When our vegetarian ancestor started eating meat two million years ago, it wasn’t just because animals taste great, it was pure necessity. Climate change made many of the plants our ancestors relied on less available and meat bridged the gap. From the discovery of fire at the latest, meat became a staple of the human diet.But over the last few years eating meat has increasingly been associated with the health risk like: heart disease, certain cancer, and an early death. unhealthy is meat, really?
Biologically, we need to eat for three reasons: for energy, to acquire materials to fabricate our cells, and to get special molecules that our body can’t make themselves. the energy and most of the materials come from the three macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates and proteins.
Proteins are the most important resource for repairing and replenishing our cell structures. the special molecules are a large variety of vitamins and minerals we need to drive metabolic processes.
Meat provides us with most of theses things. it contains all essential amino acids our body needs and a lot of minerals like: iron, zinc and essential vitamins, some of which are barely found in plants like vitamin B12. only one essential is missing in most of the meat we consume: vitamin C. it appears in almost all plants and support our immune system as well as the development of connective tissues. After few months without it you’d get scurvy. but meat has another big advantage, it’s high bioavailability. some of the nutrients in meat are broken down faster and available quicker than those from plants. spinach for example, contains more iron than meat, but it’s absorbed much slower and body needs more energy to digest it.
several health benefits have also been observed in communities that solely rely on meat. the Inuit for example, are able to survive in extreme climate conditions thanks to purely meat-based diet, if necessary. since they consume the whole animal including the organs, they get every single nutrient they need including vitamin C. so meat itself is definitely not dangerous for us. But its health effects vary, depending on how its prepare and what animal it comes from. when talking meat in the western world, we generally mean muscle tissues that have a high nutrient density, but also lack some of the vitamins that make it possible to survive on meat alone.
The healthiest animals are to eat are probably fish. fish contain polyunsaturated fatty acids like omega-3, which may lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases and support anti-inflammatory immune function. as a part of balance diet, fish can be eaten regularly without worries.
A close second is the most popular meat, chicken. it’s regarded as the meat with fewest health risks. it’s high contain of saturated fats is associated with a higher cholesterol level and cardiovascular disease. But this idea has been criticized by a large number of scientists arguing high cholesterol level might be inherited and not caused by nutrition. so, in general if you want meat and are concerned about your health, go for chicken.
Things start to get problematic with high intake of red meats like beef, veal, pork, lamb, horse and goat. A recently published study recommends for examples a maximum of 23 gram of red meat per day which is very small steak per week. however, large-scale meta-analysis studies have shown that eating 100 gram of red meat everyday increases the risk of diabetes by 19%, of strokes by 11% and of colorectal cancer by 17%.
Things gets worse when we look at the processed meat. processing meat means adding certain chemicals by curing, smoking, sorting or fermenting or in other words making it delicious. bacon, ham, salami, sausages and hot dogs contain chemical that are harmful for us like nitrates and nitrites that can damage the DNA in our digestive system and lead to cancer.
The WHO reviewed 800 studies over 20 years, and concluded that processed meat is strongly linked to an increased risk of colorectal cancer. each extra 50 grams of processed meat per day increases your risk of cancer by 18%. when it comes to cancer risk, processed meat is now in the same category as plutonium, asbestos and smoking.
The WHO highlights that its research is only about the question of whether or not something causes cancer or not to what extent.
But processed meat may also significantly increase the chance of suffering from diabetes, strokes, and coronary heart diseases. it also makes a difference what sort of life our meat lived when it was still part of a living being. it’s common to feed large amount of antibiotics to livestock in order to prevent diseases which can spread antibiotic resistance. combined, a high consumption of both red and processed meat could increase your chance of premature death by up to 29%. this mean if your chance of dying is at 3% this year, it’s now 4%.
To blame meat alone for bad health would be wrong though. there is no evidence that the very essence of meat has any negative effect beyond its high fat contain. and even this point is highly contentious. Just like with many other pleasures in life, sometimes too much of a good thing is harmful.
All in all, in moderation, meat is not unhealthy and you don’t need to become vegetarian overnight to have real impact in your health and the planet.
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