to meat or not to meat. Is it natural?

I just read an article on Alternet that claims that eating meat is not natural. I'm not a meat eater, and sincerely believe that steering clear of the stuff is a much better way to live one's life. In any case, this is what I had to say about the article, which was riddled with half truths bordering on falsehoods.


To start with:

- eating meat IS natural. Humans are designed expressly to be able to eat either meat or other types of products. Hence being called omnivores, not herbivores. This is the same argument that I make when people try to tell me it's natural to eat meat. That's wrong too. It's natural to be able to do one or the other, and we have the choice.

- access to protein is a key ingredient for growth. When we started to hunt, we got the ability to access concentrated packets of protein. (We can now do so by cultivating plants with a high concentration of protein.) Getting so much bang for your buck in terms of protein would have been a huge advantage for any group of early humans who learned to hunt, since they could grow bigger and faster, and out-compete their neighbours (until farming came along, of course, which is arguably much less "natural" than eating meat).

- animals that eat plant products have long digestive systems because it takes so long for our enzymes to act on plant materials to be able to digest them. The logic of the argument that carnivores have short intestines to get rid of toxins quickly is back-asswards. Carnivores have short intestinal systems because, after chewing, meat degrades and can be digested quickly (not to dispel rotting flesh quickly.) This has been proven by comparative physiology that looks at the concentration of nitrogen (read protein) and materials that are hard to digest, such as cellulose, in animals diets, compared with properties of animal digestive systems. We need long digestive systems to be able to digest plants, not the other way around (although there are many more specifics to the story).

- also, the idea of bringing heart disease and cancer related to meat eating into an evolutionary argument is a joke. Heart disease and cancer, especially when correlated with meat eating, generally affect people well after their child bearing years, and therefore has limited (if any) relevance to an evolutionary argument.

- our hands may not be designed to tear flesh, but our opposable thumb is designed to make and use tools that do the job for us, while our large brain can figure out how best to close in for the kill. As such, the argument that our difficulty of shredding prey with our bare hands is evidence that eating meat is unnatural bears little relation to our biological and social evolution as humans.

Finally, I do believe that the vegetarian diet, if it follows some basic principles of variety, can be far more healthy than a diet that includes meat.

Eating meat is perfectly natural, but so is not eating meat, but given the health complications of eating meat and incredible inefficiency of producing protein in the form of meat, the choice not to do so is better for both us and the planet.