*Time out*I'm sorry on that. I truly meant they, not you. I want to keep this civil...even if its a war zone. *Time out*



It absolutely does. I can't generally go into a convenience store on the corner and get grassfed beef, can I?

And yes. We/you/me/them are all lazy. And impatient. And undisciplined. You need to be methodical and allow time for your body to adjust before you can guage how well a diet works.



I have experimented with the various diets. You admit you wont. Seems to me that makes you the more inflexible of us.

I think we can agree vegetarians have an almost religious need to avoid meat.

I have found that reducing the variables in my diet(i.e. all meat) has led to a steady, predictable weight loss "regular" low carb wasn't providing. Unlike my prior 2 year experience with Atkins, I will be hitting my goal weight in under two months at my current rate.

Is there something mystical about meat and water? Of course not. Maybe its more effective because it elminates a vast number of items that might be allergenic. Who knows?



So why are you even on a diet then? Let alone a low carb one? The bulk of popular medical research says its unhealthy. If your faith in pharmeceuticals and the medical profession is so great, go on Fen Phen then. Or Orlistat. Or Xenical. Or a PSMF. Get your stomach stapled, stock your fridge with Solyent Green, etc.

And I bet you're still wondering whom to report those disappearing posts to, as well.



Haven't been in a convenience store in over a year, except to buy gas. Still not eating all meat, though. Something tells me that the people who quit on all meat didn't do it because they missed the convenience of shopping in a convenience store. It might have been the frequency of the "I miss vegetables" comments I kept reading.




When did I make this "admission"? This is kind of funny, and in line with the general reasoning level you folks are wont to fall to, and, I might add, indicative of why so many of you are crying into your meat about your alleged persecution. I don't want to eat an all meat plan (after doing a great deal of research on the topic, I might add), and so I'm "inflexible." Where did this come from? In what way is it relevant to the topic at hand? It's just another pointless personal attack of the sort you people continue to make, and then get all upset when people counter attack. Just have the integrity not to apologize for it this time.




Good for you! I'm genuinely happy for you. Does that mean, then, that all meat is the "ideal" diet for everyone, that vegetables are toxins, etc, etc, etc?

I'm going to stop here, because you are getting further and further away from making rational arguments. I'm not interested in your personal testimony -- as I said before, I can get that on a vegetarian board, a vegan board, a fruitarian board, a weight watchers board -- hell, I can get that sort of thing anywhere. There are people here on SBD who say they started losing when they switched from Atkins and added more carbs. Maybe the SBD is the "ideal" human diet.

I want to reiterate that I sincerely did not mean to make a fat joke. It was a typo. Its not my intention to insult you or anyone. If you wont accept my apology, so be it.



Which are comments made by anyone on any carb restricted plan. Oh no. I can't have potatoes/rice/whatever. Not particularly a criticism of the meat diet, is it? Adherence to any diet is poor.







You called me intense(read: fanatical/close minded) and then are perplexed when it comes back at you?



Thanks. I hope you hit your goals as well.



I don't think I ever referred to it as ideal. But the most logical place to start from from an evolutionary perspective. I encourage folks to experiment. That's the long and short of it.

Umm, no, after seeing you folks at work, I assure you nothing you say is "perplexing." All arguments from the all meat eaters seem to devolve to "accidental" attacks, followed by indignant cries that it isn't what you really meant, and how dare someone come back at you? It seems to be one of the side effects of an all meat approach to eating, or perhaps people who are attracted to that psychological dynamic are also attracted to conspicuously unusual plans and situations, dietary and otherwise. At any rate, I perpetuate the digression. Instead of replying to all this mess, I'm just going to point out that nothing you say here has anything to do with the topic at hand, and I see now that you recognize that fact yourself, in a roundabout manner, at the end of your post.

I did some research yesterday and discovered that I was confused by terms. One scientific classification of individuals is in accordance with the following basic tree:

KINGDOM
PHYLUM
CLASS
ORDER
FAMILY
GENUS
SPECIES

I was confusing the Order Carnivora with the dictionary definition of "carnivore" as commonly used in English.

Nonetheless, Coyotes belong to Order Carnivora. Humans belong to the Order Primates. Even though both species belong to Class Mammalia, I have to infer, based on this classification, that humans have more in common with other primates than they do with with members of Order Carnivora. It would seem more useful to compare the biology of humans to that of other primates.

That being said, however, the first post in this thread challenges the statement that our ancestors prior to the Late Paleolithic period ate no vegetables, and that therefore the "real" diet (whatever that means) of humans is comprised exclusively of food from animal sources. The sources I have quoted contradict these statements, as have a number of other sources contributed by members reading this thread. (Admittedly, I have not read all of them.) Certainly there is much literature to support the statement that prehistoric man ate meat, but NONE of the literature that I've read thus far concludes that man as a species ate nothing but meat. There are tribes that eat almost nothing but animal fat/protein. Conversely, there are Hindi that eat nothing but vegetable foods. The vast majority of humans eat a combination of both. This leads me to conclude that humans as a species are omnivores.



Thank you for this article. Interestingly, the author of this article states the following under the subheading "Ecology and Behavior":

"Coyotes are both carnivores and omnivores and feed on a diverse range of food items and are potential competitors or direct predators on many indigenous species, like bobcats and foxes (Litvaitis 1992)." (emphasis added)

Not to get into the debate here as I am NOT a debater but I have been a meat and egger since Jan. I have never felt better (well except when I eat dairy, ICK). It has stabilized blood glucose readings, almost completely removed my symptoms of lupus, and given me back my life. I am now able to work and go to school and care for 4 kids. Do I think veggies are poison?? Yup to me they are but maybe not anyone else. I am only the expert on me and even that is a continual learning process. Will I ever have them again? Maybe...... Most likely not though.

No need to respond to me as I am a 1 time hitter on this thread. Just wanted to share my carnivorous POV...

It seems to me that when we say that members of species X are carnivores, we are saying that when in their natural habitat--"in the wild," so to speak--they eat meat if they can get it, and nothing else, even though other foods are available. At least, that's how I understand the term. The fact that a starving carnivore will eat things other than meat doesn't make it any less a carnivore, to my way of thinking.

My understanding of "omnivore" is similar. Omnivorous animals, in their natural habitat, will eat whatever plant and animal foods are available.

Applied to human beings, to call us carnivores is to assert that in our natural habitat, given available plant and animal foods, we will not consume plant foods unless starved for animal foods. But what is the "natural habitat" of human beings?

We evolved *from* apes dwelling in tropical forests. Most modern apes are omnivores, although meat is a relatively small part of their intake. Chimps, for example, get about 4% of their energy from meat. Add bugs and larvae to that, and it's undoubtedly somewhat more, but they are still obviously omnivores that eat plenty of vegetation.

A fairly standard view of things is that about 3 million years ago, when the earth cooled, the tropical forests shrank and those apes near the periphery either had to make a living in the border of the savanna, the "transition" forest, or die out. A few made it, presumably by scavenging and continuing to exploit plant foods, which would have been less abundant but not nonexistent. The anatomically modern human species didn't appear until around 200,000 years ago, by then well adapted to hunting, but also able to use fire, in all probability. Evidence of plant consumption is not so easy to detect in the fossil record, but as has been shown by references others have provided, there is evidence.

Is there any reason to think that humans, in their natural habitat, ignored available plant foods and ate only meat? Is there any reason to suppose that in temperate zones, for example, when apples fall from the trees in the fall, or when bushes are bulging with blueberries in summer, human beings just walked on by, ignoring them? I'd need some pretty persuasive evidence before I'd believe that.

You mean to say one person's word, and the insistence of a (very) small but (very) loud minority that plants are poison isn't persuasive evidence to you? Some people just can't be pleased....

I'm just curious as to why this bothers you so much. "Plants are poison" is merely someone's OPINION. I don't particularly agree with it either, but I'm not out on a crusade just to prove someone wrong. And maybe they ARE poison, to some people. Who's to say? One cannot possibly fathom the workings of every single person's physiology on the planet.

You sound very upset about this. I could be dead wrong, but I'm just trying to understand the importance of having everyone agree with you. `

You're right: you're dead wrong.

In fact, you have it exactly upside down. I don't care if everyone agrees with me or no one does. What I do care about is the silly wars against other peoples' diets that go on, with attitudes that go something like this: "You deluded, foolish plant eaters keep attacking our plan. Why can't you weaklings just leave us alone? And by the way, plants are poison, you overly-acculturated weaklings! The real diet is an all meat one! It's healthier! Blah blah blah" Now, somebody certainly has a problem with other people disagreeing with them, but it seems to me that it's the kind of person who makes these arguments. Unless I've been sleep typing, that isn't me.

I guess I can understand why people want to discuss what the human diet was a gazillion years ago, or how we evolved and our diets changed, what our ancestrial apes ate or whatever. People are curious and like to speculate, hypothosize, investigate, research and draw conclusions. We like to organize everything into neat little explainable, logical boxes.

I'm with Kwik in that I'm not sure why discussions like this have to get ugly. One person's proof is another person's fallacy and it's never going to be proven one way or the other. We human's can survive on a wide variety of food.....It's up to each individual to figure out what works for them, dial it in and move on.

I have always understood that carnivores have fang like ripping teeth at the front. Certainly all the cat family (who literally cannot SURVIVE without meat) do, whereas dogs, which are more omnivorous like humans, don't. I understand that humans can survive without meat, we may feel a bit listless on high carnbs, but we survive all right, and breed as well.

"From an evolutionary perspective, the human appendix is a derivative of the end of the phylogenetically primitive herbivorous caecum found in our primate ancestors (Goodman et al. 1998; Shoshani 1996). The human appendix has lost a major and previously essential function, namely cellulose digestion. Though during primate evolution it has decreased in size to a mere rudiment, the appendix retains a structure that was originally specifically adapted for housing bacteria and extending the time course of digestion. For these reasons the human vermiform appendix is vestigial, regardless of whether or not the human appendix functions in the development of the immune system."

thank you for this interesting article. More evidence that our ancestors took advantage of plant foods.

this is evidence that somewhere in our evolutionary past we needed to digest cellulose. however, since the appendix is vestigal, this also might be evidence that somewhere in our evolutionary past deriving energy from plants sources became less or non-essential.