Most humans are omnivores by practice, but are we omnivores by design? Or did we evolve as herbivores, best suited to a diet of plants, and at some point go off-track and make the mistake of starting to eat animals?
Eating animal foods confers greater risk of heart disease and other serious diseases, but most of these diseases afflict people later on in life, not in their youth when they are procreating. Our Paleolithic ancestors undoubtedly faced a constant struggle to ingest enough calories, so eating animals in order to obtain enough calories made sense. Most of those ancestors didn’t live long enough to be afflicted with diseases of old age. From the standpoint of survival of the species, any food source that provided calories to help individuals live to procreate served a vital purpose.
Although it may have made sense for our Paleolithic ancestors to eat meat, from a survival standpoint, that does not mean that it makes sense for modern humans to do so. If our ancestors strayed from our natural diet, we’re not obligated to follow in their footsteps. Most of us want to live longer than “cavemen” did.
We should have been able to deduce that we are biologically herbivores since the year 1913, when a Russian fellow named Nikolay Nikolayevich Anichkov, working at a lab in St. Petersburg, fed cholesterol from egg yolks to some poor, unsuspecting rabbits and thereby brought on atherosclerotic plaque and lesions.
It was thereafter established that when you feed cholesterol to omnivores and carnivores, such as dogs and cats, atherosclerosis never develops.
Atherosclerosis, therefore, is a disease that develops only in herbivores.
Atherosclerosis develops, of course, in humans. It brings on heart disease.
Therefore, humans are herbivores.
It’s that simple, folks. This isn’t, as they say, brain science, but those who don’t finally figure it out are at greater risk of a stroke.
The field of comparative anatomy confirms the conclusion that we can draw from Anichkov’s experiment. When we compare the anatomy of mammalian herbivores to that of mammalian omnivores and mammalian carnivores, we find that in every instance, we humans line up with the herbivores. From the length of our intestines to the acidity of our stomachs, from our dentition to the gape of our mouths and the need to chew our food, in every respect, humans align with the herbivores. The food that causes the most choking deaths in humans is, unsurprisingly, meat. So atherosclerosis is not the only way that meat kills us.
Atherosclerosis is rarely discovered in any animal other than humans. Think about it. There are millions of species of animals in the world, and over six thousand species of mammals and we are the single species in the world afflicted with atherosclerosis. That’s because other herbivores don’t foolishly ingest cholesterol, and non-herbivores don’t develop atherosclerosis.
Just as malaria is a disease dependent upon contact with a mosquito infected by a parasite, usually in a tropical climate, atherosclerosis is a disease dependent upon an herbivore (humans, alas, being the only example) being foolish enough to eat animals or the lactation of other mammals. And because raising “food” animals for slaughter warms the climate, and is in fact (for a whole host of reasons explored in my book Food Is Climate) the leading contributor to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the mistake of eating animals is likely to bring malaria to our shores. (Several cases of locally acquired malaria have been reported recently in Florida and Texas, the first such cases in twenty years.) Homo sapiens, or wise man, is the only animal on the planet that kills itself by regularly ingesting the wrong food, and now that very same unwise habit, responsible for the practice of animal agriculture, threatens our civilization in myriad ways, and threatens to destroy life on the planet.
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