Why You Are Meant To Be A Plant Based Eater

people are not lions and people are not horses either so i was in the game changers and corresponded significantly with the directors and producers and you know overall is very good documentaries though are about making a point and when you’re making a point particularly when you’re trying to rectify a misperception and in the case of the game changers the misperception is if you want to be a badass you’ve got to eat meat you want to be big and strong you’ve got to eat meat if you want to be a supreme athlete you have to be i’m nervous that’s false you can fuel the supremes of human performance on a plant-exclusive diet so i think i think the movie made that point very effectively but when you’re making a point sometimes there is a tendency to tell just part of a full story because that part better makes your point so any of you see it game changers so you know there’s this segment in the middle where they’re talking about anatomy and they compare the human anatomy to a lion and the lion’s gi tract is shorter and all of that and okay we’re not lions that’s true lions are obligate carnivores we are not what they didn’t do was continue the comparison and say okay here’s an obligate herbivore like a horse and we’re not that either i have a horse my horse actually horse is colic periodically you know they’re very vulnerable gi tracts my horse did some years ago wound up having surgery and they extracted 15 feet of his intestine and i was warned by lots of people in the horsey world that he would never recover fully he did they just need to be given the opportunity he’s perfect but that’s my point he lost 15 feet of intestine and neither of us can tell that doesn’t tend to happen with people you lose 15 feet of your intestine it makes a hell of a big difference so we’re not horses either we’re in the middle we are clearly anatomically physiologically omnivores and i don’t think anybody should be reluctant or ashamed you know what that means it means we’ve got choices and then it’s up to us to make good choices and as we’ve been discussing extensively the good reasons to choose plant-based diets include not just our own health but kinder gentler treatment of our fellow creatures and good stewardship of the planet make good choices

okay alex i want to present the alternative for you on that um there are profound differences between of course strict carnivores like lions and uh um the type of herbivores that horses are and the type that humans are but the remarkable thing is that if you look at the human gi tract and compare it to that of a horse they look remarkably similar and what’s really interesting and really important is to understand that animals that are designed to subsist on a diet of other animals have to have a specific suite of anatomical adaptations that make that possible number one hunting is inherently inefficient even the best designed predators on the planet will only make a kill in the wild on an average of 7 to 10 days that means a study that was done in the isle of national royale um national park in can and canada show that one of the largest wolf packs um were unsuccessful 95 of the time they went out to hunt that meant that 95 of the time they tried to get a meal they didn’t get it so the question is what in god’s name could allow an animal to miss 95 of its meals and still survive as a species how can these predators eat once every seven to ten days and still not only live but have enough energy to reproduce and raise their kids and then you know make it till they can have another another meal well one of the biggest things is that they have giant stomachs they have stomachs that allow them to eat 30 percent of their body weight at a single meal that would mean that a person who weighs 150 pounds could eat 45 pounds of food at a single meal nobody can do that the fact is that from elephants down through rabbits all herbivores actually eat about 3.3 percent of their body weight every day that actually includes humans if you weigh the amount of food a human eats over the course of the day it will come out to be roughly 3.3 percent of the body weight uh depending on whether or not they’re overeating and and blowing up to the size of a michelin man so but this is important because it means it has implications for not only our physiology but also and this is where we’ve really dropped the ball on the kind of research we should be doing in trying to understand human disease um so that we’re told that we’re omnivores everybody’s been told that that’s a lie because the true omnivores in nature not only have physiologic anatomical adaptations to both procure and consume animal food and plant foods they also have physiologic adaptations so for instance you look at a bear a bear can literally not eat for six months come out of the den find a rotting deer carcass eat you know 30 percent of its body weight of that a deer carcass and be perfectly fine do you do you know what happened to concentration camp victims when these camps were liberated by allied soldiers and these starving people were given food many of them died because when they were given this massive uh uh concentrated load of of very osmotically active food it caused a massive shift of fluid from their already depleted bodies into their digestive tract they got diarrhea went into circular circulatory collapse and died that’s why when you go into the hospital you have bowel surgery and you stop eating the surgeons insist that you start to refeed yourself in a stepwise fashion because herbivores have a trophic uh digestive tract meaning your gut cells only mature if they’re constantly exposed to food if you stop eating they stop maturing if they stop maturing they lose the ability to uh hold water and and prevent water from translocating from your circulatory system into your digestive tract they lose their ability to to to do that whole absorption thing that they do and i’m kind of sort of shortening it uh it’s a little more complicated than that but it the differences between carnivores and herbivores actually even comes down to a subcellular level and what i mean by that there is a suite of enzymes in mammalian evolution that has been conserved throughout evolution and but where they’re found within cells depends on the animal’s diet so in carnivores these enzymes are found exclusively in the mitochondria where they are used for gluconeogenesis well why is that because carnivores don’t eat a carbohydrate so any carbohydrate they have they’ve got to make and their gluconeogene enzymes are turned gluconeogenesis means making new glucose are turned on 100 of the time all day every day if you are a plant eater you’re eating plenty of starch and glucose so you don’t need to have a full-time gluconeogenesis going on but what you do need is you need the ability to detoxify plant alkaloids because plants don’t want to be eaten and they load up their tissues with all of these compounds like caffeine and some other more sinister ones that when animals eat them can either make them sick or kill them so if you are dependent on plants you have to have the ability to detoxify these compounds that’s why you can’t feed your pets like aspirin and other medicines that or or you can’t give cats onions because it’ll cause hemolytic anemia and things like that they can’t handle those compounds and so in strict herbivores these enzyme systems are found exclusively in cellular organelles called lysosomes in by design omnivores like bears and raccoons that are designed to eat both plant and animal foods you find okay i get it half in in the mitochondria half in the lysosomes where are they found in humans exclusively in the lysosomes as they are in all strict herbivores mic drop