The Big Switch

     There are an increasing number of reports of people switching from veganism to the carnivore diet.  A web search will turn up dozens if not hundreds of such tales.  Switching from carnivore to vegan is much rarer, vanishingly so.  But, doing a web search on carnivore to vegan will turn up just as many or more sites.  After reading a goodly number of such stories I realized that we are dealing with a rather large disparity in defining what carnivore is.  Currently, those on a strict carnivore way of eating limit themselves to animal food products almost exclusively.  In my case, and very many others, I consume only one plant product in quantity, which is coffee.  Fortunately, coffee has had no noticeable affect on my overall health.

     What the vegan community considers carnivore is anyone who includes any sort of animal food product in their diet.  This is of course how the bulk of the U.S. population eats, especially the bulky part.  Those on the "Standard American Diet" normally include meat, dairy, and fish on a regular basis, but they also include large amounts of starchy carbohydrates, sugar, fruit, and vegetable oils.  Some consume as much as 80% of their diet in carbs and sugar.  So the vegan idea of carnivore, and the strict carnivore idea are at complete odds.

     In the wild, mammal predators eat only other animals they can kill or scavenge.  Their systems have been fine tuned to digest meat, and plant matter doesn't enter into the picture at all.  Such predators are called "obligate" carnivores, meaning that they must eat meat to survive.  Mammals who eat mostly meat but can tolerate some carbs are called "facultative" carnivores.  Dogs and bears fall into the facultative category.  Cats, even housecats, are virtually all obligate carnivores.  Housecats eat plant foods only at their peril, and the peril of their owners' vet bills.  Many consider humans to be facultative carnivores, therefore capable of eating a wide variety of things.  However arguably true that is, the fact remains that humans eat a huge variety of things that can and do harm them if consumed for a long enough period.  So we are then indeed facultative carnivores, but that does not mean we can just stuff whatever strikes our fancy down our gullets for decades free of consequences. The more of that "facultative" junk food we eat, the worse our health outcomes will be.

        It is my contention that modern humans need to be obligate carnivores to truly thrive and to repair the ravages of decades of carb and sugar consumption.  The older we are, the more imperative it is that we avoid carbs and sugar seeing as how they are the proximate cause of virtually all human chronic conditions, including the bane of the aged, cognitive decline.  Ignore the utterly misguided drumbeat of the anti-meat activists.  Eat mostly meat, and watch it improve your life in ways you never imagined.  In short, you can live to eat, as most people do, or eat to live, as most people most assuredly do not.