What Vegetarians Don't Understand

The problem with vegetarians: they have no freaking idea how biology works. For instance, to take but one of innumerable examples, iron absorption.

Human beings need iron for, among other things, oxygen transport in the blood, via the heme molecule. 

If you gnaw on an iron bar, or take iron supplements, that probably isn't going to help much. Eating plants with iron is essentially no different than gnawing on an iron bar. Iron transport and absorption are much easier when the iron is bound inside a heme molecule. Heme iron is absorbed efficiently by the body (about 15% to 35%) compared to non-heme iron (2% to 20%).

But how do we get heme iron, that is, iron bound within a heme molecule, into our bodies? Simple. Eat animal meat.

Plants don't wrap iron in heme.

Animals do.

You already know - and accept - that our gut biota, the organisms in our gut, either produce vitamins we can't (e.g., B vitamins) or help us absorb vitamins we otherwise couldn't. That's what gut bacteria do. That's why we have them. They are symbiotes that we cannot survive without because they digest food for us. 

Animals are simply macro-versions of our gut biota. They are really, really big bacteria with fur, legs and motility that walk around pre-digesting things for us. In the case of iron, animals pre-digest iron, wrap it in a heme molecule for us, and allow us to absorb iron much more easily. Since animals act as pre-processors for our food, a lot of the vitamins and minerals that are not normally available to us through the raw mineral or plant venues become available because the animals have pre-chewed, pre-digested, and pre-packaged the necessary vitamins and minerals for us. 

That's why we eat animals. Animals are food processing factories.

In fact, animal meat is really the original skin-foil bag of ultra-processed nutrients. Animals not only serve as food processing factories for us, they even wrap the resulting food in a sterile skin/fur package, often making the food permanently safe for consumption as long as the waste processing lines (the guts) are first removed (yes, I know, there are parasites which inhabit muscle tissue, but in general, the skin serves as a crude form of sterile plastic wrap). 

Every domesticated animal is an independent, mobile food processing plant, an external gut, a walking massive biota for our small intestines. Eating vegetarian is equivalent to surgically removing several feet of your small intestines or nuking the biota in your gut. Can you survive? Yes. Maybe. But it won't be nearly as easy. You've just voluntarily crippled yourself.

For us, meat animals are external symbiotes. We deliberately cultivate them, by feeding them appropriate pro-biotics, so we can consume what they produce - partially pre-digested, pre-metabolized vitamins, minerals and enzymes we need to live.

Hindus are famously vegetarian, revering cows as signs of divinity. India's bus lines used to carry ads on the sides of each bus that said "Killing germs is not murder! Use Lysol!" That is the logical end of Hindu philosophy, which lies at the root of vegetarianism. Jainism, the idea that we should wear masks so as not to accidentally inhale and kill insects, and sweep the ground before us as we walk, so as not to accidentally step on and crush a worm, is part of the Eastern nonsense that values all life equally.

Christianity recognizes this as absurd. Just as killing germs is not murder, so killing cows is not murder. Use not only Lysol, but your barbecue and stove. Eat beef, chicken, pork and lamb, dog and cat, fish and clam, or any other meat-bearing animal. Let Nature pre-chew your food. That's what Nature is for.