Eating Meat

• Meat is high in saturated fat--but it's also high in protein, as well as a host of micronutrients (such as creatine) that are very hard to obtain on a vegetarian diet.
• Meat is low in fiber, but so is water!
• Meat is a completed protein (contains all the essential proteins your body cannot manufacture), while getting a completed protein on a vegetarian diet means eating many of the same things (such as beans and rice) over and over.
• Your digestive tract is too long for a diet high in meat, but your teeth are those of an omnivore--not the flat teeth of a vegetarian creature.
• On the one hand, meat is wasteful. It takes a great deal of grain and water to produce an animal for consumption. On the other hand, meat is efficient. Meat is a dense source of many hard-to-get nutrients.

Looking at these facts, is meat good or bad for you to eat? The answer is yes to both. Humans do best with some meat in their diets. How much is too much? That depends on many individual factors. A rule of thumb is the amount of meat you eat at any meal should be no larger than the palm of your hand (assuming a half-inch thickness). If your stool smells especially bad, that's a hint you may have too much meat in your diet (it could be a hint of something else, so see if cutting back on meat improves the odor within a week or so). In any case, the traditional 12-oz steak is far too large.

Think back to the earliest days of humans. When a hunter caught a rabbit or other small animal, how much meat was there, really? By the time everyone got their share of the meat, there wasn't a whole lot left. As humans got better at making tools and weapons, they began eating more meat. But, the human body has not kept pace with technology (which is one reason computer-generated IRS notices cause so many heart attacks!).

Eat meat as a side dish, not the main dish, and you will be fine. Eat mostly vegetables--don't eat highly-processed grains (this includes most flour products) at all. When you do eat meat, trim the fat from it. Never eat anything that is deep-fried, breaded and fried, or cooked in hydrogenated oil (because these fats all go straight to your artery walls, and the breading makes your insulin level skyrocket, which makes your body store fat).

The best time to eat meat? Breakfast or lunch, but not supper. You want to get your protien early in the day, and meat is an excellent source of protein. You also want to give your body time to work on that saturated fat before you sleep--while you are awake, conditions are better for burning it off.

A final note on meat. The typical American man has, at the age of 53, six pounds of undigested red meat in his lower bowel. This is gross. The jokes about men and their farting are related to this fact, because that meat is fermenting. In fact, it's loaded with gas-producing bacteria. It forms a thick black tarry substance that many experts believe is a major factor in many illnesses, including bowel and prostate cancers. They believe this because they can look at who has cancer in the tarry group and who has cancer in the group with clean bowels, and they can see a lot more men with tarry bowels have cancer. Eating meat does not make for tarry bowels--eating too much meat or not enough fiber for the amount of meat you do eat causes tarry bowels.

Eat your meat, but skip the pudding. Have an apple, instead.