I’ve spoken to a few vegetarians and vegans and they often say the reason they are is because meat stays in the body forever. Seeing how the body has enzymes to break down fats and proteins, how can this be?
While I am at it. Is it also true that Humans are the only animals who get painfully sick if they consume uncooked meat? A vegetarian told me this as proof that Humans are made to herbivores.
Thanks for reading,
Brian
Well brian, lets just say you get you moneys worth when you buy a steak. Meat can stay in your colon for up to 6 months in some cases, turning a wonderful black color and giving you bad breath. Its not that veggies just shoot through you, but they are not as hard to process as, lets say, a pickled pigs foot. May I suggest a colonic and Yves veggie burger my friend?
See you in line at the Sizzler
OfBlinkingThings
Well brian, lets just say you get you moneys worth when you buy a steak. Meat can stay in your colon for up to 6 months in some cases, turning a wonderful black color and giving you bad breath. Its not that veggies just shoot through you, but they are not as hard to process as, lets say, a pickled pigs foot. May I suggest a colonic and Yves veggie burger my friend?
See you in line at the Sizzler
OfBlinkingThings
Cites?
Without cites, it’s vegetarians who are full of crap.
Eat animals, don’t love them.
Sneaking up on a plant and eating it is not sporting.
Plants are living things and have rights too.
I apologize. That was too sarcastic for General Questions.
Your skepticism is well founded. The idea that meat somehow “stays in the body forever” is is complete nonsense. Meat - which lacks indigestible cellulose - is much easier to break down and digest than vegetable matter.
What makes you think humans typically get painfully sick from eating uncooked meat? I don’t. Inuits don’t. Many people like their steak rare, and steak tartare is also a popular dish.
And of course Cecil has discussed whether
Are humans meat eaters or vegetarians by nature.
Nonsense. Even totally indigestible matter (IE, a marble or chewing gum) doesn’t take more than a few days to pass through your body. Your digestive system doesn’t hold on to stuff until it’s done, it pushes everything through at about the smae rate. And meat digests more easily and quickly than plant matter.
And here’s where a little rational thought can go a long way. See, if meat stays in the colon for up to six months, then so will everything behind it. And a six-month long bout of constipation is unheard of (at least by me).
Then, of course, there are all these sphincters throughout the digestive tract which prevent back-flow of materials. Unless you’ve got major problems (which are completely independent of your diet), intestinal gas travels in one direction. So the whole bad breath bit is silly as well. Bad breath is caused by not brushing your teeth, or illness, not by eating meat or getting constipated.
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I guess you could say that at least some of everything you eat stays in your body effectively forever. For example, if you eat something containing calcium, it is quite possible that at least some tiny amount of that calcium would be integrated into your bones and stay there for life. It is reasonable that at least some of the individual atoms that make up a body at birth will still be in it at its death. Probably not a high percentage. But, with the countless number of atoms in your body at birth, it is a reasonable idea. What any of that has to do with you should eat is beyond me.
I have eaten uncooked meat on many occasions. I never got painfully sick from it. The reason you get sick from some uncooked meat is that is may contain micro organisms that aren’t good for you. Cooking the meat kills them and makes potentially unsafe meat, safe. If the meat doesn’t have dangerous level of micro organisms in it raw, it won’t hurt you a bit to eat it that way.
We are not made to be herbivores. Strict vegetarians have to work pretty hard to escape dietary deficiencies. They frequently fail.
Do we (in the industrialize world) eat more meat than is required (or even desired) for good health? Most likely. Removing all of it is not the answer, though.
It seems the problem of today is that we are getting too good at growing food. The amount of physical labor that most people are required to do is minimal and food is abundant beyond the immaginations of people a couple hundred years ago. These, combined with a lack of self discipline is the problem.
Going vegetarian puts a barrier back up to overeating. It is much harder to be overnurished on such a diet. This may be a good thing for some (maybe alot) of people. That doesn’t mean we are built to be vegetarians.
World class athletes are very rarely strict vegetarians. This is a group of people that examine what they eat carefully. What is even better about this group is that they have a very useful measuring stick for the efficacy of a diet, namely their measured performance. If we were built to be vegans, it would stand to reason that the best performance would be on such a diet
I thought all food stays in your body for a lot longer than seven days. Or, at least, a portion of it does. If it didn’t, you’d just waste away.
I think the intended argument is more along the lines of “meat stays in your colon for [insert ridiculous amount of time here]”
Cite please
and btw I have eaten raw meat (mainly beef) many times (including complete meals) and never got sick from it.
I had a chicken tandoori on Friday that stayed in my system for about 2 hours.
…yes, I am sure. TMI.
Everything you eat passes through in its own turn, just like you in the gift shop at the amusement park. You can’t hang around Graceland forever, the crowd behind you will force you out. Just like yesterday’s burger. Mmmm, yesterday’s burger…
On the raw meat thing,I’ve eaten raw clams and oysters many times,not only didn’t I get sick,out of a doz. usually only 2 or 3 work (if I’m lucky enough) 
Knowing people in the medical field, I can say with authority that nothing packs itself into the colon for more than a few days if you eat a normal diet of meat and veggies. The veggies act like a broom and sweep out the intestines with all of their fiber. You can have diverticuli (little pouches in the intestine, like a weak spot in an inner tube that expands outward) that may capture and hold things over long, but a good diet even sweeps them out. If not, then they cause pain and you go for treatment.
I am always amazed at the ‘eternal meat’ thing that so called professionals come up with when they should know better or at least crack open a first year medical or nursing book that explains the digestive system to you. That’s like homeopathic medicines: dilute something into oblivion then place a drop of the water on an inert pill so the ‘ghost’ of the medication can magically fight a disease. None of the original substance is even in the water drop!
I have eaten raw meat many times. I’d get home with some ground beef and just eat it. I never got sick . . . But it is much safer to cook the meat just like it is safer to cook the vegetables. There have been a few cases of people dying when they got E Coli from eating undercooked meat. So better cook it but note you can get E Coli from vegetables too.
The argument about humans being the only creatures that get sick from eating raw meat falls apart when you consider that predator animals typically eat their meat fresh, in the heart-still-beating sense of the word. Carrion eaters have adapted to a diet of less-than-fresh, but they’re pretty far removed from humans on the evolutionary spectrum.
The next time a vegatarian starts bugging you about your diet, try telling him/her about that last nature show you saw where the lioness clamped her jaws on the throat of the water buffalo and squeezed for long slow minutes while the blood spilled over her razor-sharp fangs…
Ah, nature. Gotta love it.
And who said animals don’t get sick from what they eat? All animals, whether they eat meat or vegeatbles, get sick from their food. Some people have this idealised view of nature where everything works fine and in balance. Animals get sick and die from their food all the time.
I’m blessed (cursed?) with a very quick colon. What I eat today comes out tomorrow. I used to believe my vegetarian friends when they told me I had pounds of undigested meat in my gut, but I no longer believe that. I guess it’s an unwanted aspect of aging, but I’m pretty in touch with my colon, and I can guarentee you there’re no lingering deposits of meat in there.
And I loves me some good steak.
Food isn’t neccesarily stuck in the colon per se but you do get stories of Bezoar stones (balls of hair) and other strange objects lodged within the Digestive tract (usually the stomach) for many years and are usually only found upon death.
Also, I have heard the argument that Humans could never evolutionarily been vegetarians since your tooth enamel would wear away far too quickly from eating unwashed and uncooked vegtables. It is assumed that since we learned to wash and cook vegtables, our teeth haven’t changed that much.