Humans are designed to eat meat, look at our evolution and B12.
Short answer: Nobody disputes that we *can* eat meat. The leap to *must*, or to it being optimal today, simply doesn't follow.
Not a designed carnivore, a generalist. None of these traits belong to an obligate meat-eater.
The objection
“Our ancestors ate meat, it grew our brains, we have canine teeth and we need B12. We’re built for meat.”
The answer
Much of that is true, and none of it establishes the conclusion. “We evolved able to eat meat” is a claim about capacity. It says nothing about necessity, and nothing about what’s optimal now. Humans are facultative omnivores who can digest a remarkable range of foods, and that very flexibility is why we can also thrive without meat.
Look at the anatomy honestly. Our “canines” are small, blunt and useless as weapons next to an actual carnivore’s. We have no claws and can’t kill prey with our bodies, which is why we need tools, a product of culture rather than biology. Our intestines are long relative to body size, closer to plant-eaters than to cats and dogs. Our jaws grind side-to-side like a herbivore’s. We can’t synthesise our own vitamin C, a frugivore trait. What this describes is a generalist whose closest relatives, the great apes, eat overwhelmingly plants. A designed carnivore it is not.
And the B12 point quietly undermines itself. B12 is made by bacteria, and meat is merely where it ends up. Our ancestors got incidental B12 from unwashed plants, soil, water and insects, and sanitation later stripped those sources from everyone, vegan or not. Needing a clean supply today tells you about modern hygiene rather than any biological mandate for steak.
The deepest error is treating evolution as an instruction manual. Evolution optimises for surviving long enough to reproduce in ancestral conditions. It has nothing to say about living healthily to ninety in a world of abundance. Our ancestors also starved and died young. “Natural” describes the past; it is not a prescription for the present, which is why we happily accept cooking, medicine, glasses and contraception, all of them “unnatural.”
So the question of whether we can eat meat is settled. The question that actually matters is whether we should, and the leading dietetic bodies confirm we flourish without it.