Human Digestion & The Fall

But our instincts tell us to eat meat, hence the meat-eating habits of nearly every culture in the world. Also the B12 deficiency that you mentioned, and on top of that I'm not sure that enough of every nutrient could be procured in the wild from a vegan diet in large enough amounts. Couldn't our digestive physiology be due to the fact that we did not evolve from carnivores?

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I am still unsure if Calminian understands the point of the OP. I felt embarrassed for him when reading all of his replies.

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You might be surprised to find that there are a number of cultures around the world which eat almost no animal products at all. Among them are the Russian Caucasians, Yucatan Indians, East Indian Todas and Pakistan Hunzikuts. Despite the fact that these peoples do not have access to the kind of medical care available in more developed areas, they have life expectancies of 90 to 100 years. But these aren't the longest average life expectancies in the world. Those belong to the Vilcambas, the Abkhasians and the Hunzas in the Himalayas of Northern Pakistan. All three of these cultures are either vegetarian or extremely close to it. The largest of the three populations, the Hunzas, consume on average 1½% of their calories from animal sources.

But when man was still struggling to obtain enough daily calories, he wasn't terribly picky about what he ate. If meat was available, he consumed it and developed a taste for the rich fats. As he became more adept at producing food, he continued to consume those foods for which he had developed a taste. But these foods do take their toll on the human body. For instance, the cultures who consume the most flesh are the Eskimos, Laplanders, Greenlanders and Russian Kurgi tribes. These cultures display the lowest life expectancies in the world, often as low as 30 to 40 years.

As far as man's "instinct" to eat meat, one might wish to consider the natural compassion humans show for other species. This compassion is usually discouraged and molded during childhood in cultures were meat-eating has become the norm. I'm sure it's practically cliche by now but a simply mental exercise can divulge man's true instinct. Take a baby kitten and provide it with an apple and a mouse. Which will the kitten try to eat? Take a human toddler and provide it with a baby rabbit and an apple. Let me know when you find the toddler who plays with the apple and tries to eat the rabbit. Our instincts are so strong that we tend to lock our slaughterhouses out of sight. Many won't even allow camera crews inside because it is well known that people are often put off meat after seeing it produced. And due to the cruelty involved and our reaction to it, the job of slaughterhouse worker has the highest turn-over rate of any job in the U.S.

In many cultures becoming indifferent to the killing of animals for food is considered a rite of passage to adulthood, especially for males. If not for this peer pressure, most would continue to hold their compassion for other species throughout their lives. And despite the cultural pressures to abandon this natural compassion, many men have, for centuries, discontinued the consumption of meat. Among them are listed Sir Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Plato, Socrates and Tolstoy. That's not an appeal to famous personalities. It's simply a sampling through history. But when you begin to examine the lists, it's rather interesting the number of vegetarian historical figures who are known for their intellect. When you think about the fact that a stroke and a heart attack are the same phenomena, just in different organs, and think about the fact that atherosclerosis doesn't just affect the larger arteries, one begins to wonder how many tiny capillaries in the brain might become obstructed over a lifetime of consuming high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol. Just a side-note.

Imagine for a moment how you would react if you were to be faced with the choice of a fruit bowel or a freshly killed rabbit. Would you find the warm, bloody, uncooked meat to be appetizing? Hopefully, you wouldn't. Because humans have the stomach acid common to herbivores. It's sufficient to break down foods but not strong enough to kill various bacteria which can be so toxic to humans that we become very ill and often die. A carnivore can consume that same raw meat after letting it lie in the sun for hours and suffer no ill effects. It's body has adapted to handle the toxic bacteria.

As for the Vitamin B12 situation. Consider for a moment where people would have obtained Vitamin B12 living in a less domestic situation. Humans used to dig up roots and tubers and, at most, rinse them in a stream before consuming them. (My dad grew a garden every year and I can recall doing this.) The bacteria in the soil, which isn't toxic to man like the bacteria in meat, produce tiny amounts of Vitamin B12. But it's enough for man's needs. Simply not scrubbing produce grown in the soil provides all the Vitamin B12 we need. But today we don't just wash produce, we blast it under high-pressure streams, effectively removing these tiny microbes and the Vitamin B12 they carry.

If you look into human requirements for Vitamin B12, you discover something rather interesting. We seem to have developed with only a miniscule requirement. The average person utilizes only 1 microgram per day. Yet our livers can store a 6-month supply. And of the Vitamin B12 we use, our bodies recycle 70-75% of it. The indication is that the human body is well adept at enjoying optimum health on far less Vitamin B12 than is provided by an omnivorous diet.

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Beastt, every single one of those groups moved away from meat-eating because their hunting devestated the local ecosystem. Look at the very first human tools. What are their purpose? What are almost all of the tools that we find up until humans became agrarian used for? They're used to kill animals, cut up their flesh, break their bones for marrow, and render their skins as clothing and other useful items. These things far predate our species; so we can only conclude that we have some evolutionary tendancy towards meat eating.

There is no indication of Adam eating any meat before the fall. Only after the fall was it required that something had to die, in order for Adam to live. Also what ever bacteria we had to digest food or break matter down, was all "good" bacteria. It did not become harmful to us until after the fall.

Actually, there is bacteria used to decompose matter and it does not go after healthy living matter. But after the fall far to often people were dying and that bacteria started to become a problem for them because their body would start to decompose before they were dead. There are some flesh eating bacteria that moves very fast to decompose the body.

Anyone with a garden and a compost knows you need bacteria to decompose matter so that it can be used for fertilizer or food for other plants.

The american heart association recommends about 4 ounces of lean meat a day. That is not very much meat. In general it is not all that healthy for us to eat meat and it is difficult to digest. But if we do not eat meat then it is difficult to get some of the things we find in meat, like protein. You can get the protein you need without eating meat, but it is difficult, you have to eat a lot of beans or something like that. Also meat to some degree is a effective use of available land. If it were not for eating animals I am told it would take quite a bit more land to produce the food we need to survive. It is kind of like using a animal to pull a plow. If they get hungrey there is plenty of food for them growing along side of the irrigation ditch. But if you have a tractor, then you have to find the money so you can go out and buy gasoline. For people without the resources to buy gasoline, then a animal maybe more practical for them.

My wife likes to tell the story of when she was a little girl a storm washed out the bridge. So in order to get to town they had to ride a carabou across the river. Only half way across the animal decided he wanted to take a bath and he dunked her in the water. She did not know how to swim and she started to panic. So the farmer had to carry her across the river on his shoulders. I do not think he charged her any extra, which she said was like 35 cents.

JohnR7, I completely agree with you as far as a technologically advanced industrial civilization like ours goes. It's possible, but somewhat harder to do, for an agrarian culture, or a gathering culture that lives in a resource rich area like Japan or the Pacific Northwest. However if you live in the African savana or the plains of Europe or North America, and you haven't figured out how to be a farmer yet then you run into two problems with trying to be a human who doesn't eat any meat. The first is that humans aren't true herbivores. We can't digest cellulose in any form. We don't have the dention or the digestive system to eat any of the grasses. We would be reduced to eating wild tubers, some edible leaves, and fruits and nuts when they are in season. There is nothing wrong per se with that, but it takes a certain amount of land to feed a person on that diet. The second part, which compounds the problems, is that we are in direct competition with a number of animals for many of those food resources. As someone who doesn't farm, eating meat along with plant products means that you can support a person in a much smaller territory. It's not an accident that we find each and every one of those animals who eat the plant products that we can survive on tasty.

I want a source for this. I found something mentioning a 1973 National Geographic in relation to these figures, but that's it. I'm going to have to see more proof before I believe a group which would be bound to have (relatively) high infant and child mortality rates still manages to attain such an astounding life expectancy.



Depends on how the kitten was raised. Many cats who are not taught by their mother to hunt and kill mice won't know to eat them.



The baby rabbit moves, which makes it more interesting. It's also unlikely a parent would raise a toddler to kill rabbits at that young of an age. I would say it is possible the toddler might try sticking both of them in its mouth. I don't think a toddler would like either though, as an apple would be too hard to eat.



I probably wouldn't now, but when I was little I quite liked raw meat. Kind of odd, I know. I still like it bloody, but it's rare to have the chance to eat raw meat.

Either way, I personally don't think people feel compassion naturally. I think it is something that is taught and learned.

I am rather cynical of these claims to be honest. I think one of the main reasons that vegan diets appear to be healthier is because so much more attention has to be paid to them, rather than there being inherently something bad about consuming animals and/or animal products.
agreed. not that saturated fat and cholesterol are always bad mind. It's interesting to note that in the middle ages and up to say, the 17th and 18th century, often farmers and labourers lived longer than nobles, not so much because of diet, but because their lifestyles as a whole were significantly healthier.

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the problem with the question I see is this. Certainly yes, we rely on bacteria in order to digest vertain things, but we can look at it another way. we rely on those bacteria to produce things that we can digest. The difference is only very subtle, but plants do exactly the same, they take the basic organic ingredients in the soil along with things like carbon dioxide and so on and convert them into a form that ultimately we can eat, so the only real difference between the two, is that we have to actively pick plants to consume their resources, but bacteria, living inside us produce the resources we consume directly in the stomach, and have taken advantage of an environment where they can live. I think asking why we can't produce the things they produce, meaning we are reliant on them is as weak an argument as asking why can't we eat mud and breathe C02.

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.