Quote:
Originally Posted by Beuford  So some of you might have seen a comparitive anatomy of humans to herbivores, omnivores and carnviores?
Do you think it is correct when it says humans small intestines are 10-11x our body length? |
When we are dead, yes. It's much shorter while we are alive. I'll give you a quote from a corresponding paper once I have access to it again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Beuford At first I thought, well I'm 1.8m tall and my intestines are 6-7m, that should come up in the 3-4x body length. Then I worked out body length didn't include legs or head, so I measured the length from my neck to the top of my legs and I got 60cm.
60cm x 10 = 6m
60cm x 11 = 6.6m
So, the 10-11x body length for our small intestines is true for me.
If you're convinced a diet high in meat is good, and that you don't have herbivore length intestines, why don't you measure your body length? Or, tell me why herbivore length intestines don't matter, I'm interested to know.  |
I don't know why they should matter more than all the other parts of the human digestive system. Walter Voegtlin, a gastroenterologist, wrote the book "The Stone Age Diet", which you can read in full
here.
It compares the human digestive system to both sheep and dog and comes to the conclusion that man's digestion is functionally identical to that of a dog and fundamentally different from that of a sheep. You can find the table that sums it up
here.
Even if we take your 1:11 ratio (I haven't found any source which says how these numbers are actually obtained, so I can't say if it's 1:3 or 1:11), man is still closer to the dog at 1:6 than he is to the sheep at 1:25.
We don't ruminate, which is vital to a sheep since it doesn't get access to the plant's nutrients without it. We also have a small stomach which - unlike the sheep's and very much like the dog's- empties within a few hours and actually remains empty for some time, which is never the case for a herbivore like a sheep. If I counted correctly, Voegtlin lists 41 factors that make man's digestive system similar to a carnivore and different from a herbivore. Why is the intestine length factor, which points more into the carnivore direction, too, more important than the others?