| palou said: [...]Evolution doesn't care about us, beyond a certain point, and I think we can just as well stop caring about our evolutionary traits, as well. A vegan/vegetarian diet can be healthy, healthier than eating meat each day, anyways. (I don't believe that eating fish, once a week, is necessarily unhealthy either. The rest needs to be handled as a purely ethical question.) |
I've thought a lot (and I mean, a *lot*) since you posted this. I didn't want to reply immediately.
If you were an extraterrestrial cataloguing different life on Earth (cue an extraterrestrial discussing humans with David Attenborough's voice, or that's how I like to imagine it), you would conclude we were omnivores by observing our behaviour. Extraterrestrial David Attenborough would likely also observe that the most plant-based populations are the healthiest, live the longest, the most vibrant in old age, etc. And I think you and I broadly agree on all of the above.
I think the "correct" answer biologically is that both humans and dogs are omnivores. Dogs are omnivores, that lean more towards carnivores. They can live on an entirely plant-based diet, or an entirely meat-based diet. Unlike humans, dogs lean more towards carnivores though because they have a larger number of physical characteristics in common with carnivores, and like carnivores dogs can create vitamin C in their body (which is why they can exist on a meat-only diet).
Humans are omnivores as well but, unlike dogs, humans lean the other way and lean more towards the herbivorous side of the equation. The longest-living and most vibrant human populations are the eat the most plant-based diet, and humans can't create vitamin C in our bodies so we need to eat plant-based nutrition or we die of scurvy (among other diseases). A human dying on a meat-only diet doesn't even take long, there are stories of people sailing from Europe to North America and eating only fish and cured meats, and some of them dying before the crossing was finished! There's a famous story in Canadian history of a crew of Europeans arriving in what is now Eastern Canada, half dead from eating only meat for the voyage, and it being the middle of a typically bad Eastern Canadian winter. Nutrition wasn't well understood in those days (they hadn't even discovered food had nutrients yet, or that germs exist, etc.), and even if they had understood nutrition, what plants were they going to find under the Eastern Canadian winter snow? The local first nations (aboriginals) in Canada showed them that they should eat bark to get vitamin C and other plant-only nutrients to cure the diseases that they were dying of, and that saved the crew.
And while dogs have physical characteristics that lean more towards the carnivorous side of the equation, the majority of human physical characteristics lean towards eating plants. For sure you can find points that lean one way, or the other, about human physiology, but the *majority* of our biology points towards us being best adapted to eating plants. And if we don't eat any plant-based nutrients at all, we'll die in a hurry.
So we are omnivores and can include meat in our diet. We can even live off of a lot of meat, for a while at least, before our odds of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, etc., finally catches up with us. But we're not as omnivorous as dogs, as dogs can seemingly live equally well off of a meat-only or a plant-only diet. I think dogs are possibly the most omnivorous beings on the planet, actually. We can live extremely well off a plant-only diet (possibly better than an omnivorous diet), whereas we can't live at all on a meat-only diet without any plant-based nutrition. So we're omnivores I guess, but I think we undeniably lean more towards being plant-eaters.
As for fish, the biggest problem with it is the ocean pollution. There is strong evidence that fish-eaters are 2-3 times more likely to get diabetes than vegans, for example, and the problem might not be the fish themselves, it might be the pollution in the lakes, rivers, and oceans. In fact, some recent research suggests that 95% of the heavy meatls, PCBs, and other environmental toxins that people consume come from animal fat (as it bioaccumulates up the food chain and gets stores by animals in their fat). In this instance, fish is the worst offender as fish live their entire lives in tremendously polluted waterways, whereas most other meat people eat is factory farmed and not exposed to as many environmental pollutants. So fish is worst for environmental pollutants, red meat/dairy/eggs is worst for heart disease, poultry worst for communicable diseases (salmonella, bird-flus) and has been recently implicated in a raft of human diseases, there just isn't any meat that seems any safer than any others. Sure you can eat meat in moderation, but that's like smoking in moderatio... you can do it, and you might even get away with it, but it's probably not ideal, and it's definitely not an evidence-based decision. The people behind creating the DASH diet for the American Heart and Stroke foundation travelled the world and studied human populations, and they concluded that eating entirely plant-based is ideal for human health. They then created the DASH diet that recommends people eat some chicken and fish. Why? They're on the record as admitting that they watered down their recommendations from what was ideal for human health to something they thought the American public might accept. A shame, as I'd have rathered they were honest with me about what was ideal for my health, and let me make my own decisions about whether I followed the ideal recommendations or made some sort of compromise.
