Does anyone need to eat meat

Slicing worked best for meat, not only making it especially easy to chew, but also reducing the size of the individual particles in any swallow, making them more digestible. For OSUs, pounding was best—a delightful fact that one day would lead to the mashed potato. That mattered for reasons that went beyond just giving our ancient ancestors a few extra free hours in their days. A brain is a very nutritionally demanding organ, and if you want to grow a big one, eating at least some meat will provide you far more calories with far less effort than a meatless menu will.

This, in turn, may have led to other changes in the skull and neck, favoring a larger brain, better thermoregulation and more advanced speech organs. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey. You know you want it—or at least your brain does. By Jeffrey Kluger.

We are a now mishmash of compensations and add-ons that have helped us to survive over the years. If we say that we want to eat as our ancestors did, do we mean Homo erectus , Neanderthals who may well have eaten more plants than is often imagined , Australopithecus who walked the earth around 4 million years ago , the earliest primates around 50—55 million years ago , or something in-between?

If the preceding ramblings mean anything, it is that we should only eat meat if it benefits us now. The important question is how it impacts our bodies today. Nobody realistically thinks that we should meticulously go back to what our earliest ancestors ate simply because it was a long time ago.

From a medical point of view, we should only eat meat if it is healthful to do so. Over recent years, there has been a growing mountain of evidence in support of the health benefits of a vegetarian diet and the health risks of pounding too many burgers into our bodies. Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk 15 percent of incidence from total cancer.

Vegetarian diets are also tied to a lower risk of metabolic syndrome , diabetes , cancer again , and lower blood pressure , and they may fend off childhood obesity. On this matter, at least, the jury is well and truly in.

Today, however, protein is much easier to come by — in nuts and beans, for example. Vitamin B can be found adequately in cheese, eggs, milk, and artificially fortified products, and iron can be picked up from legumes, grains, nuts, and a range of vegetables. Red and processed meats are associated with colon cancer and heart disease.

The majority of studies conclude that eating more of this meat is a bad idea. But how much is too much, and what levels are safe, are harder to quantify. In contrast, there does not appear to be a measurable risk from eating red meat once or twice a week. So, should we be vegetarians? Well, when the burger hits the fan and the kebab lady sings, there will still be no clear answer.

Humans have eaten meat for a really long time, but a diet with minimal meat is much more healthful. A runner's diet should contain a healthy balance of macronutrients, adequate carbohydrates, and micronutrients from plant foods.

Learn more. Learn why some people might need to follow a mechanical soft diet, the foods they can eat safely, and the foods they may wish to avoid here. Caffeine, fatty foods, and foods high in sugar can all negatively affect sleep and keep people awake. People can often manage fatty liver disease by making dietary changes. Learn which foods to include and avoid in a diet for fatty liver disease.

Predators secrete the enzyme uricase from their kidneys to break down digesting flesh. Humans do not create nor secrete any uricase. Both the small and large intestines of humans are long in ratio to overall body length. Fiber from food is required to move food through this long channel. Predators have short intestines and have no need for fiber in their diet. It takes humans hours to fully digest a meal while a predator needs only 2 to 4 hours to digest meals. We have arms that are typically the length of half our height and we can raise them overhead while we stand up on our two legs and feet.

We need not look for food only on the ground thanks to our height and reaching advantages. At the ends of these arms we have prehensile hands, not paws, with opposable thumbs that can grab and hold a hand-sized piece of immobile food. Our nails, even when grown, are not sharp enough for latching into prey.

Fruits, vegetables, roots, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds meet these anatomical requirements, are relatively easy to secure, and nourish us completely. We need not look any further than our own bodies to identify how and what we are meant to eat.

On average, biochemically all humans are We are trained and we train ourselves by exposure geographic location, the grocery stores near us, the restaurants we visit, the people with whom we eat and who cook for us to prefer the foods we eat.

But these preferences are not locked in. Taste buds change and can be retrained mindfully over time. Poor habits sometimes die hard. When born into and living in a state of health, we are very similar to one another in our nutritional needs, as are all members of a species. It is only when the body is in a state of disease that we need personalized nutrition. Even in a state of disease, the realm of natural food choices are the same , just some specific foods may need to be limited or omitted.