Meat – Not The Superfood You Thought

Over the years I have heard several recurring excuses for eating meat, most of which apply to eating red meat like steak. The reasons make meat, including beef, appear as the most important food in our diet. Here I will list each common excuse for eating meat with a rebuttal for each. In doing so you will gain key knowledge on how to be more effective in a transition away from a meat eating lifestyle to vegetarianism. The end result is a healthier, longer life for you and a healthier environment for the rest of us.

Here are five common excuses for eating red meat. What follows are nutritional facts and insights on why these excuses are either not valid and tips how you can avoid continuing a destructive habit.

1. Meat tastes good

Does it really? Let’s explore this. Perhaps you are so use to a food that it simply tastes normal. You became accustomed to it. Or perhaps it does taste really good. In that case it may be providing something nutritional lacking in your diet. We do get drawn to what we need but that attraction can become corrupted. Take ice cream for instance. Maybe a person craves ice cream one day because they have a lack of dietary calcium. After that craving is filled it becomes replaced with a sugar addiction. Now the person is unable to differentiate between the two. The sugar addiction feels the same as the urge to uptake calcium. Sometimes our initial attraction to one thing becomes replaced with an addiction to another part. We became tricked into thinking we need something when we don’t.

When we say something is good, that simple opinion superficially is true. It’s hard to argue with a subjective opinion with another opinion. A: “It’s good!” B: “No it’s not!” Staying on the same level leads nowhere in an argument. To find a truth the level needs to be changed. A different perspective must be gained. To understand why meat tastes good requires a deeper look into the diet.

Memory

Honestly, I understand this excuse for eating meat. This past year I ate meat four times that I can recall. One time the meat tasted poor. Another time it was alright. And lastly, a few months ago I had some raw Ahi and it tasted amazing! The truth is I think I know why it tasted great. Earlier that day I was hiking and got sunburn. Perhaps my body urged me to eat the protein to repair my burnt skin. When we listen closely our body can guide our mouth to eat what we need.

In order for our body to guide us to eat correctly it needs a reference memory. When food item A contains a nutrient to fill depletion A the body remembers. Then all future instances of depletion A triggers the body to remember food item A and create an urge to eat it. This memory helps us eat correctly unless additives like MSG or addictive substances like simple carbs or even caffeine corrupt the programing.

I used to eat pizza everyday and it was my only source of calcium. When I removed all dairy products from my diet for nine months near the end of that drought visions of double cheese pizza’s danced before me – not literally but rather as a reoccurring thought. I had a strong urge to eat pizza. The white cheese glowed which help me understand that the urge to eat pizza was for the cheese and thus I probably needed calcium I reasoned. Instead I drank some milk and the desire to eat pizza vanished. (milk was never a large part of my diet but pizza has been) That is a body memory. It happens to me daily with protein. If I don’t eat enough protein my body tells me to eat meat. Meat is the food item which my body remembers carries protein. Instead of eating meat I drink whey protein or have hard boiled eggs and the desire for meat disappears. Here I am actively training my body to replace it’s meat memory with another food item.

Mothers Wisdom

My mother once told me that just because it tastes good or feels good doesn’t mean it’s necessary a good thing. For example, smoking felt good but I quit for health reasons. Drinking felt good, very good actually, but I quite for health and empowerment reasons. Meat (sometimes) tastes good but I quit for environmental and moral reasons. There are reasons above those generated by your tastes buds that can guide your dietary choices.

Another point is we often become accustomed to food rather than actually liking it. A way to test this is to remove a food from your diet for several months. Later, add it back and see how you feel about it. Does it taste good, weird, or awful? You can break poor food habits with this trick. I have.

2. Meat is a good source of iron

True, specially red meat because it contains blood. I have read that animal based iron (heme) is more easily absorbed than plant sources of iron (non-heme). However, there are excellent vegetarian sources of iron including black beans, spinach and figs. Since men require less iron than women, it is often women I hear tossing the excuse to eat red meat because otherwise they feel or become anemic. Based on personal experience, it may not be anemia that is the problem but rather at lack of protein.

Let me share what I experienced. I made a very rapid transition from meat twice a day to veganism. During my vegan diet I ate half a contain of tofu daily (40g) which is an adequate amount of protein for a person who doesn’t work out. That amount of protein wasn’t enough to keep me vibrant. Each week that passed I became weaker. By three months everything felt twice as heavy. It was if I was continuously exhausted. So I gave up that diet and cooked up some eggs and a mere two hours later I felt good and happy. Immediately I prepared more scrambled eggs and felt even better. Since then, except for a recent 6 month gap I have daily boiled eggs (and whey). It seems I need some animal protein in my diet which leads me to the next common excuse.

3. Protein

Yup. Meat has a lot of protein. However, according to the biological scale whole eggs have the highest value. In fact, eggs are such a complete and perfect protein that all other forms of protein are compared to eggs. Egg is the protein standard. Whey is around 99 in the BV scale, maybe a 100 or 101. The jury is still out on where it sits exactly but it’s very high. Chicken and turkey is about 79 with fish next at 70. Lean beef sits at 69 and then following down the BV scale are vegetarian sources of protein.

Biological value is a scale to determine how readily protein is absorbed in the gut. The scale is not a perfect guide to protein metabolism though. For example, a starving a person will absorb more protein from a food item than a satiated person. The BV of cow’s milk can fluctuate on the scale up from the 90’s down to the 70’s for that hunger reason. If you consume more protein than you need during that meal, you will not absorb all of the protein. Instead it will be eliminated. At least the BV scale does provides some useful, if basic, comparing and contrasting between different types of protein and protein metabolism rate.

Environmental Vegitarianism

A person can still have animal protein in their diet without eating meat. In fact, non-meat sources of animal protein (eggs, whey) have much higher BV ratings than actually meat. Eggs and whey are far more easily absorbed and utilized than protein obtained from flesh. Moreover, whey and free range eggs have virtually no environmental impact [1] compared to the ecological destruction large scale meat industry causes. The meat industry single handily accounts for 60% of water pollution in the United States. A 2006 United Nations report calls the meat industry as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The less pollution we cause to our rivers, lakes, oceans, air and soil the better the world will be for us, our children and all other creatures that we share this space with. Reducing your meat consumption is the single greenest change you can make towards this cause.

Again, there are other dietary options for protein including animal and sustainable vegetarian sources.

4. Zinc

Zinc is commonly found in red meats, liver, oysters, egg yolks, beans, nuts and seeds. Like iron it is said that meat and dairy sources of zinc have greater bioavailability than vegetarian sources (non-heme) of zinc. Because of that statement, I have read that lean red meat is encouraged for a “healthy” diet.

Vegetarians will need to consume greater quantities of zinc bearing foods to meet recommend daily levels. Vegetarians and vegans tend to have lower levels of zinc and higher levels of copper in the body than people on standard diets. Many people choose a passive diet for ethical reasons then eat poorly and as a consequence using an obvious example, don’t get enough zinc. So make sure you eat for the right reasons and use reasoning to eat right.

While on a vegetarian diet make sure your zinc and copper ratios are equal. Too much of one inhibits the absorption of the other. Even if your metal ratios are fine, absorbing the metals from non-animal sources can be hard. I eat many almonds throughout the day. Even though 28 almonds contain five times the levels of zinc than one large boiled egg, the BV of zinc in one egg may make both foods equal or near equal when it comes to zinc absorption. Vitamin and mineral supplementation might be a good idea.

5. B12

This is an easy one. Firstly, extra b12 is stored and then slowly released over years if it becomes scarce in the diet. Second, b12 is so inexpensive there is no reason not to include it daily in a diet. In the past I bought a bottle of a hundred pills for three bucks. Then I broke each pill up into quarters providing four hundred pieces of b12 – a years RDA supply – for just a few dollars. B12 is so cheap using it as an excuse to eat red meat is lame.

B12 doesn’t just magically appear in meat. In fact, the meat industry adds b12 in the form of cobalt salts to cattle and chicken feed to make meat have b12. The reason for this chicken and cattle diet supplementation is an interesting story about the poor state of our (lack of plant) diets. It is a complex issue worthy of it’s own blog much like the abbreviated environmental vegetarian digression in the protein section above, but I won’t get side tracked again :)

SUMMERY

The mighty food industry dictates to us what we need to eat. As a result 70% Americans according to the American Institute for Cancer Research (AIRC) eat a gluttonous amount of animal protein daily exceeding the levels required in a diet. In addition, Americans eat more meat than of the rest of the world. There is no need for this. Furthermore, only 27% of Americans eat the correct ratio of plants to animal food. So eat more plants daily. Then cut back on your junk meat, then cut back on your meat, then eliminate meat from your diets to save yourself from health issues like cancer and to save our future residency on this planet.

The common excuses for eating meat – b12, zinc, iron, protein and taste – are just that, excuses. There are other, healthier and more viable options available in this day. Replace your unsustainable animal protein with sustainable sources. Stop eating a product produced via an industry that is burning through our resources like there is no tomorrow. If there is one message I would like you to retain, it that each day you go without meat makes you a greener person and makes this planet a safer place to live for us all.

Appendage – side notes

Note 1: Whey is a byproduct of cheese manufacturing. It used to be thrown away until body builders realized how valuable it for muscle growth. Now whey is solid to nutritional companies as extra income for the cheese plants. As long as cheese is made there will be whey.

If you choose to consume dairy then I encourage eating organic, free ranged, local dairy products. Not only are they produced in an environmentally sustainable manor with less animal cruelty, but they are more nutritious, contain less toxic chemicals and tastes better too! I have fun comparing the taste of eggs or milk from difference sources and noting the differences. The differences can be subtle to extreme. Try it and you will come to see that organic dairy products do taste better! Even different organic sources of eggs and milk have marked texture and flavor differences. It’s fun exploring food! Just make your enjoyable food experiences a sustainable, green activity. Don’t pollute my air, water and soil to sedate your pleasure-seeking hunger. I live here too ;)