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You said: "nothing from a plant is dangerous according to any scientifically-based diet". But... plants contain oxalates, lectins, and phytates just for starters. Their seeds, roots, leaves, and stalks are all well defended. Only the fruit is "meant" to be eaten. In fact, if you go out in the forest and just start randomly eating the plants you find there, then you will discover that 99% of all plants are inedible and will cause you severe distress or death if you persist in eating them. Plants use chemicals to fend off predators, whereas animals will often fend off predators by running or fighting. So once an animal is dead its defenses have been overcome whereas once a plant has been killed all its chemical defenses are still intact. Interestingly, extraordinarily few animals are unsafe to eat -- less than 1%, which is the complete opposite of the percentage of plants that are edible. Also, your remark that we did not evolve on a carnivorous diet is just wrong. In fact, homo erectus bones are almost always found together with the bones of mammoths, which they hunted and ate for something like one million years. Mammoths are just one of hundreds of species of mega fauna that ancient human hunted to extinction. Also, to this day there are indigenous human communities that live exclusively on meat (Inuit, Hazda, Sami, Maasai). |