The short answer is: yes. Other than the fact that there are many people now following a purely animal-based diet and not dying, there is a lot of ancestral evidence to suggest that humans are actually facultative carnivores, which means that we only ate plants as a means to survive the lean times, just like Coyotes. Their optimal diet consists mostly of other small animals but they do have the ability to eat fruit and certain vegetables when they were unable to catch a meal.
If you were to take two coyotes and only feed plants to one and meat to the other, the plant-eating coyote will survive, but the meat-eating coyote will thrive. If you had to list all of the essential nutrients and do a Google search for each one, the food products that will be the richest source of that essential nutrient is almost always an animal-based food. You might be thinking: “but what about scurvy?”
Firstly, there are animal-based sources of vitamin C, and secondly, vitamin C competes with carbohydrates for uptake in the body, so if you are on an ultra-low-carb diet (like carnivore), you only need a really tiny amount of Vitamin C to not get scurvy.
I will also add that there are certain essential nutrients that are only found in animal sources like choline, creatine, carnitine, and taurine, which in my opinion, will prove to be the final nail in the vegan coffin. So, can you survive on a carnivore diet? My answer: just like the meat-eating coyote, you won’t just survive, you will thrive.
