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Food Hazards in Animal Flesh and By-products ~ The Problem with Meat
The meat, dairy, and egg industries are unhealthy, unhappy, and unsafe. It’s time we put them out to pasture.
Eating meat has long been a part of the American national identity, but this tradition has had devastating consequences for public health. As COVID-19 continues to spread across the country, the tide may finally be turning toward healthier alternatives.
“The pandemic is poised to usher in the biggest retreat for global meat
eating in decades,” Bloomberg News recently reported. Beyond Meat, the first
publicly traded, plant-based meat alternative company on the New York Stock
Exchange, is inking deals around the world and its stock is soaring.
Most people can’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real meat. And
there are many other brands on the rise: Impossible Foods, Gardein,
MorningStar Farms, Field Roast, Tofurky, Yves, Lightlife, and so on.
Eating meat is associated with heart disease and heart attacks — the
number-one cause of death in the world. Likewise, it increases the risk for
stroke, various cancers, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, kidney diseases,
hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, endometriosis, impotence,
gout, and other very serious ailments.
About two-thirds of diseases in the United States are diet-related, as the
U.S. Surgeon General noted in a report on nutrition and public health.
Indeed, a plant-based diet has been proven to be safe and, in many cases,
healthier than consuming foods derived from animals. Vegetarians and vegans
are, for example, are likely to live six to ten years longer than their
carnivorous counterparts.
Surgeries, medical devices, drugs, and exercise sometimes treat and control
heart disease, but only a plant-based diet has been able to reverse this
leading cause of death. “In America today, about half of all Americans die
of heart attacks and strokes,” nutrition advocate Dr. Joel Fuhrman advised.
Dr. Fuhrman believes that our diet has to be mostly “fruits and vegetables,
beans, nuts, and seeds. We need to reduce processed foods, reduce animal
products, and increase higher-density nutritious foods.”
The American Institute for Cancer Research found that a plant-based diet, in
addition to helping prevent heart disease, also lowers the risk for many
cancers. Maria Petzel, senior clinical dietitian at MD Anderson Cancer
Center, described the evidence that plant-based diets reduce one’s cancer
risk as “overwhelming.”
Similarly, The China Study, an authoritative report by Colin Campbell, Ph.D.
and his son Thomas Campbell, M.D., based on a twenty-year study of
sixty-five Chinese counties, revealed that “people who ate the most
animal-based foods got the most chronic disease… People who ate the most
plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.”
This should not be ignored.
The pandemics of the last century — the flu outbreaks of 1918, 1957, and
1968, each of which killed millions of people — originated in animals raised
for meat. COVID-19 also originated in animals and the human appetite for
them.
Whenever animals are crammed together, we risk contagion. As the prestigious
medical journal The Lancet highlighted, “all new infectious diseases of
human beings to emerge in the past [generation] have had an animal source.”
If there were no poultry industry, there would be no avian influenza. If
there were no cattle industry, there would be no outbreaks of E. coli or mad
cow disease. If there were no hog industry, there would be no swine flu.
There would also be much less deforestation and climate change.
“At the individual level,” Roni Neff, of the Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health, explained, “it seems pretty clear that the No. 1 thing that can be
done is to eat less meat and dairy.”
The meat, dairy, and egg industries are unhealthy, unhappy, and unsafe. It’s
time we put them out to pasture.
This article was originally published on TheProgressive.org and reprinted with permission of the author.
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We began this archive as a means of assisting our visitors in answering many of their health and diet questions, and in encouraging them to take a pro-active part in their own health. We believe the articles and information contained herein are true, but are not presenting them as advice. We, personally, have found that a whole food vegan diet has helped our own health, and simply wish to share with others the things we have found. Each of us must make our own decisions, for it's our own body. If you have a health problem, see your own physician.