Meat Every Day?

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by SFit

All foods don't settle well with everyone. For people who feel like they ate a brick when they eat meat, don't eat it if you don't like it and it doesn't settle well with you.

You can have much the same reaction if you've eaten only meat for a long time and then eat a bunch of veg. Largely it has to do with the specific digestive bacteria that are resident in your gut. Humans are enormously adaptable, and endlessly omnivorous, and can live solely on meat... such as several tribes of native Alaskans, and famously by LSD chemist Stanley Owlsley... or almost solely on vegetables (they still need Vitamin B12, which is not produced by plants)... but at any given time the flora of your internal caverns will primarily be the ones that are specialized for the diet you've been on for a while. Make a change... even as simple as traveling to another country and eating the food there... and your digestion can be challenged for a while until the "right" bacteria populate your innards.

Originally Posted by Cleonidas

There isn't an ecosystem on this planet that will support humans in any number on foraged vegetation or mast through four seasons. A natural human has to kill or scavenge to live.

Or store it. Or raise it. Stoneage mammoth killers stored carcasses underwater, or froze them for later consumption. Domestication of dairy animals began thousands of years ago with catching wild animals alive that could create nutritious food through the winter.

Originally Posted by Cleonidas

If you just killed it, most meat is perfectly safe to eat. The harmful bacteria of which you speak is due to the fact that the hamburger meat that you are pressing into patties from the supermarket may have been dead for a month or more and it has had lots and lots of different hands on it.

Not exactly. Whole primal cuts may have dangerous bacteria on the very surface, but it doesn't get into the meat and it gets killed in the normal cooking process. The problem with ground meat is that any surface contamination gets mixed into the whole batch, and that ground meat, no matter how fresh, makes an ideal growth medium for the bacteria to multiply in. Then undercooking allows any dangerous bacteria in the middle to survive to make you ill.

My grandfather was a butcher, and when he wanted a hamburger at home, or a meatloaf or whatever, he ground the meat in the afternoon and took it home, but if for any reason the ground meat was not cooked that night he tossed it in the garbage. Whole cuts were never a problem.

[Cleonidas]

Originally Posted by seattlenextyear

A carnivore only eats meat. I was asking if you were a wolf because wolves are carnivores.

Most modern humans are omnivores, the rest being herbivores. I assume that when you said that you were a carnivore you were either joking, you were confused as to what a carnivore was, or you were actually a wolf.

Not joking at all and I don't think there is any taxonomic implication in the statement "I've lived as a strict carnivore for a period of about 18 months". You're right that humans are omnivorous creatures by nature and excel at being able to eat nearly anything, but just as a strict vegetarian diet is viable given that certain measures are taken to avoid malnourishment, a strict carnivorous diet is just as viable and, in my opinion, easier to execute.

[Cleonidas]

Originally Posted by OpenD

Not exactly. Whole primal cuts may have dangerous bacteria on the very surface, but it doesn't get into the meat and it gets killed in the normal cooking process. The problem with ground meat is that any surface contamination gets mixed into the whole batch, and that ground meat, no matter how fresh, makes an ideal growth medium for the bacteria to multiply in. Then undercooking allows any dangerous bacteria in the middle to survive to make you ill.

My grandfather was a butcher, and when he wanted a hamburger at home, or a meatloaf or whatever, he ground the meat in the afternoon and took it home, but if for any reason the ground meat was not cooked that night he tossed it in the garbage. Whole cuts were never a problem.

I don't disagree with this, but I'm not talking about whole primal cuts. I'm talking about, for example, a medallion of backstrap that was cut from bone immediately after skinning and is still at body temperature or a bite of liver that still has enough oxygen to be performing it's hepatic function. Unless the animal has an active systemic infection there will not be the bacteria culture that is associated with, for example, cuts from a butcher.