By answering the basic question: What am I? We will encounter ourselves in the most ancient and primordial manner. Are we omnivores, creatures that must partake of vegetables and animal protein to exist? The reality of our dogged adherence to the Standard American Diet (with its made to order and well placed acronym "SAD") would have us believe so.

The fact is that we, Homo Sapiens, are not carnivores or omnivores, we are herbivores. We are not natural carnivorous creatures. We belong to the herbivore group, we are animals with all of the physiological markings of such.

They are:
a) We have opposed molar teeth for the mastication of tough vegetable fiber / cellulose.

b) Our intestinal tract is much longer than the tracts of carnivores to help digest fruits and vegetables better.

c) As opposed to carnivores, we can manufacture complex proteins from simple vegetable nutrients.

I’m sure the above are but just a few of the more salient differences between herbivores and carnivores. So, how come in school they told us that Homo Sapiens is an omnivore, capable of eating meat and vegetables? That is because Homo Sapiens chooses to be an omnivore! There is no physiological reason for us to be omnivores. We can do absolutely fine just eating a fruit and vegetable based diet.

Carnivores, on the other hand, must seek to eat meat because they can’t manufacture complex proteins as we can, they also have a very short and smooth intestinal tract to quickly relieve themselves of the toxins and other waste products left over from the constant ingestion of animal protein.

The Standard American Diet introduces a lot of toxins and waste products into our herbivore intestinal tract, and given its extra length, those waste products remain in our gut far longer than they should, causing all kinds of negative side effects.

So, what to do? Should we give up eating all animal protein in favor of a strict vegetarian diet?

According to Dr. David Servan Schreiber in his book “Anti-Cancer” we should revert to the ancient diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Animal protein was always in short supply so they subsisted on a diet of mostly fruits and vegetables with the very occasional animal protein thrown in just for flavoring.