Sure we can tolerate eating flesh, blood vessels, arterial plaque, fat and even hair just as we can tolerate smoking tobacco and using heroin. That is not a rational argument in favor of ingesting these substances or that we were fitted for them by nature. An alcoholic feels better after a few drinks. Does that imply that he needed the alcohol? Come on…the thing about truth is that it stands on its’ own authority and requires no references than a moments’ reflection.
Presumably, this column:
Are humans meat eaters or vegetarians by nature?
Cecil never made the argument that humans are carnivores because they ‘tolerate’ meat.
And your comparison of meat eating to consuming tobacco and heroin is false also, because the deleterious effects of tobacco and heroin have been well documented for decades, if not longer. Your claims for meat-caused disease are tenuous at best, and based on specious anecdotes. You are going to have to do better than that to make the case that we are not the evolved result of selection to eat meat.
We do not tolerate an omnivorous diet; that’s what’s normal for us. We can tolerate a vegetarian or (with modern science) even a vegan one, but it’s not natural.
Reflecting for a moment without reference to the world outside our heads is guaranteed to reinforce our existing prejudices and gets us nowhere near the truth as your post proves.
what about those pesky eskimos?
Is eating veggies troublesome for eskimo people (I’m not sure of the preferred term)?
Aside from the iceberg lettuce, I don’t think they had much in the way of vegetable food sources.
Well, according to this Inuit cuisine - Wikipedia the traditional inuit diet is indeed pretty heavy on animal sources, though apparently they do have some access to vegatable sources.
I wasn’t talking about availability, I’m wondering if their gut is (or was) capable of handling vegetable matter without some problems.
BTW, I was raised in iceberg lettuce land and I promise you the plant wouldn’t fare well in the far north.
I’m certainly not vegetarian myself, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a vegetarian diet is “unnatural.” In a “state of nature,” human beings will consume whatever food sources are available and while that usually includes some meat, it doesn’t necessarily.
A truly carnivorous diet would be unnatural for human beings since we require several nutrients which are generally only availalbe in sufficient quanties from plant sources. The inuit may be something of an exception, but even they aren’t 100% carnivoures.
AFAIK the inuit’s digestive tract isn’t really any different than other people’s. If their traditional diet is low on vegatable sources, presumbly it would be primaiy due to lack of availabiliy. BTW, the sources I’ve read seem to indicate that as traditional subsistence hunting and gathering is in decline, their diet is becoming more like that of non-natives.
In Canada, “eskimo” is considered at least somewhat degrogatory: The preferred term is “inuit.” In Alaska, the term “eskimo” is considered more acceptable, in part because there it encompasses some groups which aren’t technically “inuit.”
Not sure I got that one, what need has a Vegan for modern science and how is it not natural?
Actually, you can get all the nutrients you need from raw meat, which is hardly surprising, given that animals are made of all the same stuff as we are. The problem is that some of those nutrients are destroyed by cooking.
And even if the various northern natives don’t have an evolved adaptation towards meat or away from vegetables, they may well have individually-acclimated adaptations. Humans (or other animals) who suddenly make a significant change to their diet often have some digestive troubles for a while. At a guess, I’d expect someone who ate mostly meat for their whole life but who suddenly started eating significant amounts of vegetables would end up with a bad case of gas.
It’s almost impossible to get enough B12 from plant sources, without supplements. A little bit of eggs or dairy will do the trick, though.
is b12 your best reason for it being unnatural?
Here is an interesting column from Cecil on the Inuit and their diet; even without vegetables, they avoided vitamin deficiencies because vitamins, including Vitamin C, are present in many of the (often raw, and including organs like brains) meats they eat (or used to, as they eat a more Western diet nowadays; it is also interesting that they now suffer from Western aliments like heart disease as a result, one reason being that Western diets have too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3).
I was vegetarian for a few years, and gas was a pretty serious problem for a while. Not only socially, but often it was kinda painful. Beano helped, but I eventually got over it.
Most of us took B12, but I never did find out why except that our diet lacked it.
I eventually went back to meats after she went back to Canada. 
Well, that just shows that humans NEED to eat meat (or animal products like milk and eggs) to get all of their nutrients; herbivores don’t need to eat meat because they can produce their own B12 (they absorb it from bacteria in their intestines, while humans can’t, at least not enough to avoid deficiency).
Sure, one can eat any of the countless artificially enriched foods out there today, but in the natural state humans wouldn’t eat any of that stuff (never mind that too often this kind of food has too much sodium, sugar and artificial trans fats added).
I have read in New England journal of medicine Vitamin B-12 has been found in significant amounts in many plant foods, some of which are bananas, dates, greens, peanuts, and particularly sprouts and raw sunflower seeds. I have also read that meat eater has more reported cases of B12 deficiency than Vegans
B 12 has been found in water and even in the dirt on my veggies. I read that the problem isn’t that i cant get cruelty free b12 but that in our steril environment that is often cleaned away. Is this not true?