So Humans Are Indeed Designed to Eat Meat?

[Pickle Juice]

Inspired by this thread: http://forum.veggieviews.com/threads/are-humans-designed-to-eat-meat.1686/ I am interested in the reasoning behind the notion that yes, humans are designed to eat meat, evolved to eat meat, would not have evolved to our present state without meat, can be perfectly and optimally healthy while eating meat at every meal, and that those who disagree are in some kind of foolish denial, and when we open our big mouths about it we make all the smart vegetarians look very ignorant and stupid to all the enlightened and supremely intelligent carnists out there.

My problems with this kind of argument are thus:

We live in a meat-biased world. Doctors of medicine get almost no education on human nutrition at all, so to expect anthropologists to be able to interpret scanty evidence that is hundreds of thousands of years old without relying on the propaganda that meat is essential to human nutrition, is, well, silly.

Correlation does not equal causation. We ate meat during the Ice Age because there wasn't much else once the climate change killed off much of the tropical flora ancient humans lived on. And we evolved. We are still evolving. It's not like you can stop evolving, unless you go extinct. But to claim that meat eating is responsible for how we evolved actually isn't good science. Diet in general is rarely to never considered a factor in the evolution of any other species.

Has anyone ever seen a truly healthy human being? Our current estimation of human health is based on a meat-eating populace. If, for example, you have a population of people with an average cholesterol count of 378 mg/dl, that's your baseline for average. But is it healthy? Hell no.

But on to the crux of my issue. If, as many people suggest, it doesn't matter that humans are indeed designed to eat meat, evolved to eat it, and are perfectly healthy while consuming it, what matters is whether it is ethical, um, huh? It seems that people actually do believe that meat can be a vital and necessary component to human nutrition, so if it is, how long do you think you could live on your ethics if meat really is an essential source of nutrients humans are designed to eat? How can anyone live and thrive without it if human evolution is dependent upon it? How many moms are you going to convince to give up feeding meat to their children if meat is an essential part of a healthy human diet?

Either humans require meat, or they don't. If they don't, they never did. If Donald Watson can make it to his mid-nineties on a vegan diet, that is evidence that meat is not an essential or even desirable part of human nutrition. I've been without it for coming up to thirty five years myself, and simple logic tells me that if I were designed to eat meat I'd have died a long time ago.

I'm all for the ethics. I just don't understand the reluctance to say no, I don't think humans were designed to eat meat any more than cattle were designed to eat fish meal.

So instead of possibly derailing the other thread, I wanted to ask my questions in a new thread, and put it in the debate forum, in hopes people will attempt to defend their reasoning. Because I mostly just don't get the idea that yes, humans are designed to eat meat, but what's important is the ethics behind choosing not to. If we were truly obligate carnivores, or even obligate omnivores, our ethics wouldn't be enough to keep us from dying from a lack of essential nutrients, and to argue that humans are evolved to eat meat implies that we will become ill and possibly die if we don't eat it.

 

[Blobbenstein]

some races have evolved to eat dairy, and have become more lactose tolerant. But that doesn't mean we have to eat dairy; the same, I would say, is probably true of meat. Maybe if we hadn't had meat in our evolutionary past, our digestive system would be slightly different.

 

[Freesia]

http://www.eco-friendly-africa-travel.com/longevity-diet.html

I just want to reference to that again.

 

[Lord Snot]

I don't understand your thread, since nobody in the other one argued that we need meat or are in any way obligate carnivores? Just that we have adapted to be able to digest and get nutrition from meat, and we can survive and be healthy on an omnivorous diet. Therefore many of us believe the health arguments for not eating any meat aren't very robust or convincing, so for us it comes down to which is the better diet ethically.

The thread asked "are humans designed to eat meat?" and nobody said "yes, humans need meat to survive". Most said "we have evolved to get nutrition from animal and plant sources, so we have a choice whether to eat meat or not and that choice should be based on ethics since we won't die from not eating meat".

 

[Envy]

http://www.eco-friendly-africa-travel.com/longevity-diet.html

I just want to reference to that again.

dat low-calorie diet.

 

[FortyTwo]

I don't understand your thread, since nobody in the other one argued that we need meat or are in any way obligate carnivores? Just that we have adapted to be able to digest and get nutrition from meat, and we can survive and be healthy on an omnivorous diet. Therefore many of us believe the health arguments for not eating any meat aren't very robust or convincing, so for us it comes down to which is the better diet ethically.

The thread asked "are humans designed to eat meat?" and nobody said "yes, humans need meat to survive". Most said "we have evolved to get nutrition from animal and plant sources, so we have a choice whether to eat meat or not and that choice should be based on ethics since we won't die from not eating meat".

Yeah. Anything else, I believe, is stretching it. It'd be nice to think that the evolution of humans was not affected by meat and we kind-of added it in later, but that seems highly unlikely based on the way our bodies have shaped up, and even if it improbably ended up being true, it's probably not the best argument to use in the face of an already-meat-obsessed culture.

 

[mlp]

I don't think there is such a thing as an "obligate omnivore" - it's kind of a contradiction in terms. An omnivore by definition can eat a wide variety of food, and is not dependent on eating certain specific foods.

I think that the argument that we are "designed" not to eat any meat is as flawed as the argument that we are obligate carnivores - neither history nor science support either argument.

 

[FortyTwo]

I don't think there is such a thing as an "obligate omnivore" - it's kind of a contradiction in terms. An omnivore by definition can eat a wide variety of food, and is not dependent on eating certain specific foods.

I think that the argument that we are "designed" not to eat any meat is as flawed as the argument that we are obligate carnivores - neither history nor science support either argument.

Which also brings up the point which was brought up in the original thread - "designed" is a strange way of putting it in the first place. There's no goal to the process of organic evolution, and whether one believes in a deity's intervention or not, there's no question of the reality of this process.

 

[das_nut]

We have a digestive tract that can handle meat, especially meat prepared with the use of fire (i.e. cooking). Out of the other great apes, our nearest relatives eat meat in the wild (chimps and bonobos), while our slightly more distant relative eats a vegetarian diet (gorillas), and the next nearest relative eats meat again (orangs). None of them, as far as I know, are carnivores. But three out of four are omnivores.

We we probably have a digestive tract that evolved on a diet which included meat.

As far as I can tell, based on research and educated guesses, we probably evolved to be opportunistic meat eaters originally. Even in hunter-gatherer societies, plant-based food provides the bulk of the calories consumed, except in climates where plant material is partially unavailable as a food source (subarctic people). Our skills at hunting and fishing were probably not as well developed during most of our evolution. (This is a nice way of saying "stop assuming that hunter-gatherers are 'primitive'" - their hunting and fishing skills have most likely evolved to be more effective, similar to how other groups farming skills have evolved to be more effective.)

In short, we were probably lousy hunters, and when we did "hunt", it wasn't usually to take down mammoths in a stereotypical cave-man way - I suspect we were eating a lot of frogs, turtles, etc - small creatures even a child could easily catch. The bulk of our diet was most likely plants for most of our evolution.

And lets not ignore the agrarian evolution - it appears that we have had genetic shifts since we first took up farming in large numbers. If we evolved to eat meat, many of us have also probably evolved to eat grains.

 

[Tom L.]

My take on this: small amounts of foods of animal origin can be tolerated by most people, but they're not necessary- at least not with vitamin B-12 supplementation. (I suppose those long-lived communities mentioned in that link from Freesia's post are getting B-12 from somewhere, but I'm not taking any chances.) Most people in Europe and North America eat at least moderately large amounts of animal-derived foods, but going by the people I know personally, I can't figure out if their health problems are caused by what they eat or their lack of exercise.

 

[Josh James xVx]

I'd like to think I have a passable grasp on the English language and on the construction of ideas, but for the life of me I can't comprehend what the OP of this thread is actually trying to argue.

It's like he/she is shadowboxing with these imaginary people from that other thread who were arguing in favor of eating meat. I read that thread. I posted in that thread. I didn't see a single person saying eating meat was okay or that humans need it. Where's the source of this apparent outrage and frustration? Are you angry that we acknowledge that our ancestors almost certainly ate meat.

Does evidence infuriate you? Does intellectual honesty?

 

[FortyTwo]

Someone doesn't need to have clear-cut opposition to argue a point. Behind threads like this, there's usually the motivation to get a certain viewpoint off of one's chest. What's so bad about that? I might not entirely agree with what PJ is saying here, as I stated previously in this thread, but I don't see why you seem to think the reasons behind starting it are so obscure.

 

[Josh James xVx]

Someone doesn't need to have clear-cut opposition to argue a point. Behind threads like this, there's usually the motivation to get a certain viewpoint off of one's chest. What's so bad about that? I might not entirely agree with what PJ is saying here, as I stated previously in this thread, but I don't see why you seem to think the reasons behind starting it are so obscure.

Because this person is promoting a type of intellectual dishonesty I abhor - a needless appeal to an idealized world view. Let me give you another example. A guy I was debating with a few years ago about the existence of a personal deity proclaimed that he didn't want to live in a world where suffering was prevalent and served no greater purpose. Well, too effing bad, buddy! You do! Live with it! Deal with it! You can't plug your ears and close your eyes and chant "I'm not listening!" like a little child when you're presented with facts and evidence that challenge your views of how the world ought to be. How the world ought to be matters far less than how the world actually is. We can change the world, but we can't pretend it's an idealized version of its actual self. There's no honesty and no purpose in trying to promote the idea that humans evolved to be exclusive herbivores. The evidence for that is shaky at best and doesn't hold up to careful analysis.

 

[FortyTwo]

I agree fundamentally with your stance on the subject, but not on the idea that the thread was started defensively, or for no reason.