| Luke888 said: Poorly suited for eating meat, your canines tell me the opposite... Our Biology isn't a sentient entity that gets offended if we do something that isn't natural, it simply adapts to it changing us: the massive consumption of milk causes height to increase and bones to be stronger. A well trained human, even without tools is fully capable of killing with his bare hands small and medium sized animals but instead they decided to use tools because they are more suited from an evolutionary standpoint: 1-tools are more efficent than bare hands, making it possible to kill an animal quicker and reducing the time of pain of the animal which is better from a moral standpoint; 2-tools can be used by any human and decrease the ammount of calories needed to hunt down the same animal, ending up in a larger profit in the ammount of energies gained from the food compared to the ones used to kill the animal. Saying that we'd eat raw meat is again explained by evolution: Humans evolved--->discovered that Cooked meat is better than raw meat, Lions didn't evolve---> they can't use fire---->they can't find out the benefits of cooked meat.
I'd need some sources for the second half of your comment to give you a full response for example what species have that 10:1 ratio and if it even matters (but I have to say that humans are exceptions in many things, we are mammals but we don't go in lethargy, our Cubs don't start moving on their own right after birth etc. etc.) or the proves against eating meat because your comment is clearly full of Utopistic talk, and again, I like to make the example of Sardinia since I know it more it beeing part of my country to argue your Okinawa example: Sardinians are among some of the longest living human beeings in the world, their diet is full of meat and cheese (to be specific Pork, Sheeps and Salame are the most consumed foods by them) and one of their specialities is Casu Frazigu, a really fat cheese containing living worms... |
Humans don't have canines by any reasonable definition. They're called that by the dental community, but that's meaningless from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In dogs, the canine teeth are 2-3 times longer and drastically sharper. Human "canines" are not substantially longer than the rest of our teeth, nor are they sharp enough to tear and rend meat well. And the gorilla, which is broadly accepted as an herbivore, has "canines" that are much longer and much sharper. Basically, some human teeth are nicknamed "canines", but that's not at all relevant to our evolutionary biology.
Omnivores and carnivores can taste protein, humans can't. We don't have protein receptors on our tongue, so when we eat meat what we're tasting are the fats and salts. Meat is sufficiently poorly tasting to us that we choose to "season" it, which in most cases means adding plants to it to make it taste better! :)
Length of intestines matters a great deal. Our intestines are the smoking gun: they're not designed to process meat safely. They're too long, they absorb too much of the cholesterol and other negatives of meat. Controlled experiments have failed to give coronary heart disease to dogs (which are an omnivore) (Citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3603726/), yet it's become the number one killer of people in the western world. I'd say that that "matters".
It's not in question that we ate more meat starting from when we were able to kill it with weapons, cut it, and cook it. The real question is whether we ate much meat at all prior to that, and the evidence predominantly suggests we didn't. And that's part of why we're poorly suited to eating it to this day, as that was a blink of an eye ago from an evolutionary point of view.
Here are some sources.
As the Okinawans ate more meat, their health declined rapidly: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19533867
The longest-living population on record ate the most plants/least animal products: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=648593
It's possible to have exceptions without disproving the rule. I haven't researched the Sardinian diet, but the "blue zones" are heavily skewed towards populations that eat very little in the way of animal products: https://www.bluezones.com/2009/04/cnn-secrets-to-a-long-life-plant-based-diet/
One study showed vegans had 26% less heart disease and 68% less diabetes: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4073139/
Here is a comparison of human traits relative to herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores: http://www.ecologos.org/anatomy.htm
In summation, the preponderence of evidence supports the idea that an omnivorous diet is less healthful than a whole food, plant-based diet.
