| Aeolus451 said: You understood what I meant. I wrote that late at night. Anyway, I was talking about the actual definition of omnivore and humans fit it perfectly. The fact that humans require a daily intake of nutrients from both plants and animals proves that humans are omnivores. We're meant to consume both plant and animal daily. |
You're incorrect. Almost no health agency on the planet suggests any requirement for any amount of animal products for optimal health. So that's false. Animals get their nutrients from plants, and then we eat the animals, so it's just a question of whether you go to the source or filter your nutrients through animals. It's a falsehood that we require animal products for health. And we lack a lot of biological elements common to omnivores, such as we lack the ability to get rid of cholesterol. Dogs can. Wolves can. We cannot.
That's a big deal. Researchers started to notice a strong correlation between heart disease and impotence. And then they realized it wasn't just a correlation, they were the same disease. In both cases, cholesterol plaque was clogging up the body. In the case of heart disease it was the arteries leading to the heart. In the case of impotence, it was cholesterol plaque clogging up the penile artery. (Yes, emotional factors often come into play with impotence too, but it's frequently an initial 'failure to perform' that kicks off the emotional spiral.) This was on top of the previously identified correlation between heart and stroke, and a new correlation subsequently observed with several previously unexplained neurological diseases. It turns out all these diseases were the same disease, cholesterol plaque clogging up different parts of the body. They have tried to give these diseases to obligate omnivores in controlled conditions and failed, because their bodies are successful at getting rid of the excess cholesterol.
Humans traditionally ate very little cholesterol in our early evolution, as in the cradle of civilization in Africa we largely ate plants. Our bodies make cholesterol, but rarely in excess so a mechanism to get rid of it wasn't necessary. Similarly, we once had a gene to produce vitamin C, but we were eating so many plant foods rich in vitamin C that the gene deactivated in humans hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Now vested interests are trying to convince us that eating cholesterol has no bearing on heart disease, and funding science that tries to come to that conclusion. But they're useful poor scientific method and these studies are rarely submitted to peer review and are being roundly ignored by most public health agencies. The preponderence of the best and most independent science continues to tell us that eating cholesterol raises cholesterol in the body, and that increases the odds of a raft of chronic diseases.
Pair that all up with the fact that there's no disease that's caused by a lack of meat in the diet, like there is for the lack of sufficient plant foods in the diet (scurvy), and the conclusion seems pretty apparent to me. Eating a broad spectrum of whole plant foods is optimal for human health.
(Citations for everything I've said before has either been previously provided by me, or is available upon request for any point you'd like more info on.)
