 is the human digestive system closer to a carnivore or a herbivore. I've heard some people, vegans, say that the reason we see the color red is to find ripe fruit, yet meat is the color red, that we have molars to chew plant matter, but canines as well. Once you look at the digestive system and adaptations in an animal, it becomes very clear what they are supposed to be eating. Humans have thrived in a variety of climates and regions throughout the world. This means there were periods of time where we could only subsist off of animal foods. And once you actually look at the animal to plant food ratio in hunter-gatherer diets at approximately 55% animal foods and 45% plant foods, there is a lot of evidence that we need to have animal foods in our diet in order to be in optimal health. Some people bring up stomach acidity, but if you look at the stomach acidity of other animals, things become a bit unclear. That's why we have to look further into the digestive system. The lower the pH is, the more acidic the stomach. Buzzards, a scavenger animal, have a pH of 1.1. Humans are at 1.5, so fairly low. We essentially have the stomach acidity of a scavenger animal. But rabbits have a stomach acidity of 1.9. The thing is, rabbits regularly eat their own feces and a lot of it. Penguins, a carnivorous animal that eats fish, have a 2.9 pH, elephants as well as rhinoceros, have a 3.3, and cats have a 3.6, and they are obligate carnivores. Monkeys, however, have an almost neutral pH. Neutral is 7.0, monkeys are at 6. One of the easiest ways to answer whether humans are carnivorous or not is to compare an animal that's very similar from a gene perspective. We share a lot of our DNA with monkeys, and monkeys eat a lot more plant food than us, and they have different gut adaptations. Once we look at the digestive system of a human versus a gorilla, things become even more clear. This isn't just in the digestive system. Humans have a smaller liver. Their kidneys are smaller, indicating there is less digestive function. And our hearts are bigger as well, about 20%. So, you know, we're pumping more blood. We have more endurance capabilities. The brain size is a huge difference too. And all of this is in relation to body size. Of course, if you had a human and a gorilla side by side, all of the gorilla's organs would be much larger. But this is scaled in relation to body weight. Starting in the stomach, gorillas have a 20% larger stomach capacity. This is fairly significant, but the small intestine is where we see the first major difference. Small intestines in humans are 5 times longer than that of a gorilla. This is where we absorb nutrition from animal foods. Correspondingly, our large intestines are much smaller, and gorillas are 4 times larger. We also do not have a cecum. A cecum is a pouch where the small intestine enters the large intestine. It's where salts, various minerals are absorbed. That is present in gorillas. And the main thing to keep in mind here is animal foods absorbed in small intestine, plant foods ferment in large intestine. And gorillas have specific genes and enzymes and capabilities in their stomachs that humans do not have. Genes regulate all of these things, and gorillas have different genes than humans. One of them is the ELOVL gene, the elongation of very long-chain fatty acids. What this does is it actually turns fatty acids that are produced by the gorilla's gut bacteria into long-chain fatty acids. It's really interesting that a gorilla eating plants is the equivalent to a human eating animal foods, because the macronutrient breakdown of a gorilla's diet is 24% protein, 16% carbs, 3% fats, and 57% short-chain fatty acids. This is because their gut bacteria literally ferments plant matter into fat. They also have cellulase, which is an enzyme that breaks down cellulose, the indigestible plant cell wall, and they also have phytic acid neutralizing capabilities through fermentation and microorganisms. I spelled it wrong here. It's P-H-Y-T-I-C. Phytic acid binds phosphorus, and once that phosphorus is released via their microorganisms, they can utilize it for energy. Very specific digestive capabilities. A drastically different digestive system correlates to the larger human brain size, and there's a couple of other things that tie into that as well. What you should really check out is the mouth of a cow or a goat. It's literally like sandpaper, and there's also some animals that have very unique digestive systems. The reason I chose human and gorilla is because they're very similar. The difference is the size of the organs and some little things that are present and not present. If you look at the digestive system of a cow or a horse or like a deer, you're like, what is going on in their stomach? That is nothing like a human. So there's definitely some interesting digestive systems that occur in nature that tie into all of these things in a similar way. Animals need to extract nutrition from plant foods, and they have specific adaptations to do so. So we see these specific adaptations in herbivores. We also see certain behavioral changes, and this can mean eating their own poop, but eating frequency, food volume, and digestive waste are huge here. Cows, gorillas are eating plant matter for 10-12 hours a day. Therefore, their eating frequency is very high compared to a carnivore or an omnivore. We can eat once a day, once every two days, and be fine. The food volume is much lower. Vegans are known for eating incredibly large amounts of food, probably between four and six pounds of plant matter per day, whereas carnivore dieters eat between one and a half and two pounds of meat per day. And not only that, the digestive waste difference is huge. Let's say about 70-80% in most cases of meat gets utilized in the digestive system, whereas plant matter, I'd be surprised if people even digested half of it. Now, what separates humans from other carnivores? The first thing is tool usage. Normally, to hunt an animal, to overpower it, you need to be fast and strong, which requires a lot more muscle cells, and muscle cells require brain power. If we are able to replace those muscle cells with a spear, with a knife, with a trap, we are able to reduce our body mass, but since we're still procuring animal foods, maintain a higher brain size. The ability of humans to obtain animal foods in this almost unnatural way is what makes us so unique compared to other animals. Our adaptation for speech is also something we don't see. You know, the way the human neck has formed, the face has formed, allows us to make certain noises that other animals cannot make, and that communication is something else that makes us unique. The weaning period in humans is much shorter. We breastfeed an average of 2.5 to 4 years in our indigenous groups, and orangutans and monkeys breastfeed 6 to 7 years, much longer. Human breast milk has preformed EPA and DHA, and our ability to procure animal foods and feed them to our children has given us a large amount of easy to digest nutrition for brain development in early stages of life. If you look at cow's milk, goat milk, sheep milk, it's very nutritious, but the form of omega fatty acids in the milk of herbivorous animals is alpha linolenic acid. It's not preformed EPA and DHA. Human breast milk is much more nutritious than the herbivorous animal milk. And when we look at these vitamins and how the human body absorbs them, it becomes pretty clear we're supposed to be eating meat, but then when you look at how herbivores obtain these nutrients, it's even more evident that we better be munching on some steak. People love saying, oh, you can convert carotene to vitamin A, but there are genes, polymorphisms, that inhibit your ability to convert carotene to vitamin A, and there are also flavonoids in carotene-containing foods that inhibit the enzyme that allows us to assimilate vitamin A from beta carotene. Basically, if you eat a carrot, some people don't get any vitamin A. Herbivores have unique adaptations. They don't have these gene polymorphisms. They have gut microorganisms that can deal with the flavonoids, the negative substances, so they can extract nutrition. Also, these herbivores are eating much more plant matter. The volume of food that these herbivores are eating far eclipses what a human is physically capable of doing. B vitamins are only obtained from animal sources for humans. These animals, again, the gut bacteria can ferment certain plant matter and they get their B vitamins from the organisms in their stomach. Humans do not have that capability. Vitamin D3 is obtained from the sun in both carnivores and herbivores. Herbivores have, again, enzymes, digestive functions, larger organs that allow them to metabolize vitamin D3 in a certain way. Humans need cholesterol from animal foods and we can also get vitamin D3 from animal foods in order to absorb vitamin D3 properly. Vitamin K2 is only obtained from fermented animal foods. Every single indigenous group, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, consumed literally rotten meat for this specific reason. Humans don't have the digestive capability to assimilate the plant form vitamin K1 into vitamin K2 in large enough amounts in order to develop properly. And of course you have the omega fatty acids that can only be found in animal source foods in nature. From a logical and evolutionary standpoint, it's so obvious and clear that we need to be consuming high quality animal foods. If a hunter-gatherer group had unlimited access to animal foods, because keep in mind, these people were surviving. They didn't necessarily choose what percentage of calories they got from animals versus what they got from plants. But when they were able to, if they were excellent hunters such as the plains Indians, they tended to consume 75 to 85% of their calories from animal foods. So there are definitely optimal amounts and when we see higher amounts of animal foods in the person's diet, we tend to see a taller stature in that group of people, more physical impressiveness, and it makes sense. A person is going to be larger, taller, and stronger when there are more animal foods in their environment because there's more caloric accessibility. If there's a bad period of time, if we start eating more plant foods, if humans wanted to adapt to a vegan diet, we could essentially get back to that point, but it would take tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. You'd have to slowly reduce the amount of animal foods in our diet in favor of plant foods, and then, hey, maybe a million years from now, we'll be back in the forest eating our own shit with the other monkeys. But if you make the change too drastically, which is the vegan diet now, that's where you start having health issues, people going infertile. If you want to be a gorilla now, you will simply go extinct. At the end of the day, it's very clear that humans are meant to obtain their nutrition from animal foods, and any sort of calories obtained from plant foods would be specifically used for energy as we cannot assimilate those nutrients. This is probably the strongest argument against a vegan diet, but people don't really understand the digestive capabilities of herbivores of these animals. Once you explain these things, this actually opens a lot of people up to the idea that we need to consume animal foods, and then vegans will always just jump back to the anecdotal argument of, oh, I've been vegan for like 10 years, and I'm completely fine. It's just all of my organs are gray, and I can barely get out of bed in the morning. It's completely ridiculous, but that being said, thank you guys for joining me today. If you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon, and share it if you can. If you guys would like to support me further, just check out some of the other videos on my channel. Recently I've launched Frankies Free Range Meat, my goal being to provide you guys with high quality, nutrient dense animal foods at an affordable price. So go to frankiesfreerangemeat.com if you would like Frankies meat in your mouth. Thanks again guys, and enjoy the rest of your week.