Everyone in privileged countries should be vegetarian

Without eating meat we would not be here today as humans. We would still be Neanderthals, the growth of our brains is why we are where we are today, this is by the consumption of protein. Our brains are the largest with the exception of whales, this is why we are on top of the food chain. Our ability to think, come up with solutions and invent things like guns that revolutionized the way we hunted. If it weren't for meat you would still be a gorilla in a tree. It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet, and if Australopithecus had had a forehead to slap it would surely have done so. Being an herbivore was easy"fruits and vegetables don"t run away, after all. But they"re also not terribly calorie-dense. A better alternative were so-called underground storage organs (USOs)"root foods like beets and yams and potatoes. They pack a bigger nutritional wallop, but they"re not terribly tasty"at least not raw"and they"re very hard to chew. According to Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, the authors of the Nature paper, proto-humans eating enough root food to stay alive would have had to go through up to 15 million "chewing cycles" a year. This is where meat stepped"and ran and scurried"in to save the day. Prey that has been killed and then prepared either by slicing, pounding or flaking provides a much more calorie-rich meal with much less chewing than root foods do, boosting nutrient levels overall. (Cooking, which would have made things easier still, did not come into vogue until 500,000 years ago.) In order to determine how much effort primitive humans saved by eating a diet that included processed animal protein, doctors recruited 24 decidedly modern humans and fed them samples of three kinds of OSU"s (jewel yams, carrots and beets) and one kind of meat (goat, raw, but screened to ensure the absence of any pathogens). Using electromyography sensors, they then measured how much energy the muscles of the head and jaw had to exert to chew and swallow the samples either whole or prepared one of the three ancient ways. On average, they found that it required from 39% to 46% less force to chew and swallow processed meat than processed root foods. Slicing worked best for meat, not only making it especially easy to chew, but also reducing the size of the individual particles in any swallow, making them more digestible. For OSUs, pounding was best"a delightful fact that one day would lead to the mashed potato. Doctors in the study concluded, a diet that was one-third animal protein and two-thirds OSUs would have saved early humans about two million chews per year"a 13% reduction"meaning a commensurate savings in time and calorie-burning effort just to get dinner down. That mattered for reasons that went beyond just giving our ancient ancestors a few extra free hours in their days. A brain is a very nutritionally demanding organ, and if you want to grow a big one, eating at least some meat will provide you far more calories with far less effort than a meatless menu will. What"s more, while animal muscle eaten straight from the carcass requires a lot of ripping and tearing"which demands big, sharp teeth and a powerful bite"once we learned to process our meat, we could do away with some of that, developing smaller teeth and a less pronounced and muscular jaw. This, in turn, may have led to other changes in the skull and neck, favoring a larger brain, better thermoregulation and more advanced speech organs. Your ancestors all ate meat and that is why you are here as a human being with an intelligent brain, otherwise you would still be a gorilla sitting in a tree eating leaves. So you can go ahead and keep eating vegetarian maybe if you and your future generations keep eating vegetarian you might even devolve into an ape eventually, but I will stay on top of the food chain as a meat eating highly intelligent, non anemic human. (mic drop) http://www.berkeley.edu... https://news.harvard.edu...