Let's Settle This: Are Humans Carnivores? by Roxana Soetebeer, MPHC, NNP, MHP, PFC

 

Let's Settle This: Are Humans Carnivores?

Every once in a while, someone will try to mock carnivores with the same tired argument:

"You're not real carnivores. Lions hunt with their bare teeth. You don't. You have to cook your food."

The idea seems to be that because we don't have claws and dagger-like teeth, we cannot possibly be carnivores. Unless we’re sprinting after deer and ripping into raw carcasses with bare hands and teeth, eating meat somehow isn’t "natural" for us.

Meanwhile, I have yet to see a vegan walk into a wheat field, pick a few kernels, and start chewing.

No flour. No oven. No bread.
Just raw, hard, nearly inedible seeds.

And that's not even getting into the fact that many plant foods — including staples like kidney beans — are literally toxic unless processed.
Kidney beans in their "natural" state contain phytohaemagglutinin, a toxin potent enough to cause severe illness — or worse — if not boiled properly.
And no, boiling doesn't make them toxin-free. It just lowers the dose.
Raw soybeans aren’t much better.

Grains?
Grains were never human food until we figured out how to harvest, thresh, mill, soak, ferment, cook, and bake them into something edible.
Without that long chain of processes, they're practically useless.
And even after all that work, they remain inflammatory, nutrient-poor, and poorly suited for human digestion.
As Dr. William Davis points out, modern wheat is more a product of chemical and genetic manipulation than of nature.

If we're going to judge the "naturalness" of a diet by what can be safely eaten raw, meat wins hands down.
You can eat raw meat and survive on it.
You can eat raw eggs and drink raw milk.
You cannot survive eating raw grains, raw beans, or raw potatoes.

Built for Meat

Humans evolved as hyper-carnivores, meaning that for most of our evolutionary history, animal foods made up the vast majority of our diet.

"Hyper-carnivore" simply means that anywhere from 70% to 100% of our food came from animals.
Up to 30% could come from plants — usually seasonal, fibrous, low-toxin plants, not grains or legumes.

Some people today still feel better with a small amount of carbs (from fruits, tubers, or certain nuts), while others thrive without them.
Either way, humans are fundamentally meat-eaters.

The evidence is overwhelming:

• Stomach acid: Humans have highly acidic stomachs — about pH 1.5 to 2.0 — even more acidic than many other predators. That acidity is designed to kill pathogens and break down animal flesh efficiently.
• Brain size: Our large, energy-hungry brains could only evolve on dense, nutrient-rich foods like meat and fat.
• Digestive system: Our guts are short compared to herbivores. We're designed for rapid, efficient absorption of nutrients — not for fermenting plant matter.
  (Want proof? Eat some corn. Half of it comes out looking exactly the same.)
• Stable isotope analysis: Fossil evidence shows nitrogen isotope ratios consistent with top-level predators — higher than wolves and lions.
  We didn't just hunt prey — we hunted other predators too.
• Essential nutrients: Key nutrients like Vitamin B12, heme iron, DHA, and preformed Vitamin A (retinol) are found only in meaningful amounts in animal foods.

Plant foods were fallback foods — survival foods — not staples.
You processed them because you had to, not because they were optimal.

Cooking Meat Made Us Human

Carnivores get mocked for cooking meat to avoid parasites or improve digestibility — as if the use of fire somehow disqualifies meat as real food.
But humans have been cooking meat for nearly 2 million years.
It’s one of the things that made us better hunters, better eaters, and better adapted to our environment.

Baking bread?
Grinding grains?
Brewing soy into tofu?
That came much later — agriculture emerged only about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago at the earliest.

Nobody ever says:
"You're not a real vegan unless you chew raw wheat and eat raw kidney beans straight from the field."

Because deep down, everyone knows: plants aren't naturally edible for humans.
They have to be tamed, broken down, detoxified, and processed just to be halfway usable.
(And even then, absorption rates for nutrients are much lower than from animal foods — but that's a conversation for another day.)

Real Food Doesn't Need a Factory

If something needs a multistep industrial process just to be safe or digestible, maybe it’s not the "natural" food you think it is.

The fact that we learned to cook meat doesn’t make us less carnivorous — it makes us better carnivores.
More efficient. More adaptable. More human.

Meanwhile, the real question for vegans isn't why humans don't hunt with their bare teeth.
It’s why the vegan diet collapses without combines, refineries, factories, and synthetic fortification programs.

Final Thought

You can survive on meat with nothing more than primitive tools — rocks, spears, sharpened sticks.
You can't survive on grains without the full machinery of civilization.
Think about that.
Tell me again — who’s eating the real human diet?

Eat like it matters,
Coach Roxana

Written by Roxana Soetebeer, MPHC, NNP, MHP, PFC
Published April 26th, 2025

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