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Originally Posted by tore
When a meat diet has been a tremendously important part of our evolutionary history with consequences for our whole biology which includes stuff like brain size and the shape of our bodies, how can you say it's unnatural? And you say we come from places "optimal for growing vegetables". Meat in our diet happened a long, long time before agriculture. It's a matter of a diet change measurable in millions of years ago (meat eating) compared to something that first happened some thousands of years ago (agriculture).
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The human brain began to grow when humans had to deal with increased social interaction. That social interaction tends to follow hunting, since unlike with gathering, huge ammounts of calories could be ingested in what were occasional bonanzas of meat. This led to an increase in the complexity of social behaviors, including finding how to rise in rank with procurement of meat and other animal products, which were rare, and a luxury... since meat was not nessesary for growth or development; but it was a rare case of having large ammounts of fats+protein calories for the group.
It was the gatherings that resulted from harvests (of veggies) and finding meat that led to increased brain complexity, not the item being eaten. By that logic lions would be the most intelligent (at things like math and reading of all) animal on earth.
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Vegetarianism was not an option for the average healthy human not long ago. In most places on our planet, such a diet would lack essential nutrients. Being a vegetarian is feasible in modern societies today because you can have vegetables grown on every continent on your plate to fulfill your nutritional needs. Needless to say, it's not long ago that most couldn't. In Norway (where I'm from), that would've been a real problem up until not very long ago at all, probably easily measurable by decades.
I think you should reconsider what you think of as natural or not. 
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Health is relative to the time period. It changes with the advent of new Knowledge/technology/education The average "Healthy" human in the 1800s would very rarely live to see 50.