Are Humans Natural Meat Eaters?
I often hear the argument that humans are supposed to eat meat because we have canines. I wanted to take the time to write this blog post to debunk some popular myths out there.
When it comes down to it, we are natural plant eaters and our bodies are designed exactly for that.
Just because humans can eat meat doesn’t mean that we should. Yes, we can digest meat. However, it isn’t good for us and that shows in the way that it’s digested.
Our Earliest Diet
Dr. T Colin Campbell is a well-known professor and author. He wrote the book “The China Study.” He stated that when you look at history, humans only recently began eating meat.
Yes, we ate meat around 10,000 years ago, but in the grand scheme of things, our earliest diet consisted primarily of plants.
Canine Teeth
When it comes down to it, we don’t have the natural physiology that other animals that eat meat have.
Even though some people might argue that we have canines, we really don’t.
If you want to see what true canines look like, take a look at a lion. Those are true canines! Ours look nothing like that.
We couldn’t rip apart raw flesh with our teeth even if we wanted to, which is exactly what all animals who have true canines do.
Our “canine” teeth are to help us eat tougher foods such as apples.
Claws
Another reason that shows humans are herbivores is that we don’t have claws to rip apart our food. We have hands with fingernails that can peel oranges, not rip apart an animal.
All animals that eat meat have sharp and long fingernails that are used to grab onto and dig into flesh.
Our hands are perfectly adapted for eating plant foods. The most perfect example is picking fruit off a tree, such as an apple.
This is literally what we were meant to do, and it shows in how effortless it is.
Intestines
Another reason that we aren’t meant to be eating animals is that our intestines are totally different from animals that eat meat.
Humans have very long intestines, just like other herbivores.
Carnivores, on the other hand, have very short intestines. This is so the meat they eat can quickly pass out of their digestive systems so it doesn’t sit in there and rot.
When humans eat animal flesh, it literally rots in our intestines for days because of how long they are.
Common Sense
Despite all the scientific evidence showing that our human anatomy is the same as other herbivores and not carnivores, it’s just common sense that humans are not natural meat eaters.
If it was natural for us to eat meat, we would literally salivate at the sight of road kill, like other animals do.
We would be able to chase after and hunt our prey without the use of guns, bows & arrows, or anything else. After catching our prey, we would be able to bite into their raw flesh with our sharp canines and claws. Then, we would eat the meat raw without any digestive issues.
However, humans can’t do any of that.
We can’t hunt without the use of guns, we can’t tear flesh with our teeth and claws, we need to use knives. We can’t eat meat raw without getting severely sick.
All of these reasons and more just prove that eating meat is not what humans should be doing.
Conclusion
Even if humans used to be hunter-gatherers in the past, that’s not the point.
The point is that we live in 2018 and there is absolutely no need to eat meat. In the past, people might have had to hunt for reasons such as scarcity of plant foods. Now, we have plants available to us 24/7 in grocery stores.
There’s a great quote by William C. Roberts that I want to share with you to finish this blog post off. He is the editor of the American Journal of Cardiology. He said:
“Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”
This is so true.
Think of all the diseases and health issues eating meat causes us.
Do you really think that’s natural? You don’t see lions getting cancer from the meat that they are eating.
I hope you learned something from this post.
Next time you hear the argument “but humans are natural omnivores” hopefully you can use this article as a resource!
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