Neat, I hadn't heard the Christianist term yet. Time has even used it in the title for an article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html

Wikipedia has an article under a different name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominionism

It's interesting watching people tilting at windmills like this.

Vegans are crazy! I saw on discovery channel (i know...) that if we had not scavenged left over meat, our brains would stay smaller and we would stay a pray, won't become the mightiest hunter of this planet. Meat is very condensed with various fatty acids that helped our brain grow.

85% of diet of those men (Homo Erectus, Neanderthals) were meat, veggies only when they can't find meat.

If we leave vegans in a wild island, few centuries down the road their brains would be reduced to the size of a monkey's brain and Lions will be feasting on them.

Imran! (More greetings on the next post!)

Re Vegans: Indeed! From what I know, you're dead right, about brain size. (They think fish consumption, with lots of omega-3 acids, may have played a very significant role in that.)

Another tidbit: People looking at the human form have always been a bit confused. If we're "supposed" to be meat eaters, then how come we don't have a short intestinal tract (which I guess aided the processing of soon-to-rot meat), like carnivores?

If we leave vegans in a wild island, few centuries down the road their brains would be reduced to the size of a monkey's brain and Lions will be feasting on them.

Vegan diets are easy to do incorrectly. I agree that people are not naturally vegan and that early tribes would have been foolish to go that route. While I think a high fish diet (without red meat or pork) is optimal, from the standpoint of nutrition, it's possible to be vegan and very healthy with a variety of workarounds (which many vegans neglect.) Nutritional yeast is used as a Vitamin B12 supplement. Veggies can be blended and strained to provide large amounts of nutrients that are without bulk and easily digested. Seaweed extracts serve as an EPA source. (since, in a traditional diet, oceangoing fish would eat seaweed and concentrate the DHA and EPA.) Extracting nutrients from food is not a problem in the modern age when we have blenders, stoves, and even genetic engineering to aid us. My programming skills wouldn't be of much use on a desert island either, but I don't think that devalues them. We adapt to our environment, whatever that may be. Grazing cattle on pastureland makes sense. But there are a lot of problems with factory farmed food, on a personal health(lower levels of certain nutrients) and societal level. Not to mention, for some, a moral level.

Veganism is a lot more work than most people are willing to do. And yes, it does tend to select for unusual people.

People looking at the human form have always been a bit confused.

Interesting! Yes, I'd been confused in exactly that way. We seemed like hunters with eyes squarely on the fronts of our heads, but we had the teeth and digestive tracts of herbivores. Thanks. That makes sense.

If we're "supposed" to be meat eaters, then how come we don't have a short intestinal tract (which I guess aided the processing of soon-to-rot meat), like carnivores?

I reread this just now. I think the longer digestive tract is required for digesting plant matter, especially cellulose, which humans lack the microbes to digest, as well as absorbing the nutrients produced by guy bacteria. I've been told the microbes for digesting cellulose would give us diarrhea. Digesting the cellulose in plant matter is hard. Digesting meat is easy, provided you can get a bite of it. The whole mad cow thing started, for instance, because cows were being fed to other cows. If it weren't for the spread of disease, cows seem perfectly capable of digesting meat.

Cows can eat what people eat. People cannot survive on what cows eat.

guy bacteria -> gut bacteria

I've read a few claims that feeding meat to horses would cause digestive problems but nothing to substantiate it.
I don't know if there's a difference between raw meat and cooked meat, but feeding cooked meat to horses seems
to have been done to good effect in the past.

Arabs prepared camels' flesh with other feed in the form of cakes which were given to their horses... a division of English army horses fed American dried meat made into a biscut with oats showed decided superiority over horses fed in the ordinary way

uggh... seriously... a vegan diet is easy to do well if one has even a basic level of urge to do so.

Hemp seeds for example, contain all the essential amino acids in an easily digestible form and all the essental fatty acids in perfect ratio for human nutritional needs.

there is no mythical ingredients in meat that can't be found easily somewhere else~ deal with it, eat some hemp seeds, and enlarge your brain.

Greg - Granted, you can get all the essential amino acids through vegetables. But noone here suggested otherwise. Essential fatty acids are not the same as essential amino acids. You might want to address the points that people have brought up, which includes essential fatty acid consumption and B12 consumption (not essential amino acid consumption.)

Yes you can get B12 from nutritional yeast or supplements, but not everyone does and some nutritional yeasts, kept out in sunlight, lose their B12 and some people don't supplement at all.

Also, while the alpha linoleic acid from flax seed or hemp is converted (in very small quantities) into EPA it is still debated whether a person can get enough EPA that way to satisfy optimal dietary requirements (assuming, for the moment, that carniveroius EPA requirements are the same as vegetarian EPA requirements. It could be argued that vegan diets are less inflammatory and thus may require less EPA.) Carniverous diets fufill their EPA requirement primarily via fish consumption and secondarily by conversion from Alpha Linoleic Acid to other unsaturated fatty acids.
Personally, I get my EPA directly from seaweed extracts just to be on the safe side.

Vegans get enough EPA from ALA to prevent deficiency, but it's reasonable to question whether their levels are optimal. The jury seems to still be out here.

I didn't include the source for the second citation.

Incidentally, flax is a better source of Alpha Linoleic acid than hemp, since Alpha Linoleic Acid and Linoleic acid compete for the same enzymes and people already get too much Linoleic acid in their diet relative to Alpha Linoleic acid. The ratios of the two are important, and most people get much more LA than ALA.