The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Speaking of Vitamin B12 (funny you would mention that, because it's cropped up in my life today), anyone know of any information on how much is in different kinds of eggs?  I have a friend who has some health problems, and she's been told not to eat any red meat for a while.  She was told that duck and goose eggs are a better source of Vitamin B12 than chicken eggs are (is that perhaps because of the typical factory-egg-layer diet?), so I've been making some phone calls, trying to find anyone who has duck eggs right now (no luck, but I'm going to try posters at the feed stores when I go into town again). 

I know, I just totally side-tracked the thread, Paul, so if you want to cut this out and move it, go right ahead!

Kathleen

Quote from: Warren David on Yesterday at 20:02:32
I always thought that one of the main appeals of grass fed beef was that animal was less likely to have been given antibiotics.

I

Tinknal wrote:
I raise my own beef.  If you raise your own you get to control what they get and don't get.  My cattle get free feed grass or hay their whole lives, and varying amounts of grain.  I wouldn't feed grain all the time but for the fact that I get a pickup load of bread every two weeks and have to feed it up.

I'm not sure if you addressed my comment about the antibiotics? I know virtually nothing about raising cattle so it's nice to be able to put questions to those that do. I read an article somewhere that the grain fed cattle tend to need more medications. For all I know this could have been written by somebody that knows nothing about it or has some sort of agenda. What is your opinion?
I'm very interested in this because I may want to raise some cattle myself eventually.

Ruminants' multiple stomachs and cud-chewing have evolved to digest and thrive on the cellulose in leaves. Grain is basically poisonous to them, and they are often medicated to assist their survival on a grain-based diet.
New Zealand has no 'tradition' of feeding  grain to beef cattle, but dairy farmers are increasingly supplementing pasture with  palm-kernel from plantations on clear felled Indonesian rainforest. Eeek
Sorry, all rather OT, but couldn't help myself! I edited this post a bit, but I'm comfortable maintaining my opinion that ruminants, cattle especially, are not designed to eat grain.

Warren, the vast majority of disease in grain fed cattle is caused by the fact that these cattle tend to be kept in confinement with thousands of other cattle, not the grain per se.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#E._coli

Escherichia coli, although considered to be part of the normal gut flora for many mammals (including humans), has many strains. Strain E. coli 0157:H7 is associated with human illness (and sometimes death) as a foodborne illness. A study by Cornell University [23] has determined that grass-fed animals have as much as 80% less of this strain of E. coli in their guts than their grain-fed counterparts, though this reduction can be achieved by switching an animal to grass only a few days prior to slaughter. Also, the amount of E. coli they do have is much less likely to survive our first-line defense against infection: stomach acid. This is because feeding grain to cattle makes their normally pH-neutral digestive tract abnormally acidic; over time, the pathogenic E. coli becomes acid-resistant.[24] If humans ingest this acid-resistant E. coli via grain-feed beef, a large number of them may survive past the stomach, causing an infection.[25] A study by the USDA Meat and Animal Research Center in Lincoln Nebraska (2000) has confirmed the Cornell research.[26][dubious – discuss]

I was dating a sickly vegetarian who read this book and told me it was shit. Then I convinced her to start eating meat, and within a week she wasn't sickly any more. Totally an anecdote, totally doesn't mean anything, but it does make me think it's worth the time to look for more information.

Travis, I'm pretty sure that study has been debunked.  I'll look around later.

I got a note from somebody that thinks that the vegetarians are getting picked on a bit.  I think there is a bit of truth in this concern, although I think people are doing a pretty good job of qualifying their stuff.  For the most part, I think the omnis here just outnumber the vegetarians. 

So, I would like to ask folks to word their omni posts with respect to a few things:

A)  vegetarians are attempting to live a more evolved life - respectful of other living things and and the planet in general.  Most of the omnis they know shop at safeway and dine out a macdonalds.  I think everybody here could admit that nearly all vegetarian diets are better than that type of omni diet.  It is possible that a permie-omni diet is more evolved than a typical vegetarian diet - but it is not utter fact - and it might end up being utterly false.  I think there is lot of excellent info the vegetarians can bring to the table here.

B)  Some people have tried the vegetarian path and later changed their mind.  Often, those folks want to "save" other vegetarians from their mistakes.  I think voicing concern for others along this line is valid, but let's also keep in mind that there millions of people that have thrived on a vegetarian diet for decades or even their entire life.  Therefore, while some people thrive on omni, that doesn't mean that everybody will. 

Sorry for this interruption.  I'm gonna post this in a few threads in the hopes that certain threads will be more about building collective wisdom and less about trying to convert folks.

travis laduke wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#E._coli

Escherichia coli, although considered to be part of the normal gut flora for many mammals (including humans), has many strains. Strain E. coli 0157:H7 is associated with human illness (and sometimes death) as a foodborne illness. A study by Cornell University [23] has determined that grass-fed animals have as much as 80% less of this strain of E. coli in their guts than their grain-fed counterparts, though this reduction can be achieved by switching an animal to grass only a few days prior to slaughter. Also, the amount of E. coli they do have is much less likely to survive our first-line defense against infection: stomach acid. This is because feeding grain to cattle makes their normally pH-neutral digestive tract abnormally acidic; over time, the pathogenic E. coli becomes acid-resistant.[24] If humans ingest this acid-resistant E. coli via grain-feed beef, a large number of them may survive past the stomach, causing an infection.[25] A study by the USDA Meat and Animal Research Center in Lincoln Nebraska (2000) has confirmed the Cornell research.[26][dubious – discuss]

It isn't quite so cut and dried.  From Slate;

"But between 2000 and 2006, scientists began to take a closer look at the effect of diet on E. coli O157:H7 specifically. A different set of findings emerged to indicate that this particular strain did not, in fact, behave like other strains of E. coli found in cattle guts. Most importantly (in terms of consumer safety), scientists showed in a half-dozen studies that grass-fed cows do become colonized with E. coli O157:H7 at rates nearly the same as grain-fed cattle. An Australian study actually found a higher prevalence of O157:H7 in the feces of grass-fed rather than grain-fed cows. The effect postulated (and widely publicized) in the 1998 Science report—that grain-fed, acidic intestines induced the colonization of acid-resistant E. coli—did not apply to the very strain of bacteria that was triggering all the recalls."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242290/pagenum/2

Maybe we could use crop dusters to distribute grain all over the countryside so we could have free-range grain-fed beefs

travis laduke wrote:
Maybe we could use crop dusters to distribute grain all over the countryside so we could have free-range grain-fed beefs

My dad was raising pastured grain fed beef since before I was born.  I still do.  I really think it makes the best tasting beef.

On a more philosophical note has any heard of Joseph Cambel and heard his discussions on what the choice of being a vegetarian means in the larger spiritual context of symbol and religious myth?  He essentially says its the choice that spiritual esthetics take to deny the body what it craves and its the willful embrace of DEATH within the context of most world cultures.  .

FremanSurfer wrote:
On a more philosophical note has any heard of Joseph Cambel and heard his discussions on what the choice of being a vegetarian means in the larger spiritual context of symbol and religious myth?  He essentially says its the choice that spiritual esthetics take to deny the body what it craves and its the willful embrace of DEATH within the context of most world cultures.  .

Hm...that uses the word "myth" much differently than it is used in the thread title.

Aesceticism isn't necessarily the same as vegetarianism. For example, a lot of medieval European monks were vegetarian, and even had long periods of mandatory fasting as part of their service. Hovever, the economics of their role required vigorous labor, so they developed some extremely rich and caloric (and delicious) varieties of beer to allow themselves to be fully nourished without eating anything.

I think there's a spiritual acknowledgement of death involved in any attention we pay to food: to reap or to slaughter means cutting something down, and, on the other hand, starvation is death.

Vegetarianism has a special place in many religious traditions, but I'm not certain it has any special relationship with death.

Then again, I'm much more a fan of Walter Wink than of Joseph Campbell.

Just discovered this site and was sort of just putting a few posts up to flap my wings around here..  Then I get this really thoughtful reply with a great reference and I'm thinking Im gonna hang around a bit and check this place out.  very cool. 

Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
Her basic premise is that a vegan diet is very closely tied to strictly-controlled, topsoil-burning, fossil-dependent farming; that producing enough food for a vegan population means excluding (exterminating?) a forestful or prarieful of creatures from every kingdom and maintaining a monoculture where the only survivable niche for an animal is shaped like an operator of heavy machinery.

That premise is true...if you assume the food is produced in an industrial monoculture.  If you don't note this assumption, you read this and draw the conclusion that veganism leads to huge ecological destruction, instead of the truth which is that industrial monoculture leads to huge ecological destruction.  Read that premise again, but this time when you come to the word 'vegan', replace it with 'meat-eating'.  Holds every bit just as true.

I've heard it argued as an argument against veganism that more creatures are killed growing vegetables per acre than when raising animals for meat.  Of course they assume industrial monoculture.  I mean, all the insects killed by pesticide, and animals killed by heavy machinery during harvesting of cultivated land must exceed in number the animals raised and slaughtered for meat, right?  Until you remember that all those animals slaughtered for meat were fed grain produced by industrial monoculture.  Comparing creatures killed growing vegetables and orchard in a permaculture setting versus raising animals for meat in a permaculture setting would be silly, as nothing is killed growing vegetables besides insects and microbes in the simple acts of walking, occasional digging, etc.  That's random, unavoidable, just life.

Yeah we have to 'manage' wildlife now because we have 'too many' of them.  Yeah that's what happens when you essentially wipe out all natural predators.  We killed off all the predators because we were afraid that they would eat the animals we wanted to eat and also that they might eat us.  We don't have a deer plague, we have a wolf/cougar deficiency.

As far as grass vs. grain-fed beef, cows are fed grain because corn is cheap (through subsidies it is cheaper than the real cost of production) and this allows them to be temporarily held much closer together and centralized than nature would ever allow.  But cows not designed to eat grain, they are designed for grass and herbage.  Besides messing with the cow's stomach and health, grain makes them gain weight (product).  Beef from grain-fed cows is several times higher in saturated fat than beef from grass-fed cows.  Saturated fat is known to be a big player in heart disease, which is leading cause of death in the United States, not to mention obesity.  So whether it's about caring for the health and quality of life of the cows or about your own health, grass-fed > grain-fed.

As much as vegan/vegetarian may be morally commendable or superior to many people, a simple change of diet composition cannot save the planet.  Permaculture could though.

Joshua_TX wrote: Saturated fat is known to be a big player in heart disease, which is leading cause of death in the United States, not to mention obesity.

Much of the latest research suggests otherwise and there are a lot of people on fitness and low carb message boards that are saying how they have reversed  heart disease and related diseases by eating more saturated fat and cutting down on grains and other carbohydrate rich foods.
Here's some interesting pdf's on the subject of cholesterol, saturated fat etc. http://anthonycolpo.com/?page_id=442
I eat loads of saturated fat. I do not have heart disease nor am I obese. People get obese when they eat too many calories.
Are you overweight?

No I'm not overweight and when I say that saturated fat is known to be a factor for heart disease I am only echoing what pretty much all doctors and health associations have been saying for years.  Diet and health is a complex thing with many factors, plenty of people have diets high in saturated fat and don't have issues with heart disease or obesity.  Just like many smokers don't have cancer.  I checked out the link and I'm not sure if it is wise to place faith in the words of a physical conditioning specialist who uses sensationalistic language on his website claiming that the doctors have it all wrong and not only are saturated fat and cholesterol not associated with heart disease, but also claims choosing a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol is actually potentially dangerous.  You are free to believe anything you want though.  Peace. 

Joshua_TX wrote:when I say that saturated fat is known to be a factor for heart disease I am only echoing what pretty much all doctors and health associations have been saying for years. 

Yes and during that time people in general  have been cutting down on saturated fat but there is more heart disease and obesity now than there was when people didn't give it a thought.

Diet and health is a complex thing with many factors, plenty of people have diets high in saturated fat and don't have issues with heart disease or obesity.  Just like many smokers don't have cancer. 

Yes those pesky people that can always be used as an example to win any argument.

I checked out the link and I'm not sure if it is wise to place faith in the words of a physical conditioning specialist who uses sensationalistic language on his website claiming that the doctors have it all wrong and not only are saturated fat and cholesterol not associated with heart disease, but also claims choosing a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol is actually potentially dangerous.  You are free to believe anything you want though.  Peace. 

He used to have a message board a few years ago. It had a lot of very informed people on it. The only thing that spoiled it was him!  He is a bit of a hot head and would get into arguments about politics and loose his temper. I do think he has good information though. I have been to my doctors or in the hospital and been treated very nice and polite by obese doctors and nurses who were trying to tell me about nutrition. I think I would much prefer to get my nutrition advice from a lean, rude person than a fat, nice person.

Joshua_TX wrote:
No I'm not overweight and when I say that saturated fat is known to be a factor for heart disease I am only echoing what pretty much all doctors and health associations have been saying for years.

Pretty much "everyone" figures monoculture is the way to go too. The studies pegging saturated fats as bad... were pretty bad.... do doctors make more from teaching you how to eat or operating on you? Do you go there when you are healthy. Doctors just read textbooks to learn, many of them(the books) are quite old. Most doctors I have met are so busy doing their practice they do not continue research... they do read periodicals... but generally not any deep research. I have found my knowledge on some things to be far beyond that of the doctors. This is aside from the info they (at least where I live) are not allowed to give.... like what immunizations known side effects are. I had one say to me "now that you have done the research, I can nod my head, but I can't say anything".

Processed starch/sugar has more to do with our failing health... a good diet, vegan or not, should avoid pretty much any of these processed and dead foods. Most vegetable oils have transfats, which are bad and probably are GMO. Again a good vegan diet would be careful to avoid such things and many are also raw food people which avoids the problems of cooking veg oils.

I eat meat, but I try to be careful where it comes from, they are animals I personally have seen living in the field. I am just as careful where our veggies come from. I am trying to teach my Yf  to serve us more raw ones (she likes to cook everything). The only thing I am having problems with is sourcing milk. Fermenting is good too, but counter to much of our culture... and the bane of corporate lawyers (you want to sell what!).

Just my two cents....

doctors are there to promote the use of medications made by chemical companies, that's about it in a nut-shell. they know nothing of alternatives or the chemical residue issues in our food chain. like one doctor said when he saw i used alternatives "if they worked we'd be using them" sorry doc' there is no profit for chem' co's and hence then no kick back for doctors that is why they do not use alternatives.

len

Emerson White wrote:
I was dating a sickly vegetarian who read this book and told me it was shit. Then I convinced her to start eating meat, and within a week she wasn't sickly any more. Totally an anecdote, totally doesn't mean anything, but it does make me think it's worth the time to look for more information.

There's a lot of difference between a vegan/vegetarian on a healthy diet and one on a poor diet. I've been vegetarian all my life and no major health problems yet apart from a mild (not life threatening) allergic reaction to amoxicillin which probably has nothing to do with diet (my grandmother has the same sensitivity).  The key to being healthy as a veg*n (or any diet I imagine) is a balanced diet.

As for the whole omni vs veg*n debate I'm kinda sick of it all. There's generally a lot of animosity on both sides of the argument, and I get sick of answering the same questions over and over whenever I get into a debate with friends. It's refreshing to see such a rational and well-reasoned discussion!

I'm of the opinion that everyone should do their part to reduce negative impact upon local and global ecology. How people go about this doesn't really matter so much as long as it's a step, or several, away from the evils of monoculture, chemical dependency, factory farming and unsustainable food-miles.

So yeah, I can live with you permaculture practitioners eating meat, and I hope you lot can live with me being a permaculture vegetarian

Sam wrote:
So yeah, I can live with you permaculture practitioners eating meat, and I hope you lot can live with me being a permaculture vegetarian

Absolutely

The whole topic of living 'deathlessly' is, one should add, not for us (two) to ponder.
Non-vegan vegetarians are people who don't eat animals, for whatever reason, yet like meat eaters accept that animals are kept, used (f.e. milked) and ultimately killed for their food.

I guess you'll encounter all degrees of realization about this, just as you will with people growing a backyard garden without any edible plants in it.


And of course vegans come in all shapes and sizes as well :

"Smoking the hide.The deer was shot by the resident vegan, then processed and consumed by the interns."
(livingpermaculture.blogspot.com)

TheDirtSurgeon wrote:
For how many hundreds of millions of years now?  And it's not sustainable?  Holy crap, Batman, let's kill all those damn unsustainable animals right now!

Perhaps Travis is referring to overstocking? Or an imbalance due to livestock being confined in fields as opposed to free-ranging a-la buffalo?

hügel wrote:
Absolutely

The whole topic of living 'deathlessly' is, one should add, not for us (two) to ponder.
Non-vegan vegetarians are people who don't eat animals, for whatever reason, yet like meat eaters accept that animals are kept, used (f.e. milked) and ultimately killed for their food.

Yes, and you'll find a lot of debate and controversy between vegans and vegetarians because of this - vegetarians often receive almost the same level disdain as omnivores do by some vegans. Personally I don't consume dairy or purchase leather for the reason you highlight. I have considered cutting out eggs as well but I can make a distinction between an unfertilized (organic, free range) egg and, for example, a calf.... Yes, chickens still get killed in a commercial operation but, once we get settled on our new smallholding we'll have our own chickens which won't be killed (my whole family is vegetarian), and one more ethical dilemma will be resolved to my personal satisfaction.

And of course vegans come in all shapes and sizes as well :

"Smoking the hide.The deer was shot by the resident vegan, then processed and consumed by the interns."
(livingpermaculture.blogspot.com)

Some people would argue that the person in question isn't technically a vegan, especially from an ethical point of view.

I'm curious of how she plans to cross permaculture and raw fruitarian diet in a temperate climate ...

permaguy wrote:
I'm curious of how she plans to cross permaculture and raw fruitarian diet in a temperate climate ...

she certainly seems to have a lot of info on her site about warming greenhouses with compost, etc.
i think many people who are raw foodists (high fruit, obviously, the other kind doesn't cross with permaculture as well) generally move to locales that they can grow all of their own food. some people don't, but many do.
i originally heard about permaculture through raw fruit eaters and it is a huge concept in that movement, so i wouldn't discount them

I do personally think that a vegan diet seems to be healthiest, but that is in my experience. I think you can be very unhealthy on both vegan and meat eating diets, and the reverse is true as well.

I'd just like to add something to the debate as a means of clarifying something.

There seem to be two different spectrums that people are using to debate this, and often the two spectrums get crossed.

Spectrum A:
Extensive industrial Food Production ------> Extensive permaculture (animals or not). ---> (Hunting and Gathering??)

Spectrum B:
Vegan -------> Vegetarian------> Omnivore ---> Carnivore (most people falling into the omnivore or vegetarian categories).

Often what you'll see is someone from B calling out someone from B using argumentation from spectrum A.
Example:
a vegan says: Force-feeding grain to cows is cruel and unsustainable, thus omnivores are cruel and unsustainable.
a omnivore says: Plowing acres of land for vegetable/grain production is cruel and unsustainable, thus vegans are cruel and unsustainable.

Both statements are seemingly true, but they confuse the issues a bit.

So, there really are two debates going on. One is how "sustainable," or better, "regenerative" we can get with a particular diet, the other is how healthy a particular diet is for a single individual.

hope that helps.
william

William wrote:
a omnivore says: Plowing acres of land for vegetable/grain production is cruel and unsustainable, thus vegans are cruel and unsustainable.

This is assuming that vegans have to have grains in order to live. This isn't so. And we all know that fruits and vegetables can be grown sustainably.

And we all know that animals don't have to raised in factory farms on grains either. They can roam around and eat things that we don't and be sustainable.

It can work both ways, it just matters what your preference is in regards to ethics and what nutrition camp you belong to.

dustbin wrote:
This is assuming that vegans have to have grains in order to live. This isn't so. And we all know that fruits and vegetables can be grown sustainably.

No doubt fruit and vegetables (and nuts!) can be grown sustainably. I think the question might be rather whether you could have a group of, say, 100-300 people that could live for 10,000 years+ on fruits/nuts/veggies. Perhaps in the tropics, maybe not so much in a temperate climate, which lends itself to grains. The question not "if" they could be grown, but "would" they be grown.

Whether it's possible or not, and granted there have been many instances where such tribes did just that, I think the overwhelming history of humanity lends itself toward mutually sustaining relations between animals and humans, a relationship with includes the death and consumption of both.

Oh, as an aside, I don't eat meat (5+ years, but who knows what the future holds)
...just to get that out there.

william

I've deleted some posts here.  I would like to remind folks that bashing others is outside of my comfort zone and said bashing will be deleted. 

It might be wise to pop by the tinkering forum and read the be nice thread.

Hi Paul.
Thanks and sorry (to everyone who may have been offended).
best,
william

William wrote:
No doubt fruit and vegetables (and nuts!) can be grown sustainably. I think the question might be rather whether you could have a group of, say, 100-300 people that could live for 10,000 years+ on fruits/nuts/veggies. Perhaps in the tropics, maybe not so much in a temperate climate, which lends itself to grains. The question not "if" they could be grown, but "would" they be grown.

Whether it's possible or not, and granted there have been many instances where such tribes did just that,

I have been reading about this stuff for years but have never come across any information regarding a vegan tribe anywhere in the world.
Can you give me more information on this please?

Hi Warren,
This is interesting, even if a bit inconclusive.
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/employee/r/rmumme/FS101/ResearchPapers/StephaniePeske.html

Then there's this:
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/09/us/new-testing-on-fossil-remains-indicates-prehistoric-man-ate-balanced-diet.html

And this...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/shattering-the-meat-myth_b_214390.html

I don't know. For me, the jury is still out on this one.
best,
William

The Huffington Post article is terrible and should not be taken seriously. The other two articles basically suggest that ancient man was eating plants and animals and that maybe some pre-humans were herbivores.
One thing that modern day hunter gatherers go to great lengths to get their hands on is meat. There are no vegan tribes.

Warren David wrote:

One thing that modern day hunter gatherers go to great lengths to get their hands on is meat.

Because it's very hard to get enough calories otherwise, especially for males.  One has to eat literally pounds of roots or tubers a day to get sufficient calories.  Nuts are available only in the Fall

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
Because it's very hard to get enough calories otherwise, especially for males.  One has to eat literally pounds of roots or tubers a day to get sufficient calories.  Nuts are available only in the Fall

I think its more a question of fats and proteins

William wrote:
Hi Warren,
This is interesting, even if a bit inconclusive.
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/employee/r/rmumme/FS101/ResearchPapers/StephaniePeske.html

It's inconclusive because it was probably written by a freshman student for a low-level/intro science class. The bias shows through the poor and extremely selective use of and interpretation of some research and conclusions reached. It ignores most of the research that Jane Goodall did on chimpanzees, including their hunting and insect-eating habits which make up an important part of their omnivorous diet, which she and many other researchers after her have thoroughly documented in books, studies, and film. In other words, IMO, the paper and its conclusions are crap.

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
Because it's very hard to get enough calories otherwise, especially for males.  One has to eat literally pounds of roots or tubers a day to get sufficient calories.  Nuts are available only in the Fall

A little while ago I was reading about a people called the !Kung (yes their name has an exclamation mark at the front). They live in the Kalahari. Apparently a big part of their diet is mongongo nuts. They also eat meat etc. I read up a little more on them. One article stated that although the !Kung eat a lot of mongongo nuts they are not overly keen on them. As you can probably imagine, living in the Kalahari, they are not spoiled for choice.

They !Kung/San are extremely interesting and tough people.  They didn't always live in the desert apparently, they used to live in the mountains but were forced out.  Now they're even being forced out of the desert.    They're able to live under the toughest conditions as foragers, but have had a difficult time learning how to grow food.  They shouldn't have to - they should be allowed to live as they please, in my opinion. But other people want the land.  Having to grow food may make them more vulnerable to starvation compared to as foragers in which they did quite well in droughts when all the farmers around were starving.  They just eat more foods they don't like much, like those nuts.  I think there's a video of Bill Mollison teaching them some permaculture techniques.  I think it's in the "Permaculture Drylands" video.

H Ludi Tyler wrote:
They !Kung/San are extremely interesting and tough people. 

Yes indeed. I find all of the hunter gather groups around the world, fascinating.

Here's something a little more scientific.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/27/1104627108

While not a direct human ancestor, this hominid ate grass.

"This study provides evidence that Paranthropus boisei was not cracking nuts, but was instead eating mainly tropical grasses or sedges. It was not competing for food with most other primates, who ate fruits, leaves and nuts; but with grazers -- zebras' ancestors, suids [ancestors of pigs and warthogs] and hippos."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110502151343.htm