Meat: Delicious or Disgusting?

While carnivores take pleasure in killing animals and eating their raw flesh, any human who killed an animal with his or her bare hands and dug into the raw corpse would be considered deranged. Carnivorous animals are aroused by the scent of blood and the thrill of the chase. Most humans, on the other hand, are revolted by the sight of raw flesh and cannot tolerate hearing the screams of animals being ripped apart and killed. The bloody reality of eating animals is innately repulsive to us, more proof that we were not designed to eat meat.

Ask yourself: When you see dead animals on the side of the road, are you tempted to stop for a snack? Does the sight of a dead bird make you salivate? Do you daydream about killing cows with your bare hands and eating them raw? If you answered "no" to all of these questions, congratulations—you're a normal human herbivore—like it or not. Humans were simply not designed to eat meat. Humans lack both the physical characteristics of carnivores and the instinct that drives them to kill animals and devour their raw carcasses.

If we were meant to eat meat, why is it killing us?

In addition to being anatomically ill equipped to digest meat in the short-term, the long-term damage that a meat-based diet wreaks on the human body confirms that we were not meant to eat flesh. Natural carnivores never suffer from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, strokes, or obesity, ailments that are caused in humans by the consumption of the saturated fat and cholesterol in meat.

Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of the authoritative American Journal of Cardiology, sums it up this way: "[A]lthough we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

Studies have shown that even when fed 200 times the amount of animal fat and cholesterol that the average human consumes each day, carnivores do not develop the hardening of the arteries that leads to heart disease and strokes in humans.⁴ Indeed, researchers have found that it is impossible for carnivores to develop hardening of the arteries, no matter how much animal fat they consume.⁵

Carnivores are capable of metabolizing all the fat and cholesterol in meat, but humans are a different story: Our bodies were not designed to process animal flesh, so all the excess fat and cholesterol from a meat-based diet makes us sick. Heart disease, for example, is the number one cause of death in America according to the American Heart Association, and medical experts agree that this ailment is the result of the consumption of animal products.⁶ In fact, meat-eaters have a 50 percent higher risk of developing heart disease than vegetarians, and a low-fat, completely vegetarian diet has been repeatedly used to unclog the arteries of heart disease patients—it not only prevents but also treats the disease!⁷ Learn more about animal products and heart disease.

In addition to pointing out the damage done by saturated fat and cholesterol, scientists have also shown that eating animal protein can be harmful to human health. We consume twice as much protein as we need when we eat a meat-based diet, and this leads to osteoporosis and kidney stones.⁸ Animal protein raises the acid level in human blood, causing calcium to be excreted from the bones to restore the blood's natural pH balance. This calcium depletion leads to osteoporosis, and the excreted calcium ends up in the kidneys, where it can form kidney stones. The strain of processing all the excess animal protein from meat can also trigger kidney disease in meat-eaters.

The consumption of animal protein has also been linked to cancer of the colon, breast, prostate, and pancreas. In fact, according to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the director of the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health, and the Environment, "In the next ten years, one of the things you're bound to hear is that animal protein … is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered."

Eating meat can also have negative consequences for stamina and sexual potency. One Danish study indicated that "Men peddling on a stationary bicycle until muscle failure lasted an average of 114 minutes on a mixed meat and vegetable diet, 57 minutes on a high-meat diet, and a whopping 167 minutes on a strict vegetarian diet."⁹ Besides having increased physical endurance, vegans are also less likely to suffer from impotence.

Since we don't have strong stomach acids like carnivores to kill all the bacteria in meat, dining on animal flesh can also give us food poisoning. In fact, according to the USDA, meat is the cause of 70 percent of foodborne illnesses in the United States because it's often contaminated with dangerous bacteria like E. coli, listeria, and campylobacter.¹⁰ Every year in the United States alone, food poisoning sickens over 75 million people and kills more than 5,000.¹¹ While carnivores can process all the saturated fat, protein, and bacteria in animal flesh, a meat-based diet can send humans to an early grave. Clearly, people were not intended to eat meat. Learn more about how meat affects human health.