Continuing to Delve - The Meats

Meat is a vital component of the human diet. Vegetarians, despite their claims, simply cannot get 100% of the vital amino acids from vegetables without also consuming dangerous levels of plant-based estrogens and enzyme inhibitors that keep them from properly digesting their food. In addition, vegetarians almost universally suffer from minor copper toxicity and a corresponding zinc deficiency (the two are antagonistic: too much of one causes a drop in the other).

Meat, in the primitive diet, was a much more profitable consumption than it is today. Back when we had to hunt our own animals, we got meat that was created by a healthy, active creature living off the land. Today, most of the meat we eat is "dumbed down" - it's meat from docile, passive creatures that eat a melange of garbage left over from human and other animal feeds. That said, meat still acts as a concentrated source of many nutrients and vitamins. In much the same way that a huge funnel allows you to collect raindrops from several square feet into a concentrated flow of water, meat allows you to collect nutrients from hundreds of plants (or other animals!) in a single, easy-to-consume source.

Meat is also the only complete source of amino acids, a vital substance for bodily function. Something very close to a complete protein set can be faked up by eating legumes and rice together, but there are simply some amino acids that don't exist in plant matter, and that your body can't create on it's own.

It's almost impossible to eat too much meat -- not because there isn't a point at which it becomes "bad for you", but because your body literally stops you before you reach that point (unless you have a carbohydrate addiction and the meat is packaged with a easy-to-digest carbohydrate, like McNuggets or pigs-in-a-blanket.)

The most important thing to remember when eating meat is to not overcook it. Not only does overcooking break down some proteins and ruin the complete protein profile, it also destroys many nutrients that the meat would otherwise provide. While brief cooking is good to make meat palatable and reduce the risk of bacterial problems, overcooking is just as bad if not worse, in the long run, then eating the meat raw.