swiftcobra15
Regular
305 messages
joined Dec 2002
I’ve been reading this thread from the start, and I have to say, you all gave me a good laugh. Honestly, there isn't this much nonsense even on the comment sections of major US news sites like CNN.
First off, just so everyone knows which camp 😁 I belong to: I haven't eaten meat in about thirty years. I'm not a vegetarian, let alone a vegan.
However, once I stopped eating meat, I made a point of studying human nutrition thoroughly, and I think I actually learned a thing or two along the way.
Originally, humans (Homo sapiens) were essentially omnivores. This specifically means that in pre-civilization times, our diet consisted of about 70–80% plant-based foods, while the rest came from animals—things like insects, larvae, shellfish, crustaceans, fish, birds, and mammals, just to name the big ones. I mention this so the skeptics don't immediately assume we were living solely on spiders.
Even today, so-called "primitive" groups still eat this way, unless they live in extreme environments, such as the Inuit or certain Samoyed communities.
With the rise of the modern food industry—which is driven primarily by industrial factory farming and mass meat processing—there has been a massive surge in the consumption of unnaturally produced meat. Consequently, we are seeing a spike in many modern diseases that our ancestors barely knew existed.
Just a few generations ago, our ancestors might have had meat once a week, or perhaps a few more times a year. They were also much more physically active, and for the most part, they were healthy. A crucial difference compared to today is that the meat they did consume was naturally raised, so it couldn't harm them the way today's products do.
Meat was often a staple on the tables of the wealthy, which created the misconception that meat is the ultimate food. Interestingly, even "experts" fell for this bias; I remember being taught in school that we needed to consume huge amounts of animal protein every single day. Today, official scientific guidelines have actually halved those recommendations, yet some people still insist that a significant portion of protein must come from animal sources. To me, that seems like utter nonsense when you consider the millions of people worldwide who don't consume animal products at all.
Our body's proteins are synthesized from essential amino acids, all of which we can easily obtain from plant-based foods. When we consume animal proteins, we are essentially making digestion more complicated, because those proteins first have to be broken down into essential amino acids before our bodies can synthesize our own proteins.
😉 It feels like I've gone on a bit too long here, so if there's interest, I'll continue this another time.🙂
