Just WHAT is going on? My social circle is polarized and the subject is almost banned as too touchy. The nicest people I know have been sucked in by simplistic vegan propaganda.
The way out of climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, and growing enough food to nourish a burgeoning population is clear. It’s called regenerative agriculture, and it relies on grazing animals. For me it is not just theory or what Ive heard but what I’ve practiced and observed to work wonders for soil. But instead of embracing regen. ag. , the majority of my environmentalist friends are going the vegan way.
Ive been accused of pushing meat down people’s throats and of being “adversarial” for raising the real issue of vegan health deterioration, admonished with “each to his own” . If only we had the luxury of avoiding the debate, but as extinguishing our selves and millions of other life forms looms we urgently need more people to understand the nature of our biological planet and take their place in the food web. I am just one of thousands of former vegans who are reporting they became a physical and mental basket case while abstaining from all animal products, as a quick “ex vegan” search on you tube will attest.
Just who is behind the ever present messaging to avoid eating meat? Here are some clues:
Nina Tiecholz wrote the book A Big Fat Surprise, working furiously to complete it over an entire decade, such was the depth of her investigative journalism and the corruption involved. Nina uncovered that the Co-chair of the EAT Lancet group was Walter Willet. This document about him is apparently 8 pages long https://www.scribd.com/document/397606854/Walter-Willett-Potential-Conflicts-of-Interest and I was unable to see more than half a page without paying for the rest, but I found: Willet has published 3 vegetarian books and works closely with David Katz, a prominent promoter of the vegetarian det who receives $millions from food companies. Under Walter Willet ‘s directorship of the HARVARD TS Chan school of public health, the school has received between $455, 000 and $1,500,000 from companies or groups promoting a vegetarian diet or products. The school has also received between $350,000 and $950,000 from pharmaceutical companies which presumably would not benefit from a nutritional solution to chronic disease. Willet rarely discloses any conflicts of interest.
Im a Saggitarian, and THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD. Nothing inflames more more than fallacies being believed about meat. These myths are preventing one of the most effective actions against climate change, and reducing the size of people’s brains so they can no longer grasp the concepts. https://www.sott.net/article/203114-Vegetarians-have-smaller-brains
The well funded misinformation campaign is working, and bears all the hall marks of large and greedy corporations. They just bombard us from all sides with the opposite of the truth. Examples of their success: a dear friend identified as an organic meat eater at a climate change rally in a chat with the 2 young vegans beside her and was asked in a vicious way “Why are you at the rally if you eat meat?” Huh? The proprietor of an organic café struggling to stay afloat turned the café vegan even though we had agreed about the environmental benefits of regenerative organic animal products and discussed her concerns over the physical, mental /emotional state of her vegan patrons and their seeming disconnectedness with the Earth.
My own niece who has competed a bachelor of science in astronomy tells me beef uses heaps of water and electricity to produce. Huh?
At my local organic garden and café the barrista says the take up of plant “milks” is about 40 %.
At our farmers markets the majority of organic customers identify with a touch of pride, being vegetarian. I immediately want to know why. Sometimes I do ask and get staggering answers like “my father died of bowel cancer” . End of story, as if meat is carcinogenic, when there is no evidence for that belief ( see below). A lot of my friends, forest protectors and animal lovers, are strict vegetarians, if not vegan. I witness with sadness their aches and pains, knowing their quiet sacrifice has done the opposite of their intentions for animals, the environment and a safe climate.
Here are a few examples of accepted beliefs I do not accept :
*Prescribed burning is necessary to remove fuel load and prevent wildfire.
*Doctors know what’s best for your health and will cure you with medication
* Dietary fiber is essential for GIT health
* Meat is bad. fruits, vege, whole grains , legumes , nuts and seeds are good.
* Climate change is due to our lavish use of fossil fuels and would be solved if only we went renewable.
As I write Australia is on fire. Climate change ( CC) awareness belatedly dawns on more Ozzies, as NZ chokes in smoke from our fires as does Sydney for the foreseeable future, and my sister evacuates from the south coast of NSW as an area half the size of Belgium is expected to burn this weekend. Hazard reduction burning has contibuted enormously to this situation, an example of why the above myths need busting urgently. No doubt renewables are needed NOW, but far more important is it to eat for the environment , ie ORGANIC. We need to get vast areas of soil alive and functioning again as a carbon sink. We must stop deliberately burning the bush, and put out any fires fast, as forest burning is a far greater polluter and contributor to GHG emissions in Australia than all our fossil fuel emissions combined.
It so happens the best diet for Earth is not only organic, but it is organic MEAT. Meat and other animal products are the species- appropriate diet for us with our huge brains.To be clear, I abhor factory farms, and refuse to support the water pollution and the cruelty associated with them no matter how hungry I am late at night and how tasty and juicy I remember a KFC drumstick.But grass fed organic meat production is totally environmentally beneficial. Eating meat from factory farms is the worst thing you can do for the planet, but buying regenerative meat is the best ecological and health move you can make.
I wanted to answer all the vegan false claims in one place ( here) but that would probably require a book, so this article will not be exhaustive. I hope to be able to copy and paste the various topics into forums to de- bunk what our vego friends and sometimes paid trolls are saying all over the place and encourage you to join us in pushing back.
Electricity and Water usage to produce meat is an issue raised against omnivores, but the calculations vary wildly depending on sources. PETA ( People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) cite extraordinary numbers such as that it requires 2,400 gallons or 12,000 liters of water to produce 500 grams of meat. As Joel Salatin says, “Don’t know who came up with those figures but they weren’t a farmer!” I don’t think they factored in that water drunk by a cow doesn’t all go into growing muscle, they urinate and defecate and breath out water laden breath. I know without a doubt our vegetables take more water to produce than it takes to keep our animals alive. Somebody has done some calculations and found a bunch of plant foods including walnuts use far more water to produce per kilo than meat. It takes 5 liters of water to grow a single almond, yet sales of almond milk are still skyrocketing as millions of almond trees are dying of drought in California. In any case there are so many variables from soil health, to rainfall, to aspect, to housing and growing systems that such a simplified statement as PETA’s is meaningless. Nevertheless it is parroted by all and sundry. Amazing that many vegans have pets, which also need to drink water and eat meat. Cows are the scapegoat for everything.
There is open warfare by protestors on animal farms ( we feature on the “Aussie Farms map”) , but did you know there are more horses than dairy cows in this country ( and presumably they drink water too?) As for energy consumption a ruminant on pasture uses none, the slaughter and butchering of a steer can be minimal. Packaging & refrigeration and freight can be minimal for local consumption so what’s the fuss? Carnegie Mellon University has released a new study showing lettuce production is 3 times worse in terms of GHG emmissons than bacon, and that the lettuce is far more likely to become food waste in the fridge and then create more emissions, Surely the devil is in the details with all these claims, so why do people so easily accept and live by such sweeping generalizations?
I acknowledge we are all from different genetic backgrounds, with different gut microbiomes and have individual needs when it comes to diet, and that accordingly there are a few people around who can be healthy long term on a vegan diet, but feel duty bound to warn that these folks are the exception. For most people a vegan diet is disastrous, especially for children. It is equally disastrous for the environment UNLESS organic. Conventional ( chemically grown) oats, wheat and legumes (mainstays of vegan diets) are often sprayed with glyphosate just before harvest, even in Australia, and of course conventional horticulture relies on plenty of highly toxic chemicals.
Kind to animals? As for our farm “slaughtering animals for their flesh” to quote vegans , consider the cost in terms of animal lives with a plant- based diet. Someone on a carnivore diet, eating regenerative meat only, would not only be very healthy but would be responsible for only about one steer death a year, where as someone on a plant based diet, usually not organic, would be responsible for tens of 1000’s of deaths from microbes up.
“A vegan diet minces up or poisons far more sentient beings than a meat based diet. A study published in the journal of Agriculture and Environmental Ethics examined incidental death of field animals that occured as a result of growing and harvesting crops in the U.S. and the estimate is that 7.3 billion animals die annually. Who determines that a cow’s life is more important than that of a rabbit, mouse , turkey or bacteria?”
..Beef causes deforestation of the Amazon? Eating a steak in Australia, the US or indeed anywhere but where South American beef is sent ( China, Hong Kong and Russia) makes not one iota of difference to the rainforests. Cattle farming is not the only cause of deforestation. Logging has destroyed forests all over the word to a horrifying extent, another major cause of climate change. Brazil produces 120 million tons of soybeans. Of that, 80 million tons are exported to China who squish soybean oil from them for the humans and feed the expressed soy cake to pigs. Destruction of Indonesian rain forest for palm oil is equally disturbing so please check everything you buy as palm oil is in EVERYTHING they say, from vegan snack foods to shampoo and conditioner.
We don’t have the land ?
Could everyone eat regeneratively grown animal products? Well here in south west W.A. everyone could. People have acknowedged that the way we produce meat is not only sustainable but positively regenerative, but that we are just a drop in an ocean of bad meat production, so vego is the way to go world wide. But why not eat a soil- building, planet cooling diet if you can? Do the right thing here and now. If just Australia’s farmland went organic and increased soil carbon levels by 1% , Dr Christine Jones says this would have taken 38 giga tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. It is often levelled that while Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm and Merri Bee Organic Farmacy may be improving the environment, combatting climate change and having animal welfare as top priority, not everyone can eat meat from such as farm, it is not possible to scale up. To which I answer: Try us! Who says we can’t all eat better meat from carbon negative farms? This is the core issue! Cattle grazing regeneratively has doubled the carrying capacity of numerous farms in one year so perhaps there is no limit to how much meat can be produced from a certain number of acres? Certainly there is no limit to how deep topsoil can go. “Yedoma” soils in Siberia , formed by the grazing of numerous wooly mammoth and other prehistoric ruminants 9,000 years ago, goes down 40 meters and holds one ton of carbon under every square meter. Not a typo. See Pleistocene Park Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park
It has been measured at White Oak Pastures ( WOP) regenerative grazing farm by a “Whole of Life” GHG audit of their beef operation that more carbon is being drawn down than is being emitted. WOP beef has a carbon footprint 111% lower than a conventional US beef system, in fact a negative carbon footprint. To offset GHG emissions from an “Impossible Burger” you would have to eat some WOP beef! “WOP beef is a rare climate-positive product and there could be a large net-positive carbon benefit should this production model replace degraded crop land.” Read the results of the study here https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf
No doubt this drawdown is occurring on all organic farms….. Rodale Institute measured it at 7 tons per acre per year, but Colin Seis on Winona NSW is sequestering 33 tons of CO2 per hectare annually. Doesn’t it stand to reason then that we need to increase the acres of land under biological management? We need everyone’s help to scale this up, not just an unsubstantiated statement that it isn’t possible to feed everyone this way!
We know @ Merri Bee Organics we could increase our carbon sequestration and carrying capacity out of sight, if we could go to daily moves of our livestock. If the demand was there we could pay people to herd. More farms could transition to this model if supported by your buying dollar, so what are you waiting for? Should we keep mining coal because as a country we are a small player in GHG emissions? Should you keep eating from chemically managed crops? [BTW, I’ve been accused of profiting from the “murder” of animals, so want to state that there is not much profit in meat but organic fruit sales are not too bad.
Here is an article showing how an Australian station has doubled its grass production and stocking rate using Holistic Management. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-01-07/landscape-rehydration-better-than-dams-in-improving-production/11834394?fbclid=IwAR3s76ZbKTMM0xKRX7NST8U_RSr5lR
“We’ve got twice the cattle we had here before, we’re up to 2,000 head … we’ve got groundcover everywhere and there’s enough feed to go until the end of January.
It turns out cheaper to eat nutrient dense organic meat as most meat- based folks end up only eating twice a day, as opposed to 6 times a day when plant- based and snacking. Try this at home: breakfast on animal products like bacon and eggs and see how long before you get truly hungry. Next day breakfast on plant foods like toast or museli and fruit or any other insulin spiking food and note how soon you are hungry again. We find carbs make us hungry. We are not yet considering energy involved in packaging, transport, blitzing- gadget- embodied- energy and fuel costs of preparing all those vego meals, but in any case you could consider a regenerative meat purchase as a donation to the environment and an investment in your health. “Health ?” you ask with an eyebrow raised. Yes indeed, meat heals. Of all the diets and super foods and suppements Ive tried to lose weight and gain energy, the carnivore diet is the only regime that is do able long term and therefore gives noticeable results.. There are sound reasons why, but before we leave ecological audits, consider the environmental costs of disease. In the U.S. , the healthcare system generates 10 percent of the nation’s GHG, whilst current ( poor practice) beef production only generates 2%. Obviously alleviating certain health conditions takes away from the environmental burden of disease management. And alleviating the most common of our expensive chronic diseases is what meat does.
Human Health
Human health is a mess, particularly in the U.S., which ranks number 1 in the world for death on the first day of life. Diabetes, obesity, cancer, mental illness, auto immune diseases are through the roof globally. Just as when Gabe Brown decided to do the opposite of every conventional farming practice and found his yields and profitability increasing exponentially, some very ill people with multiple chronic diseases, 14 years ago, decided to go against all accepted dietary advice and embark on a meat only diet, the ultimate elimination diet. And they thrived and continue to do so, clear of all symptoms, unless they venture to add a plant food back in! Today thousands of people are thriving on a “carnivore diet” .Let me quote from the back of a book I just purchased, The Carnivore Diet
“ Shawn Baker’s Carnivore Diet is a revolutionary, paradigm-breaking nutritional strategy that takes contemporary dietary theory and turns it on its ear. This diet breaks just about all the “rules” and delivers outstanding results that address common chronic issues, such as prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, anxiety and depression, PCOS, arthritis, and many other ailments of our modern word. At the heart of the diet is a focus on subtraction rather than addition, which makes this an incredibly effective and easy-to-follow nutritional plan.The Carnivore Diet reviews some of the supporting evolutionary, historical, and nutritional science that gives us clues about why so many people are having great success with this meat -focussed way of eating. It highlights dramatic real-world transformations experienced by people of all types. This diet often reverses common disease conditions that have a reputation for being lifelong and progressive. …….”
If you have a rare condition and NEED to eat nothing but plants, this can be done organically ( though hellishly expensive due to the volumes of this low nutrient/ indigestible food required) yet the food miles of a vegan diet are never good. So, the rest of us are going to have to eat more meat from local regenerative farms to offset your non- local organic diet, until local organic WA growers of lentils and peanuts and such- like show up. I am a member of a whole food co op and most of the organic whole foods come from overseas. You could try to grow your own food organically and this may work, but after 36 years of trying here, it’s an F for FAIL, and it is only getting more and more difficult thanks to CC. We have invested in a seeding machine with not just the aim of establishing perennial pastures during the narrow windows of opportunity we get, but growing pulses and grains. Our region grows organic oats but currently it is all contracted to a German baby food company.
Longevity
Running counter to suggestions that eating meat shortens your life , researchers have conducted several formal epidemiological studies indicating there is no advantage to a plant based diet when it comes to mortality. These include the “45 and up” study from Australia with a sample group of 250,000 people, the Epic Oxford study which included 60,000 people, and the PURE study with 135,000 participants. As they are only epidemiological they need to be taken with a grain of salt.
People in Hong Kong eat the most meat per person at an average of 750 gms per day, and live to an average of 85 years. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/02/health/hong-kong-world-longest-life-expectancy-longevity-intl/index.html
Cognitive function Our huge brains are a wonder of the universe. It seems we did not evolve to eat meat, but evolved because we ate meat. Eating animals nose to tail provides all of the nutrients that a human needs in the most optimal, bioavailable forms, in the right ratios, without any of the plant toxins. Plant toxins? Yes. Ubiquitously thought of as innocent, plants have been around far longer than humans and have developed protection from being eaten, in the form of chemical warfare. They use oxalates, lectins, gluten, phytic acid, sulphurophanes, glycoalkoloids ( found in night shade family) Goitrogens ( cabbage family) , protease inhibitors , saponins, Salicylates, and Flavonoids ( which are potentially beneficial at low doses but at higher doses have been noted to produce genetic mutations, free radical damage and hormone inhibition.
Here is a transcript of Dr Paul Saladino talking to Dr Gundry :“Paul Saladino: So polyphenols …..They’re often plants defense mechanisms. They are plant toxins, or they are used as colorings or pigments in plants. But what we know about polyphenols is that they’re often compounds that don’t even participate in plant metabolism. Tannins are a great example.Tannins inhibit digestion in animals. So … we see this time and time again with polyphenols that have been much touted for health whether it’s resveratrol or curcumin. When we actually look into the data, resveratrol has repeatedly failed in human trials and has shown many negative effects. It decreases androgen precursors, it’s been shown to create thrombocytopenia potentially modulate the immune system in negative ways by affecting T Helper 17 cells.Curcumin is much the same, there are over 120 failed randomized double blind placebo controlled trials with curcumin. And then if we actually look at what curcumin is doing in the rest of the body we find it can interfere with a potassium channel called the hERG channel. It can affect DNA replication and inhibit topoisomerases, which are DNA repair and unwinding enzymes. So this gets back to the idea that imo, polyphenols, they’re from a different operating system. “
Dr Saladino , a classically trained MD who has specialized in psychiatry, has always looked for the root cause of illness. He ended up going back to study functional medicine (which looks for the underlying cause of disease). He has embraced the carnivore way of eating for over a year . His cognitive function is A1 and his ability to study relentlessly, retain info and pass it on coherently is astounding and so useful. Here is what he said on the evolutionary evidence for a carnivore diet :“….the evolutionary argument is that humans have been eating a primarily meat based diet for 3.5 million years. And there’s evidence for this in the fossil record………. that probably …to change our brains from an Australopithecus type animal, which is a primate- like animal, to a homo genus animal like Homo habilis or Homo erectus, was the consumption of a large amount of meat. ….. very nutrient dense food, which provided all sorts of special nutrients…. fat soluble vitamins, Omega-3s, DHA, EPA, which most people believe allowed our brains to grow. Primate evolution proceeded human evolution for 20 plus million years. We know that eating lots of vegetables doesn’t grow a brain because primate brains pretty much stayed the same size, 300 milliliters. Some primates have larger brains. But for the most part, over 20 million years of primate evolution, the brain remained the same size eating primate diets.And then something really important in human evolution happened about 3 million years ago, when Australopithecus became Homo erectus. We started to walk more upright, and our brain exploded in size. It went from 300 to 600, to 800 to 1000 ccs. And then in the last, maybe 800,000 years, our brain went from 1000 cc to 1500 ccs. So our brains have been growing. And we know that with these growing brains comes increased complexity of processing, and human intelligence, higher development of structures and increased neural networks. And I think there’s a very clear argument that animal foods allowed this to happen.If we go back and we actually look at fossilized remains, we see stable isotopes studies from Neanderthals and contemporary Homo sapiens, even 70,000 years ago. What we see is that the amount of nitrogen in that collagen is so high that it’s higher than any other known carnivores at the time. These are ..compelling studies to suggest that 70 to 80,000 years ago, our Homo sapien ancestors as they were moving up from Africa to Europe and contacting the Neanderthal, were both eating a lot of meat, perhaps almost entirely meat. I would argue that humans are facultative carnivores. People often want to compare us to obligate carnivores and say, well, clearly humans aren’t carnivores, because we don’t look like lions and tigers [but we do use tools and fire. A lot of evidence points to the fact that we were apex predators who teamed up and used language to hunt and thrive. The Aborigines hunted mega fauna to extinction and the Siberrian tundra was full of animals until 9,000 years ago when humans arrived and wiped out the wooly mammoth and many more species]Our stomachs are darn acidic [the most acidic stomachs in the animal world at 1.5 ph]. But we have become, a facultative carnivore. And what that means is that animal foods provide the ideal nutrition for humans. But we can eat plants if we need to during times of survival, …, if animal foods are not around. So it’s this really incredible adaptation.”
I’m guessing we can do well short term on a plant based diet but long term we need to nourish ourselves with meat, or nutritional deficiencies start to rear their ugly heads.
But what about all the studies vegans will tout showing people are healthier on a vegan diet? Ah, the hierarchy of scientific evidence is important to be aware of and the involvement of politics in science.
The hierarchy of evidence pyramid provides an overview of various types and levels of scientific research, systematic reviews sit at the top of the pyramid, followed by randomized control trials and observational studies. Expert opinion and anecdotal experience are ranked at the bottom.
So let’s talk about research and epidemiology. There’s experimental and non- experimental epidemiology. Non experimental epidemiology has traditionally just been called epidemiology. These are population studies based on food frequency questionnaires. These are notoriousy inaccurate as people either don’t remember what they ate or dishonestly answer and fail to mention the tim tams. Sometimes epidemiology is all we’ve got. But we have to understand the nuance of this because it can be misinterpreted in so many ways. With epidemiology we are looking at associations and correlation does not always mean causation. Sometimes correlation can be an indication of causation. But ideally, these studies generate hypotheses that are then tested in interventional studies, a much higher quality of evidence.Nutritional studies that are interventional, are very rarely done due to the ethics and expense of locking people up long term in a metabolic ward and measuring their intake and vital signs / organ function. The majority of studies, if not every single study, that suggests that plant-based diets are beneficial to people in terms of longevity or health outcomes, are non experimental epidemiology. There is a bias here called healthy user bias :For the last 70 years, most of the westernized world has been told red meat is bad for you. So, who by now eats red meat? People that also smoke, people that exercise less, people that are have lower socio economic status, people that are rebels. …the James Deans who are saying, “Ah, I don’t care about your recommendations. I like my hamburger.” Well, is it the hamburger that’s not beneficial for them? Or the fact that they’re washing that burger down with Coke, not exercising ,smoking and/ or drinking alcohol? This is the unhealthy user bias, that’s been associated with red meat. And again, this is all just theory. And this is why the epidemiological studies trotted out by vegans need to be followed by interventional studies.If we look in Asia, there’s so much interesting epidemiology that shows the reverse trend repeatedly. In Asia, meat is associated with royalty. So what do we see in the studies in Asia? That people that eat the most meat live the longest and the best. Asians love meat and live a long time, and the people that eat the most meat, live the longest. The biggest meat eaters on Earth live in Hong Kong, followed by New Zealand and Japan. In Japan they have been decreasing their rice consumption and increasing meat steadily since 1961. Colin Campbell wrote The China Study, an extremely influential book, and preaches the exact opposite of this, but Colin may have done a little bit of cherry picking of his statistics! Multiple people have done re-analysis of his data and de- bunked his book, which is not a study in any way. As humans, we always have a bias.While epidemiology has its limitations and RCT’s are far more rigorous, even peer reviewed and published research can be influenced by “publication bias” and conflict of interest in academic publishing. For example, studies with conflicts due to industry funding are more likely to favor the product of their sponsors.
One of the weaker forms of evidence is “consensus of expert opinion” , yet a report put out by a panel of experts early this year got SO MUCH air time, SO MUCH promotion, you would definitely have heard of it. It’s findings were bizarre …saying we should limit red meat to a portion the size of a blue berry, chicken to 2 blueberries worth a day, and eat only a quarter of an egg a day. Interestingly, Frédéric Leroy and Martin Cohen published a powerful opinion piece about the EAT-Lancet Commission’s report, questioning their global action against meat saying: “isn’t it remarkable how meat, symbolizing health and vitality since millennia, is now often depicted as detrimental to our bodies, the animals, and the planet?”The following summary is by Nina Teicholz January 24, 2019“The EAT-Lancet report, published by The Lancet last week, has been presented as the product of 37 scientists from around the world who gathered to evaluate the science on diet and both human health and the health of the planet. These are separate scientific questions that each deserve careful evaluation.It’s important to note that there are significant scientific controversies on both these questions. On diet and health, I can safely say that there is an enormous amount of legitimate scientific dispute surrounding the question of whether a plant-based diet is best for health and also whether minimizing red meat in the diet is healthy or even safe. The best, most rigorous (clinical trial) evidence supports the idea that red meat does not cause any kind of disease. There are also a number of analyses showing that diets low in animal foods are nutritionally deficient, thereby increasing the risk of many diseases and interfering with normal growth and brain development in children.Evaluating the science on any subject requires convening a range of viewpoints so that scientific controversies can be fairly evaluated and discussed. Presumably The Lancet, an old and venerable journal, knows this. And yet an examination of the EAT-Lancet authors reveals that more than 80% of them (31 out of 37) espoused vegetarian views before joining the EAT-Lancet project.This was clearly a highly biased group, and the outcome of their report was therefore inevitably a foregone conclusion..”
Red meat causes cancer?
Similar conflicts of interest exist at the World Health Organization. Referring to their 2015 proclamation that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen and processed meat is a class 1 carcinogen, (which puts it into the same category as smoking cigarettes in terms of risk of developing colon cancer), first know that this was not a consensus decision, 30% of the IARC panel disagreed with the conclusion. Dr Georgia Ede has done a remarkable job of sorting through the same data the IARC cited and has determined that the evidence in support of the claim that meat causes cancer is fairly underwhelming. You can find Dr Ede’s critique at www.DiagnosisDiet .com. Ive read it , appreciated her sense of humour and interpretations and have now truly lost my lifelong awe of scientists. I thought they were smart but I could have designed better experiments. What relevance do studies on rats have when they are natural grain eaters unlike humans who only recently began to eat grain? Why confound your human experiment with orange juice and fail to mention baseline health status of participants? Sloppy work! Here is the conclusion of gorgeous psychiatrist Dr Ede:“When you get right down to it, the only plausible evidence to suggest that red meat might be risky to human colon health is contained in two, that’s TWO, human studies, both of which were very small and poorly designed, and therefore unable to give us useful information about the effects of red meat on cancer risk. These studies are inconclusive at best, and worthless at worst. Human nature being what it is, believing is seeing. People looking for reasons to avoid red meat may view these two studies as concerning. People looking for reasons to eat red meat may view these two studies as reassuring.Trumpeting to the world that meat causes cancer on the basis of these two studies is ridiculously irresponsible and makes a mockery of the WHO. There is ample information to suggest that the WHO’s report is biased, incomplete, and scientifically dishonest.”
For an excellent review explaining the limitations of epidemiological studies of meat and human health, please see this article authored by the USDA’s National Program Leader for Human Nutrition, David Klurfeld PhD: Klurfeld DM 2015 Research gaps in evaluating the relationship of meat and health. Meat Science 109: 86–95.] Dr Klurfeld was on the IRAC panel and was frustrated as the panel refused to consider the good quality studies he tried to present showing no harm from meat.The generally accepted lifetime risk of developing colon cancer is 4%. If the WHO is correct, that risk goes up to 5% and there is a 1% increase in absolute risk. This is one of the classic statistical numbers games used to scare people. Hyper insulinemia, abdominal obesity, and chronic inflammation are much scarier risks . As these conditions resolve for most people sticking to a carnivore diet, their overall risk for colon cancer likely falls. As pointed out elsewhere, Asians are big meat consumers but have low rates of colorectal cancer, but if they move to the United States their likelihood of developing cancer and getting fat and sick in other ways goes up. This suggests it is the junk food consumed with the meat, not the meat! 4.5 billion people live in Asia so we better note their data carefully.Norwegian Founder of EAT – Gunhild Stordalen, the Australian CEO of the EAT Foundation – Sandro Demaio, Harvard Professor – Walter Willett and the world-wide headlines they created, are claiming we all need to go virtually vegan now, but just as many authorities are saying the diet they have devised is dangerously low in nutrients, especially for growing children. Numerous court cases have found well- meaning ( but no doubt cognitivley challenged) vegan parents guilty of starving their children ( sometimes to death) on the vegan diet. Why doesn’t this register with our evangelical vegan friends?
Some comments on the Eat Lancet Commission’s report : “The ambition of the authors …risks laying the groundwork for further worldwide increases in malnutrition and food waste” Apparently the methods of dissemination of the report, sent a few days prior to the editors of newspapers and magazines around the world “under strict embargo”, fanned media clamour that the EAT-Lancet commission wanted to achieve, rather than warn about presumed dangers resulting from the improper use of food and natural resources….Science is not based on opinions: 37 scientists, although authoritative, are not the scientific community”
Carni Sostenibili Full Article here.
James Cameron invested $140 million into his pea protein powder business and helped produce the big budget vegan propaganda film The Game Changers. Chris Kresser debunked the film on the Joe Rogan podcast for over 2 hours. Soon enough the producer of the film, James Wilks, was invited to debate Chris Kresser on the Joe Rogan show, but totally bullied Chris, to the point I found it impossible to watch past the half way mark. Fortunately the “de bunk of the debunk of the debunk” was then done by Paul Saladino and Brian Sanders ( Brian produced the doco FOOD LIES). This show was exhaustive too but with the advantage of time to investigate James Wilks’s claims, the lads did an excellent job, just as Chris Kresser did on the spot while being bullied . The Game Changers promulgated many myths but one deserves a mention here… the story that we can obtain enough B12 from eating dirt and drinking lake water. James Wilks insisted he had a study which proved this, but he omitted the fact that the dirt in the study was enriched with human manure. The study in Iran is mentioned by Barry Groves below. Only one lake and only in winter has it been measured to contain much B12 at all. And vegans, if you drink 20 liters a day from this one lake in the world, you will be OK . In winter.
Look around you next time you’re in a random crowd, and realize that most of us have done what experts have told us to do for 60 years, we have continuously lowered our meat and saturated fat consumption during that time, and we’ve increased vegetable oil. How is it working out for us? Plant foods up, animals foods down, obesity and diabetes way up!
A study has found that when vegans were supplemented with 5 grams of creatine a day ( the amount found in 500 gms of beef) they got more intelligent….ie recall, processing speed etc increased. Indicators showed that they were operating at a low threshold of cognitive function to begin with.
Dr Barry Groves points out that “ humans have a comparatively small gut with which to absorb all the nutrients and energy our bodies need, and a modern low-calorie, low-fat, fibre-rich, plant-based diet is woefully inadequate as an energy source for our energy-hungry system to function at peak efficiency. That lack has begun to show. Since the advent of agriculture, there has been a worrying trend as our brains have actually decreased in size. A recently updated and rigorous analysis of changes in human brain size found that our ancestors’ brain size reached its peak with the first anatomically modern humans of approximately 90,000 years ago. That then remained fairly constant for a further 60,000 years.-11 Over the next 20,000 years there was a slight decline in brain size of about 3%. Since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, however, that decline has quickened significantly, so that now our brains are some 8% smaller.
This suggests some kind of recent historical deficiency in some aspect of overall human nutrition. The most obvious and far-reaching dietary change during the last 10,000 years is, of course, the enormous drop in consumption of high-energy, fat-rich foods of animal origin which formed probably over 90% of the diet, to as little as 10% today, coupled with a large rise in less energy-dense grain consumption.-12 This pattern still persists; it is even advocated today: it is the basis of our so-called ‘healthy’ diet.
Vitamin B-12 is only one nutrient undersupplied or absent in a vegetarian diet. Zinc, carnosine, carnitine, Creatine, Taurine Cholesterol and Heme Iron are others
If any more convincing that we have to be a meat-eating species is needed, there is one other essential nutrient that is not found in any plant food. That nutrient is Vitamin B-12.
Vitamin B-12 is unique among vitamins in that while it is found universally in foods of animal origin, where it is derived ultimately from bacteria, there is no active vitamin B-12 in anything which grows out of the ground. Where trace amounts of vitamin B-12 are found on plants it is there only fortuitously in bacterial contamination of the soil. And even that is lost if plants are washed thoroughly before eating them.
Bacteria in the human colon make prodigious amounts of vitamin B-12. Unfortunately, this is useless as it is not absorbed through the colon wall. Dr. Sheila Callender tells of treating vegans with severe vitamin B-12 deficiency by making water extracts of their stools which she fed to them, thus affecting a cure.-13 An Iranian vegan sect unwittingly also makes use of this fact. Investigators could not understand how members of this sect remained healthy, until their investigations showed that they grew their vegetables in human manure – and then ate the vegetables without being too fussy about washing them first.“
No article is likely to persuade vegans but I hope this effort will be of help to those not yet badly effected. Like a vegetarian lady at a talk I gave years ago who commented “ I went in to hospital for a minor op but they couldn’t do it because my iron was too low. Up until now I have felt too guilty to consider eating meat but after your talk I‘m going to have a nice steak tonight and enjoy it” .If less people feel guilty about eating meat after reading this, the time spent will have been worth it.We have been enjoying the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought for far too long as Peter Ballersted points out. I would like to finish by pasting from Dr Georgia Ede’s website a forum comment by “Alice”, because she hits the nail on the head. Commenting on the WHO “meat causes cancer” debarcle Alice says to Dr Ede:
“Thank you for this terrific analysis of the latest ‘fear mongering’ by WHO. When I first heard about it, I stood farther back and dismissed it out of hand. When diagnosed with diabetes; which I recognize as an unwittingly self-inflicted condition, I did the research and realized quickly the ‘traditional’ approach to ‘treating’ this problem actually exacerbated it; i.e. intent focus on chemically suppressing the most obvious symptom; high glucose levels, and not the insulin response to consuming carbohydrate. I stopped eating carb for six months in a successful attempt to partially rehabilitate my permanently damaged insulin receptors….. my glucose levels became normal and have remained so without the use of any medications but rather by adjusting diet and exercise. My diet is focused on ‘clean’ meat and healthy fats. In order to accomplish this I was required to do a great deal of research and I was disheartened to realize the medical ‘industry’ and institutions we are supposed to respect and trust are; in my opinion, criminal organizations operating cooperatively to simply create profit without consideration of the general health and well being of the public they were originally meant to serve. The USDA and FDA are run by “ex” executives of Monsanto and for the benefit of Monsanto. The CDC and WHO are right in the pot with them and there is no doubt whatsoever of this reality and their collusion with the pharmaceutical industry. …. I believe our ‘health’ organizations have been gutted and something very dark has been substituted for sound medical/dietary guidance and information. ….Those at the very top seem exceptionally intent upon encouraging us all to eat the wrong foods. ….hundreds of studies have proven sugar; in all its forms, is poison to the human body. We are expected to believe our primary diet should consist of plant food which is unnecessary and processed by our bodies as poison? If you feed a cat grain it won’t eat it because it knows grain is not its food, however the cat needs the nutrients in grain. Mice and birds eat the grain and the cat eats the mice and birds. Many different kinds of animals eat every kind of plant food. There are approximately 18lbs of vegetative nutrient in each single pound of wild meat. The animals eat the plants [carb] and we eat the animals. That is how we gain access to those nutrients. Our bodies were never meant to consume these plants directly and I see this as one of the fundamental causes of virtually all ‘modern disease’. Notice our hunter ancestors did not stalk carnivores for food. They hunted the plant eaters … just like the other carnivores. The rivers of insulin created by continuous consumption of carbohydrate disrupts the entire; profoundly complex, human hormonal system leading to the ‘progression’ of ‘diabetes’ into ever increasing destruction of the body. I can only assume the pharmaceutical indoctrination of a ‘medical education’ is generally overwhelming critical thought not to mention common sense”
Please share this article widely. I don’t have a big budget to promote the real, the actual, game changer—– regeneratively farmed meat. The information contained above is but the tip of the iceberg , I have more if you want. Meanwhile, spread it!