I agree with you!! You're so smart. Here's some info I gathered.
More energy is required to digest meat than can be
obtained from the meat. This wears out the protein digestive organs,
and leads to stressful indigestion. Looking at a true carnivore –
like, say, that lion with his big sharp teeth -- we can see enormous
differences in their digestive tract. Specifically, the lion's small
intestine, where most of the nutrients are only about three times the
length of his body. This means that the meat he eats moves through his
system quickly, while it's still fresh.
Humans, however, have much, much longer intestines, with food taking
from 12 to 19 hours to pass through the digestive system. This is
ideal for plant-based foods, allowing our intestinal tracts to absorb
every little bit of nutrient available, but it also means that when we
eat meat it's decaying in a warm, moist environment for a very long
time. As it slowly rots in our guts, the decaying meat releases free
radicals into the body.
Free radicals are unstable oxygen molecules that are present to some
degree in every body. When you hear advertisements trumpeting the
importance of foods and supplements containing cancer-fighting
"anti-oxidents," it's these free radicals that they're battling.
While they'll always be a part of you – free radicals are built in to
cells as part of their normal activities – you can do things to
minimize their damage. Too much sunlight in the form of excessive
tanning encourages the production of free radicals, which is why even
though a little sunlight is important each day. Using a good sunblock
will not only help you avoid skin cancers, it'll help keep you younger
in general. But the biggest thing you can do to limit the free
radicals in your body is to avoid eating meat. For the 12 hours or
more that meat is rotting away in your system, those tiny, free
radical time bombs are multiplying in your system.
Along with that, as meat protein breaks down it creates an enormous
amount of nitrogen-based by-products like urea and ammonia, which can
cause a build-up of uric acid. Too much uric acid in your body leads
to stiff, sore joints – and, when it crystallizes, can cause gout and
increased pain from arthritis. Carnivorous animals, interestingly,
produce a substance called uricase, which breaks down uric acid.
Humans don't produce uricase, though – another clue that we're not
meant to be meat-eaters.
When you eat meat, how much of it do you eat raw? Well, Mr. Lion eats
his raw, while its still brimming with enzymes that aid in digestion.
Humans, however, cook their meat. In fact, we cook our meat to
temperatures over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. This has the benefit of
killing most disease-causing bacteria, but it also kills the enzymes
in the meat.
Whenever you eat dead food – food lacking in the natural enzymes that
help you digest it – your pancreas has to work extra hard to provide
more so the food will break down for digestion. This puts strain on
the pancreas that it wasn't originally designed to handle. Which isn't
to say that you should eat raw meat, like the lion. But it's another
consideration when we look at whether humans are designed to eat meat
– when true carnivores eat raw, fresh meat, all the enzymes are
present to help them garner the nutrients they need as it passes
quickly through their short digestive tracts, and the
nutrient-depleted waste is eliminated soon after.
When we eat cooked meat, though, our bodies have to work extra hard to
digest it, using precious energy needed for other purposes, overtaxing
the pancreas, and creating free radicals as the dead flesh decays in
our intestinal tract. But when we eat a plant-based diet, we're
feeding ourselves food that's abundant with living enzymes, which
breaks down efficiently in our systems, and which provides extra
energy by not demanding that our organs work overtime to use it.
On the flip side, the digestion of plant materials takes longer than
meat proteins largely due to its cellulose (hard to digest) component.
This is why plant eating animals have relatively long digestive
tracts. The Inuit (~ Eskimos) have shorter digestive tracts than most
other humans due to the great proportion of meat in their traditional
diet.
The digestion of plant materials is a relatively difficult and lengthy
process, usually necessitating the incorporation of specialized
cellulose-digesting bacteria into the gut of plant eating specialists
and, often, large body size to house the large stomachs, etc.
necessary to the pull required energy out of often nutrient-poor
foodstuffs (think of cows and grass).