Meat-eating Albertans try raw vegan diet for a month

Did they print out a menu ?

No, thank you.

I don't get it, when we last had a raw vegan diet, our life expectancy was about 25-30 years.

Are there a lot of different permutations of a carrots-and-sawdust diet?

Evolutionary biologists postulate that it was our protein rich diet that boosted our brain development overy other primates. Mind you, it was mostly fish and shell fish that was initially responsible.

Can't eat fish because of the mercury, farmed fish is disgusting, and most of what's left of the wild stocks are being rapidly exterminated by the fishing fleets anyway. Can't eat the shellfish because they mostly come from the waters off of China/SE Asia and have been heavily contaminated by raw sewage and toxic industrial waste released directly into the waterways. Maybe the lack of being able to eat healthy seafood is one of the reasons the world gets stupider every passing day.

We have all the walleye we want that doesn't have dangerous mercury levels....other heavy metals leaching from the shield rocks.....well we all die someday.

We also didn't farm, so we weren't exposed to many diseases. A heightened immune system and modern vaccines have led us to the point where we now get old enough to die of heart disease, cancer, Huntingtons, Alzhimers . . . And now we are finding some of those have a causal relationship to eating most animal protein.

I think they had to eat the menu.

I recall Louis Leakey postulating that a diet that included competing primates was also responsible for the rise of humanity.

Hunting other primates also necessitated teamwork, weapons use and fabrication, and then the ability to plan and communicate that plan to peers.

He also said that he thought we were evolutionarily adapted to kill each other.

I have tried to cut out as much red meat as possible recently. I was taken in by some of the accounts of vegetarian friends and others who described the energy they had and attributed to the fact that digestion of complex protein chains requires lots of energy and can leave you lethargic naturally.

I do believe that most people eat way too much meat in general and that in our natural state, if there is even such a thing, our diet would consist mainly of the things we could grow and forage easily and be supplemented by the food that we needed to hunt or defend from predators in the case of livestock. I think this fits in well with a path of least resistance philosophy which I think is as natural as a plant growing toward light or villages sprouting up by fresh water sources, etc.

Before conducting my experiment, I did a fair bit of research on the foods that were available to supplement the protein I would be missing. I didn't want to end up extremely deficient in a vitamin or mineral and end up exposing myself to disease or weakness.

It was during this research that I had determined that there is no possible way that humans were meant to be vegan, and mainly for three reasons, B12, Zinc, and Coenzyme Q10.

These essential ingredients are almost exclusive to animal flesh and are absolutely necessary to a normal functioning human body.

Without finding foods that were "fortified" with B12, the only other place to find it in any quantity is in algae and medical research has indicated that it does not work as a viable replacement:

Vitamin B-12 from algae appears not to be bioavailable.



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2000824

Again zinc can be found in beans, lentils, peas, seeds, but because the levels are so low, you would end up over consuming in order to achieve the required levels that you could easily obtain from a small amount of meat. A high percentage of vegitarians are zinc deficient for this reason.

Lastly, Coenzyme Q10 is necessary for the proper function of every cell in our body and although it can be found in spinach broccoli cauliflower and other members of the cabbage family, you need to consume a lot of it to maintain safe levels.

Interestingly, these missing ingredients are generally highest in fish, and being from the east coast, I love my fish so that has been my main non vegetarian supplement but I do still enjoy a steak or pork chop once in a while because I think it is healthy to do so.

I'll admit that the changes in my diet have given me more energy, I still enjoy my meat though and believe it is completely natural for us to eat it, just not as much as some do.

I don't have a problem with vegetarian food once and a while, but a vegan diet, thanks but no thanks.

We were not "meant" to eat anything in particular. We have, however, Evolved to eat Meat, Grains, and Veggies.

Not sure when this was, but even in ancient times when Meat/Plants were part of our diet we didn't live much longer than that. Our current Life Expectancy is only partially due to diet. Good Food Supply, Sanitation, and Medicine play the largest roles.