Douglas Schorr

Our ancestors left us with stomachs as acidic as vultures’—a’ digestive fire that forged not just strong bodies, but clear minds and stable communities. Modern diets smother this flame—and us with it.

This isn’t a tale of dragons, but of an equally powerful fire—the one burning in our bellies. Its flames forge not just our bodies, but our minds and souls.

When studying the ways of our ancestors, I came across a fascinating discovery. Our stomachs, those quiet warriors within us, are remarkably similar to those of vultures. Now, don’t wrinkle your nose—this is a compliment!

Picture a vulture. Vultures feast on meals that would sicken other animals, thanks to what I call their “fiery stomach”—so acidic it could dissolve nearly anything but metal, with a pH of about 1 and one of the most acidic in the natural world.

Our stomachs, with a pH in some as acidic as 1.5 mirror this power—a legacy from our scavenging ancestors who, fresh from the trees, needed to break down our new diet of tough meat to extract every bit of nutrition.

Think of it this way: vultures can keep food in their digestive system for up to 24 hours, breaking it down completely. We humans, clever as we are, discovered something amazing—fire. By cooking our food, we could begin the digestive process even before it reached our stomachs. This meant we didn’t need to digest for quite as long, but our powerful stomach acid remained ready to transform our food into energy.

Like a campfire transforming wood into heat and light, our stomach acid transforms food into life’s building blocks. When we eat as our ancestors did—focusing on nutrient-dense foods like meat—our digestive system works at its magnificent best, just like a well-tended fire. Sheep, goats, antelope, buffalo, and cattle have an entirely different system.

Plant-eaters have perfectly evolved four-chambered stomachs that transform grass and leaves into nutrition while returning vital elements to the soil—a magnificent cycle that sustains both the animal and Earth’s plant life. We’re not built like cows with their grass-processing factories, nor are we like rabbits with their special systems for digesting leaves. Our fiery stomachs tell us who we are. We are super-efficient predators, with stomachs built to extract maximum nutrition from dense, protein-rich foods. But here’s where the tale takes a sad turn.

With the help of interfering do-gooders and their politicians in recent times, many have forgotten their fiery stomachs, feeding them fire-dampening substitutes—GMO everything, processed foods, refined sugars, and industrial oils. Our stomachs will tackle any job, but they struggle to convert these substitutes. Their efforts at keeping a master forge at peak performance on a fuel of wet leaves, nuts, and green grass—the ‘recommended diet’—will smoke, and the lights dim.

It isn’t simply about breaking down the stuff shovelled in for digestion. Our stomach is the forge where our very essence is crafted. The deliberately promoted “Woke” view assumes bodies and brains function independently of what fuels them—that any calories will do, provided they contain basic nutrients and minerals. The “Eating is a Must” story explains that every living thing has its niche fuel. Feed our fire with the dense, lasting fuel our ancestors thrived on, and we forge not just strong bodies but clear minds and stable spirits within a growing brain. Think of your stomach as a factory filled with master craftsmen unconcerned with feeling hungry or satisfied. They are all about making available to the rest of the body’s team the energy for the building blocks of reason, patience, resilience, and an expanding imagination.

Instinctively, our ancestors understood that food was both the construction material and the medicine for both body and mind. And they proved that a properly fed individual, with fire in the belly, forged allowed strong bodies and receptive minds to build strong communities. When we ignore this wisdom, when we feed ourselves stuff designed for others that dim our inner fire, we don’t just weaken our bodies, we lay ourselves open to a range of mental and physical illnesses and immune problems that destroy the very bonds that held societies together.

Shutting down the butcher kills

From wealthy nations to developing ones chasing GDP growth, people have abandoned their ancestral fuels. These modern poisons dampen our internal fire, sending distress signals throughout body and mind long before middle age. Worse, that we persist to continue (because it’s nice and we’ve not been caught) generation by generation, we pass the failures on. You might be fine, but it seems to me, it is our grandchildren who get hit with a multitude of physical degeneration along with a horrifying increase in cancers and diseases we’d not really heard of before. So be it… one person’s illness is another’s path to wealth.

But the most troubling of all is the decline in rational intelligence, the growth of mental fog, and the loss of emotional balance. I watched communities transform as their meat-based diets dissolved into sugar. Where once stood resilience and unity, now frustrations easily ignite into rage… a type of fire no one either wants or saw much of in the past. When we deny our digestive fire its proper fuel, nothing in our body or mind can function at its peak. Take a moment to look around your community. When I did, I discovered not just rising physical ailments destroying the lives of younger people, but a rising tide among the teenage to 40ish group of aggression, depression, and social breakdown. Now tell me it’s just coincidence that as we’ve moved further from our ancestral diet, we’ve seen more unstable behavior, more violence, more disconnection from each other.

Hope burns eternal in our still-capable stomachs, waiting only for proper fuel. Return to nutrient-dense, protein-rich foods, and we heal more than just our bodies. It was my experience that when I said, “no more poison on my plate” my mind immediately issued the statement, “This guy’s serious. Start renewal”. I like to think I’ve taken my new attitude into my social community!

It is beyond ‘you are what you eat’—you think, feel, and behave according to how well your fiery stomach forges nutrients into the building blocks of mind and spirit. A dragon breathing fire is mythical and makes for nice stories. You carry within you a remarkable condition, gifted to our ancestors by the trinity—a fiery stomach that can rival nature’s most efficient apex predators. Treat it well because, by doing so, it is your gift to the future.