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scrapking said: 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. |
Your argument about canines is simply wrong, Dog caninens differenciate from the human ones because we are different species, them, revolving their diet mainly on meat need sharper teeth otherwise their main source of nutrition would be too hard to get for the species to survive, on the other hand our evolution making us omnivores that eat primarly vegetables and derivates had us not needing enormous canines. Gorillas are Omnivores, just like any other money-like animal they counsume insects in large quantities while alterning them to vegetables of course (since it's the easiest food for them to find in their habitat).
Cholesterol and other "bad things" contained in meat are easily avoided simply following a diet that contains the right ammount of meat needed, which most americans don't follow, hence why I find the data from ncbi to be meaningless: in one of the countries with the highest rates of obesity in the entire country aswell as an high amount of consumption of meat it's clear that people following a diet that eliminates meat consumption will result healthier, especially given the quality of the meat in the US.
Many of your sources' pages don't work hence I can't answer them but of those I could see there are no proves against eating meat: the Ikarians documentary for example never stated that they don't consume meat, but made a list of herbes extremely common in the diet of everyday (at least here in Italy) again pointing at the problem beeing that the only problem of meat consumption resides in the quantity and the quality, which are wrong in the US.
I feel like you are taking a bit too seriously the diet of everyone here, it almost feels like you want to force everyone to become vegan when you clearly can't. Even if meat was indeed remotely as bad as you make it seem to be the vegetable output of the farmers around the world is nowhere near to beeing capable of meeting the demand of over 7B people, if in one night every person on earth became vegan milions of people would die of starvation because of the lack of offer frrom the farmers...
