The Vegan View

If the vegan diet is superior, what about all of those people of past cultures who ate meat? From early man to Native Americans, animals were hunted and killed and their meat eaten even though there were vegetable foods available.

VegFamily readers reply:

Article continues below

Kelly:
When Native Americans were hunting for food, they hunted it because they needed it to survive. There weren't grocery stores around and alternate food options like there are today. Also, there weren't large scale slaughterhouses where animals were mistreated a few hundred years ago. Now, in this day and age, we have a moral obligation to eat a plant-based diet and there is no good excuse for NOT doing so. There are many vegetarian and vegan options available at grocery stores, and you can also buy plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables and grains and make hearty vegan and vegetarian meals. A vegetarian/vegan diet is healthier now because meat is pumped full of horomones and has plenty of saturated fat on top of that. The Native Americans and past hunter/gatherer cultures did not eat meat that was as tainted as it is today.

Joan:
When you know better, you do better. Enough said.

Gerry:
Over the past millennia very few animals have changed and enlarged their habitats and lifestyles as much as humans have. At some juncture, or over some extended period of time, for one reason or another, humans learned a new method of feeding themselves, that of killing and eating other animals. Many humans continue to eat other animals even though the intake of animal protein and fat causes enormous harm to their unprepared digestive systems. One such result is the release of large amounts of uric acid each time that meat is consumed. This highly toxic acid can, and often does, do irreversible damage to our bodies, because human livers can only eliminate small amounts of uric acid, while carnivores? livers are designed to process twelve times the amount. No matter what amount of animal fat carnivores eat, they do not develop furred arteries. Humans descended from apes and inherited their skeletal structure. Humans also inherited their digestive system, which was clearly designed to cope with fruit and vegetables alone. Despite this, many hundreds of millions of humans are omnivores. Not alone are the digestive systems of carnivores and omnivores very different from humans, but also their fingers and toes, which are designed to grip and tear flesh and not to extend and curl around fruits, nuts and branches. Humans do not have the claws, the long fangs, the rough tongue or the jaw action of carnivores and omnivores. Nor do we have the innate desire to kill when we spot a pig or a deer, yet our bodies do remember other prehistoric impulses like those of self-preservation and sex.

Tim:
Do you think man can catch prey with his bare hands and rip the meat open and drink the blood like a true carnvavor? Do you think man's first diet was meat or more likely fruit? If you were starving how much energy would you put forth to catch an animals many times faster than you or would you just simply pull off a piece of fruit that is not running from you but hanging right within your reach to quell the hunger?

IF the right thing to do is superior then I guess you could call the vegan diet superior. I don't. I think Raw food vegan is the best way to go. How many of us are ready for that? One step at a time. Do you know how much rain forest land is plowed up to grow cattle to feed non-vegans? That hamburger you buy does a lot more to threaten your survival as a human than it does to feed your body nourishment. So why do you do it? If you were born into a raw food vegan world you would do that but since all you have known is the death consumption culture you think that is normal and therefore superior. Actions speak louder than words. Being vegan says I refuse to spend my dollars torturing animals and destroying rain forests which clean the greenhouse gasses up from our gas guzzling cars and power plants that keep our lifestyle going. Being vegan means you care and you have thought about your actions and want to take actions with less adverse karma associated.

Shari:
Today's meat which is raised in containment areas and fed all kinds of hormones and who really knows what else, in my opinion can NOT be healthy. The native americans had a far better choice of a somewhat healthier meat based diet than we do today. Most cultures that included meat used it as a supplement to the grain based diets. It seems today, meat is the main focus on a plate, a huge slab of it, which is by far not healthy for a daily diet.

Have a question you'd like to ask and get responses from the VegFamily community? Submit your question here.

Sponsors: