Douglas Schorr

“Don’t be silly! My children are sicker than yours.”

The words hang in the air, sharp with irony or maybe exhaustion. We’re the only animal that normalizes preventable illness while searching for every explanation except the obvious one. Step outside, look around—it is not a game.

Every creature on Earth is sculpted by its diet. Plants thrive on carbon dioxide, earthworms on soil, the visiting cutworm on what it wrests from the soil to become a moth, bees on nectar, and chimps on an assortment of greens, a little in-season unadulterated fruit and meat occasionally. Each body is so perfectly tuned to its fuel no one can fill another’s role. A fish doesn’t dream of being a bird; it’s flawless as is. Perfection rules the veldt.

Sitting quietly, I watch a valley hum with life. All exist as we are because we precisely met the demands of our energy-producing factories, whether formatted as a stomach, gizzard, fermenting gut, or other specialized digestive tools. The right food in the right facility initiates a sequence that dictates what we are—how we look, how and why we behave!

On the ridge, a kudu nibbles leaves, its slender frame expertly camouflaged blends into the trees. I spot it only because something—a blood-sucking tsetse fly perhaps—made it flick its ear. Far below, an explosion of Red Bishop birds announces a waterbuck is on the move, chewing through tough reeds and heavy grass by the river, its stocky build and coarse coat suited for the wet. Same family, different meals, different bodies—all etched into their genes over millions of years. Magic.

An aardvark trundles by and I get the giggles at nature’s eccentricity. Its snout pokes the ground, ears twitching like radar dishes, and that comically oversized tail! But for feeding on insects, a marvel of design with shovel-like claws, a snout shrugging off toxins, a sticky tongue firing like a machine gun. Its specialized stomach refines insects with precision—enzymes, fermentation, the works. Distant cousin elephant sports a sensitive yet powerful trunk too, but its specialized factory requires heavy plant material which changed the shape of everything. Once we remember all have a common ancestor, double magic squared.

The universal is that we all must eat. What we eat and how it’s processed is the magic.

For humans, it’s simpler than we’ve made it: lifestyle is diet, diet is lifestyle. Nature’s blueprint is clear—every species thrives on what it’s built for. So why do we, the clever crossover animal, keep rewriting the rules?

Where our time was shaped by the search for fuel, we shovel in junk to the point we are now ordered by when the doctor is free. Oops, substitute “available” for that nasty, misleading, 4-letter swear word. Figures coming out of the US suggest complementary health products account for $30.2 billion annually, making up 9.2% of all out-of-pocket health spending. The weight management industry was valued at $37.86 billion in 2023 while, on top, dietary supplements remain a steady monthly expense. And then there is the US public health care system in which no one wants to be trapped. And you don’t have to—it’s your choice!

For millions of years, we knew nature has precise boundaries. What nourishes one species can poison another—it’s not personal, it’s biological specification. Most vegetables dump oxalates into our system. In time, their crystals make themselves painfully known to us. The oxalates that a koala’s specialized gut neutralizes would destroy our kidneys. The lectins that birds have evolved to process can trigger autoimmune responses in humans. The rabbit thrives on foods that would cause inflammation in our bodies. Each animal comes factory-equipped with precise digestive machinery for specific fuels. When we disregard these boundaries—feeding carnivore pet foods to herbivores or grain-based diets to humans evolved for meat—we aren’t being open-minded; we’re violating biological operating instructions.

Then an unhealthy mix of theologians, the woke and professional politicians engaged brilliant minds to challenge themselves by tweaking nature’s blueprint. Enter GMO-enhanced grains, carbs and fruit, and more humane practices for animals. Modern nutritional advice treats all creatures as interchangeable fuel processors and ignores millions of years of specialized evolution. Brilliant minds in laboratories established that as plants have protein, sugars and fibre, we not only do not need meat, but plants ultimately are better! What they didn’t do is refurbish the human stomach into a 4-chamber ruminant configuration. Take the pig: once a tough, single-chamber-stomach omnivore, under EU regulations it is now processed corn and soy on legs. Sausage sizzle days are over. In my local wholesaler there are whispers that they’re being slaughtered young because if they’re left to mature, they get “unaccountably” sick. If I was given $10 for every time I was told “It’s a disease of old age,” I’d be rich.

Why Are We Eating Like Chimps? We’re not chimps. Our compact, acidic guts mirror a lion’s, built for meat and fat—not a chimp’s sprawling colon for fermenting plants. For 99.99% of our history, we ate meat, fat, and occasional wild plants—fuel that kept us sharp and strong, nature’s Rolls-Royce. Being clever, playing gods, inventing farming nudged us off course. 5,000 years ago, grains, greens, carbs and fruit were meant to be supplements when herds were low, but farming is such an engaging, inclusive profession that they slipped in as regulars. A stumble, not a fall.

We are the only life-form that believes it isn’t an animal and that universal rules don’t apply to us because we’re smarter than the gods. That’s true, we are smarter. Like the diets that have been foisted upon us, they’re fabrications of the elite for control of us the masses. I hope what you’ve read will spur an internet search where you will find there is evidence enough that we’re guests of the Trinity. The forever unique inventive spirit of Father Complicity, the incredible capability of Mother Evolution, and the guidance of Mother Nature are the creators of the perfect balance. It is true too that we are the only anomaly; we are great apes, but it is because we have compact stomachs and acidic guts, designed to convert meat and fat into boundless energy, nutritionally we’ve more in common with the vulture, the fox, the lion – carnivores!

Like something out of Mission Impossible — like the aardvark, red bishop bird and kudu we were made perfect. Like the pig, we’ve fallen — it was forced, we made a choice.