Human Biology and Vegetarianism - Are we meant to be vegi?
- Thread starter ska invita
- Start date
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
dash_two said:
hmm
hadn't thought of that
there again, if you look at the skull of a gorilla (predominantly a herbivore, although eats insects too)
I wouldn't be surprised if a gorilla, at some point in it's evolution, ate meat. Look at those teeth, those impressive canines look like meat tearing teeth to me.
interesting article here too
http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-2b.shtml
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
That's a really good article on a number of levels, especially the discussions on evolution.
Gromit
International Man of Misery
Belushi said:I've been a veggie for years and if I sat on you you'd be a dead man
Hurrah! I was waiting for someone to joke back!
Was beginning to think no one realised I wasn't serious.
I'd be massive if I was veggie I think. I'd only eat pizza or other stuff covered in layers of cheese.
Louloubelle: Very interesting n impressive gorilla skull pics. You'd think that gorillas would be better off without their canines. The way they lock together suggests that gorillas find it hard to make circular grinding movements with their jaws, which would useful for an animal that eats a lot of leaves - unless the canines serve some other function.
The canines emerge at maturity (it says here) and are larger in males than females. So presumably they are used in fights with other gorillas and/or as part of convincing threat displays.
The canines emerge at maturity (it says here) and are larger in males than females. So presumably they are used in fights with other gorillas and/or as part of convincing threat displays.
ska invita
back on the other side
since a few people have picked me up for using the word design i think i should clarify that i dont believe umans have been designed either - my question is: considering our biological make-up what diet best suits us?Diana said:
I think the answer is that we have the capability to eat a little meat, but on the whole our biology is not 'designed' for such a task - its not suited for it.
Yes, some humand have been canibbals and yes we have eaten meat in different amoutns in our history - evolutionary speaking the amount of meat eaten has not been more than 7% of our diet according to that one article, which should be reflected in our evolutionary makeup as a result.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
We've been eating it for 2.5 milloin years, from when the first humans walked the Earth, so quite clearly we are evolved to live off an omniverous diet.
ska invita
back on the other side
I think the revelation that primates eat termites is not really something to blow apart the idea that human biology is essentially vegetarian - there is a huge difference between digesting a termite and digesting the raw flesh of a cow - it may have pissed off some vegan hardliners, but in terms of biology I think it still points to an essentially herbivore biological makeup of primates (and therefore us as closest descendants).Louloubelle said:
ska invita
back on the other side
the proportion of meat to veg is crucialy relevant in evolutionary terms, and primate biology is also critical. "Omniverous" suggest we are equally well adapted to eat either - I dont think the evidence backs up that claim at all.kyser_soze said:
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
I think that whole website blows apart the ideas surrounding 'natural' diets in humans, and the irony of your little twist abuot termites not being meat the same way cows are, which is something the site writer actually refers to (he's vegetarian in case you didn't get that far). Termites, ants and insects are not vegetables, and as a veggie you aren't allowed to eat them; ergo, any species that DOES eat them is not 'purely' veggie either.
And why exactly is it crucial in evolutionary terms? Don't you get it that we started out as meat eating creatures? I think you should read a LOT more of that website - you're actually rationalizing the way she says many veggies do!
And why exactly is it crucial in evolutionary terms? Don't you get it that we started out as meat eating creatures? I think you should read a LOT more of that website - you're actually rationalizing the way she says many veggies do!
david dissadent
New Member
We are unequivically omnivorous.niksativa said:
What is the point your trying to make about meat?
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
niksativa said:
Sorry but I've posted lots of links to clarify that humans have been eating meat for millions of years.
The link you refer to clarifies that gorillas (not humans) are not vegetarian. Animals that eat insects are not vegetarian and humans are not gorillas.
We are much closer genetically to chimps and chimps hunt for meat and eat meat. So ner
eta
we're even closer to bonobos, who also eat meat
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cach...tion.pdf+bonobo+diet&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk
No it doesn't. Omnivores, including faculative omnivores such as humans, are adapted to be able to eat both animal and vegetable matter. It has nothing to do with the proportions of either that are eaten.
As an example, if you look at an obligate herbivore, such as a cow or a sheep, they do not possess the ability to digest and extract nutrition from animal matter (leaving aside the point that if you grind up and cook sheep carcasses, then process them into pellets cows will eat them voila - BSE). Omnivores can eat either meat or veg, they don't have to eat both meat and veg, although subsisting on a diet of solely one or the other is likely to bring health problems.
Added to this, we are not descended from either chimps, or gorillas or any other living primate, rather we share a common ancestor. All of the evidence from studies of Australopithecus and early Homo species show that meat plays at least some part of their diet. Leaving aside for a moment that modern humans are definately omnivorous, to suggest that humans are 'meant' to be vegetarian requires you to explain when exactly this happened, given that all our (known) ancestors were omnivores.
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
niksativa said:
where do you get that 7% figure from?
obviously the percentage of meat in a diet will depend on a number of environmental variables.
for example, nomadic people inhabiting a desert or ice floes will eat a higher percentage of meat than humans living in a green and lush environment.
Were you aware that the traditional diet of Inuit people pre cultural and actual genocide was composed of between 90 - 95% meat?
Do you think that we are so genetically different to the Inuit that they are a separate species? Because they are not a separate species they are identical to us genetically.
eta another link from that great veggie website
http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-3c.shtml
and an interesting link re the Inuit diet
http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=lw313
ska invita
back on the other side
my mistake - I got it confused with a post about maximum meat intake of primates on page 1Louloubelle said:
I think there is a big difference from looking at human biology and the realtively recent practices of groups such as Inuits.
Obviously homosapiens in different places in different times have eaten varying amounts of meat - this isnt the question.
What I want to know is to what extent has the human body evolved to eat meat.
So far we have seen that primates are herbivores, except for some insect matter, and the occasional bit of carrion after a fight - but this isnt considered part of their regular dietary practice.
As to early humans less has been talked about. Dash two mentions Australopithecus robustus who he says were exclusive herbivores, but from whom we are not descended.
My query is this: if we descend from essentilay herbivorous primates, even if we as a species have begun eating meat culturally, is our biology really suited for the task? There have been a number of examples posted that suggest not, and others have siad that we can process it, but its not necessarily good for us. How much has our digestive system/ general biology evolved since primates in order to deal with meat without a negative effect on our health?
your link LouLou http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-3c.shtml contains nothing i disagree with: humans have eaten meat and it must have had some kind of effect on our evolution - but ultimately i see little evidence that we have evolved far from our herbivorous primate biology.
whatever the extent of the evolutionary effect it doesnt mean that we are now adapted to eat meat without any negative health effects (such as undigested rotting meat in our overlong intestine).
ska invita
back on the other side
The issue regarding Inuits is what effect such as diet had on their life expectancy and how much illness resulted as of such a diet.Louloubelle said:
Obviously there are many many facotrs that effect life expectancy and without a breakdown of causes of death the figures are meaningless. Diseases such as cardiovascular disease or cancer are the tell tale signs.
It is obvioulsy true that humans are capable of digesting meat, and of living of it tp different degrees - but that doesnt mean the biological set up of the human body is best geared to do so - and that is what I am asking in this thread. To what extent does an animal free diet (or at least vegetarian diet) improve health - or to rephrase, to what extent does an animal meat diet shorten lifespan, and cause disease? What is the role of evolution in this, and what kind of a biological make-up have we inherited from our ancestors (including primates).
A car may be able to run off chip fat oil but it would run a lot better with a special fuel - to carry on the analogy chip oil may also detrimentaly effect the workings of other components.
Christ, is this desperately forcedly forced revisionist argument still going? The whole idea of humans 'evolving' or compromising to eat meat is clearly duff - witness the preponderance of the earliest cave drawings showing hunting and feasting. It's clear that early man valued and craved meat.
As for the idea of optimum nutrition or notions of healthiness, it's worth noting that meat is a hugely efficient carrier of protein and amino acids - even today vegan and vegetarian sportsmen have to watch their recovery levels and diet much more closely. And in an age where agriculture was less developed and fewer pulse type crops available, the presence of meat in a diet could give a clan/tribe a serious advantage over rivals. We probably eat too much meat now in the West, which may afffect our healt slightly, but it's almost certainly easier to put together a more varied, balanced and healthy diet using meat.
We seem to want to judge man's evolution in middle-class Westerner terms. Go to a place where food is much scarcer and see some of the joy that a (rare) good and meaty meal can bring. There's something far more primal and satisfying about the presence of meat in our diet than our pampered option-rich food choices would seem to suggest now.
As for the idea of optimum nutrition or notions of healthiness, it's worth noting that meat is a hugely efficient carrier of protein and amino acids - even today vegan and vegetarian sportsmen have to watch their recovery levels and diet much more closely. And in an age where agriculture was less developed and fewer pulse type crops available, the presence of meat in a diet could give a clan/tribe a serious advantage over rivals. We probably eat too much meat now in the West, which may afffect our healt slightly, but it's almost certainly easier to put together a more varied, balanced and healthy diet using meat.
We seem to want to judge man's evolution in middle-class Westerner terms. Go to a place where food is much scarcer and see some of the joy that a (rare) good and meaty meal can bring. There's something far more primal and satisfying about the presence of meat in our diet than our pampered option-rich food choices would seem to suggest now.
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
Actually Inuit people who follow their traditional high fat 90% meat and fish diet are much more healthy than the Inuit who have been forced into a sedentary, non hunting lifestyle and who eat shop bought processed "western foods"
http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/?/news/2001/09/21/inuit_diet010921
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/12/9/926
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic32-2-135.pdf
It's not the high meat diet that's cause for concern, it the processed food
http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/?/news/2001/09/21/inuit_diet010921
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/12/9/926
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic32-2-135.pdf
It's not the high meat diet that's cause for concern, it the processed food
these kind of threads only serve to remind me of all the interesting evolutionary and biological psychology that i used to know in depth and have since forgotten 
re: meat & its high caloric intake: there's stuff about meat eating sparing up time for other things, like sleeping, generally staying alive & for those animals with larger brains (man), problem solving/mental tasks/philosophising, etc. hunting & killing provides a feast, whereas non-meat eaters would have had to constantly forage for food & eat smaller amounts at regular intervals, thus spend a great deal more time eating (and less time doing other things like mental tasks/staying alive) than their meat eating counterparts - who would hunt & kill a great feast & then not need to eat again for a number of days at a time. something like that anyway....
oh i knew so much more & it was so interesting & i've lost it all *digs out old revision notes*
re: meat & its high caloric intake: there's stuff about meat eating sparing up time for other things, like sleeping, generally staying alive & for those animals with larger brains (man), problem solving/mental tasks/philosophising, etc. hunting & killing provides a feast, whereas non-meat eaters would have had to constantly forage for food & eat smaller amounts at regular intervals, thus spend a great deal more time eating (and less time doing other things like mental tasks/staying alive) than their meat eating counterparts - who would hunt & kill a great feast & then not need to eat again for a number of days at a time. something like that anyway....
oh i knew so much more & it was so interesting & i've lost it all *digs out old revision notes*
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
I like this page advising Inuit to eat more "country food" (unprocessed meat) to reduce the risk of diabetes
http://www.inuitdiabetes.ca/reduce-risk-inuit-food.html
http://www.inuitdiabetes.ca/reduce-risk-inuit-food.html
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
If the Inuit had not eaten the epidermis of the beluga whale, incredibly high in vitamin c, they would have become very sick with scurvy.
http://www.itk.ca/environment/wildlife-beluga.php
eta
another interesting article about why the Inuit high meat diet is so healthy
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox
http://www.itk.ca/environment/wildlife-beluga.php
eta
another interesting article about why the Inuit high meat diet is so healthy
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox
niksativa said:
Re. the issue of chimps eating insects. They don't do this passively or accidentally, they actively seek out termite mounds and ants' nests in the wild. Chimps use twigs to poke into the nests to extract the insects - sometimes they lick the twig before use to make sure more ants/termites stick to it.
We can assume that our forebears soon after the chimp ancestor/human ancestor split around 5 million years ago continued this kind of opportunistic foraging. They then gradually developed stone tools which initially faciliated the scavenging of carrion meat - certainly by the time of Homo habilis, who lived between 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago, perhaps a little earlier.
So it's a fairly long timescale over which our ancestors increased the proportion of animal protein and fat in their diet. It would be correct to characterise them as omnivores, adapted to a very varied diet. Hence sensible advice on what humans should eat always revolves around urging a 'balanced diet', as distinct from what vets would recommend for, say, a koala bear or a sealion.
Only Neanderthals (again, who we are not descended from) moved away from this in a big sustained way, in the direction of a diet reckoned to be around 90% meat-based.
If you're looking for relatively abrupt changes in diet which did have negative impacts on human health, then you could focus first on the shift from a hunting/foraging lifestyle to one of settled agriculture in which a far more limited (though more reliable) diet was adopted.
And second, on the rise of industrialised food production, thanks to which we can now eat as much of the salty/savoury/sweet things that we like so much but which were once hard to find.
ska invita
back on the other side
Agreed- my point was that primates are still essentialy herbivores - the digestion of termites is not equal to the digestion of animal flesh. A pip in an apple is probably harder to digest.dash_two said:
Aye - I would guess that it was tools that lead man to be able to hunt and get into killing and eating.dash_two said:
So we are talking about 2 million years of evolution in which to start eating meat. However there is an issue about how this porcess of evolution may have gone about. On the one hand meat eating may have given some health survival advantages, on the other natural selection may have favoured against meat eating due to the ill health that may have resulted from a herbivore-primate biology suddenly having to process meat. For example we still have the same long intestine...
Some evolutionary changes we can be sure of, such as the appendix, which it is thought was used by our primate ancestors to deal with the more rough pulpy twiggy bits of their herbivore diet. - The appendix serves little use in our body now.
To what extent is that adaptation definable - what are the evolutioary changes between humans and primates that show a real evolutionary adaptation for the processing of animal meats?dash_two said:
I wouldnt be suprised to learn that the lifespan of neanderthals went much over 30 - thats a guess of course, and said before life expectancy on its own mean nothing - my point being that just because meat was being eaten on a grand scale in this circumstance doesnt mean it was healthy... which leads on to the Inuits:dash_two said:
That is very interesting. The article suggests that the Inuits have a few evolutionary adaptations to such a diet:Louloubelle said:
But the strap line of the article is misleading:
First of all "we" is not a scientific category and I presume is meant to include many people with all kinds of unhealthy lifestyles/diets. Is an Inuit diet healthier than a vegetarian/fructarian one?
Yes, they manage to get the necessary vits from blubber etc., and fish oils are also doign them good. But again Inuit life expectancy is significantly shorter - without a thorough understanding of causes of death and the possible role of diet within this it is hard to say that their diet (whilst providing vits+oils and avoiding other bad things) is perfectly suited ('designed') to their biological make-up.
niksativa said:
Good question. Here are a couple of articles which suggest that some of the genetic differences between humans and chimps (especially those expressed in liver function) are down to dietary differences:
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/12/031219072314.htm)
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060309190112.htm)
Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html
also says meat makes up about 3% of their diet... hardly "essentialy herbivores"
also says meat makes up about 3% of their diet... hardly "essentialy herbivores"
Maybe millions of years ago primitive man did feed predominately on plants etc...
Maybe humans over thousands of years have developed morphologically and physiologically to feed on meat?
We are animals really, so other species can adjust to the environment they are in where resources are concerned so maybe we have developed significantly at one stage in the development of human beings thousands of years ago?
Maybe we did have a 'vege' diet once like primates, but have metamorphically adapted at some stage to hunt and eat animals to provide higher energy and protein levels. Darwinian fitness theory????
Maybe humans over thousands of years have developed morphologically and physiologically to feed on meat?
We are animals really, so other species can adjust to the environment they are in where resources are concerned so maybe we have developed significantly at one stage in the development of human beings thousands of years ago?
Maybe we did have a 'vege' diet once like primates, but have metamorphically adapted at some stage to hunt and eat animals to provide higher energy and protein levels. Darwinian fitness theory????
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
The words /essentially herbivourous' make no sense. Terms like 'herbivore' and 'carnivore' are spefic and mean 'only eats veeg/meat' - a species that eats animal matter, insect or otherwise, is NOT a herbivore.
Innit? The funniest thing is niksativa is making EXACTLY the arguments, evasions etc as the author of the site Loulou linked to said others have already made - 'essentially herbivorous' for example...
Similar threads
