There are those who argue that humans were meant to be meat eaters;
but their flawed arguments simply don’t stand up to reality. You know
the ones, as Howard Lyman lists them in Mad Cowboy:
“We evolved as hunters. We have canine teeth. You can’t fight Nature
– we have blood lust.”
Yet, the answer is, as Howard F. Lyman points out in his book
Mad Cowboy, “not new to science; it was given long ago by
Plutarch, who pointed out that man ‘has no curved beak, no sharp talons
or claws, no pointed teeth…on the contrary, by the smoothness of his
teeth, the small capacity of his mouth, the softness of his tongue and
the sluggishness of his digestive apparatus, Nature sternly forbids him
to feed on flesh.’ Plutarch was right. Like our cousins the anthropoid
apes, whose diet consists mostly of fruit and nuts, our digestive system
is twelve times the length of our bodies (it takes meat five days to
take this voyage and pass out of the body; vegetarian food, one to two
days), our skin has pores for evaporation, and our stomach acid has
roughly 5 percent the strength of the carnivores’. Obviously, we have
neither claws nor powerful carnivorous jaws, but have molars for
grinding and predigesting our grain. Like herbivorous animals, we have
alkaline saliva and the enzyme ptyalin to predigest grain. The teeth we
call our ‘canines’ have only the name in common with the long, sharp,
piercing teeth of dogs or tigers. If you don’t believe me, try using
your ‘canines’ to tear the living flesh of a moose. I have challenged
many people to do so, and not one has come back with the moose in his
mouth.”
“Do we have blood lust? Well, does the idea of tearing a chicken or
cow apart with your hands and teeth and sucking its warm blood appeal to
you? People eat their meat packaged and disguised precisely because the
reality of eating flesh disgusts most of us.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that.”
Reading this, I thought about how the skyrocketing cost of “disease
care” is obviously related to carnivorous eating habits, and how the
answer is so simple: Go Vegan!
For health articles, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health.html
For great-tasting vegan recipes, photos, and information, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/recipes.html
