Meat. Should you eat it or not?
What about red meat--is it any worse for you than white meat? Let's look at the issues in
an intellectually honest way.
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.
A Cattle Concept
Beef cattle are an important part of the food chain, yet misinformed
people will tell you how much grain and water we waste by eating meat
instead of grain. Let's look at the truth.
Cattle are ruminants, which means they can digest things we can't.
They turn inedible roughage into highly-digestible meat. This meat is a
complete protein source, is a good source of B vitamins, creatine, zinc,
and various other nutrients. Two thirds of the land in the world needs
forage vegetation to prevent erosion, and only ruminants can harvest
that forage. Are you starting to form a mental picture, here? Good!
This
material, copyright
Mindconnection
LLC 1997-2008. See
About Us for policies and contact information.
Don't make all of your communication electronic. Hug
somebody!