FALSE!!!!!!!!!!

What vegetarian is making the argument that "humans can't actually digest meat"??
This " Vegetarian propoganda" simply doesn't exsist...I have been around vegetarians since I was born..The reason is simple. Animals are tortured and objectified for our want of consumption (Notice I didn't say need). They are brutalized and sacrificed unwillingly on a genocidal level, yet the majority of us turn a blind eye out of conveniance and wilful ignorance. I'm willing to bet cold hard cash that a meat manufacturer or employee of, is behind this website.. EDUCATE YOURSELF PEOPLE!!! Look at non-Bias documentaries like 'deconstructing dinner' or 'Food Inc.'

Last year I inadvertently experienced a lengthy experiment that further convinced me that meat is *much* easier to digest than plant material.

At the late age of 49, I spent 15 mos in orthodontic treatment. I didn't chicken out with Invisalign, either - I had "train-track" brackets & titanium arch broadening wires to correct my narrow & crowded almost V-shaped arches into much broader U shapes.

Needless to say, there were plenty of reasons it wasn't fun turning 50 yoa with braces, and I had to make many adjustments to my cooking and meal choices to accommodate a sensitive mouth and teeth, etc., while at the same time, make sure that I was eating very well so that my middle-aged approaching menopause jaw bones would have the necessary nutrients to remodel and retain the teeth that were being moved to the extreme edges of my arch capacity.

In the first few weeks of having braces and every month or so after I'd had an arch wire or ligature adjustment, my teeth felt quite loose and very tender, so I either ate really soft ground, pureed, or practically liquid food, or I ate solid food that could be easily mashed & swallowed without much chewing. Throughout my time in braces, I *never* had a problem digesting meat, seafood, poultry, dairy, and fats, even when I swallowed chunks of unchewed meat or barely mashed it with minimal chewing (I did make sure to cut firm meat into fairly small pieces to minimize choking risk). The ability to digest meat didn't seem to depend on either texture or degree of cooking, thought that did make a difference in my comfort while eating and chewing.

But for about 7 or or 8 months, whenever I tried to eat vegetables, I either minimized vegetable ingestion or else I had to either cook them to the point of being disgustingly soft & mushy or pureed with a blender. It wasn't just for eating and chewing comfort, either. If I prepared vegetables the way I prefer (raw or lightly cooked, aka al dente), my abdomen "talked" to me for hours after a meal, evidently trying extra hard to break down the vegetables. I wasn't in pain or particularly uncomfortable, but the obvious and continual churning, rumbling, and somewhat increased gas production from barely chewed vegetables was very annoying and interfered with good sleep for both myself and my husband (he could hear the rumbling and gurgling noises).

Salad greens were the worst to eat, because it was *very* hard to chew the thin leaves efficiently so they took a ridiculous amount of effort and time to consume, and they created the most abdominal noise and churning sensation. I love having a big salad with my dinner, so initially I tried swallowing salad without much chewing, but that created a far worse choking hazard than swallowing unchewed meat (the leaves would act like plastic cling wrap & stick at the back of the mouth or top of the esophagus). For the first 7 mos with braces I mostly gave up on raw and chunky vegetables and salads. When I ate vegetables, I either cooked them until very soft and/or blenderized them to make up for my inability to chew well, or I limited myself to just a few small bites.

If I had any doubt about the difference in digestibility between meat and plant foods, I don't now.

J. Stanton:

I've been experimenting and I'm going to point out the errors in the logic.

You've never been Vegan for at least a year. A vegetarian's gut flora is similar to a meat-eaters gut flora, as in harboring more harmful bacteria than beneficial bacteria and a lot different than a Vegan's gut flora, as in, a Vegan harbors very little harmful bacteria and a lot of beneficial bacteria. Vegetarians have levels of protease enzymes close to those of meat-eaters, going from Vegetarian to eating meat is not a big leap in noticing what rots and what doesn't.

As a vegan that has been vegan for over 3 years, I decided to test cooked meat, raw meat, cooked fish and raw fish.

Cooked meat: I experienced a serious immune system response, my body did not want the cooked meat, right away it exited my stomach where it was dumped in my GI tract to rot, major gas and abdominal pain.

Raw meat: Digested beautifully however my armpits and feces stank the day after.

Cooked fish: Digested fine however I woke up with a small ball of snot in my throat. Very small immune system response.

Raw fish: Digested beautifully however my armpits and feces stank the day after.

For me, meat is for survival and nothing else since I know how we humans produce large quantities of Vitamin B12. So.. There isn't anything needed in meat that can come from vegetation and that we can easily produce ourselves.

I've never had grains and vegetables rot in my GI tract, only beans at the beginning of going Vegan from being a meat-eater, not anymore. My guess is that a meat-eater/vegetarian moving from their current diet onto a Vegan diet will experience gas at first as the gut flora changes, harmful bacteria dying off and GI tract getting cleaned up from the processed animal products and/or cooked flesh. Grains should be avoided because of the anti-nutrients and the damage they cause on the brain.

We aren't herbivores, omnivores or carnivores. We are frugivorous apes that should be butt naked and barefoot in the tropics.

I have been reading that if we eat too high of a protein diet we get sick...our kidneys will fail and we get diarrhea and things like that..I am aware that we do not digest the fibers in non meat foods but I am pretty sure that we do get some of the vitamin benefits from the vegetable matter foods as no one runs around with skurvy these days and it is my understanding that meat is a poor source of vitaman c.

I am not personally going for a zero residue diet. I am more than happy to poop out fibers and inedibles and toxins.

Also beans do not make me gassy but man some of the asian cooking products sure do. No fish sauce for me.

So I am sticking to meat, veggies, some dairy and some fruit. Do not try to convince me that a strawberry is toxic lol.

I lean a little bit toward the idea of a diet that consists of animal protein, vegetables and a fairly high fat content that includes animal fat - providing those animals are grazed on grass and fed with ground up animal carcasses. Yet I take issue with the idea that the so called paleo diet represents the diet of early man. Even with modern weapons, hunting an animal for food hard work, particularly in the winter and early spring. Those animals that our early forefathers did manage to kill were thin and filled with parasites. I suspect that early man fed himself on roots and grubs far more consistently than he fed himself on meat. Except for those animals killed in summer when forage was plentiful, the amount of fat on an animal would be skimpy at best. The chances of overindulging on fat in prehistoric days would be few and far between. Quite frankly the Paleo Diet in and of itself is a diet that is only feasible in a country that is wealthy enough in terms of open space and grasslands to support an abundance of meat animals. It is also only possible in a society where agricultural practices restrain the growth of parasites, while promoting a relative amount of cleanliness in the packing houses. Also, if it is true that the formidable armies of ancient Rome primarily subsisted on rations of grain that they ground daily with their portable mills, then a high protein diet is not necessarily the best option for all peoples.

Do you have a post on the ethics of meat eating? I haven't thoroughly investigated the page yet actually, but I did not see one. I have just read through the last years worth of comments on the subject, and I think the ethics do play a part in the discussion IF you are a vegetarian or vegan. I have been a strict vegetarian for four years. (No meat ("nothing with a face") dairy or eggs. My primary reason for being vegetarian is that once I realized what was taking place within the mass factory farm situations, I chose to not be part of it. It is that plain and simple. I have two daughters, one is a vegetarian and one is not. I still cook meat for my non veggie girl...but I have a hard time doing it. I don't try to push the health benefits of being vegetarian...it IS more difficult than eating very readily available meat...but I do feel that if more people were aware of what actually took place behind the scenes there would be more people that did not include meat in their diet. I don't know if I am better off, but I have never had any of the problems associated with eating a vegetarian only diet that some of the posts here talked about. My cholesteral is very low and my blood pressure is great too at 46...and I feel better since I stopped with the animals. So, anyway, I would be very interested to see a post related to the ethics behind animal consumption...I think it would be interesting and, of course, more specific since this started truly in regard to the issue of the "rotting food". I do feel though that the majority of people "for" eating meat that would post would be the McDonald's burger and nuggets folks that really just don't care and turn away from what is unpleasant. I feel like so many people in the above posts are so negative in regard to vegetarians which I just don't get! They were so excited to have some kind of information that they could re-post on their facebook pages next to a picture of them eating a steak or a bucket of KFC...they weren't really concerned with the health issues or the digestion (which you were pointing out) but just that someone made it okay for them to not feel bad about eating it. Anyway...more than I originally meant to say...it was an interesting hour...