Anything else supposed to be unique from animals? Omega-3? Well, yes and no. We make it ourselves. But the health benefits are very real indeed. Someone with an ideal diet, however, wouldn't need to supplement with fish oil. Anything else? Think hard.
The rest of it, re the philosophy of diet, of functioning and performance, and common sense and ethics, well, these are easy. Whatever works. The China Study tells tells us that animal products are powerfully correlated to degenerative diseases.
That's functioning. Performance is a more difficult issue -- it seems clear that protein is a performance enhancer, and animal products are an easy if not actually dense source of amino acids.
Common sense? Ahem. Yeah, it's good to eat something that will kill you if you leave it in the sun too long. Something that stinks to make you puke is really good food. The deader the better in fact ... put thick woolly hair on your chest ... make you strong like bull!
Ethics? Let me kill you and eat your body because, well, because I like the way you taste. Yum.
Is it demonstrated, conclusively or by inference, that animal flesh, its "high-quality" protein, results in better performance? One is unaware of such evidence, although the argument is common. Perhaps it's true though? Never argue with reality. The reason for such an outcome, if true, would be that subclinical putrefaction is mildly toxic, and excites a moderate stimulatory stress response in digesting organism -- which would augments performance, short-term. It would be a seasonal benefit with a delayed downside, as in precipitated degeneration in later decades. Like WWII pilots using methamphetamine on long-range bombing runs. Meth saved the world from Hitler. That doesn't make it good.
Type two diabetes is the over-stress and eventual disruption of pancreatic function. Adrenal fatigue, likewise, of the adrenals. Digestive decline as well ... decades of abusing the enteric system with hard-to-digest consumables lead to a middle- and old-age filled with gastronomic nightmares.
What we know is that here is a lot of nonsense involved in the whole area of nutrition. Lots of emotion, lots of extremely shoddy thinking. Diet is a profoundly religious thing. We know that disease has a number of causes -- bacterial and viral, genetic and chemical -- but that a if not the major cause of disease in our own culture comes from a diet that is nothing but slow poison. Too many carbs, and too much animal stuff.
So, does it matter, talk about apemen or Eden? -- matter in some way other than philosopho-religio-theoretically? We want an open mind regarding what is best for our health. False assumptions might lead us to healthful conduct. True assumptions seem more likely to. But anything that closes our minds to behavior that would improve our lives, is a thing to be avoided. Track records matter; long-term results matter. Success is a convincing kind of authority. Find models of success, and copy them.
Health and performance, and physical beauty and power, are not merely the outworking of genetic happenstance. We can't change our bones, but we can help what hangs off of them. We can't help our features, but we can preserve youth -- that is, delay decay -- with the due diligence that we owe to our progenitors who cared for us enough that we've gotten as far through life as we have, and that we owe to our offspring, who will grieve for our ill-health at least as deeply as we would grieve for ourselves. Health is a duty.
Rule Five: "You may freely eat of every thing that you can fit into your mouth and swallow, but many of them will kill you, fast or slow." (See Rule Two.)
Be excellent.
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