Why Do We Have to Eat Meat?

It's true the meat industry puts out a product many people find themselves unable to stomach, and rightly so.

However, not eating animals at all is not the solution. Humans are designed to function optimally with animal protein fluctuating between 20% and 60% of our daily calories. There is no magic, perfect numerical formula for the percentage of this or that that we all should strive steadily for in our diets.

Food is the fuel for what you are doing. You've got your basic functions, breathing etc, and from there your actual metabolic needs are dictated by details of age, gender, musculature, immune- and other system requirements, genetics and how you are using yourself.

The day you spend digging a 40-foot bed for your tomatoes is a day you'll need more food than the day you spend sitting in a chair typing a term paper. Chasing your 3 and 5 year-old while breastfeeding their baby sister takes a lot of fuel. Maybe as much as you needed when you were climbing rock walls or running marathons -- and, you'll need to tolerate carrying some extra fuel (also called fat), to boot, for as long as you are the nutritional transfer station for that bundle in your arms. All this is different again from what you’ll need to eat when you are sashaying to the stage to receive your Biker of the Year award for alternative commuting in the 70 years-and-older category.

The point is we all need fresh, whole, clean foods, including fats, protein and carbohydrate, in amounts that serve the demands of our day, demands which change, always, inevitably over time. And we cannot eliminate a whole category of basic nutritional elements- that which we receive from animal food- and be optimally healthy.

It’s important to keep in mind that the original design for the human system included surviving, even thriving on a somewhat unreliable food supply. Original humans had to have broad and eclectic tastes, to essentially be willing to eat anything and everything. We ate something because it was there, ripe in season or because someone risked his or her life to run it down, kill it and drag it back to share. The rule was eat it now, whatever it is -- bug larvae, fish eyes, a four-legged carcass stolen from under the noses of dozing hyenas, whatever! -- because it was not certain where the next meal will come from or when.

We pretty much eat that way now -- that is, we eat what is there, now now now and what is usually in front of us is too much of something highly refined and full of toxic synthetic chemistry and especially carbohydrates we don’t need. We don’t need those carbs because we aren’t using them. In addition, they can worsen PCOS symptoms.

Carbs are our muscles favorite right-now food. Also, our mouth and brain-pleasure-center's favorite! Over 60% of Americans are overweight because we have a relentless supply of calories that we do not use up in abundant muscles that are regularly active.

A vegetarian diet rich in complex carbohydrates and good quality fats is OK for some people, in some very special cases. However, as a regular diet, as a commitment for life, a vegetarian diet will always lead to inevitable nutrient deficiencies.

A person can get more than enough calories on a vegetarian diet in the US of A. But the lack of appropriate proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, the resulting acid/base imbalance in the gut and innumerable other more or less subtle but essential nutritionally based chemical cascades in the body will go awry.

This is part two of a six-part series.

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