There are several clues that indicate that humans were not meant to be
carnivores.
- To start with, humans get easily sick if they eat raw meat, a sign that
neither their stomach nor their immune system are designed for meat.
Real carnivores have stronger stomachs that also "eat" the parasites, bacteria
and worms of rotting meat.
- Humans cannot digest meat well: mostly they have to cook it. Carnivores
don't cook. Humans began eating meat on a large scale after the invention of
fire.
- Humans are the only primates that eat meat (any animal can eat meat in
small quantities, but no primate eats meat on a regular basis).
- Humans who eat a lot of meat get heart disease, cancer, diabetes,
osteoporosis, and all sorts of degenerative diseases. Carnivore animals who
eat a lot of meat live healthy lives.
- When they don't abuse of meat, humans live very long lives by the standards
of the animal kingdom.
- Humans need to sleep about the same amount of time as other herbivores,
who sleep a lot less than carnivores.
- Human "canine" teeths are shared with horses, not with carnivores. There is no carnivore that has teeth like our canines. Horses have them. Whatever their function, it is not to eat meat.
- Humans are the only carnivore that enjoys putting "sauces" on meat. In fact, very few humans would eat meat cooked with no sauces. What sauces do is to hide the taste of meat.
- If a vegetarian diet were dangerous, half the population of India would be
dead or very sick. On the other hand, in the places where the diet is mainly
carnivorous, people do get sick and die by the thousands of their diet.
- It is fairly easy for a meat-eater to become a vegetarian; it is difficult for a vegetarian to eat meat. This is a sign that the human digestive system has to be trained from childhood to digest meat, otherwise it wouldn't.
- As a world traveler, i noticed that the percentage of vegetarians among independent traveler is way higher than in any of their countries. After enough years, i started realizing that it's just natural selection at work: meat eaters are more likely to get sick when they travel, and therefore are more likely to stop traveling. All it takes is a slightly different way of cooking the meat and humans cannot digest it anymore.
- At a personal level, i have always noticed that my friends who eat meat are afflicted with weak health, get easily injured and are more likely to get a flue. Needless to say, they would claim that this has nothing to do with meat, and that they would be sicker and weaker if they stopped eating it.
- Last but not least, most humans are disgusted by dead animals. If you see
a dead cat or dog or raccoon in the street, brains and entrails all splattered
on the asphalt, you are more likely to vomit than to salivate the way a real
carnivore would.
Meat is the primordial fast food. At some point humans realized that they
could absorb a lot of nutrients (notably, proteins) by just eating someone
else's brain. Humans were cannibals before they were carnivores. The human
brain was the first meat item in the menu (it is also one of the easiest to
digest for non-carnivore). Then humans started eating also other animals,
but to this day they are disgusted at the idea of eating most animals.
Humans still don't eat the majority of animals. The reason they
started eating animals is simple: it was easier than hunting and eating humans.
Why did humans started eating human brains? I think it was one of the many
accidental discoveries of human civilization: humans were killers before they
were cannibals, and one day they realized that they could eat the brains of
their victims, and that the brains were highly nutritional. My feeling is that
"hunting" is just an evolution of "fighting". Humans are equipped with an
uncanny ability and passion to kill fellow humans. It is an art in itself.
Humans were killers from the very beginning. They became cannibals much later,
more or less by accident. They became meat eaters and animal hunters even
later.
Fish is a different story. Humans can and do eat raw fish with a relatively
high chance of not getting sick. And there is evidence that a fish diet
is not easily replaced by a vegetarian diet.
I would be happy to list counter-arguments that meat is a natural diet for
humans. So far i haven't found one. Many readers send me links to "scientific"
studies but either the studies were done by meat companies (...) or they end up
proving the opposite (e.g., the often repeated story that chimps eat meat too,
when in fact chimps "hunt" but it does not seem that the reason they hunt
animals is nutritional, and in any case meat represents at most 5% of their
diet).
Note that this is *not* an argument in favor of being vegetarian.
The point is that eating meat is unnatural. So are many other things that
we do, from wearing clothes to jailing people who steal food, from going to
work in offices to banning sex with underage girls. Civilizations
themselves are "unnatural". Just about everything we do in a day is "unnatural".
I am just saying that eating meat is "unnatural"
in that our body was not programmed to eat meat. There are many wildly
"unnatural" things we do. We can argue forever if it is good or bad to do
unnatural things (first we should define what is "good" and what is "bad",
which would be another long discussion). From the viewpoint of a diet, maybe
the "good/bad" and "natural/unnatural" discussions are a bit easier: your
body may have adapted to a lot of changes, but your stomach is still
fundamentally the stomach of a million years ago.
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