Originally Posted by BoBoGuy

Some studies question if humans are biologically supposed to be vegan?

As long as you are getting enough calories from diet, various plant foods can indeed give you all the nutrients you need by themselves or in combination with one another. This includes adequate protein and is why the gorilla's vegetarian diet is healthy. They do consume some protein from the few insects, insect eggs and the larvae on the plants they eat but the amount must be very small relative to the gorilla’s size.

The simple fact is that humans have taught themselves to eat everything in order to survive. Humans have teeth and a digestive system consistent with herbivores so human beings are not natural meat eaters. I suspect that primitive societies consumed meat simply as a survival tactic when plant foods were in short supply.

Also, we have the fact that consumption of red meat correlates with health risks in modern humans due to a mutation that occurred after our last common ancestor with great apes.

As I understand it, the gradual incorporation of a non human molecule found in red meat into the cells of the human body over a lifetime contributes to the inflammatory processes involved in various diseases. It’s a slow process so the chronic effects of this foreign molecule would not be felt until old age.

During primitive times, life was brutish, nasty and short so Homo Erectus probably would not have survived long enough to suffer the health consequences of their red meat diet as modern humans do.

Perhaps we are indeed biologically vegan and simply refuse to admit it?

Bo.