Karl McKinnon writers:

>        The gut is what really closes it, though.  The gall bladder and
>intestine-mass ratio shows that man is a meat eater, although as I much
>on some celery hearts I would not say that he is a carnivore like a wolf
>or a housecat.  But humans are in no way vegans like cows or horses.  It
>is my firm belief that absent technology to make beans and grains edible
>(and some supliments), the vegan would die.

Well, not quite, but also not far from the truth either. Speaking as
someone who edited a small newsletter for Natural Hygienists for 4 years
recently and became acquainted with a lot of vegans and their stories
(before as a renegade I abandoned ship and went omnivore/carnivore after
looking at the evolutionary evidence), I can relate a few interesting
things.

My best estimate from having heard a fairly wide range of experiences from
this group of mostly raw-food vegans was that when you got past all the
excuses for their ongoing "healing crises" (euphemism for unwanted symptoms
they were experiencing), it was nevertheless true that, I would say,
roughly 10-15% of them could survive quite well long-term (i.e., we'll say,
more than a year or two or three) in good health on a raw-food diet without
grains or beans or some other form of concentrated cooked starches like
potatoes, squash, etc. Some of these people we are talking doing well
healthwise for 10-20-30 years or more.

But in the main, the health of those who doggedly stuck to that kind of
diet past the 2 or 3-year mark (just a rough estimate here) was not that
ideal. Late last year, after I resigned the editorship of this publication,
I put together a 12,000-word article for a renegade Natural Hygiene
publication (Chet Day's Health & Beyond) that was willing to print my views
in opposition to the mainstream N.H. establishment dogma about all the
problems experienced by a large portion of the N.H. community that had been
swept under the run under various euphemistic explanations.

What typically seemed to happen was that almost everyone initially
embarking on such a diet program like this improves considerably and
thrives at first, assuming their previous diet was the usual junk-food
American diet. This was ostensibly due (and I believe this view is probably
substantially correct as far as it goes, which of course I do not believe
is far enough) to the effect of eating such a "clean" diet compared to the
usual junk-food American diet. This initial improvement lasting perhaps a
year or two or more, would serve as the proof they needed to convince them
of the diet's "rightness" for all time.

Over time, though, for probably a good half of these people, they would
start having health problems of one sort or another, which they looked upon
as "healing crises" (i.e., supposedly ejecting more and "deeper" toxemia,
etc., as the body supposedly gets more energy to do so). But by this time
they were already so utterly convinced of the efficacy of the vegan diet,
most of them simply could not consider that their symptoms might not be due
to creeping deficiency problems instead. In their worldview deficiencies
were almost impossible if you ate a wide-enough variety of raw vegan foods,
so everything was always pinned on toxemia that one was supposedly not
fully rid of as long as you were having symptoms. So it became a circular
self-reinforcing worldview like an abyss once you fell into it, from which
it was rare to ever see anyone extricate themselves psychologically, or
improve physically.

So I wouldn't say vegans who don't eat grains or beans are going to die,
but most will have a difficult time after they have exhausted their stored
nutritional reserves. How long these will last depends on the
individual--many years in some cases. Also some people digestive systems
seem to be much more efficient extractors and assimilators than other
people's, and so I believe (from observation, though I have no proof of
this) that these types of individuals can sometimes get what they need from
a vegan diet.

What I am curious about, is now that the Paleolithic perspective is
starting to more heavily researched and publicized, how much longer can
vegans continue the facade that veganism is the most "natural" way to eat?
It will be interesting over the next decade or two to see how they respond
in the light of all the evolutionary scientific evidence coming to light. A
good spectator sport, so to speak.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>