Imagine for me two children, coming in from an afternoon of playing in the backyard. Each child is handed a glass of milk from his mother, which he receives happily and sits down to drink. The first child sits down, sips the milk slowly, enjoying the rich flavor, until feeling satisfied and going back out to play. The second child sits down, gulps down his drink, and then still feeling hungry, goes back for a second, or maybe some other snack that will curb his hunger.
What’s the difference between these kids – simply, they were born 100 years apart, and therefore received very different beverages, even though their mothers called it by the same name.
The milk consumed today is only a slight resemblance of the milk consumed by our ancestors, or even those children saved by milk in the early 1900s. Yes, milk was once recommended to cure serious diseases, such as rickets, because of its high nutrient content. The milk of the past was natural milk – untampered with, and therefore containing all the wonderful nutrients nature provided it with. It was high in fat from cows fed their natural diet. That means it contained plenty of natural vitamins and other nutrients, and consisted of a completely different chemical makeup. This milk was unpasteurized, which means that it didn’t go through a process that destroyed or mutated many of chemicals which make it up. This unpasteurized form of milk would have beneficial bacteria to improve gut health, along with enzymes to help with absorption of nutrients like calcium. Futhermore, the vitamins and amino acids would be undisturbed, thus maintaining their functional forms. In contrast the pasteurized milk consumed today would have had its enzymes and many vitamins destroyed, along with the healthy bacteria.
Most importantly, since that milk from 200+ years ago would be high in fat, making it much more capable to fill up the consumer. Contrast this with the milk commonly consumed today, which I like to call basically water with some protein (casein) and some synthetic vitamins. That isn’t going to fill up anyone, making it just another method to consume extra, dangerous molecules.
While we may call the beverage these two boys consumed by the same name, there is actually very little in common with the two beverages. One contains a wonderful mixture of nutrients in their natural form – a beverage that was designed by nature, even containing the tools it needs for optimal digestion. However the other one contains high levels of damaged molecules, lacking nutritional value such that is must be pumped up with artificial nutrients in a sad attempt to mimic the delicious, nutritious beverage it once was.
When I think of differences between traditionally consumed foods and foods today, I often think of milk. It may look the same, but it is hardly the same substance. This goes for the way any animal foods are consumed, and is the topic of today’s discussion. Today we live in a world where it is common knowledge that consuming animals leads to disease. With the continuation of my discussion on animal foods, I wish to show you that, while this belief that our consumption of animals as a driver of disease may be true, that does not mean that consuming animals or their products is inherently dangerous.
Previously I took the hypothesis that consuming meat and animal products causes disease, and showed that, while this hypothesis has a great amount of support, its null-hypothesis does as well, thus discrediting the hypothesis! Meat eaters get diseases at higher rates than non-meat eaters, but that doesn’t mean that meat is inherently dangerous; only that the two are correlated. However, there is causal data showing numerous mechanisms by which animal foods cause disease, and these need to be addressed.
It is now time to piece together the actual problem with consumption of animals, and how these problems can be avoided. How do we eat animals in a healthy manner, and avoid the ways in which they cause disease. Because animals can be consumed in a healthy manner – our ancestors proved this by consuming animal-based foods for 2 million years. The question is why are these seemingly same foods killing us now?
Please note here that I am going to leave the ethics and sustainability out of the argument, so that we can focus solely on health. This is not because I think the ethics and sustainability are unimportant. They are very important, and worth a good discussion, which I intend to do at a later time. For now just know this: stepping away from the American/industrial way of eating animals, to a more traditional, healthy way of consuming animals, is inherently a large step towards a more ethical, more sustainable food chain. Making animals a part of a healthy diet is a major step towards making animals a part of a sustainable food chain.
In my previous article on the subject, I tested the hypothesis that consumption of animal-based foods makes humans sick. I showed that, while there is plenty of evidence supporting the animal foods cause disease hypothesis, there is also ample evidence supporting the null-hypothesis, thus discrediting it. Based on the data I discussed, I formed a new hypothesis. This is the follow-up article that will further discuss why I support my new hypothesis.
HYPOTHESIS: The consumption of animals is not inherently dangerous to human health; rather, the consumption of animals from the industrial food chain causes disease.
Said a little differently, it is not that consuming animals in their natural form causes any problems; rather, the methods used to get animals from “farm” to plate are to blame for their disease-causing properties.
Animals as they are consumed today
We must first establish the way that animal foods are typically consumed today:
1. Beginning with the obvious one – consumption of animals today often comes in highly processed forms. To name a few examples:
- pizza
- cheap hamburgers
- chicken nuggets
- microwaveable meals (my favorite to cringe at is microwaveable bacon)
- hot dogs
Note with these examples, the meat is often only a part of the food, along with refined wheat, sugars, and refined oils
2. Animals used for food are raised under awful conditions:
We consume animals that have been raised to minimize costs and optimize efficiency. The method we’ve chosen to do this involves feeding from the cheapest food sources (grain), along with being pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones. Animals spend their lives packed together, living in their own feces, unable to move around. And then we eat them.
3. What we eat along with the animal based meal:
Meat is often consumed along with sugar, grains, and vegetable oils. Think of a hamburger – sure, it contains meat, but it also includes highly refined grains, condiments like ketchup or barbecue sauce, and likely other processed foods for sides (e.g. chips and fries).
4. The cuts of meat and cooking methods:
Avoiding toxic components of the animal, along with remnants from the way the animal was raised, involves opting for cuts of meat that are as lean as possible, and cooked sufficiently to kill off any pathogens. Thus, well-done, lean meats are prized, while cuts with skin and/or bones in tact are shunned.
5. The quantity of meat we consume today:
Meat is often the centerpiece of the meal, and eaten at most meals.
Let’s explore these animal-based products consumed today. In the interest of time, I feel no need to dive into the reasons why the highly processed foods are killing us. My intention is not to gloss over the processed part because it’s not important. It is incredibly important. However this information is obvious, and I believe it would be a great waste of time to hash out all the reasons that American “cheese” or fast food chicken nuggets cause disease. So these items will only be touched upon – however if you want a full discussion on the hundreds of ways fast food meat kills you, I’d find that information elsewhere.
To get started, imagine a hamburger – one that would typically be sold at any restaurant or served at a barbeque. Let’s explore the components of this meal to shine some light on how exactly it kills us.
First of all, hamburger is generally eaten from a cow that was pumped up with antibiotics and growth hormones, neither of which is good for you. Because molecules bioaccumulate, these toxins get passed directly from the animal to the consumer of the animal, such that the growth hormones and antibiotics fed to the cow also get to circulate through the human body. (Note, this goes for other toxins as well, such as mercury in fish. Little fish contain a little bit of mercury, which then gets eaten by a bigger fish, which gets the total load of the mercury from all the little fish. As bigger and bigger fish eat these, the mercury accumulates of the food chain, until eventually consumed by us humans, which get the total load. Tip – eat smaller fish.)
Now back to that hamburger:
That meat was also made by feeding that animal a grain-based diet. If you are what you eat, which you are, then there’s no way that a cow is going to be nutritious when raised on a nutrient-deficient diet. For example, grain-fed cows produce beef with a 1:6 omega-3:omega-6 ratio, in contrast to the 1:3 ratio seen in grass-fed beef (4). We’ve all heard about the importance of eating more omega-3’s and fewer omega-6’s. Well, grass-fed beef is a great source of fat for a good ratio, while grain-fed is not so great.
Next up, that hamburger comes on a bun, probably with ketchup or other sugary add-ons. Refined grains and sugars wreak havoc on your body. They elicit a large insulin spike, telling your body to store fat. And of course, all that sugar is one of the foods consumed that does the most damage to the body (if you find yourself disagreeing with this statement on sugar’s ill health effects, I suggest checking out Gary Taubes, whom I can almost assure you will change your mind). So of course people that consume industrial animal foods are going to have fat storage problems. But it is not because we eat animals. It is because the meat we eat is part of an insulin-stimulating meal.
Let’s discuss this insulin problem real quickly. You are likely familiar with the idea that saturated fat can be dangerous. Here is why. Saturated fat causes trouble when it gets stored in muscles, because it interferes with the functioning of insulin. When insulin can’t do its job because the muscle cells no longer respond, then the pancreas has to pump out more insulin. Therefore it is crucial to 1. keep insulin levels low, and 2. make sure saturated fat doesn’t get stored in the muscle. Unfortunately, foods like a hamburger both 1. induce a high insulin response, and 2. contain saturated fat, resulting in stored saturated fat, causing insulin resistance.
The question still remains, does the hamburger itself harm our health? Asked differently, if we were to ditch all the modern, industrial components of the hamburger, would it still make us sick?
To answer this, let’s go back to a time when hamburger resembled, well, meat.
The role of animals in the diet of our ancestors:
Now that we have established how we typically consume animals today, let’s contrast this with how animals have been consumed throughout history.
It’s typical to think of our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers, as burly beings that lived off meat. Men would go out, get the kill for the day, and would come back for the tribe to feast on animal flesh. What is likely more accurate is thinking of humans as evolved primates: plant eaters that evolved to supplement with animal-based foods. It is important to understand that meat was an integral part of evolution. However, I do not mean to overplay its role in the diet. We have to clear up the common misconception that we evolved as hunter-gatherers, consuming loads of meat all the time. As Katharine Milton, PhD, a UC Berkely professor of Biological Anthropology describes:
“In nature, any dependable source of digestible energy is generally rare and when discovered is likely to assume great importance in the diet. Animal foods typically are hard to capture but food such as tree fruits and grass seeds are relatively reliable, predictable dietary elements. Furthermore, humans come from an ancestral lineage in which plant foods traditionally have served as the primary source of energy” (1).
We did not go from a species that ate plants to a species that ate meat. We went from a species that ate plants, to a species that ate plants and sometimes ate animals. But still, that doesn’t mean that we should downplay that role of meat in the diet, as it provided a major advantage for our ancestors. Milton explains the advantage of the addition of animal-based foods into the human diet, as we evolved further from previous species:
“By routinely including animal protein in their diet, they were able to reap some nutritional advantages enjoyed by carnivores, even though they have features of gut anatomy and digestive kinetics of herbivores. Using meat to supply essential amino acids and many required micronutrients frees space in the gut for plant foods. In addition, because these essential dietary requirements are now being met by other means, evolving humans would have been able select plant foods primarily for energy rather than relying on them for most or all nutritional requirements...This dietary strategy could also have provided the energy required for cerebral expansion” (2).
That addition of meat to the human diet was crucial, yet it is important to understand that it supplemented the diet – it did not replace it. We can’t know for sure how much meat was consumed throughout evolutionary history, but we do know a few things. Meat was an integral part of our evolution as a species. Whether it was a causal agent for our incredible growth, both physically and culturally, we probably won’t ever know. But we do know it has been present for millennia. Based on this, the argument that we should not eat animals because meat is one of the main agents killing us off today is simply absurd.
Let us think for a second – if eating animals causes disease, because people today that eat a good quantity of animals have higher rates of disease, then it would make sense that traditional populations living entirely off of animals should see incredible rates of disease. Is this true?
Since we can’t go back in time to examine these evolving populations, the best thing we have is cases of native populations that existed on traditional diets, before industrial food took over. Note that this isn’t a great way to draw conclusions from true hunter-gatheres, as there are many modern influences on many of these populations. However, it’s the best we have, and the data that comes out of these cases is quite revealing.
The Inuit are one such population that were documented based on their strange diet, consisting almost entirely of animals. This population, strangely enough, seemed to be free of chronic disease, such as heart disease.
One such encounter was documented from an early 1900 expedition by Vilhjalmur Stafansson, in which he spent time with this people, living off the Arctic diet, entirely on animals (3).
“It is interesting to note from the careful observations published from the Bellevue study that Stafansson ate relatively modestly of protein, deriving between 80–85% of his dietary energy from fat and only 15–20% from protein. This was, and still remains, at odds with the popular conception that the Inuit ate a high protein diet, whereas in reality it appears to have been a high fat diet with a moderate intake of protein. In his writings, Stefansson notes that the Inuit were careful to limit their intake of lean meat, giving excess lean meat to their dogs and reserving the higher fat portions for human consumption” (3).
Cases such as these are well documented and thoroughly discussed, and if you’re interested I suggest The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, or Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. They discuss many such cases, such as populations like the Masai tribes in Kenya, which were shown to have extremely low levels of cholesterol and superb health, despite a diet of mainly milk, blood, and occasionally meat. For now I’ll leave you with another description of the Inuit diet, an example from Teicholtz’s book:
“For six to nine months, they ate nothing but caribou, followed by months of exclusively salmon, and a month of eggs in the spring. Observers estimated that some 70 to 80 percent of the calories in their diet came from fat. It was clear… that fat was the most favored and precious food to all the Inuit whom he observed. The fat deposits behind the caribou eye and along the jaw were most prized, followed by the rest of the head, the heart, the kidney, and the shoulder. The leaner parts, including the tenderloin, were fed to the dogs.”
Passages like these may sound revolting, but the truth is that we can get plenty of nutrition – all the nutrients we need – from eating all the different parts of an animal. The fat is crucial because it contains all the fat-soluble vitamins. Additionally, we can get a variety of fatty-acids, which is crucial for a well-functioning body. We can also easily get all the amino acids we need, along with other important nutrients, like collagen.
With these cases we see populations living off of animals, while their populations lived free of chronic disease plaguing us today, clearly eating animals, in itself, cannot be the reason we are so sick. Therefore, the way in which these foods are consumed today, the industrial versions of animals, must be the culprit.
Back to Animal Consumption Today:
Think back to the brief discussion of a typical way we eat animals today – the hamburger.
Again, the hamburger likely contains toxins such as antibiotics, hormones, and viruses picked up at some step in the industrial food chain. The hamburger also comes along with highly refined wheat, sugar, highly processed cheese, and any number of other industrial toppings. But none of this means that consuming hamburger, in general, will cause any harm.
Well, now is as good a time as any to ask that question. Does meat, itself, cause harm?
Which brings me to one of the more interesting parts of the discussion: meat. We’ve talked a great deal about the industrial components of the food chain and how they cause disease. Now we can dive into whether the meat (animal muscle) itself, causes disease.
If you would, think back to the descriptions of how the animals were traditionally consumed. What was one factor that stood out?
The thing that strikes me as relevant, and shows up in case after case, is varying forms of the statement that traditional populations literally “threw the leaner pieces of meat to the dogs.” We saw this statement in Teicholtz’s quote: “The fat deposits behind the caribou eye and along the jaw were most prized, followed by the rest of the head, the heart, the kidney, and the shoulder. The leaner parts, including the tenderloin, were fed to the dogs.”
We also saw it in the original account of the Inuit, followed by cases from early American explorers: “…Stefansson notes that the Inuit were careful to limit their intake of lean meat, giving excess lean meat to their dogs and reserving the higher fat portions for human consumption” (3).
It appears once more in Dr. Cate Shannehan’s book, Deep Nutrition (247), with native Americans: “According to early American explores like Samual Hearne and Cabeza de Vaca, North America natives preferred the fattest animals, and valued their fattest parts most of all. When hunting was especially good, they’d leave the lean muscle meat behind for the wolves.”
Interestingly, animal protein seems to have never been a prized source of nutrition, as it is today. Rather, it seemed to be the one part of the animal that got tossed away, while the rest was consumed for all the nutrition it provides.
These earlier populations knew where the nutrients reside: the fat, the bone, and the blood – not the muscle. The muscle is just a ton of protein, and contrary to common belief, we don’t need a ton of protein.
While there is some disagreement between the exact amounts that are ideal for humans, the general consensus is that we should consume around 0.7 – 1.0 grams per gram lean mass, per day with experts today advocating for even lower numbers. That’s only around 80 – 100 grams of protein per day. That number easily gets exceeded once people start regularly consuming lean cuts of meat (a single steak can contain around 60 grams of protein).
Here’s the problem: we’ve been told for years that animal fat (saturated fat) is killing us, which has led to this widespread belief that choosing lean cuts of meat is the healthy choice. To be healthy, we’ve been told to opt for chunks of muscle, aiming for the least fatty meats, which leads to high levels of protein consumption. On top of that, the health field touts the importance of protein, turning the population into protein junkies. How very dangerous this is.
To continue with this protein problem, let’s jump to another example: chicken. Imagine a meal that one would generally consider fairly healthy: a large chicken breast, skinless of course. This nice, lean piece of meat can’t be at fault for killing us, can it?
Do you know what you just did with that meal – you cut out all the nutritious parts of the animal, for a large portion of muscle – the part that actually causes problems.
The recommended serving size for chicken is 4 ounces, which contains about 35 grams of protein, or around half a day’s worth of protein. But of course, that won’t be the only meat eaten that day. Add in a burger or steak later on, possibly with an egg-white omelet for breakfast, and you’re already at the protein limit.
If you’ve been absorbed in the mainstream, and this news about protein is new to you, I know you’re going to be likely to just toss the information aside. I strongly urge you to open your mind a little bit, because I believe this point is crucial to understanding so many health problems.
The most compelling thing I’ve found about this data on the dangers of too much protein is that this isn’t coming just from the vegan folk – we also hear it from the high-fat, keto crowd (https://www.dietdoctor.com/how-much-protein-should-you-eat). When both sides of the (nutrition) aisle both arrive at the same conclusion, I think it’s definitely something worth listening to.
Could it be that the way we eat meat today, opting for large servings of lean meat, is a strong cause of so many diseases?
Problems with this line of thought
Now I know, there’s a problem here – because if you purchased chicken that was raised industrially, you have a tough choice. On the one hand, you could choose the portions with most of the toxins removed (i.e. the lean cut, with the toxin-containing fat deposits removed). However, those fat deposits are where all the nutrients are. So if you want to consume the nutritious parts of the meat, you have to eat all the toxins too!
The good news is there’s a simple solution – stop buying industrial meat! Buy traditionally raised chicken, ones that weren’t injected with foreign substances, or forced to live on top of each other and their feces. Then this problem goes away, because you can eat the whole animal, with all the nutrients in place. Then you don’t have to consume huge chunks of muscle to fill your belly – you get full on all the nutrients by consuming fat, along with a reasonable amount of protein from the muscle!
Let me take you through one more common meal: the sandwich. The one I’m envisioning here is the basic ham/turkey sandwich. Take a piece of bread, slap some lunch meat down, add a slice or two of cheese, and maybe add some mayo to that. Voila, there’s lunch! Now this one is a staple lunch idea – quick to make, relatively healthy, and another chance to get more protein! Oh, and it’s a great way to avoid any sort of fat, given the mayo and cheese is left off. Let’s examine it to see what it actually does to your body.
First and foremost, the deli meat (or as I see it, ground up animal muscle with additional chemicals, lots of salt, and likely some sugar). Going through what we’ve learned so far, that meat is simply concentrated protein, which, from what we’ve learned, can be dangerous in high quantities. Furthermore, we once more get a load of unnecessary toxins from everything else mixed in with the meat, such as nitrates/nitrates, which are strongly linked to cancer, among other problems (migraines, etc.).
And then, we have of course, the bread, or as I see it, one of the best ways to spike insulin and send the body into fat storage mode. But it’s not just the bread, because unbeknownst to most, protein also stimulates insulin. That’s right, both protein and carbohydrates stimulate insulin, while fat does not. So not only do you get an insulin spike from the bread, but that gets increased due to the meat!
I hope now that you see this meal as, not one that’s healthy because it’s void of fat, but one that’s unhealthy because it only contains refined carbs, protein, and any other toxins mixed in with that meat.
Sure, you could add some fat in there – maybe slap on a slice of cheese, or dab on some mayo. But again, these are just more industrial foods. That mayonnaise is just a great opportunity to give your body a douse of vegetable oils, arguably one of the most dangerous substances we consume for food . The cheese may not be a terrible idea, if from a good source, but if you’re choosing cheese to top off an industrial food sandwich, I am highly skeptical that it would be of any sort of quality. And at this point, with the insulin-stimulating effects of the bread and meat, there would be a sufficient insulin response to drive your body into fat storage mode, so any additional calories from that additional fat would be stored as well.
So do yourself a favor: ditch the cold cuts, for which you need the bread and those industrial toppings to give it any flavor, and pick cuts of meat with all the nutrition, and flavor, still in tact.
Summary
For the last time today, let’s think about that hamburger – again, the typical American hamburger. Yes, consuming hamburgers such as these is going to make you unhealthy because they are simply industrial foods, and industrial foods cause disease. When choosing what animal-based foods to ditch, the easy ones to start with are the processed crap. Remember, it is the bun, all those industrial toppings, and the crap in the hamburger that makes the meal unhealthy.
However, in addition to the crap that comes along with the typical meat-based meal, I hope you gathered one more piece of information – information on the meat itself. Meat is unhealthy when consumed in too high of quantity, because the amount of protein consumed from animal sources plays a role in disease progression. Similarly, dangerous components of animal foods, such as saturated fat, are really only dangerous when consumed in insulin-stimulating meals. So if you eat animal foods in the context of insulin stimulating foods (i.e. refined carbs and high protein), then yes, consider that a dangerous meal.
However, that hamburger meat doesn’t have to play a role in an unhealthy diet. It can also be a perfectly healthy part of a healthy diet. To do this it needs to be consumed in the most natural form possible, which does not involve taking out all the fat to make it a big chunk of protein. It needs to be consumed with the fat still in tact, so that there is enough nutrition to fill up on without having to consume too much protein.
Remember, when your meat comes from traditionally raised animals, fed their natural diets and free from hormones, antibiotics, and any other toxins, then you don’t have to worry about consuming the fatty parts. Rather, you can consume these cuts of meat, enjoying the natural, delicious taste that fatty foods create, all the while knowing that you are nourishing your body.
I will stick with my current hypothesis: The consumption of animals and their products are not inherently dangerous; rather, the way in which they are generally consumed today, in their industrial form, makes them so.
Until data surfaces from well-done, well-controlled, randomized-control studies, showing that it is the consumption of animals, itself, that is dangerous. Until then, I stick with the diet that we, as a species, evolved on: a plant-based diet, supplemented with animal foods.
References:
(1) Milton, K. (2000). Hunter-gatherer diets — a different perspective, 665–667. Am J Clin Nutr.
3: 665-667
(2) Milton, K. (1999), A hypothesis to explain the role of meat-eating in human evolution. Evol. Anthropol., 8: 11–21. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1999)8:1<11::AID-EVAN6>3.0.CO;2-M
(3) Phinney, S. D. (2004). Ketogenic diets and physical performance. Nutrition & Metabolism, 1(1), 2. http://doi.org/10.1186/1743-7075-1-2
(4) University Nebraska-Lincoln Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources: https://beef.unl.edu/2017-nebraska-beef-cattle-report
Further Reading:
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions. New York: The Macmillon Company, 1921.
Shanahan, Cate & Shanahan, Luke. Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. Macmillan, 2017
Teicholz, Nina. The Big Fat Surprise. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.