Ilya wrote:
> JoAnn Betten wrote:
> > all i can say is i tried living on nothing but meat, water and an occasional
> > piece of fruit.  i ate this way for about a year, until i got severe
> > diverticulitis from low fiber in my diet.
> Often people who have problems without fiber don't consume enough fats,

When you eat an all meat diet, you must consume at least 70% of your
calories in the form of fat.  As your intestinal flora diminishes
considerably during this type of diet, eating an occasional piece of
fruit will cause problems as vertebrate bodies cannot digest vegetables
on their own.

Of course since Jane Godall pioneered field studies of Primates in the
1960s, we now know that "fruitarian Primates" are a myth.  Although some
arboreal Primates eat lots of fruit, as S/N pointed out, all fruits are
seasonal and not a year round source of food for any Primate.

Modern physiological studies of Humans have also pointed out that all
unique Hominid physical charicteristics are adaptations for red meat
consumption.  Voegtlin devotes three chapters to these characteristics in
his book "The Stone Age Diet" (the chart found on pgs 44-45 is a great
sumation).

The reasons for vegetarianism in some cultures has nothing to do with
kindness towards animals.  Animals that are eaten benifit from this
relationship in several ways.  They have longer average lifespans than do
their wild counterparts, they have a more consistant food supply than
their wild cousins, they have greater populations and they suffer less
when they die than those who experence seasonal famine and predation.
Many such as cows, horses, chickens, pigs and goats would be extinct if
people didn't eat them.  Even the scacred cows of vegetarian India suffer
from conditions of poor nutrition that would land a person in jail in the
U.S. if you tried to feed your cattle in this way.

The real reason for vegetarianism is that domestic animals compete with
grains for resources.  When resources are strained by population growth
as in India in the 6th century BC (when Budism and Janism began and
Hindus became vegetarians), the animals have to go to produce more grain.
 See Marvin Harris's (Anthropologist, Columbia University)"Cannibals and
Kings" for more on this process and how grain cultivation led to this
overpopulation.

As for breeding to consume less meat, domestic dogs have been eating a
largly vegetable diet for many more generations than any humans and any
dog will still do better on a wolf diet just as any human will do better
on a Neanderthal(a non domesticated Hominid) diet.  Modern humans and
dogs are almost identical in their degree of DNA differences when
compared to wolves and Neanderthals respectively.

Ray Audette
Author "NeanderThin:A Caveman's Guide to Nutrition"
http://www.sofdesign.com/neander