods built us?What foods damage us?What happens when we remove the modern dietary signals that drive hunger, inflammation and metabolic dysfunction?
That is the conversation Sameer Dossani and I explore in this episode.
And it is exactly the kind of conversation we need if we are serious about helping people become metabolically healthy, not merely medicated.
Need help applying this to your own health?
If this conversation makes you question your own diet, weight, hunger, energy or metabolic health, ProLongevity Essentials gives you a structured, pharmacist-led way to start rebuilding health without guesswork.
For people using, stopping, or considering weight-loss injections, these articles may also help:
- How to Prevent Weight Regain After Stopping Mounjaro or Ozempic
- How to Save Money on Mounjaro or Ozempic Without Regaining Weight
- GLP and Starvation Mode: Facts and Fiction
Because the goal is not simply to lose weight.
The goal is to build a healthier metabolism, a stronger body and a way of eating that works with your biology rather than against it.
0
0 comments
What should Humans Eat?
powered by
skool.com/prolongevity-essentials-8320
ProLongevity Essentials | Free | Pharmacist-Led Community
Suggested communities
Powered by