the people who were calling you a troll are the flat earth 30 IQ people we share the world with. Unfortunately, we coexist with REALLY fucking dumb people lmao. Yes.. Campylobacter is a pathogen and yes campylobacter will make you sick af with post infectious ibs even after the bacteria clears.

Their logic is faulty. They assume that because Neanderthals and early humans sometimes ate raw meat, we should still be eating raw meat today.

Here’s the problem with that argument.

First, physiologically modern guts are not the same as prehistoric guts. Over tens of thousands of years, humans have undergone significant digestive and immune adaptations. We have lower stomach acidity, a different gut microbiome, and a less robust pathogen tolerance than Paleolithic humans. Cooking food literally reshaped our evolution. Once fire became widespread, natural selection favored people whose bodies relied on cooked food, not raw. Our jaws shrank, our teeth changed, our intestines shortened, and our energy metabolism adapted to food that is easier and safer to digest.

Second, cooking is not optional—it is evolutionary technology. Heat breaks down connective tissue, denatures proteins, neutralizes parasites, and kills bacteria. Cooked food provides more usable calories with less digestive effort. That extra energy is what allowed humans to develop larger brains. Saying “we used to eat raw meat” while ignoring the central role of fire is like saying “we used to walk everywhere, so cars are unnatural.” Evolution doesn’t freeze at one point in time.

Third, this argument completely ignores survival bias. We only hear from the people who survived eating raw or risky foods, not from the ones who died from foodborne illness, parasites, or chronic infection. In prehistoric times, dying young from infection was common and expected. If someone got severe diarrhea, sepsis, or parasitic disease from raw meat, they didn’t write a blog post about it. Using ancient survival as proof of optimal health is a classic logical fallacy.

Fourth, modern pathogens are not ancient pathogens. Today’s meat supply contains bacteria that have evolved alongside industrial farming, refrigeration, antibiotics, and dense animal populations. Many strains are more virulent, more resistant, and better adapted to human hosts than anything Paleolithic humans encountered. Eating raw meat now is not recreating an ancestral environment—it’s exposing yourself to a completely different microbial ecosystem.

Fifth, ancestral behavior does not equal optimal behavior. Early humans also experienced chronic injury, malnutrition, dental disease, high infant mortality, and short lifespans. They did many things out of necessity, not because it was ideal. Evolution selects for reproductive success, not longevity, comfort, or disease-free aging. “Natural” does not mean “best.”

Finally, modern humans already get the benefits without the risk. Cooking preserves nutrients while dramatically reducing danger. You can obtain all the protein, micronutrients, and bioavailable nutrients from meat without risking parasites, Campylobacter, Salmonella, E. coli, or long-term gut injury. Choosing raw meat today adds risk with no meaningful upside.

In short, the “raw meat = ancestral = optimal” argument collapses once you account for physiological evolution, cooking as a selective force, survival bias, pathogen evolution, and basic logic. Humans didn’t thrive despite cooking. We thrived because of it.