Meat (Part 1): Not a Natural Food
Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 12:00PM 
Let me correct that. Meat is a natural food for carnivores. It’s not a natural food for humans. Humans aren’t carnivores.
When we examine animals that are designed to thrive on a diet of meat, they share common traits. At first glance, we can recognize them from their sharp canine teeth and their talons or claws which they use to bring down their prey and tear the flesh from their bones.
Last I checked, humans aren’t so endowed. If you were placed in a field with a deer, with no weapons or tools, would you be able to run down that deer, tackle it, bite its throat, and kill it? Would you want to, for that matter? Or would you rather just walk over to that fruit tree over there? Mmm… peaches…
How about another example. If you place a baby in a playpen with a bunny and a banana, which is it more likely to eat. I think it’s safe to say the baby will eat the banana and play with the bunny every time.
We aren’t naturally drawn to eating animals any more so than we find the thought of eating raw flesh to be appealing. One must acquire the taste after being raised on cooked meat.
Even if one does come to fancy the eating of charred animal flesh, that doesn’t make our bodies any more suited to the task. What carnivores all have in common that we can’t see are very short intestinal tracts. This allows them to pass the meat through their digestive system quickly, before it putrefies. They also have very powerful livers that can handle neutralizing all the toxins that come with a meat-based diet.
Humans, on the other hand, have long intestinal tracts, measuring 10 to 12 times their body length, and livers that are comparatively quite weak. If we had to rely on tracking down and eating animals as a food source, I’d have to say evolution did a pretty crappy job in designing us.
Meat quite obviously isn’t something we’re designed to eat, but isn’t it a good idea anyway? After all, we’ve got fire and tools now, and we can handle much more effectively than in early times.
No. That doesn’t change the fact that meat isn’t the right food for our bodies, nor is it nutritionally sound. We'll examine why in the next post.
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Reader Comments (1)
Is that to say meat is bad for you? After all, we are capable of digesting meat and have been eating meat for ages.
I suppose that's not the question though, or rather not up for debate, since meat undeniably lacks the nutrients you can find in fruits and vegetables. Therefore a better question would be: what about the things meat *is* good for, such as high levels of creatinine and high protein? Long question short, can a tandem diet of meat and vegetables and fruits ("well balanced diet") still be considered healthy?