Meat, Low Meat Or No Meat | According to Sadhguru

For something slightly different (from my previous posts)...

I happened to pick an image from the Nutrition Facts website of Dr. Greger, the author of the mega-Bestseller "How not to die" (which instantly had made it on the New York Times Bestseller list upon its release) and its follow-up "How not to diet".

He compares a low meat to a no meat diet here: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/low-meat-or-no-meat/

But actually I wanted to share a chapter from Sadhguru's book "Inner Engineering - A Yogi's Guide to Joy" (a New York Times Bestseller as well):

"There is an ongoing debate between the proponents of vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism. I am often asked which is better.

Vegetarians are often inclined to act holier-than-thou, while non-vegetarians often claim they are more robust and fit for the world, given that they are willing to include all the species on the planet on their menu. Great philosophies have evolved based on food choices.

In yoga, there is absolutely nothing religious, philosophical, spiritual, or moral about the food that we eat. It is only a question of whether the food is compatible with the kind of body that we own.

This compatibility depends on various ends. If being big is your highest aspiration, then certain types of foods have to be consumed. If you want a body that supports a particular level of intelligence, or if you want a body with a certain level of alertness, awareness, and agility, other types of foods must be consumed. If you are not someone who will settle just for health and the pleasures of life, but want a body perceptive enough to download the cosmos, you will need to eat in a very different way. Depending on your aspiration, you will accordingly have to manage your diet. Or if your aspirations involve all these dimensions, you will have to find a suitable balance.

Keeping aside our personal goals and aspirations, what type of fuel is this body designed for? This is something to which all of us should first pay attention. Modifications, adjustments, and adaptations of diet should come later. If it is simply a question of basic survival, eat whatever you want. But once survival is taken care of and there is a choice, it is important that you eat consciously, and are led not by the compulsion of the tongue but by the essential design of your body.

In the animal kingdom, you can largely classify animals as herbivores and carnivores-those that eat vegetable matter and those that consume meat or prey upon other animals.

Between these two categories of creatures, there are fundamental differences in the design and construction of their physical systems.

Since our focus is food, let us explore the digestive systems of each. The whole alimentary canal is a digestive tract from the lip to the anal outlet. If you travel down this tube, you will find some very fundamental differences between herbivores and carnivores. Consider a few significant ones.

For one, you will find that carnivores are capable of only a cutting action in their jaws, but the herbivores are capable of both cutting and grinding actions. We human beings have both cutting and grinding actions.

What is the reason for this design difference?

Suppose you take a bit of uncooked rice and place it in your mouth for a minute or more, you will notice that it turns sweet. This sweetness is happening because right there in your mouth carbohydrates are getting converted into sugar (an essential part of the digestive process) by an enzyme called "ptyalin," which is in your saliva. Ptyalin is present in the saliva of all herbivores, but not in carnivores. So carnivores just have to cut their food into smaller pieces and swallow it, while herbivores have to chew their food. Mastication involves grinding and then thoroughly mixing the food with the saliva; hence the design modification in the jaw.

If mastication happens properly, close to fifty percent of your digestive process would be finished in the mouth. In other words, the stomach region is expecting partially digested food to efficiently complete the process. In modern life, people are in such a hurry that we gulp our rush-hour lunches without the food being properly masticated.

The stomach is burdened not only with undigested food, but also with partially destroyed food. Today's kitchens have largely become places where food is efficiently destroyed. Food that is nutritious and full of life is systematically degraded through the cooking process, which depletes its nutritional value and largely obliterates its pranic value (its capacity to be spiritually supportive).

Next, if you look at the length of the alimentary canal, for herbivores it is generally about five to six times the length of their bodies. In carnivores, it ranges from two to three times the length of their bodies.

To put it simply, carnivores have distinctly shorter alimentary canals than herbivores, and this difference clearly indicates what type of food each species is supposed to consume.

If you eat raw meat, it takes between seventy to seventy-two hours to pass through your system; cooked meat takes fifty to fifty-two hours; cooked vegetables twenty-four to thirty hours; uncooked vegetables twelve to fifteen hours; fruits one and a half to three hours.

If you keep raw meat outside for seventy to seventy-two hours, putrefaction sets in-one small piece of meat can evict you from your home! Putrefaction occurs very rapidly in the summertime, when the temperature and moisture are conducive. Your stomach is always a tropical place, and if meat stays there for up to seventy-two hours, the level of putrefaction is very high. This essentially means there is excessive bacterial activity, and your body must expend a lot of energy to contain the bacterial level, so that it does not cross the line that separates health from illness.

If you visit a friend who is sick in the hospital, you would surely not take him a pizza or a steak. You are most likely to take him fruit. If you happen to be in the wild, what would be the first thing you would eat? Definitely fruit. Then would come roots, the killing of an animal, cooking, and raising crops. Fruit is the most easily digestible food and all human beings know this instinctively.

Most carnivorous animals do not eat every day-definitely not three times a day! They know the food they eat moves very slowly through their tracts. A tiger is said to eat once every six to eight days. He is agile and prowls when he is hungry, eats a hefty meal of fifty-five pounds of meat at once, and then generally sleeps or ambles around lazily. A cobra eats sixty percent of its own body weight in a single meal, and eats only once every twelve to fifteen days. The pygmies from the central African region used to hunt elephants, eat their organs and meat raw, and drink the blood fresh. They say they would sleep after this kind of meal for over forty hours at a stretch. But as lifestyles change and grow more urban and sedentary, it is clear that human beings cannot maintain such a mode of life. You certainly cannot afford this sort of lifestyle. You have to eat every day and rest at specific times because your alimentary canal is similar to that of the herbivores.

THE PROTEIN DEBATE

There is much emphasis laid nowadays on eating protein. It is important to understand that only three percent of our body is composed of protein and excess protein consumption can cause cancer. Meat runs high in protein. A very small portion of the meat that one consumes can fulfill the human protein requirement. The remaining portion, which travels very slowly through the alimentary canal, leads to a variety of problems such as excessive bacterial activity, enhanced sleep quota, increased inertia levels in the body, and decreased cellular regeneration. All of this, in turn, manifests as a drop in one's sensitivity of perception. It is in this context that meat has been regarded as spiritually unsupportive, because the spiritual process is essentially about enhancing one's perception beyond the limitations of the physical.

EVOLUTIONARY CODE

If you must eat non-vegetarian food, the best would be fish. Firstly, it is easily digestiblewith very high nutritional values. Secondly, it leaves the least amount of its imprint upon you.

What is meant by this?

Our bodies-all that we eat, excrete, and what eventually gets cremated or buried-is just earth. The software within your system determines that if you eat a fruit it is transformed into the human body, and not into a monkey or a mouse. The efficiency of your system obliterates the other software that transformed soil into a fruit and arrives at a new software that will make a fruit into a human form. For more evolved creatures, particularly mammals, their software is more distinct and individuated. This makes it harder for your code-breaking system to erase the software of the creature that you consume and to overwrite it with a new software.

Among the animals, fish, being one of the earlier forms of life upon this planet, have the easiest software code for our system to break and integrate into ourselves. Animals that have more intelligence, particularly those that are capable of a variety of emotions (such as cows or dogs), will retain their own memory systems. In other words, we are incapable of completely integrating more evolved, intelligent, and emotionally endowed creatures into our systems.

In earlier times, in communities that were more in tune with the earth, people could hunt and eat animals and work out the consequences through enormous amounts of physical activity. But given the largely sedentary lives people lead nowadays, the acidity produced by such a diet could contribute greatly to the unexplained levels of stress that are being widely experienced today. Additionally, large animals, particularly cows, are aware of their impending slaughter well before it happens. Consequently, they experience high stress levels, which generate a tremendous amount of acidic content in their systems. This, in turn, has its own adverse impact on those who later consume the meat

Also interesting, but slightly off-topic, he says the following about digestion...

FOOD AS FUEL

Your physical body is just an accumulation of food. Yoga pays much attention to food because what kind of food you put into the system has a tremendous impact on the kind of body you have constructed. There is a whole yogic science behind what to eat, how to eat, and when to eat. What kind of stuff you put into it determines the quality of the body and how comfortable it is with itself.

Are you preparing this body to run as swiftly as a cheetah? Or are you preparing this body to carry two hundred pounds? Or are you preparing this body so that it becomes conducive for higher meditative possibilities? You need to eat the right kind of food depending on your inclination and what you want out of your life.

You eat food for energy, but if you eat a big meal, do you feel energetic or lethargic? Depending upon the quality of the food that you eat, you first feel lethargy, and then slowly you start feeling energetic. Why is this so?