Raw fooders like to point to other primates as evidence that humans should eat a raw plant food diet. For example, Steve Pavlina :
Like other raw fooders, Pavlina here confused quantity consumed with preference. The fact that chimps eat more fruit than any other type of food does not indicate that they prefer fruit to all other types of food, any more than the fact that Chinese eat mostly rice means that they prefer rice to all other foods. In fact, chimps prefer to eat termites over fruit, and always start their foraging looking for insects, only moving on to fruits after they have exhausted their insect supplies. The preference for animal matter occurs in other apes; see "Omnivorous Primate Diets and Human Overconsumption of Meat" by William J Hamilton in Food and Evolution Far from vegan, the wild chimpanzee diet is about 5% animal food in the forms of insects (primarily termites) and hunted monkeys and antelope. Like other raw vegans, Pavlina appears either to ignore or not know that humans have different gut anatomy and physiology from the great apes. Milton discusses this in detail in "Primate Diets and Gut Morphology: Implications for Hominid Evolution" also found in Food and Evolution Briefly, both of the apes closest to humans by genetic constitution (about 98% identical), chimps and gorillas, are hindgut fermenters. In chimps and gorillas, the hindgut, or colon, comprises about 52 percent of the total gut volume. It houses microbes that ferment fiber, converting it to fatty acids that supply up to 65% of the animal’s energy requirements. In contrast, in humans the hindgut comprises only about 17 percent of total gut volume, and has relatively small microbial population. At most, microbial fermentation in the hindgut can provide about 10% of human energy requirements. Because hindgut fermentation provides the majority of the energy used by a chimp or gorilla, the colon is a vital organ for these animals and they will die if you amputate it. In contrast, the hindgut is of so little importance to human energy acquisition that humans can live without the colon (as shown by victims of colonectomies). In the human gut, the small intestine dominates, comprising 67 percent of the total gut volume. In great apes, most digestion and absorption occurs in the hindgut, aided by microbes, whereas in humans most digestion and absorption occurs in the sterile small intestine. Human digestion occurs using enzymes released from the pancreas and small intestine, not microbial action.
In short, the largely vegetarian apes are, well, adapted to a largely vegetarian diet composed primarily of cellulose. |