Help my knowledgeable friends!

[singing4every1]

I need a reminder about why and how we were/are meant to be vegetarian and vegan. I still believe that vegans are the healthiest, only because it's been shown in several studies I have read/seen. But am I being biased? Am I not looking enough to the other side? I worry about that sometimes. I tried checking the tags here for evolution, etc. and

Comments

[affectionjunkie]

Evolution wise, humans are where they are now in the food chain because of meat according to Dr. Richard Leaky, the top scientist on evolution. This is because going back to the early forms of man who were primarily forgagers, began to eat meat, which due to its high fat content, it increased the brain capacity, which eventually led to the human's higher developed brain. I can't say scientific facts, but when I saw him speak it made sense.

This does not mean that human bodies were designed to eat meat though. And one could say that the meat eating was a form of survival, but the way modern humans live their life, where we can get fat from other sources, eating meat is not necessary anymore.

As for the way the body is designed like a herbivore, check out these links below. I tried to find unbiased sources for these links: (as in not on vegetarian sites)
http://www.aptb82.dsl.pipex.com/stopcancer/Humans_are_herbivores.htm
http://microbiology.suite101.com/article.cfm/are_humans_omnivores

blog forum with some good tid bits: http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=92836

[art_junkie]

*thumbs up*

[mindfulness]

We have evolved enzymes whose only role is to digest gelatin and does not digest any vegetable matter. That suite101 article doesn't mention gelatinase and thus I think it gives an inaccurate impression of the science.

However I still think there's many great reasons to be vegan of course and that includes health as animal products cause inflammation due to their proteins that set off our immune system. I wish I could find the article about that. It was great.

And then there's animal rights and the environment. Pick what you want, there's many great reasons to be vegan.

[bitspike]

Something I thought I'd add:

Even if our brain size increased due to the consumption of meat (I haven't read enough on the subject to have an opinion on the accuracy of that statement yet) it does not mean that eating meat can help us evolve further intelligence. Natural selection can't work effectively with such a large population as we currently have as a species - besides, any mutation giving a slight increase in intelligence, if selected for, would unlikely be due to diet, save for a major catastrophe which limited certain foods available to us.

But I agree with everything you said about 'design'.

And my comment gives no assistance to the OP as it says nothing about health =)

[singing4every1]

Hey thanks now this makes sense! Good backup!