I don't know how you can say for certain it's false. At one point on the evolutionary scale we were plant eaters. Only 3% of what a chimpanzee eats is meat. Biologically we're almost identical. It seems more and more likely that once we mastered fire and were able to cook meat that we unnaturally became a meat eating species.
Interesting since this is a thread about turkey, you can't find any in Korea! You can get a turkey breast sandwich at subway but that's about it...
First of all, I need to qualify my statement that I can only be as certain only as there is certainty in science, which means of course I cannot be "certain" of it in the colloquial sense.
That said, that story and what you just said are false on several levels.
1) The "human-as-herbivore" story is largely based on a comparative anatomy "analysis" coming from a book chapter written by a certain Milton Mills, MD. However, the analysis in there is misleading, selective, and in many places outright wrong. E.g, his basis of a typical "omnivore" anatomy is the bear, which evolved from a definitively carnivorous lineage, whereas humans evolved from a predominantly herbivorous or herbivo-omnivorous lineage of the primate-lagomorph clade, thus rendering the entire comparison flawed and pointless and showing a lack of proper understanding of comparative anatomy and evolutionary biology. This leads to such errors as the assertion that "omnivore" saliva has no digestive enzymes, when they clearly exist in other herbivore-related omnivores such as rats and pigs. The bigger error is the assumption that there is even a standard "herbivore" or "carnivore" anatomy that absolute comparisons can be made.
2) Meat diet in chimps range from 5-10%, not 3. Importantly, the fact that they eat meat at all, and that chimps actively seek out 150-200 different types of non-plant food indicate they fall squarely into the category of omnivores, not herbivores, and that chimps are highly opportunistic in what they eat depending on what's available.
3) Humans and chimps are almost
genetically identical, not
biologically identical. That's a huge difference. As misguided by the common but fallacious analogy, genes are not a "blueprint" that builds an organism, it's a "program" whose pattern of execution is just as / more important than the simple underlying code. The small difference in the two genomes, plus the many different ways that the genes are expressed (what's known as epigenetics) result in two very different species.
4) Finally, the "humans are herbivores" story is liable to a sort of naturalistic fallacy. Even if the human body is "designed" more for herbivory than carnivory (which it isn't; humans and the rest of primates retained the largely generalist anatomy of ancestral mammals, and certainly did not evolve the highly specialized anatomy of either the "strict" carnivores like cats or the "strict" herbivores like the hoofed animals), it in no way implies that humans are "meant" to be vegetarian or that herbivory is more "natural" for us. Look at the panda: its anatomy is so poorly evolved for its almost exclusively herbivorous diet that they have to eat all day and barely extract enough nutrients, but does that mean they are being "unnatural" or that we should feed them more meat? Humans, from the very earliest hominids several million years ago, are clearly omnivores as evident from fossil and anthropological records, most likely in an unbroken pattern inherited from our ape cousins/ancestors. Where do we draw the line that such is natural and beyond which it isn't?
The modern North American meat-heavy or meat-only diet is no doubt different from our ancestral condition and most definitely unhealthy. But humans are
not "naturally" herbivores; humans must obtain vitamin B12 from our food because we don't / have lost the ability to make them in our guts (actually it is gut bacteria that make it in herbivores), and this essential nutrient can only be obtained in animal-derived food sources. Unless we go the "unnatural" route of fortifying or engineering vit B12 into soy or other plant products (which is standard in modern day food supply), vegans will and do develop vit B12 deficiency.
