Picture yourself walking down a tranquil forest path. It is 5,000 years ago and your environment is pristine, the sun is flickering through the leaves of the full green trees. The sky is brilliant blue and the air is fresh and cool. While nature is vibrant you are hungry. The conveniences of today are not available. You can’t walk to the local grocery store and pick out whatever you feel like eating.
You are hungry. What do you do?
All of a sudden a deer jumps out in front of you. It is large enough to feed your family for a week or more. However, you have to catch it first. The deer is much faster and agile so you really have no chance. It darts back into the undergrowth.
Say you did catch it, how would you kill it? Do you have long sharp canine teeth and powerful jaws? How would you slash open its hide and tear off its flesh? You do not have the teeth or claws of a leopard or a wolf. Instead you have flat back molars and jaws that move sideways for grinding and masticating. You have flat blunt nails made to protect your fingers not tear open hides.
These are the first clues that help us understand that we are not a natural predator and that, maybe, our place is not at the top of the evolutionary food chain. Yes, we are clever and create ways of getting what we want but what we want and what we are designed for are two different things.
There are many evolutionary details that suggest we are designed to be vegan.
The digestive tracts of true carnivores are short, smooth and highly acidic, unlike the long, convoluted, and mostly alkaline intestines of herbivores and frugivores, including our own. The far smaller area and high acidity are to facilitate the rapid digestion, absorption, passage, and excretion of putrefying meat rather than the extraction of nutrients from fibrous plant matter.
The gastric acid of carnivores is much stronger than our own. This is to rapidly break down the connective tissues and robust protein complexes of meats and animal foods. True carnivores also have acidic saliva whereas the saliva of herbivores, frugivores, and humans is alkaline. Herbivores and frugivores sweat to help prevent over-heating while carnivores pant.
In “The China Study,” top US research scientist, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, documented the link between rising meat and dairy consumption and the skyrocketing rates of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other modern lifestyle diseases.
What is interesting to me, and might be of greatest interest to all, are the links to cancer. Dr. Campbell and his team were able to control the rate and progression of cancer development in laboratory animals by altering just one factor in their diet, the intake of animal protein. His results were then reinforced by the largest epidemiological human study ever conducted, The China Study. Dr. Campbell’s findings confirmed that meat, egg, and dairy protein surpass the majority of even very potent chemical carcinogens in their effect in causing cancer. He states that women who derive their protein from animal products are 5 times more likely to die from breast cancer than those who follow a plant-based diet. Vegetable proteins do not have this effect. Given the fact that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women are being diagnosed with cancer in present day Western societies, the link to these facts becomes even stronger and more a more urgent action to be taken.
The “modern lifestyle” has taken us down a path of massive disease with virtually 100% of people being diagnosed with something and more than 80% of people on some pharmaceutical drug.
The conclusions have become quite clear. The observations, anecdotal evidence, and increasing bodies of scientific research are supporting these facts. We are designed for a different food type than previously believed. We are designed to thrive on a diet that is more similar to that of herbivores and frugivores. In my opinion, the human diet should consist solely of fruit and vegetable foods. Meats, dairy products, and eggs are not foods for us. Our body cannot metabolize or even tolerate them. These so called foods are actually quite toxic to us and the incidence and mortality rates of the common degenerative disease now afflicting western society increase along with their consumption.
Be Well!
Andrea Lambert
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