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However, modern life, with its office jobs, cars, and central heating, does not exactly impose the same physical demands on the human body. For this reason, those concentrated packages of calories and nutrients don’t make sense, says Dr. McDougall. “Modern Eskimos living in heated houses and driving around in their climate-controlled SUVs, still consuming a high-meat diet, have become some of the fattest and sickest people on earth.”

If we no longer need to eat meat, then why have our bodies evolved to eat it? The truth is that they haven’t in an efficient and healthy way,
and that’s because our physiology has much more in common with herbivores than with carnivores.

Let’s take a tour with Dr. Milton Mills, an expert in the anatomy of herbivores vs. carnivores.

Start with the mouth: Carnivores’ mouths consist of a jaw with a simple hinge joint and relatively little musculature. They have short, pointed incisors, elongated canines for cutting and tearing flesh, and triangular, jagged-edged molars that work like serrated knives. Their saliva contains no digestive juices.

The saliva of herbivores, in comparison, is full of an enzyme called alpha-amylase that helps digest the complex carbohydrates found in plants. Carnivores don’t need this enzyme because meat doesn’t contain carbohydrates. Their mouths are made to cut and tear large hunks of flesh from the bone and then swallow it whole, without mastication.

Human mouths exhibit the same characteristics as those of herbivores. We have large, well-developed lips, and muscular jaws that can move side to side and back and forth to aid in biting off and mashing up plant matter. We also have spade-like incisors and square, flattened molars, better for grinding and chewing than chomping and sheering. Even our canines are comparatively blunt compared with the dagger-like teeth of carnivores.

And our saliva? Chock-full of alpha-amylase.

Heading down into a carnivore’s stomach, in the belly of the beast you find a large (compared to its body size) stomach, a bubbling cauldron of highly concentrated acid followed by a short, straight, and relatively simple intestine. The stomach needs to be large because meat eaters eat relatively infrequently, and when they do they need to be able to gorge themselves all at once, then digest later. The highly acidic stomach juices are necessary to dissolve the large quantity of muscle and bone materials that carnivores swallow, and to kill the bacteria in the rotting meat that could otherwise kill the animal. The intestines are designed to move food quickly out of the system so that it does not begin to putrefy.

The human stomach, again like that of other herbivores, is smaller and only moderately acidic because digesting fruits, vegetables, and grains is much less of a labor-intensive task. Our intestines are long and coiled, slowing the digestion process and allowing our bodies to break
down foods slowly and to absorb more nutrients from them. Crucially, our large intestines have a pouched structure that is only seen elsewhere in the large intestines of herbivores.

As food digests, the liver clears some of its more harmful elements from the body. The liver of a carnivore rids its body of 100 percent of the cholesterol that enters it through eating meat (remember, kooky cholesterol only exists in meat). Our human livers, on the other hand, are very bad at getting rid of the stuff, a problem that causes cholesterol to build up in our arteries (a process called atherosclerosis) and results in heart attacks.

Another curious feature of our digestive system is its need for certain vitamins. Animals have a tendency to evolve in relationship to available foods. Carnivores, who were unable to get ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, from their diets (as it is found only in plants), instead evolved to synthesize it in their own bodies.

Humans, who have always eaten plants, have no such ability and depend on their diets to get vitamin C.

So eating meat isn’t a biological necessity. But why did our ancestors do it? Although some people might want to view them all as happy, club-wielding cave dwellers who feasted on mastodons and wooly mammoths, the truth is that their diets varied greatly depending on the periods during which they lived. The earliest humans probably ate an almost exclusively plant-based diet, while further down the timeline they turned to hunting and gathering, which effectively flipped their diet into one that included meat.

Then, with the advent of farming roughly 10,000 years ago, our fickle ancestors flopped back to mostly plant-based eating, a trend that can be seen as recently as the era of feudal Japan. So history shows us that more than being meat eaters, humans have always been opportunistic eaters who are much more likely to follow environmental trends than what biology actually dictates.

Best-selling writer and zoologist Desmond Morris has written extensively about human dietary preferences. In his book
The Naked Ape
, he discusses why, despite our meat-eating habits, humans are better suited for plant eating. “It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets, we should be able to do the same,” he writes. “We were driven
to become flesh-eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient primate feeding patterns.”

Meat eating may well have played an important part in our human past. In hunter-gatherer societies, where bringing home the bison was a full-time job, meat was a calorie-packed supplement to an otherwise plant-based diet. But in the twenty-first century, most of us have full-time jobs where failure doesn’t imply starvation. We are trying to take calories
out
of our diets, not pack them in. Food is readily available in the most benign hunting ground imaginable—the supermarket.

If meat was a necessity for us at various moments in our natural history, we’ve long since evolved past it. Yet some people insist on living in the past—particularly the Paleo dieters. (For more on the Paleo people, see
chapter 11
.)

M
eat is a must.” “Meat, it’s what’s for dinner.” “Humans can’t live without meat.”

Do you ever wonder where we get all this good news about meat?

Try the meat industry itself. The U.S. cattle industry alone had $74 billion in sales in 2010 (for 26.4 billion pounds of beef) and you can bet your rump steak that a hefty chunk of that went into political lobbying. The sad truth is that the information we get about health often has more to do with politics and money than with science and fact. Meat eaters are misinformed for good reason. Most companies involved in the meat business are represented by one of three lobbying groups: the American Meat Institute, the National Meat Association, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Their influence goes right to the top.

When Michael Taylor was appointed by the Clinton Administration as head of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (the meat watchdog branch of the USDA), two names already present on the speed-dial of his office phone were the American Meat Institute and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The USDA has been in cahoots with these guys since its inception in 1862, because it has always had the dual mandate of protecting American agricultural interests
and
advising the public about food choices. In plain speak, this is called “the fox guarding the henhouse.” Or as my father likes to say, “This would be like having Al Capone do your taxes.”

The classic example of the USDA’s conflicting roles came when the creation of the food pyramid in 1991 was delayed for a year and a day because of pressure from the meat industry. Just days before the pyramid was set to debut, Marian Burros of the
New York Times
broke the news that the Washington-based health advocacy group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) had asked the USDA to
make its four food groups completely plant based: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes—and the carnivores had a cow!

Even though the USDA declined the request, the Cattlemen’s Association called an emergency meeting with the Secretary of Agriculture, Richard Madigan (who had just attained the position with the support of commodity and farm groups). The trade groups complained that the proposed pyramid would hurt meat consumption. In response to the complaint, the USDA spent another $855,000 on research in order to confirm what they already knew—that you should eat more of every other food but meat.

If you think that sounds bad, try this: In 1995, the meat industry did everything it could to stop the USDA from implementing food-safety regulations that would require testing for salmonella in ground beef. The stampede was led by Representative James Walsh (who received $65,000 from agriculture-industry companies during the 1996 election). And although Walsh was unable to stop the rules from being implemented, the cattle industry went on to challenge the USDA in the Supreme Court, and won. Based on that decision, the USDA still can’t shut down a ground beef plant based solely on salmonella levels in the beef.

Hold on to your cowboy hats, because the meat lobbyists look like wimps compared with the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF). The tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman founded this group with nearly $3 million from Philip Morris, back before they changed their name to Altria Group to distance themselves from the fact that their products, including cigarettes, were deadly to their own customers.

The Center is dedicated to “shooting the messenger,” Berman-speak for discrediting any groups that try to publicize the health risks of the products produced by the companies that pay them, namely tobacco, junk food, and, you guessed it, meat. The Center for Consumer Freedom and its buddy the American Meat Institute have been trying to smear PCRM (our friends who recommended that the four main food groups be plant based) for years.

Other recent CCF campaigns have targeted the WHO, because it addressed obesity; the CDC, for investigating food safety; and even Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for some reason.

Our steak-and-kidney-pie-eating friends across the pond are playing the same game. A high-profile study released in 2011 by the British Nutrition Foundation concluded that people
shouldn’t
reduce their meat
intake—but there wouldn’t have been a study if the British meat industry hadn’t funded it.

Besides dissing plant eating, the meat industry is constantly thinking up ways to make its product seem healthier. Get a load of this: There is an online, six-hour college course offered by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called The Masters of Beef Advocacy. Yep. It’s available in forty-seven states. Students who receive their so-called MBA are then expected to speak at schools or promote meat through social media.

If such advocacy fails, the industry may personally go after anyone who threatens their message. This includes schools. In 2009, Baltimore city schools implemented a “Meatless Monday” program in their cafeterias as a way for the chronically short-funded school system to save money and fight rising obesity rates among students. When the American Meat Institute got wind of it, they went straight to CNN to complain that American children weren’t getting enough protein. Then, as the “Meatless Monday” movement gained steam with celebrity chefs like Mario Batali, the meat lobbyists went into overdrive, sending threatening letters to organizations that had adopted the movement and campaigning against it on the Internet.

The good news is that even the powers that be are slowly coming around to the sad realities about meat. They are reading the studies and reviewing the research. The USDA’s latest plant-strong, plate-shaped food guide of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and protein has eliminated the “meat” group entirely and replaced it with “protein,” showing that you don’t need to eat meat to have a healthful and balanced diet. Ever. So don’t think you do. Don’t buy the “B.S.” I certainly don’t, and haven’t since 1987.

Most of what’s been written about the problems with meat has concentrated on its obvious and well-studied risks. Meat is high in fat and cholesterol, and bad for your heart as well as your arteries. But new studies from the Cleveland Clinic, published in the spring of 2013, have found yet another big problem with meat. Or rather, a very, very small problem: Eating meat affects the microscopic bacteria that live within us in a surprisingly harmful way.

We now know that there are ten to twenty times more of these tiny bugs inside our gut and intestinal tract than there are human cells in our body. Now, many of these bugs are good for us—they are known as probiotics because they support our health. However, as proven by the Cleveland Clinic studies, some of these bugs turn out to be very bad for us.

The research was led by Dr. Stanley Hazen, chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. Dr. Hazen and his team looked at blood samples from thousands of people who had come through the clinic’s Cardiology Department. They discovered that when omnivores eat a substance known as carnitine, which is found in
red meat, the bugs in their intestines gobble it up and then belch out a gas known as TMA (trimethylamine), which smells like rotting fish.