VEGETARIANS GO APE
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In using comparative anatomy to determine what man was “meant” to eat, we should look at the species most similar to man, namely the anthropoid apes–chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, and orangutans. Of all animals, man’s digestive organs and teeth most closely resemble these apes. In captivity, some of these animals will eat meat if forced to rather than starve to death. But in the wild, all eat a vegetarian diet.
Eating a healthy diet goes far beyond cutting back a bit on red meat. In a recent study of 6,500 Chinese, Dr. T. Collin Campbell of Cornell found that even though the Chinese overall eat only a fraction of the animal protein Americans do, those who ate the least animal protein nonetheless had lower risk of disease than the average Chinese. Dr. Campbell concludes, “We’re basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimizing our intake of animal foods.”
Your quibble about the measurement of intestinal length is not compelling. Even if we adopt your method and assume a three-foot “body length” for humans, our gut-to-body ratio is 8, about midway between plant-eating pigs and horses (20 and 12, respectively) and meat-eating cats (3). This tends to support the idea that we are omnivores.
