Are humans meat eaters or vegetarians by nature?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_087.html

“Like the hard-core carnivores, we have fairly simple digestive systems well suited to the consumption of animal protein, which breaks down quickly. Contrary to what your magazine article says, the human small intestine, at 23 feet, is a little under eight times body length (assuming a mouth-to-anus “body length” of three feet). This is about midway between cats (three times body length), dogs (3-1/2 times), and other well-known meat eaters on the one hand and plant eaters such as cattle (20 to 1) and horses (12 to 1) on the other. This tends to support the idea that we are omnivores.”

If we compared omnivores with humans, humans are closer to the 10-12x body length of herbivores than the 4-6x body length of omnivores. Omnivores and carnivores achieve less than or equal to pH 1 with food in the stomach while humans get pH 4-5 like herbivores.

*"Herbivores also have a variety of specialized digestive organs capable of breaking down cellulose, the main component of plant tissue. Humans find cellulose totally indigestible, and even plant eaters have to take their time with it. If you were a ruminant (cud eater), for instance, you might have a stomach with four compartments, enabling you to cough up last night’s alfalfa and chew on it all over again.

Or you might have an enlarged cecum, a sac attached to the intestines, where rabbits and such store food until their intestinal bacteria have time to do their stuff. Digestion in such cases takes place by a process of fermentation–bacteria actually “eat” the cellulose and the host animal consumes what results, namely bacteria dung."*

Humans are neither omnivore or herbivore, they are fruitarian apes.

“The story is roughly the same with teeth. We’re equipped with an all-purpose set of ivories equally suited to liver and onions.”

*"Good thing, too. I won’t claim meat is the ideal source of protein, but on the whole it’s better than plants. Sure, soybeans and other products of modern agriculture are pretty nutritious. But in the wild, much of the plant menu consists of leaves and stems, which are low in food value. True herbivores have to spend much of the day scrounging for snacks just to keep their strength up.

So make no mistake: we were born to eat meat. That’s not to say you have to. There’s no question that strictly from a health standpoint we’d all be a lot better off eating less meat (red meat especially) and more fruits and vegetables. But vegetarians aren’t going to advance their cause by making ridiculous claims."*

“Here it seems to me the best evidence is our history as a species. We have been happily eating meat for at least two million years, and probably much longer. The common view among anthropologists, in fact, is that increased meat consumption was a key element in the development of human culture, since getting and distributing the stuff requires cooperation.”

[Insert fanatical vegan diatribe against culture and eating meat]

“Not all anthropoid apes are exclusively vegetarian. The primatologist Jane Goodall established more than 20 years ago that wild chimpanzees kill other animals once in a while and eat the meat with relish. Other primates (although apparently not gorillas) do so as well. It’s true chimps and other apes eat a mostly veggie diet, but for that matter so do most humans. Hunter-gatherers today consume only about 35 percent meat to 65 percent vegetables (Lee and Devore, 1976). Anyway, we and the anthropoid apes diverged six to 14 million years ago–who cares what monkeys munch now?”

When monkeys eat insects and small animals it is a negligible quantity, it constitutes less than 1-2% of their total consumption.

“Your argument that meat-eaters are more prone to chronic disease is irrelevant. Chronic disease typically strikes the old, not those of prime child-rearing age. Till recently most folks never got chronic disease because they died of the acute kind first. It’s had minimal impact on our ability to reproduce ourselves, which of course is the basis of natural selection. In short, as we evolved, chronic disease did not “select out” for vegetarianism. I trust you see the significance of this.”

Humans get acute diseases also from their poor cultural diet.

2

Sorry, but a vegan-biased website is not a credible source of information, particularly those author is clearly an idiot:

Besides, you can claim whatever you want, but the fossil anthropological record shows quite conclusively that h. sapiens have always eaten a variegated diet, including meat, fruits, grains and vegetables throughout its nearly 200,000-year history.

3

200,000 years is nothing from a Darwinian standpoint. So that’s just evidence humans have been killing themselves with poor diet for that long.

4

And yet we’re still here.

5

What constitutes a “poor diet?” What are the consequences (both sort- and long-term) of such a diet? What makes the dietary choices our earliest ancestors made different from those of any other primate; that is, why were their diets “poor” but that of other primates were “natural?”

6

Agent Smith: I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.

7

Ah, movie quotes. Always a source of good science and logic. :rolleyes:.

8

because human physiology shows humans weren’t designed for grains or meat, other great apes do not suffer from the kind of diseases found in humans and also you don’t see them skinning and cooking meat.

9

Actually, our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have been known to kill other animals and eat them.

We are omnivores. We eat what we can get. We crave things that are good for us in small quantities but are hard to find in nature: fat, sugar, salt. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were actually on an individual level better nourished than the hordes of farmers and herders that became civilization.

10

i already said other great apes eat primarily fruit, meat consumption in percentage is at least ten times smaller than that number for humans of today given by Lee and Devore

11

You did not answer any of my questions. Try again.

12

to your first question: a poor diet is one not suitable for humans.

then about the consequences of food, the old saying, You are what you eat is true, the consequences of eating the wrong things are many.

to your third question the answer is that great apes didn’t decide to cook food and eat it so they don’t suffer many of the diseases plaguing humans.

13

Milton R. Mills - the author of the article the OP quotes from - was at the time associate director of preventive medicine of and is still on the board at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The PCRM is a militant vegan organization that puts out much of the propaganda that PETA disseminates.

Propaganda can be carefully cherry-picked facts, but little the PRCM does rises even to that standard.

Look at the note attached to the article that the OP fails to mention:

I would go back and check the rest of the “facts” in that article and see if any of them are true before quoting it again.

14

Circular reasoning.

And yet, none of these things appears to be serious enough to have prevented our species from being spectacularly successful. Huh.

We didn’t “decide” to cook food, either. In fact, current thinking is that our ability to control fire and subsequently to cook food is in large part the cause of our success as a species, since by cooking we can eat things which otherwise would be undigestible or, at best, digestible with difficulty.

15

what food is suitable for humans? whatever human physiology dictates. if you call that circular reasoning what should i call your assertion that i didn’t answer your three questions.

success? humans are successful when they are living in equilibrium with their environment. eating cooked food is just as bad as eating meat, bad for you and bad for the environment! listening to you talk of success invokes an image in my head of someone’s cancer surviving medical treatment and boasting.

16

Bingo. Ya know how people are always comparing the height of modern humans with, say, humans that lived 300 years ago, and noting how we’re so much taller? It’s largely because we eat a much more varied diet than they did. However, there’s a dirty little secret: we’re actually not much taller than hunter and gatherers were before they turned into farmers. Humans used to be tall, like we are now. When they started settling down, though, and became farmers, they got dramatically shorter. Although they might’ve gotten enough calories, they were poorly nourished. That’s what happens to people who eat the same thing over and over. Hunters and gatherers had much more varied diets.

17

you are comparing two deviancies from the natural eating habits of humans.

18

Accurate. Unless you contend that you had, in fact, answered all three of them prior to the time I posted my statement.

No. Any species is successful when it survives and flourishes. Unarguably, humans have done that; whether the success of humans is a good or bad thing is a matter for a different debate. And your example of the cancer patient is just bizarre. I don’t know what point you’re trying to make there.

19

How do you figure that 8 is closer to 10-12 than to 4-6? 8 -> 10-12 = a difference of 2-4. 8 -> 4-6 = a difference of 2-4.

I’ll also point out that herbivores are quoted in the SD column as being at least 12 (horses) to 20 (cows), which has a much greater different from 8 (namely, 4-12) than your claimed 4-6 of omnivores (being, again 2-4).

Would you care also to provide a cite that, as opposed to just claiming:

that gives actual measurements, as the SD column you quoted above does for human (namely “the human small intestine, at 23 feet, is a little under eight times body length (assuming a mouth-to-anus “body length” of three feet)”)

I see now actually, where you got the “humans are closer to herbivores” theory, but even if the herbivore = 10-12 and omnivore = 4-6 is right, the human = 10-11 doesn’t match the measurements you quoted from the SD column. Where did your site come up with the intestine to body length ratios it’s claiming? What measurements did it use, and which species for the carnivore, herbivore and omnivore measurements?

20

What is the “natural” eating habit of H. sapiens? What you say it is? What a vegan site says it is? What Ben & Jerry’s says it is? What the species commonly had available to eat a million years ago? Two million? Ten thousand?