Douglas Schorr

They’re dismantling millions of years of biological truth. The evidence is right there in your pet’s food bowl—and your own declining mental health.

Life began with three absolutes: water, heat, and sunlight. When CO₂ joined this trinity, it allowed plants, masters of energy creation and Earth’s dominant Kingdom to thrive. Its flourishing enabled the advance of the equally diverse Animal Kingdom, mainly because one needs the other just as Adam and Eve are useless separated. This is how it happened, and in a perverse way, it is all about eating:

Plants achieved perfection by turning CO₂ into their primary food, with other elements serving as supplements. Animals, including us, faced a more complex challenge. Firstly, we cannot survive for long without what plants discharge as a waste product—oxygen. Secondly, to thrive, we must consume others and process our food through uniquely evolved digestive systems.

Viewed from another angle, because animals can’t create energy directly from sunlight, our survival depends on our ability to eat the right stuff, the material expected by our unique systems of digestion. Each in our own way has to hunt, gather, and process food through an intricate system of organs, culminating in the mitochondria’s conversion of glucose to energy. While oxygen plays a vital role in this process, it’s just one component. Miss a meal, and the countdown to death begins—whether that’s days or weeks depends on our evolutionary heritage.

Every animal’s life connects to plants somewhere in the food chain. The insect world—Earth’s largest and most diverse animal family—demonstrates this perfectly. From soil-dwelling worms to wood-boring beetles, each species has carved out its unique dietary niche. In African bushveld, you can witness this magnificent specialization: grazers, browsers, and diggers coexist because each has evolved to process different parts of the available vegetation. Meanwhile, carnivores patrol the edges, waiting for the vulnerable—the young, old, sick, or isolated.

When our ancestors descended from the trees, we weren’t included in the patrols. We had no natural weapons suited to our new ground-based life and few skills beyond skulking in the shadows and darting out to steal scraps left by a senior predator. Yet, within a few million years, we became the apex predator!

Our ascent to apex predator status began with necessity: we consumed our prey completely—nose to tail, not from choice but for survival. This ‘waste not’ approach provided the diverse nutrients that fuelled our evolution, creating a natural cycle where humans, animals, and plants existed in beneficial interdependence. Plants produce the “free oxygen” animals need, while our expelled methane and CO₂ feed the atmosphere, which feeds the plants, which feed our prey, which feed us.

We thrived on a diet of meat, fat, and animal organs. That food was the driver of our development simply because it is the food that our gut evolved to process. While those who migrated to Eurasia had a far greater range of fruit, nuts, and grasses to experiment with, it was minuscule and seasonal. Only meat and fat were in the stomach all the time.

Our success story began unravelling just 5,000 years ago. Agriculture started innocently enough as a supplement to hunting but spawned something far more dangerous: bureaucracy. First came religious doctrine, then ideological movements, and finally today’s professional politicians—each layer moving us further from our biological truth.

The last 60 years have accelerated this departure dramatically. Today’s power brokers push policies that not only ignore but actively oppose our evolutionary dietary needs. They’re dismantling both human health and natural ecological cycles while blaming the very foods that built our species.

Modern medicine’s ability to extend lifespan masks a devastating reality: each generation starts failing earlier than the last. While our ancestors died from external threats, we’re dying from internal collapse—expensively maintained by pharmaceuticals until our final breath.

And perhaps most telling is what we’re doing to our pets. We’ve imposed our misguided dietary ideology on creatures who, in their natural state, are pure carnivores. We feed them processed cereal-based ‘pet food’ and then medicate them through the inevitable diseases that follow—just as we do ourselves.

History shows that controlling food controls populations. But never before has this control been so complete, so global, or so destructive to both human and animal health, while mounting restrictions on real food production are devastating both farm and wild ecosystems.

Our pets’ deteriorating health mirrors our own, but we’re told it is natural; it is what happens when you age. As our mental faculties crash under a deluge of sugar, we make decisions through brain fog rather than clear thinking. Nature’s law is simple: eat what you evolved to eat or fade away. There is no third option.