Meat makes man mortal. Ok, that's not so bad if, like I do, you also hope one day to die. The bad news is the way in which your mortality becomes more apparent through eating red meat.
Red meat consumption is linked to higher heart disease and cancer. Ok, are they causative? Not necessarily, but this is a problem with all science, which creates knee-jerk reactions of all kinds leading the banning of DDT, CO2, and now 2,2,4-trimethyl pentane and beef (which is also threatened by the Flattulence Tax).
Here's the codicil:
The study relied on people's memory of what they ate, which can be faulty.
In the analysis, the researchers took into account other risk factors such as smoking, family history of cancer and high body mass index.
Ok, now, I support this. Why? Scientifically, meat is high in nitrogenous waste, which must be purged immediately to keep the blood from being toxic. Secondly, most amino acids cannot be directly incorporated into proteins, so they must either be modified or metabolized. Third, animals do not eat the best foods- mad cow disease by way of example comes from feeding cows the ground up meat from other cows, and if that includes brain matter of a diseased cow the consuming cow will catch it. Even in Austria, which is a green and organic country, guess how they fertilize the fields of grass? They spray liquid cow dung on it. Gross.
Finally, meat must be cooked to be edible. Even if only one bacillus survives, E. coli doubles fast enough that one survivor can pollute you with millions in rapid succession. During cooking, the chemical structure, and therefore the utility, of components falls apart, making most of it of little use except as glucose substitutes. Also, if you cook it poorly, via charring, an innocuous enzyme in the liver can turn that harmless byproduct into a carcinogen.
Some people claim that you can't bulk up without meat, but cows just eat grass, and they bulk up just fine. Do you need meat? No. I love fish, and a really, really, really good steak tastes good now and then.
