Meat
Looking for the real food
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Real food! In fact, real food for real people! What an attractive thought! What an exciting promise!
Real food? Are you talking about those old commercials?
The commercials may be history, but the sound bite is brilliant. The real food turns out to be beef—and a beautiful girl croons that she’s not sure she wants to know anyone who doesn’t eat it. A macho actor complains that vegetables fall off his shish kebab. An authoritative voice informs us that three ounces of the new, leaner cuts of beef contain no more cholesterol than is found in three ounces of chicken.
What that voice didn’t tell you is that lean beef, while comparable to chicken in cholesterol content, holds three to six times more dangerous, cholesterol-raising saturated fat. Besides, who eats three-ounce portions? The average hamburger weighs close to five ounces, and an average-size steak weighs in at six ounces.
But don’t we need meat for protein?
Meat is a nutritious source of protein, but it carries along several problems.
For one thing, most people overestimate their protein needs. The American Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) for protein as set by the National Academy of Sciences is a generously adequate 45 to 60 grams. Most Westerners, however, consume twice this much. These excessive amounts of protein are hard on the kidneys, promote gout, and cause calcium to be leached from the bones.
An even bigger problem is the hefty dose of fat (mostly saturated) and cholesterol. Scientific research has overwhelmingly implicated a rich diet as the major culprit in today’s chronic killer diseases. And the rich foods that are doing us in are mostly animal products, such as meat, fowl, eggs, and dairy products.
The trouble is, while the human body can nourish itself on animal foods, it lacks protection against large amounts of fat and cholesterol. Excessive fat and cholesterol stack up in the bloodstream and begin attaching themselves to the linings of blood vessels. Gradually, over time, plaques form, arterial walls thicken and harden, arterial lumens narrow, and atherosclerosis has established itself.
As a result, blood supplies to vital organs diminish or get cut off, and the stage is set for many of today’s killer diseases, such as heart disease, hypertension, stroke, arthritis, diabetes, and several types of adult cancer.
Haven’t Americans always eaten meat?
• Let’s look at the turn of the century. We didn’t have many of these atherosclerosis-related diseases because in 1900 we didn’t eat meat two or three times a day as we do now. Some 70% of our protein then came from plant foods. Today we get 70% of our protein from animal sources loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol.
• We also raised our animals differently then. Chickens scratched in barnyards and pigs loafed around in mudholes. These idyllic, happy farms, however, have been replaced by today’s factory farms. The greatest possible number of animals are raised in the smallest possible space at the lowest possible cost. Most food animals today are raised on feedlots or contained in cages, with practically no exercise. The meat from these animals may contain up to twice as much fat as the meat from range-fed and free farm animals.
• Animals ingest and store chemicals in their bodies from the fertilizers and pesticides used on their food. Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals also often are routinely administered to animals in intensive confinement systems to mask stress and disease and to speed growth. Residues of these contaminants find their way into the food chain.
To those willing to look at the evidence, the bulk of the scientific literature implicates a rich diet as the major culprit in today’s health problems. Those culprits are mainly animal foods.
The message, however, is slowly getting through: Americans today consume less beef, eggs, whole milk, and butter than they did 10 years ago. But, regrettably, they don’t replace them with products of the plant kingdom, but with chicken, turkey, lobsters, shrimp, and cheese.