"Warren Gallin" <wgallin at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> wrote in message
news:8p3cc9$80i$1 at mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk...
> I doubt that abandoning animal protein is uniformly leading to an
> increase in health.
Doubt, based on what?
Have you actually tried this on a personal level, or are your opinions
based on experiential and conceptual ignorance?
People who actually do the experiment uniformly report so. Why would
the millions of people who have changed their diets to plant-based ones in
the past several decades do so, if they experienced no clearly observable
personal gains??
Trying to communicate about plant-based diets with human carnivores is
like trying to get sexual counseling from a celibate priest. Their opinions
are firmly grounded in a total lack of personal experience.
> Even so, the fact that meat causes changes to body
> odor isn't a strong argument that humans are not adapted to eating meat.
In order to refute any conceptual model, it is necessary only to
demonstrate error(s) in the facts, or the logic used on those facts, to
produce the conclusion. Unsupported blanket denials are worthless.
Since most of the objectionable odoriferous compounds in the feces of
human meat-eaters are due to toxic amine compounds: viz. indole, skatole,
putrescine, cadaverine, and since the amine radical (-NH2) comes into the
body only in proteins, certainly not in carbohydrates or fats, then the mere
presence of such compounds is clear evidence that the proteins were not
digested and assimilated properly. If they were, and their amino acids had
been transported and assimilated, there would be NO amines in the feces.
QED.
The other major odor is due to the good, old rotten-egg odor we all met
in high school chem lab: H2S, and the S is only in proteins, not cho or fat.
If you find any flaws in this logic, please correct them.
> In fact, the Inuit live on a nearly pure meat diet and their health is
> poorer when they shift to a diet richer in plant components.
What is their life-expectancy at birth?
I would like to see your citations on this; please summarize them and
their methodology and findings.
Would this alleged "shift to a diet richer in plant components" be one
of adopting a highly-processed, preserved, canned, White-man's, junk-food
diet, rich in sugar and refined pseudo-foods, like grains? I'd bet so. For
this statement to be meaningful, they would have to consume uncooked plant
material, and this most certainly would not result in any decrease in
manifest health.
The Inuit are one of the most diseased, alcoholic, overweight,
suicide-prone, short-lived people on the planet; not really a good example
of pristine human health or our natural ape-diet.
> Also, digesting meat and vegetables are not completely different
> pathways. The same proteases and lipases can hydrolyze proteins and
> lipids from animal and plant tissues.
There are two major issues here: quantity and quality.
Since current RDA's indicate that human adult protein needs are ~1/3% of
the overall diet, one would have to provide a really solid, credible
argument as to just why Nature would provide a rarely-usable,
excess-protein-digestive capacity to deal with ~100 times the inherent
design limit. Nature is generally not known to be so wasteful. But, could
you do so?
In fact, people who do personal dietary experimentation and move closely
to an all raw, frugivorous diet uniformly experience that concentrated
proteins from any source, e.g. nuts/seeds, are not digestible. Other than
containing ~100 times the required protein, these contain high quantities of
fat, which coats the chewed particles and insulates them from aqueous
digestive enzymes.
The quality issue is also of fundamental importance: cooking denatures
proteins; i.e. it destroys the 3-dimensional secondary, tertiary, and
quaternary structures of the protein molecules by breaking the fragile
hydrogen bonds that produce and maintain such structures. Biochemistry
claims that such 3-dimensional structures of proteins are absolutely
necessary for the 'biological activity' of such molecules. Destroy the
structure, and you destroy the biological activity.
This denaturing occurs at temperatures only a little above body
temperature, which is why body temperatures above 105+ are considered very
dangerous: biochemistry stops, AKA death.
> Poor nutrition certainly decreases fecundity.
The 50% drop in human sperm count in the past several decades indicates
something very wrong is happening in the human species.
Fecundity in human populations where 'medical miracles' force the most
unfit to survive, and pass on their faulty genes, when they should not
according to Nature, is not a meaningful index of health or 'fitness'.
> If animal protein as part of the diet
> increases fecundity you would get selection.
Actually, a high-protein diet produces excessive sexual stimulation, but
any resulting differential fecundity is certainly not a correlate of natural
selection or a shift toward 'fitness'.
In fact, do not populations under severe stress tend to reproduce more
frequently? This does not imply 'fitness' either.
> 1) I don't see that these are non-natural diets.
Do you run down, kill, tear asunder, and eat your animals raw as all the
true carnivores/omnivores do? Do you know anyone who does, except
self-deluded 'instinctos'?
Is cooking and the severe chemical changes it produces natural?? What
other species cooks?
> 2) The metabolic pathways for handling the components of animal and
> plant tissues are quite similar,
Respond, in detail, to the quantitative and qualitative issues
introduced above.
Laurie
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