Meat: My Heart, My Soul, and My Planet (Part One)

I eat meat. I eat a lot of meat. After all, I'm pretty much on the Atkins diet. My whole family are totally meatatarians. But I worry about it, I think about it, I am conflicted on the topic. I have to reason it out, and justify it to myself.  Life would be so much simpler if I were ignorant.  I read too much; I listen to too much NPR.   Because I know what I know, I can't just do whatever seems easiest. I have to thrash my way through it, and come to at least a temporary equilibrium.

There are at least three broad aspects to consider when deciding whether to eat meat:  its effect on my health, the morality of farming and killing animals, and the ecological burden on the earth. The first topic, health, for me is the easiest.

I know the human species evolved as hunter-gatherers.  For millions of years, we ate a meat- and plant-based diet.  Modern studies of the diets of hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the twentieth century established the majority of calories came from meat. The Inuit are close to 100% meat eaters, and the average calorie component for meat is closer to 60%. The plants we ate could be plucked, pulled, or dug up.  The technology to cook grains and starchy vegetables (pottery), the breeding of higher density grain foods, and finally true agriculture, are relatively recent inventions evolutionarily speaking. Agriculture appears to have developed in Iraq only 20,000 - 30,000 years ago. And, for our health, it doesn't appear to have done us much good as a species.  People got shorter and fatter.  Heart attacks and diabetes are diseases of civilization, and apparently the price we paid for writing and mathematics and poetry and painting.

It is clear to me that grains and potatoes aren't so good for us. Then, staying away from them negates most possibilities for a totally vegan diet, so meat becomes a more important source of food. But modern meat isn't quite like wild meat. Animals are what they eat just as much as we are. Cows evolved to eat grass, and grain fed beef is different from grass fed beef at the very molecular level. A grain based diet isn't any better for cows than for us. As a result, eating grain-fed beef is just an indirect way of getting grains back into our bodies. The fats in modern corn fed American beef are not the heart healthy omega-3 fats you find in wild meats.  Factory raised animals have to be fed massive amounts of antibiotics in order to survive the unnatural diet and crowded unsanitary conditions in which they are raised. This leads to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.  Grocery store meat and eggs are not necessarily providing what is needed to be healthy.  "Free range" meat from the farmer's market or even Whole Foods is more likely to result in healthy food than the cheap stuff at the Giant. Sigh.

A fundamental misconception about heart health arose with the discovery of cholesterol and its role in the body. The fact is, dietary cholesterol does not translate directly into our internal blood levels of cholesterol. So even the classic Atkins in-your-face "diet" meal of steak with bearnaise sauce, is not necessarily driving up your measured cholesterol levels. Eggs benedict (poached eggs with egg-based Hollandaise on ham on an english muffin) isn't bad, except for the english muffin part. We manufacture in our own bodies the vast majority of our own cholesterol, and what fuels its manufacture is high levels of insulin in the blood, which is in turn driven by eating a starchy and sugary diet.

(This is a very quick and over-simplified overview. I've read extensively on this topic, and there are a bunch of books on the topic of meat and heart health.  There are other books on the topic of the badness of grains and the impact of insulin on heart health.  The ones I'm drawing from right now include Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, and What To Do About It, both by Gary Taubes, Protein Power and related books by Michael and Mary Dan Eades, and The Paleo Diet and related books by Loren Cordain.  Of these, I recommend most Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, which, as the title might suggest, is very straightforward and direct in its message. The others are more for fanatics like me.)

So on the health issue, I am firmly convinced a healthy diet relies on meat. There is no question (at least in my mind) the diets we evolved on - wild meat and wild plants - are the best for our bodies.I am inclined to farmer's market and fancy free range and pastured products, as delivering more of what our bodies need to thrive, and less of what we should do without.  Lucky for me I am financially and logistically able to make that choice.

What about fish? I think of it as a sub-set of "meat". More detail on fish specifics at another time.

Next:  What does eating meat do to my soul?