CHAPTER 7 – The Happy Vegetarian – How a Meatless Diet Will Improve Your Health and Well-Being

Overall health and well-being is a foreign concept to many people. They don’t realize that they have the power to control their own health and that their well-being is often dependent on what they choose to eat and how active they allow themselves to be. Sooner or later, their bad choices catch up with them, and they end up overweight (or obese) with a multitude of health problems. They develop heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, and a slew of other deadly conditions that could have easily been avoided. All you have to do is be aware of what you are eating. There is more power on your dinner plate than you realize.

It is a known fact that vegetarians, as a whole, are more healthy that nonvegetarians. They have lower rates of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, gall bladder problems, and more. They also tend to be more active, involved, and aware of the environment because the principles of a vegetarian diet often permeate into other aspects of life. Lowered cholesterol, high amounts of vitamins, nutrients, and fiber, and a healthier lifestyle are all guaranteed benefits you will get simply by becoming a vegetarian.

Now, let’s talk digestion, a topic that is both fascinating and important. If you still have any lingering suspicions that humans are supposed to eat meat as a primary source of protein, you might want to take a look at the digestive tract of true carnivores.

Meat is hard to digest, and it takes time for it to break down so that the nutrients can be used by the body. We’ve already talked about the differences between the teeth of carnivores (sharp and pointy for tearing flesh) and the teeth of plant-eaters (blunt and flat, like ours), and that’s where digestion begins—in the mouth.

While you’re chewing your food, the enzymes in your saliva begin the digestive process—the first step in breaking it down to its most usable form. After you swallow, the food moves on to your stomach, where it’s dunked in a bath of hydrochloric acid that breaks it down further into a substance called chyme. Chyme travels from there to the digestive tract where it’s slowly pushed through by contractions of the intestines called peristalysis. As it goes, tiny little hairlike fingers called villa absorb most of the nutrients from the chyme.

Finally, the almost completely digested food makes it to the colon, where water and some more vitamins and nutrients are absorbed from it before its exit through the rectum.

Meat—the Protein that Overstays Its Welcome

Here’s where it gets interesting. Looking at a true carnivore—like, say, the lion with his big sharp teeth—we can see enormous differences in their digestive tract. Specifically, the lion’s small intestine, where most of the nutrients are only about three times the length of his body. This means that the meat he eats moves through his system quickly, while it’s still fresh.

Humans, however, have much longer intestines, with food taking anything from twelve to nineteen hours to pass through the digestive system. This is ideal for plant-based foods, as it allows our intestinal tracts to absorb every little bit of nutrient available, but it also means that when we eat meat it’s decaying in a warm, moist environment for a very long time. As it slowly rots in our guts, the decaying meat releases free radicals into the body.

Free radicals are unstable oxygen molecules that are present to some degree in every body. When you hear advertisements trumpeting the importance of foods and supplements containing cancer-fighting anti- oxidants, it’s these free radicals they’re battling.

Scientists only know a little bit about free radicals at this time, but what they do know is that free radicals are connected with the aging process and that they may play a part in heart disease and cancer. They are, essentially, the tiny mechanisms that break down our bodies so that, eventually, we die.

While they’ll always be a part of you—free radicals are built into cells as part of their normal activities—you can do things to minimize their damage. Overexposure to sunlight resulting in excessive tanning encourages the production of free radicals, which is why even though a little sunlight is important each day (remember our buddy, vitamin D?), using a good sun block will not only help you avoid skin cancers, it’ll help keep you younger in general. But the biggest thing you can do to limit the free radicals in your body is to avoid eating meat. For the twelve hours or more that meat is rotting away in your system, those tiny, free radical time bombs are multiplying in your system.

As meat protein breaks down, it creates an enormous amount of nitrogen- based by-products, like urea and ammonia, which can cause a buildup of uric acid. Too much uric acid in your body leads to stiff, sore joints; when the uric acid crystallizes, it can cause gout and increased pain from arthritis. Carnivorous animals, interestingly, produce a substance called uricase, which breaks down uric acid. Humans don’t produce uricase, though—another clue that we’re not meant to be meat eaters.