Should We Eat Meat?

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Before we begin, a short quiz:

1. You are heading down a road, when you see an injured deer. Do you:

            a) Stop to see if she needs your help, or

            b) Stop and devour her raw?

2. Your toddler is in a room with a rabbit and an apple. Does (s)he:

            a) Bite into the apple and play with the rabbit, or

            b) Bite into the rabbit and ignore the apple?

3. You’re feeling hungry, but there’s nothing in the house to eat. Do you:

            a) Go out to a restaurant, or

            b) Go out and chase down an animal, ripping it apart with your fangs and   claws?

If you chose “b,” then you might, in fact, be a carnivore (or, at least, an omnivore). If you selected “a,” however—congratulations, you’re a normal human herbivore.

Comparing the anatomy of carnivores with our own clearly illustrates that we were not designed to eat meat. Starting at the beginning of the digestive tract, our teeth, nails, and jaw structure indicate that nature intended for humans to eat a plant-based diet. We have short, thin fingernails and pathetically small “canine” teeth. In contrast, carnivores all have sharp claws and large canine teeth capable of tearing flesh.

The jaws of carnivores move only up and down, requiring them to tear chunks of flesh from their prey and swallow it whole. Humans and other herbivores can move our jaws up and down and from side to side, a movement that allows us to grind up fruit and vegetables with our back teeth. Those molars are flat and allow the grinding of fibrous plant foods. Carnivores lack these flat molars.

Carnivores swallow their food whole, relying on their extremely acidic stomach juices to do most of the digestive work and to kill the pathogens that would otherwise sicken or kill them. Humans and other herbivores have digestive enzymes in our saliva—unlike carnivores—so our stomach acids are much weaker.

Carnivores have short intestinal tracts and colons that allow meat to pass through it relatively quickly, before it has a chance to rot and cause illness. Humans, like other herbivores, have intestinal tracts that are much longer than comparably-sized carnivores, allowing the body more time to break down fiber and absorb the nutrients from a plant-based diet. Our long human intestinal tract actually makes it dangerous for us to eat meat, since bacteria has extra time to multiply during the long trip through the digestive system as the meat begins to rot.

In addition to being anatomically ill equipped to digest meat in the short-term, the long-term damage that a meat-based diet wreaks on the human body confirms that we’re not meant to eat flesh. The saturated fat and cholesterol in meat can cause heart disease, cancer, diabetes, strokes, or obesity in humans, but not in carnivores.

Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of the authoritative American Journal of Cardiology, sums it up this way:   “[A]lthough we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”

Beyond the biological evidence, consider that while carnivores take pleasure in killing animals and eating their raw flesh, any human who killed an animal with his or her bare hands and dug into the raw corpse would be considered deranged. Carnivorous animals are aroused by the scent of blood and the thrill of the chase. Most humans, on the other hand, are revolted by the sight of raw flesh and cannot tolerate hearing the screams of animals being ripped apart and killed. The bloody reality of eating animals is innately repulsive to us, more proof that we were not designed to eat meat.

Humans lack both the physical characteristics of carnivores and the instinct that drives them to kill animals and devour their raw carcasses. We not only survive, but thrive on a meat-free diet. It’s time to retire the self-serving myth that humans are meant to eat meat—to do otherwise harms both humans and animals.