Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

Comparative anatomists tell us that "there is an excellent, although not perfect correlation between the food habits of the animal and the length and shape of the intestine." It is my opinion that where this correlation is not perfect, it is due to the fact that the "adaptation" is not completed. I shall refer to this again towards the end of this article.

It is commonly thought by vegetarians and fruitarians that the diet of an animal is determined by the internal adaptations of the animal — that an animal eats what he does because he is what he is. The lion, for instance, eats flesh because he is constructed and constituted for such a diet, his claws, his teeth, his digestive tract, his instincts fit him for this bill-of-fare.

That this is true today seems evident enough; but has this always been so? Was the lion always a flesh-eater, a killer, and was he always adapted to the flesh diet?
We do not think so. We think that internal and external adaptations are largely determined by feeding habits. We think that a change of feeding habits results in a change in adaptations, so that, in the end, feeding habits determine not only the anatomy and physiology of the organism, but even its status and its survival.
We said that man's digestive tract is twelve times the length of his body. This is not always so for, the same correlation of structure with habit is seen in the human species as is found in the order of bats. The Eskimos have a shorter digestive tract, the difference being found chiefly in a shorter intestine, than the white races.
Are the Eskimos carnivorous because they possess a shorter digestive tract, or do they possess a shorter digestive tract because they practice carnivorism? Which comes first, habit or adaptation?
Were the primitive ancestors of the Eskimos carnivorous, or were they frugivorous or omnivorous? Have the Eskimos acquired a shorter digestive tract since they were driven into the far North and forced to live largely on flesh food, or did their ancestors from the South bequeath to them their shorter digestive tracts?
It is my view that the shortening of the digestive tract resulted from the adoption of a flesh diet: that it is a negative compensation for violation of the fundamental symbiotic requirements of life. I believe, also, that all carnivores are descended from once noble ancestors who lived without stealth and murder. They have undergone modifications of structure and function (chiefly losses) to adapt themselves to their changed way of life and anti-symbiotic diet.

To return to bats, which have been previously mentioned, I think we can get a better picture of the correlation of food and food-getting with structure than the various tribes of man can supply.

There are a great number of kinds of bats in the world and they are of various sizes. In their dietetic habits they range all the way from strict frugivores to rank carnivores and cannibals. One variety of bat has actually become a blood sucker — a vampire. Some of them have not completely abandoned their fruit diet, but eat both fruit and flesh. Some are insectivorous, others are known to catch fish. It is interesting to note that the intestines of the vampire bat is shorter in proportion than that of any other beast, while its stomach is prolonged into a long tubular pouch. Its teeth are unlike that of any other bat - in bats generally the incisors are small and the "canines" are large, but in the blood-sucker the upper incisors and "canines" are both large and very sharp edged, while its grinders, not being required by its blood-diet, have degenerated into small and unimportant vestiges. The fruit eating bats are larger than their meat eating relatives.

It may not be amiss to point out that the repellent features and odor of insectivorous, carnivorous, cannibalistic and vampire bats are lacking in the fruit eating bats. Indeed, one naturalist says of the fruit eating bats that "with their keen, intelligent-looking, doe-like heads." they "inspire nothing but friendly interest when seen at close hand, and might quite probably be popular as pets if they were better known." The hammer-head bat of the Gabu district of French Equatorial Africa, a fruit eater with a great partiality for figs, is an exception to the better-looking qualities of the frugivorae. He is described as hideous, though in his photograph he is not as hideous as the carnivore. Monstrosity is everywhere the outgrowth of illegitimate food and food-getting.

The bats show us an unbroken descent from strict frugivorae to frugo-carnivorae. to carni-vorae, to cannibals, to near parasites with a corresponding degeneration of form and loss of status with each step of their dietary degradation. They suffer negative compensations — losses and modifications of structures and functions—which are entailed by their illegitimate food supplies and methods of food-getting. The vampire bat has actually undergone some of the modifications seen in parasites.

It would be possible to extend our study of comparative anatomy to cover many other parts of the body, but space limitations do not permit. It must suffice for the present that we say that among the higher apes there are several species of them whose alimentary organs in all respects very nearly resemble those of man and in that species which approaches closest to man in general organization and appearance, the alimentary organs, in almost every particular, so closely resemble those of man, that they are easily mistaken for them.

Sylvester Graham used the alimentary organs of the orang-outang as "the true type with which we are to compare those of the human body, in order to ascertain the natural dietetic character of man. He pointed out that "in all that the organs of the orang differ from those of man, they bring the orang between man and carnivorous animals; and thus, as it were, push man still further from a carnivorous character."

Graham wrote several years before Darwin derived man from an "ape-like arboreal ancestor." It has always seemed unaccountable to the present writer that transformationists (they have stolen the term evolution, and miscall themselves evolutionists), while insisting that man and the apes are brothers (or cousins) and are descended from a common ancestor and that man (or his ancestor) formerly lived in the trees (frugivorous) also at the same time, insist that primitive man was carnivorous, even cannibalistic. For, while his organization places him at the apex of creation and shows him to be the arch-type of the frugivorae, they have pictured him as more beastly than any beast."

In his Outline of History, H. G. Wells, following the "scientific" pattern (or line) describes our early ancestor, just after he had emerged from the ape-stage, and says: "When he found dead animals, semi-putrid, he would relish them nonetheless. He would eat his unworthy children. He would seek larger animals in a weak and dying state. Failing to find them, dead and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice."

This is the crowning achievement of our carnivorous biology. This "early man" who has been created by biological speculation, should have descended from a jackal or a hyena, not from an ape. His dietary habits as "described" by Wells, relate him to saprophytes (scavengers) and carnivorae and not to the frugivorae from which, according to the hypothesis, he sprung.

It is our contention that, instead of early man being the degraded beast that Wells and most Darwinians picture him, the carnivores and saprophytes of the present and past have "fallen" from their once high estate to their present state of degradation.

I'm missing 1/2 of my intestines. Should I go back to being a carnivore?

Maybe. Or maybe if you eat only fruits your body will adapt by rebuilding a longer intestine

@vege

I took my research down. It led me down the right path of finding out why we are not producing B12 and how we produce it. I'm going to keep it to myself for the time being.