I forgot to mention that clearly different bodies are designed for different diets for maximum health. I seemed to have been born a vegetarian (plant eater), as even when I was a little kid I refused to eat meat, and had health issues when I ate other animal products. So I'm pretty sure that the most good, true, and beautiful food for me is plants.
And while it seems a bit unusual for a single species to have more than one body design when it comes to food, it appears that humans do vary in their basic food requirements, so that some humans might actually need some animal products, while others don't. But it's hard to tell as we don't really have a way to do controlled studies on this sort of thing. However, if there is any sign of disease, removing animal products from the diet has been shown in many cases to be the fastest way to cure the disease. So it's possible that all humans really are designed to eat plants as the ideal diet. But we may never really know, because we're likely to create some kind of Star Trek technology where we simply replicate food from raw energy and simple matter really soon...
By contrast though I might point out that there are some cultures (the Inuit in particular) that survive entirely on raw red meat and seem to do quite well on it.
Yes, especially with groups that have been in a very extreme environment for a long time, it's quite possible that they have evolved genes that make eating mostly meat an ok diet. However, I wonder if they really are doing "quite well". Do you have any studies about how long they live and how often they get things like heart disease, diabetes, etc., compared to groups that live in a similarly extreme environment but that eat a mostly plant based diet (maybe somewhere in the rainforest, or northern inland China)?
Oh, and body types...
Date: 2009-06-29 04:55 am (UTC)And while it seems a bit unusual for a single species to have more than one body design when it comes to food, it appears that humans do vary in their basic food requirements, so that some humans might actually need some animal products, while others don't. But it's hard to tell as we don't really have a way to do controlled studies on this sort of thing. However, if there is any sign of disease, removing animal products from the diet has been shown in many cases to be the fastest way to cure the disease. So it's possible that all humans really are designed to eat plants as the ideal diet. But we may never really know, because we're likely to create some kind of Star Trek technology where we simply replicate food from raw energy and simple matter really soon...
Re: Oh, and body types...
Date: 2009-06-29 05:00 am (UTC)Re: Oh, and body types...
Date: 2009-06-29 05:06 am (UTC)