by Joe Monzo (2002-6-2)
I'll start by stating the primary message i'm here to say: the only diet that will ensure a healthy human life is to eat primarily healthy, raw, living plant foods. But note that i don't believe that meat should necessarily be dogmatically excluded from the diet. If one becomes vegan because of ethical or spiritual beliefs, that should be applauded. But as every individual has different dietary requirements, one's diet should be formed from a close inspection of those requirements, which in some cases may include animal foods or by-products.
While i share the horror of all vegans at the way animals are mistreated by the food industry, i need to state that i believe that plants are sensitive to what we do to them as well. The only reason they are treated a bit better by agriculture (given more space, etc.) is because they simply will not produce edible end-products if we don't.
But just as animals are caged, force-fed, and injected with steroids, vaccinations, and antibiotics, plants are subject to pesticide sprays and genetic engineering. And just as we now have organic plant foods available to us if we're willing to seek them out and pay the price, we can also find meat from healthy pasture-fed and freely-grazed animals if we choose to do the searching and make ourselves afford it, or we can also eat wild game.
Of the organisms that we must eat to survive, only plants can create their own food source, by the photosynthesis of energy from the sun. For animals the case is different. The fact of the matter is that in order to live, any animal, including humans, must kill something else that is living, by eating it.
I submit that the biggest problem with the modern development of civilization and the food industry is that it has dried, cooked, canned, frozen, packaged, and otherwise processed this act of murder out of the equation by having "hired professionals" do the dirty deed and then insulating the final consumers of the food from it by virtue of time, distance, and money spent.
I consider even processed "veggie" food products (veggie burgers, tofu, soy milk, etc.) to be highly suspect in this way. The further back the point of death occurs, of either the plant or the animal, from the eating of the end-product, the less healthy is that end-product. For optimum health, the moment of death should occur as the food is being chewed and swallowed. Unfortunately, for one to be able to do this with a clear conscience, one must accept that he/she has to be a murderer in order to continue his/her own healthy life.
. . . . . . . . .
I'm going to make a slight digression here to talk about meat and cooking. If you are a creationist and do not accept the theory of evolution, you should skip the next part of my talk. I accept the premise of evolution and think the following is a significant commentary on what our "natural" diet really should consist of, even while it contradicts my primary belief in consuming raw plant food.
Even tho the whole family of primates has bodies designed to process primarily plant food (as opposed to true carnivores such as cats and dogs), primates's digestive systems are different from those of true herbivores (such as cows, horses, etc.), and all species of primates do eat a small percentage (ranging in non-humans from negligible amounts in gorillas to about 8% in chimpanzees) of their total food intake as animal food, primarily insects.
The invention of agriculture only occured about 10,000 years ago, which was not very long ago in evolutionary terms, and certainly not long ago enough to engender really deep adaptations in the symbiosis between humans and their food sources.
Recent scientific evidence into the so-called "Paleodiet", that is, the diet of humans who were hunter-gatherers for the hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, strongly suggests that for that long period of time in its devlopment -- since learning how to control fire, which occurred possibly as long ago as 500,000 years ago -- the homo genus of primates ate about or more than 50% of its diet as animal food, and also about or more than 50% of its diet as cooked food.
This means that our bodies have had as much as 50 times the amount of time to adapt to eating meat and cooking than they have had to adapt to eating grains, which still form the staple of most diets ("bread is the staff of life", etc.).
In fact, our bodies are not at all well-adapted to eating grains, which must be either cooked or sprouted in order to make them edible. As a result of the agricultural revolution, the fact that large groups of people could settle down in one place and have a reliable food source led to the whole development of modern civilization.
But the fact that this reliable food source, based on grains, would keep them alive, does not also mean that it would keep them healthy! In fact, the evidence is growing that the "ills of civilization" (cancers, heart disease, etc.) are mainly the result of this grain-based diet and the constantly increasing stress of modern life. (And indeed these two factors may be more closely related than they seem, as a diet based on generally does not keep the immune system as strong as a diet based on raw plant food.) In so-called "primitive" groups which still exist today in the rain-forests of South America, Africa, and southeast Asia, whose diet does not include grains and whose lives have much lower levels of stress, these types of diseases are basically nonexistent.
Meat is more easily processed by the human body when cooked, and this is also true of some vegetables (particularly very fibrous ones). Meat provided early man with a very concentrated source of protein and fat, and in fact some of the proteins are constructed differently than those available in plant foods and are useful to the development of the body. It has also been documented that in times of plenty, humans on a hunter-gatherer diet with throw away the parts of the meat that moderns prefer (the lean muscle tissue), and focus on eating the organs (especially the brains and kidneys) and the fat.
In humans, the two systems which use up the most energy in the metabolism of food are the digestive system and the brain. By studying the evolutionary development of the relative sizes of these two systems in the genus homo, it has been concluded that the human digestive system shrank as human brain size increased. This leads to the conclusion that the eating of meat must have played an increasingly important role in the devolopment of the brain. In direct contrast, over the last 10.000 years (since the beginning of the agricultural revolution and a grain-based diet), average human brain size has actually shrunk slightly.
So anyway, that's just "food for thought" for those who maintain that early man, and by extension all of us, are and should be "naturally vegan". It may be true that in today's more enlightened age veganism is an admirable goal, but it was not what enabled early man/woman to develop into the wonderful intelligent organism that he/she has been for the past several milliennia.
. . . . . . . .
There are three primary dietary factors which will ensure a healthy human life, and my opinion is that this is their order of importance:
1) A wide variety of items eaten
2) learning to pay cose attention to what your body demands to eat
3) keeping the vast majority of your food intake as raw, living plants
When i say "pay close attention to what your body demands to eat", i'm not talking about simple cravings. I'm talking about having a mainly-raw-plant-based diet, but watching out for serious deficiencies that may occur by sticking to too limited a diet. Variety is the key for a healthy primate diet.
Ideally, the best way for a human to eat is to walk up to a living, growing plant, pick off some leaves, fruit, or seeds, put them in his/her mouth, chew slowly and very thoroughly, and swallow. The body will know what to do from there, and will function at its optimum.
Of course in our modern polluted environment this is hardly ever possible, but the closer one can get to this ideal, the better health one will maintain.
2002.6.2