Obligate Carnivore

A couple of weekends ago I attended a seminar with Sally Fallon. She gave a weekend-long talk covering many topics, such as the problems with vegetable oils and the cholesterol myths, the work of Weston Price and traditional diets, and how to incorporate traditional foods into your life. Seeing as I quote her every other blog entry and have read a tremendous amount of her work, I was definitely the choir she was preaching to. Still, it was nice to have someone talk me through the chemistry of lipids and I found her tips on cooking and meal planning to be very useful. I would highly encourage anyone to go and hear her speak if she comes to town.

One of the new things I learned was the term Obligate Carnivore. This term is often applied to cats because they need to get their calories from meat. It refers to an animal that eats virtually nothing but meat. Sally used it to describe people who cannot be vegetarians. I suppose that Obligate Omnivore would be a more accurate description of such people, but for now I will stick to Obligate Carnivore, because I think it drives the point home.

I’ve known for many years now that I cannot maintain my health without eating animal products. Sally Fallon explained that depending on one’s ancestry it is possible to have more or less of the enzymes that allow nutrients to be extracted from plants. She gave Indian people as an example of a population who often has higher levels of the enzymes necessary for eating a plant based diet. People from coastal regions tend to have less of this enzyme.

One example she gave is the enzyme called Delta-6-Desaturase (D-6-D). This enzyme is essential for the elongation of essential fatty acids (EFAs). I wrote in a previous blog entry about the inadequacy of flax seed oil as a source of Omega-3 fatty acids and I’m actually going to quote myself (heh),

“Flax seed oil is rich in the omega-3 oil alpha-linoleic acid (ALA), but lacks the other Omega-3's eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) or docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Our bodies, especially our brains, have an absolute need for EPA and DHA. This means that we cannot function without these fats. It is possible, in a healthy body, for to be converted into EPA or DHA, but not in the amounts that are necessary to maintain optimal functioning…”

This is where D-6-D works its magic, which I unfortunately do not know the intricacies of. What I do know is that it plays a crucial role in transforming into the longer EFAs: EPA and DHA, of which our body has an absolute need. OK, I’m straying dangerously into chemistry that I have only a very weak grasp of, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

The point of all of this is that some people really do have an absolute need to eat a lot of meat, and some people really can live on a diet with a higher ratio of vegetables. I find this reassuring in the face of vegan propaganda that asserts that meat-eaters just lack willpower or compassion. Essential fatty acids are only one example of the plant sourced nutrients that must be converted before they can be used; some other examples are Vitamin A and taurine, and I am willing to guess that there are a lot more. Our bodies all work differently and therefore our ideal diets will vary. An ethical diet must have enough flexibility to keep its adherents in good health, something that I believe veganism to utterly fail at.