CHAPTER 7 - The Happy Vegetarian - How a Meatless Diet Will Improve Your Health and Well-Being
Let’s talk digestion. No, really, this is 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 its nutrients can be used by the body. We’ve already talked about the differences between the teeth of carnivores (sharp amd 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 enzyme’s 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’s creaks it down further into a substance called chyme. It travels from there to the digestive tract where its slowly pushed through by contractions of the intestines called peristalysis. As it goes, tiny little hairlike fingers called villi absorb most of the nutrients from the chyme.
Finally, the almost completely digested food makes it to the colon, where water is absorbed from the chyme along with some more vitamins and nutrients before exiting through the rectum.
Meat – the protein that overstays its welcome
Here’s where it gets interesting. Looking at a true carnivore – like, say, that 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, much longer intestines, with food taking from 12 to 19 hours to pass through the digestive system. This is ideal for plant-based foods, allowing 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-oxidents,” it’s these free radicals that they’re battling.
Scientists only know a little bit about free radicals at this time, but what they do know is this: free radicals are connected with the aging process, and 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 in to cells as part of their normal activities – you can do things to minimize their damage. Too much sunlight in the form of 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 sunblock 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 12 hours or more that meat is rotting away in your system, those tiny, free radical time bombs are multiplying in your system.
Along with that, as meat protein breaks down it creates an enormous amount of nitrogen-based by-products like urea and ammonia, which can cause a build-up of uric acid. Too much uric acid in your body leads to stiff, sore joints – and, when it crystallizes, 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.
The raw and the cooked
When you eat meat, how much of it do you eat raw? Well, Mr. Lion eats his raw, while its still brimming with enzymes that aid in digestion. Humans, however, cook their meat. In fact, we cook our meat to temperatures over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. This has the benefit of killing most disease-causing bacteria, but it also kills the enzymes in the meat.
Whenever you eat dead food – food lacking in the natural enzymes that help you digest it – your pancreas has to work extra hard to provide more so the food will break down for digestion. This puts strain on the pancreas that it wasn’t originally designed to handle. Which isn’t to say that you should eat raw meat, like the lion. But it’s another consideration when we look at whether humans are designed to eat meat – when true carnivores eat raw, fresh meat, all the enzymes are present to help them garner the nutrients they need as it passes quickly through their short digestive tracts, and the nutrient-depleted waste is eliminated soon after.
When we eat cooked meat, though, our bodies have to work extra hard to digest it, using precious energy needed for other purposes, overtaxing the pancreas, and creating free radicals as the dead flesh decays in our intestinal tract. But when we eat a plant-based diet, we’re feeding ourselves food that’s abundant with living enzymes, which breaks down efficiently in our systems, and which provides extra energy by not demanding that our organs work overtime to use it.
