u/AldarionTelcontar

So vegans have a lot of arguments

But which of these get your hackles up the most?

For me, it is the following (taken from here and here):

Humans don't resemble carnivores

Yeah, cause we are omnivores. Duh.

Humans didn't eat meat until agriculture and lack the ability to be good hunters

Humans are literally the best persistence hunters existing in nature. Only animals that can match our endurance hunting abilities are wolves - which is why wolves were the first animal we domesticated, and perhaps the only domestic animal to self-domesticate. And if you look at how human body plan differs from that of the apes, all of the differences are there basically to make us better persistence hunters.

If humans were supposed to eat meat, we'd be eating it raw

Um, okay? First off, we absolutely can eat meat raw, and many cultures have dishes made of raw meat. The reason meat generally isn't eaten raw isn't because we can't digest it, it is because raw food - not just meat! - has pathogens and parasites in it, but whereas you can wash fruit and vegetables, any such things in meat tend to be inside it. Cooking isn't so much about digestion as it is about sanitization. But if you have a trusted source of meat you know is healthy, there is 0% issue eating it raw. Or straight off the cow. Second off, cooked meat is just tastier. As a matter of fact, even wolves prefer cooked meat.

Humans lack the teeth and claws and jaw of proper predators

We had been using tools to cut and fire to cook meat for literally millions of years, well before the anatomically modern Homo Sapiens was even in the beginning stages of evolution. We never had any reason to evolve the teeth and the claws in the first place.

Also, humans are in fact omnivores. Omnivores who eat cooked food. And cooked food - even meat - means chewing. Which is precisely what our jaw and teeth are designed for.

Human digestion

Human digestive tract is that of an omnivore, and lies in fact somewhere in between that of a wolf and a bear. Argument that presence of amylase proves that we are herbivores is false because 1) it merely helps digesting plants, it doesn't magically prevent you from eating meat and 2) it is in fact a very recent evolutionary adaptation, perhaps as recent as last 10 000 years.

Length of our digestive tract is also squarely in between the carnivore and the herbivore, and in fact we lie somewhere in between the dogs and the pigs in that regard.

As for the argument that humans have weak stomach acid which is incapable of neutralizing pathogens... human stomach acid ranges from 1,0 to 3,5, which is similar to pig (1,15 to 4,0) and dogs (1,5 to 2,0) but not herbivores (7,13 - 7,61).

Any other common vegan arguments you can think of?

So I have been experimenting a lot due to my IBS... and came back to carnivore. But I had been thinking about why I had left the carnivore diet to begin with... and it turns out, some foods on the diet had been causing me issues which I had then ascribed to the diet as a whole.

Thinking back, I'd rate the foods as follows:

• Butter: A+. Zero issues, and even solves issues with some other foods.
• Beef: A. Zero issues, unless I mess up the preparation.
• Eggs: B. Normally excellent, but I have to avoid eating too many hard boiled eggs and omelettes. Soft-boiled and sunny-side up eggs are excellent though.
• Fatty fish: B. Tuna, salmon and so on are decent when fried in butter.
• Chicken: C. No issues with boiled or baked/roasted chicken (except for the fact that baked/roasted chicken is dry like sandpaper, but having butter on top and eating the consequently-very-buttery-skin solves this), but fried chicken breast causes me major stomach upset. I suspect it is due to the lack of fat... the one time I tried it, I forgot to bring butter or mileram.
• Most fish: D. Simply too dry.
• Turkey: D. Too dry even when fried in fat, unless we're talking turkey meatballs or cevapi. In that case, it rapidly jumps to B+ or A-.
• Dairy: D. Mileram is fine (C+ or B-), but yoghurt, kefir, milk itself and especially cheese are apage satanas.
• Bacon: F. It probably has to do with the fact that it is not actually bacon but rather a bunch of chemicals masquerading as bacon, but store-bought bacon causes me issues no different from eating confectionery.