On the other side of the coin, there isn't any culture that has lived on a nothing-but-meat diet either, which is the other extreme. If you look at all the global cultures, the majority eat some kind of "staple" starch (yams may have been the first staple food for hominids), with a lot of vegetable/fruit matter, and a fair amount of eggs, dairy, seafood, poultry, nuts. (Plus reptiles and insects in more Paleo cultures). And meat on feast days or after a big hunt. Plus, per Fast-5, the tendency is to eat one or two meals a day, since the meals are a lot more work to prepare.
That is a diet that is high in soluble fiber, iodine, Omega 3 fatty acids, and has a balanced amount of fats, carbs, protein. Most of those kinds of cuisines are really yummy too, and it's not a hard diet to stick to. It's a diet that has been successful for eons, and like you say, the real test is does a diet work for many generations.
The "European diet" (which the American diet is based on) has not been working for some time though, and I think people are experimenting, trying to figure out why, ever since the explorers first noticed how healthy the "natives" were. But the issue isn't "meat" vs. "not meat". Europeans typically ate more muscle meat than "natives" did, and that is, I think, still true. None of the native groups were "vegan", but their sources of protein were (and are) more the ones I mention above. Which used to be the definition of a "vegetarian" diet (or a "fasting" diet on church "no meat" days). So a "vegetarian" diet in the sense of basing the protein content on fish, eggs, milk, nuts, poultry ... HAS been tried, and it works fine.
The current diet people are calling "high protein" isn't a diet that has been used in any culture over several generations, at least not successfully. There are people who rely on mainly ruminant meat for their protein ... like the sailors and pioneers ... but they had fairly serious health problems. There are loads of people who have used it short term and it seems to work short term for them ... as does veganism for the people who use it short term. No one really knows what would happen long term, because the experiment hasn't been done. But both extremes are low in different nutrients, so I don't think either one would be good for a developing fetus.
Personally, I think the issues with the European diet are likely:
1) The reliance on wheat as the "staple". Esp. when it's finely ground (feeds yeast) and enriched with too much iron, and full of bromine (which blocks iodine).
2) The reliance on beef, pork, sheep, and goat as the main meats. In America we have further narrowed "meat" down to mean mainly beef and pork muscle meat. Neither is an ideal source of protein.
*** At this point someone always brings up the Inuit and the Maasai. I might point out that neither group relies mainly on "meat" in the American sense. The Inuit eat mainly seafood, including sea mammals, which are just not the same thing as land animals. The Maasai are pastoralists who drink mainly milk, with some blood, and rarely kill or eat their cows.
That is a diet that is low in Omega 3 fatty acids, low in iodine, low in glucosamine, too high in iron, and pro-inflammatory (all the protein comes with neu5gc, and wheat promotes gut inflammation for many people). Anyway, it's a diet that has NOT worked well in Europe or the US. There are hundreds of other diet possibilities that would work fine, with or without "meat" per se.
*** At this point someone always brings up the Inuit and the Maasai. I might point out that neither group relies mainly on "meat" in the American sense. The Inuit eat mainly seafood, including sea mammals, which are just not the same thing as land animals. The Maasai are pastoralists who drink mainly milk, with some blood, and rarely kill or eat their cows.
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:37 AM, free2bmekeywest <dogdoright@aol.com> wrote:
Hi,
You really can't tell if someone is "healthy" unless you draw blood and run several series of tests to determine the composition of the blood and the levels of important elements/hormones in the body.
In America, someone who appears to be "healthy" is usually a visually based observation which is based upon physical thinness. Not an accurate reading at all.
And yes, there are "healthy" vegans. And there are "healthy" people who live on a diet of Jack Daniels and Twinkies. That still does not mean that the rest of us can thrive under those conditions.
There isn't any ancedotal or scientific evidence that vegan/vegetarianism is the optimal diet for humans. Zero.
Even if you take a look at the list of Earths super-centurians, the oldest living people who are healthy-they all eat animal products (meat, milk, eggs, honey) and drink. Not one vegan or vegetarian in the bunch.
Vegan/Vegetarianism is a political philosophy based on emotion ( I am more humane, I am more ethical, I am more moral) not evidence.
Think about it.
AMA
__._,_.___
.
__,_._,___
No comments:
Post a Comment