Are we plant or meat eaters

I have no idea but here is an interesting table of attributes. 

If we are really plant eaters that can eat meat then this might have a bearing on UC. 

Seems that the length of the small intestine would indicate that it is made to digest carbs,also the saliva

contains carb digesting enzymes.

Old Mike

http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html

Post Edited (Old Mike) : 8/19/2012 1:56:28 PM (GMT-6)

Yeah that'S really interesting...I guess there is no way of knowing for sure what we are meant to eat and what we are not meant to eat, but looking at our anatomy is probably the best indicator.

I think its pretty clear that we are omnivores that adapt to our environments. While the consuming of wild grass seeds processed with stone tools probably dates back many thousands of years, our eating of wild plants and animals predates modern humans.

I'm strongly in the "humans are omnivores" corner. Last week I happened to be in the small town of Clovis, New Mexico where pre-historic human artifacts were discovered in 1929 and at the time were the oldest human finds in North and South America, dating to 11,500 years before present. Spearheads were found along with animal remains and I don't think the sharp pointy things were used to gather plants.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture

Cultivated grains came many thousands of years later (wheat was cultivated in Europe long before grains such as maize/corn were grown in the Americas, thousands of year after Europe).

There is no doubt we humans are omnivores but is everything we eat good for us? Of course not.

I used to be a vegetarian and was fit and healthy. UC made my gut reject most food except meat and non-starchy veggies. I loved being a vegetarian but the gut rules.

Find out what makes your gut happy and eat it. (Silence of the Lambs being an exception).

yea...the "standard American diet" (SAD) is killing us off...one obese person at time. It's like the movie WALL-E, except it's not fiction.

It really comes down to how long we have been evolving on different diets- although we have certainly been omnivores for hundreds of thousands of years- but pb4 has it nailed down best: the thing to avoid is processed garbage. Processed grains and sugars in particular are too recent to have allowed any real evolution, and we, along with diabetics, etc, seem to be canaries in the coal mine.

i do not know the answer to this! when i was vegan, i was convinced that it how we were born to eat. our teeth and digestive systems are very different to that of carnivores and we do not crave raw meats. we would never just go hunt and take a bite out of a deer. we have to cook it to make it edible for us (although i know that people do eat things like raw oysters and tartar- it's just not our first choice of foods). if we were given a choice of an apple or 1/4 lb of raw ground beef, i'm sure most of us would choose the apple. without fire, i do not think we would have evolved to eat meat, but since we do have fire, our bodies have adapted now.

Yes I believe we are omnivores ,but also believe meat could/might be a problem with UC. But then again
the pre civil war diet was about 178 pounds per person/yr,grass fed.
Old Mike

are you blonde or brown haired ? tall and thin or short and not so thin ? can you bench press 400 # or is pulling a kleenex out of the box an effort ? big ears, small ears ?

we are all different - inside and out - shouldn't it stand to reason that i do great eating meat 3 meals a day, but you do better eating it 3 times a year -

figure out what works for YOU -

and pass the tofu

I should mention that before we were all modernized, we were ALL members of our respective ancestral primitive cultures. By primitive I mean we were then, as we are NOT now, living essentially by natural laws and not breaking them as a matter of normal everyday behavior.

Not ONE primitive culture on Earth was ever totally vegetarian.

Post Edited (freddyj) : 8/21/2012 2:15:00 PM (GMT-6)