Q J Med 2000; 93: 387
© 2000 Association of Physicians
Correspondence |
Vegetarian diet
Retired Medical Inspector, Italian State Railways, Padua, Italy
Sir,
Segasothy and Phillips1 state that ‘dietary intervention with a vegetarian diet seems to be a cheap, physiological and safe approach for the prevention, and possibly management of modern lifestyle diseases’. While a vegetarian diet may well be cheap, it can hardly be physiological and really safe, because human physiology has been largely moulded by the high-meat diet that characterized our hunter-gatherer ancestors,2 whose intake of animal protein derived essentially from meat. They, for millions of years, ‘could have had no dairy foods at all’.2 As Eaton et al.2 pointed out, ‘the principles of evolutionary adaptation suggest that if a dietary pattern is maintained within a lineage for nearly two million year, it must be optimal’. By implication, a vegetarian diet, which deprives us of what concurred to mould our metabolic physiology, can lead to undesirable consequences.3 Vegetarianism, as a philosophical and/or religious product of the last 0.1% of human evolution, is both pathetic and absurd in its attempts to ‘rectify’ what evolution imposed and fostered genetically during the first 99.9% of its course.
The beneficial effects of a vegetarian diet, far from reflecting the prohibition of meat, simply mirror the great similarity between some features of mankind's original diet2 and other aspects of vegetarianism, such as little fat and abundant consumption of fruits and vegetables.1 That lean meat (the only available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors2) is not responsible for modern lifestyle diseases is clearly shown by the dramatic improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian Aborigines after reversion to their traditional diet providing 80% of energy as lean meat and fish.4
Instead of mistakenly attributing diabetes and atherosclerosis to consumption of meat, which is well known to our metabolic processes because it shaped them, we should focus on genetically unknown foods,5 for which humankind is still metabolically unequipped.
References
1.
Segasothy M, Phillips PA. Vegetarian diet: panacea for modern lifestyle diseases? Q J Med1999; 92:531–44.
2. Eaton SB, Eaton SB III, Konner MJ, Shostak M. An evolutionary perspective enhances understanding of human nutritional requirements. J Nutr1996; 126:1732–40.
3. Dwyer JT. Nutritional consequences of vegetarianism. Ann Rev Nutr1991; 11:61–91.[Web of Science][Medline]
4. O'Dea K. Marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian Aborigines after temporary reversion to traditional lifestyle. Diabetes1984; 33:596–603.[Abstract]
5.
Baschetti R. Genetically unknown foods or thrifty genes? Am J Clin Nutr1999; 70:420–1.
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