Humans Are Not Made to Eat Meat

Interview:   Andreas Moritz and Raena Morgan  (2011)

Raena Morgan: Were we just not designed to eat meat?

Andreas Moritz: We are not designed to eat meat because we don’t have the teeth to rip out flesh from an animal that just died. If you were a cat, you can rip it and you swallow it right away. Our teeth don’t have that design; they would fall out if you did that, tried to do that. It’s so tight, the flesh is so tight. It becomes more easily chewable when you are cooking it, when you break down the protein structures you destroy them.

RM: You’re cooking it so you can chew it.

AM: You destroy the protein and then you can chew it.

RM: Okay.

AM: So it becomes like bread in a way, whereas in the form, your body doesn’t have the ability to do that. Plus the stomach has only weak, very weak hydrochloric acid, enough to digest things like nuts, seeds, vegetables, grain foods, and so on, but it’s not capable of digesting concentrated meat that required five times more concentration of hydrochloric acid than we have.

RM: It does?

AM: Like a cat. If you, as I mentioned, put the chicken in the cat stomach, it will dissolve entirely, the whole thing would be digested.

RM: Because it has more hydrochloric acid?

AM: Yes. But cats sleep a long time, they need to. I lived in Africa and I watched the lions, and they sleep twenty-four, twenty, sometimes three days in a row; you pass by and they raise their heads and then go back to sleep. So for them, they need to- that’s a completely different kind of species. You don’t see the same thing for herbivores, you know, grazing animals. Gorillas, elephants, the strongest animals, the cows, that make milk by the way, where is their protein intake?

RM: Grasses.

AM: No, from the air.

RM: Oh, from the air, yes.

AM: It’s the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

RM: Thank you for reminding us.

AM: A horse, a wild horse with big lungs, so they ingest all those molecules that convert into amino acids. Why did nature not put protein in breast milk, except 1.4 percent? If the baby is breastfeeding after a year, it will be .9 percent protein. So why would there be even less protein the older you grow? Because we don’t need to eat it. We’re not designed to eat the concentrated proteins. We can, but it is a disadvantage because it will be much harder on the digestive system to deal with it and the side effects are much higher. That’s why a China study showed that in China, the largest ever study done on all disease, no or virtually no cancers, no heart disease, no diabetes in these countries in places of rural areas where people didn’t have access to animal proteins.