Are Humans Supposed to Eat Meat? Research Says ‘No’ 

What are humans supposed to eat naturally? Are humans designed to eat meat? Quick test: If you saw a dead animal on the side of the road, would you be tempted to stop and snack on them? If your answer is “no,” then you’re an herbivore.

Mountains of research shows that a natural human diet is vegan—and that exploiting animals for their milk and eggs and slaughtering them for their flesh isn’t what nature intended.

Think you’re a paleo caveman or -woman? Well…

“But our ancestors ate meat!” That may be true—but we aren’t hunters and gatherers. According to research, millions of years ago, humans ate what was available for survival; even then, their diets consisted mainly of fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds.

Today, animals raised and killed for their flesh spend most of their lives in filthy, cramped sheds on farms, where they can’t bask in the sun, take dust baths, or even move around comfortably. Farms often genetically manipulate animals to grow unnaturally, painfully large, and routinely cut off cows’ horns, pigs’ tails, and the tips of hens’ sensitive beaks—all without painkillers. 

At slaughterhouses, workers slit animals’ throats, often while they’re still conscious. Many can still feel it when workers plunge them into the scalding-hot water of the de-feathering or hair-removal tanks or hack their bodies apart. Nothing about this process is “natural.”

How Human Anatomy Is Built for Plants

Although many humans choose to eat both plants and meat, earning us the dubious title of “omnivore,” we’re anatomically herbivorous. Let’s break it down:

Our Teeth, Jaws, and Nails

• Humans have short, soft fingernails and small “canine” teeth. In contrast, carnivores have sharp claws and large canine teeth capable of tearing flesh.
• Carnivores’ jaws move only up and down, requiring them to tear chunks of flesh from their prey and swallow them whole. Humans and other herbivores can move their jaws up and down and from side to side, allowing them to grind fruit and vegetables with their back teeth.
• Like other herbivores’ teeth, humans’ back molars are flat for grinding fibrous plant foods.

Stomach Acidity

• Carnivorous animals swallow their food whole, relying on highly acidic stomach juices to break down flesh and kill the dangerous bacteria in it, which would otherwise sicken or kill them. 
• Our stomach acids are much weaker in comparison because strong acids aren’t needed to digest prechewed fruits and vegetables.

Intestinal Length

• Animals who hunt have short intestinal tracts and colons that allow meat to pass through their bodies relatively quickly before it can rot and cause illness.
• Humans’ intestinal tracts are much longer than those of carnivores of comparable size. Longer intestines allow the body more time to break down fiber and absorb the nutrients from vegan foods. Still, they make it dangerous for humans to eat meat. The bacteria in meat have extra time to multiply during the long trip through the digestive system, increasing the risk of food poisoning. Meat begins to rot while it makes its way through human intestines, which increases the risk of developing colon cancer.

What Do Experts Say?

Author of the book The Power of Your Plate, Dr. Neal Barnard, talks about humans’ early diet, explaining that we “had diets very much like other great apes, which is to say a largely plant-based diet…. [M]eat-eating probably began by scavenging—eating the leftovers that carnivores had left behind. However, our bodies have never adapted to it. To this day, meat-eaters have a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other problems.”

Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, adds, “[F]ruit and different plants and other things that we may have eaten maybe became less available…. The meat-eating that we do, or that our ancestors did even back to the earliest time we were eating meat, is culturally mediated. You need some kind of processing technology in order to eat meat.… So I don’t necessarily think we are hardwired to eat meat.”

Dr. Richard Leakey, a renowned anthropologist, summarizes, “You can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand. Our anterior teeth are not suited for tearing flesh or hide. We don’t have large canine teeth, and we wouldn’t have been able to deal with food sources that require those large canines.”

What About Dairy? 

Did you know that a whopping 68% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant? Humans are the only animals who consume milk from other animals—if this seems odd to you, it’s because it is. Cows produce milk for the same reasons that humans do: to feed their babies.

In the dairy industry, farms separate mother cows from their precious calves so humans can steal and consume their milk. While cows suffer on these farms, humans who eat dairy cheese increase their chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and many other ailments. Additionally, any nutrient found in cow’s milk—like calcium and vitamin D—is available in plant foods, such as leafy greens and tofu. These foods are better for you and don’t contribute to a tremendously cruel industry.

The same goes for eggs and other animal-based products.

Animals’ milk, eggs, and flesh belong to them—period. From cows who form lifelong friendships to chickens who establish complex social hierarchies known as “pecking orders,” every animal is someone who can feel love, pain, and fear.

Go Vegan!

Eating meat or other animal-based foods isn’t natural, but having empathy is. Make the compassionate switch for animals, the environment, and your health today. Order a free vegan starter kit with recipes, tips for going vegan, and more:

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