| HN Mirror

The article found at the URL submitted by OP ( https://plantbasednews.org/news/science/fermented-foods-huma... ) seems like classic blogspam, i.e. regurgitation, of this Harvard Gazette article:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/02/did-fermented...

IMHO HN staff should, as the often do in such cases, update the OP link to point to the Harvard Gazette article.

As for the questioned passage, it appears to originate from the author of the Harvard Gazette article, reading there:

"This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the human large intestine is proportionally smaller than those of other primates, suggesting that we adapted to food that was already broken down by the chemical process of fermentation."

Thankfully, the perspective study itself appears open access:

.https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3

And we can thus check it for addressing the meat consumption hypothesis, and indeed, we find:

"[…]

A smaller colon may reflect a reduction of dependence on fibrous plant material, given that a major function of the colon is to house bacteria that aid in the breakdown of enzyme-resistant carbohydrates to SCFAs. Did a shift to meat-eating, as suggested by Milton, permit this drastic reduction in colon size in the human lineage? Indeed, humans and members of the order Carnivora share a small colon size. However, the gut transit time in Carnivora is much faster than in humans. Although Milton postulates that this difference is due to our evolutionary history as plant eaters96, another explanation is that colon reduction follows from a reduced need to break down fibrous plant material within the digestive tract due increased bioavailability of nutrients before food is consumed—i.e., external fermentation (Fig. 1).

[…]"

As for the affiliations:

I can't find much on the obvious outlier among the author list, albeit I didn't check for very long, only an old interview here which appears partially misleading NOT due to content but due to what seem like incorrect social media references:

https://voyageatl.com/interview/meet-matthew-bagshaw-christi...

And an archive of their website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012150/https://www.hungr...

The work breakdown given at the end of the paper in the contributions section looks like the following:

"K.L.B. and E.E.H. conceived the paper, K.L.B. and E.E.H. compiled data and analysis, K.L.B., E.E.H., and C.H. wrote the manuscript, with E.E.H. focusing on metabolic and nutrition components, E.E.H. on human evolution components, and K.L.B. on fermentation and culture components. All authors contributed to the final editing process."

Hope that clears things up for people arriving later to the comments section, and perhaps offers further avenues for exploration, albeit I'd advise caution as to avoid accidentally creating a tempest in a teapot