MEAT: GOD’S FOOD
March 15th, 2007The vegetarian hypothesis has it that we were wholly dependent on plant foods and that meat never played an important part in our evolution. It is a hypothesis that has had fervent support in the USA.
Fossil evidence
The first evidence lies in the fossil sites. Where hominid remains are found, so also are animal bones – at times in their thousands. If we were not meat-eaters, why is that?
Secondly, although modern hunting tribes do eat plants, they have fire. Without it, there are very few plant foods with sufficient calorific value that we could have digested. There were fruits, of course, but there is not one prehistoric site in all Africa that indicates forests extensive enough to have supplied sufficient fruit to meet the needs of its inhabitants. Indeed, there is agreement that our ancestors did not dwell in forests at all but on the savannahs where there were vast plains of grass. However, grass is of no value to our digestive system. Even to live off fleshier leaves would require the much more highly specialised digestive systems of other primates. Compare the shape of the gorilla against that of the man in Figure 3. The area between the chest and the legs of the gorilla is much greater than the same part of the man. This is because the gorilla, a herbivore, needs a much larger digestive system. The walls of all plant cells are made of cellulose, a form of dietary fibre. There is no enzyme in the human digestive system that will break it down. And with the cell walls intact, the nutrients in the cells cannot be digested. Passing unaffected straight through the gut, therefore, all the nutrients in the plant would be ejected as waste.
Studies conducted on monkeys have led to the suggestion that the seeds of the grass could have supplied us with the energy we required (6) . However, if this were the case, why is it that we cannot eat them now without cooking them first? Seeds, the staples such as rice, wheat, maize and beans, play an important part in our lives today. All of them, however, must be cooked before we can eat them in any quantity. Seeds and berries are a plant’s reproductive system. Many are designed to attract animals to eat them but there would be little point in this if the seeds were digested. No, they are indigestible – deliberately, designed to pass through the animal to be defecated and take root elsewhere. Two means only are available to make them digestible: cooking and grinding.
Before fire was harnessed, the only means by which the seeds could have been rendered digestible would have been by pounding them and breaking down the plant cell walls, but no archaeologist has ever found a Stone Age tool for this job. If chewing were the method used to do the job, a very large proportion of the seeds would escape and, passing through the body undigested, end up in the faeces. Hominid faeces, or coprolites as they are called, have been found and studied in detail (7) . Older coprolites from Africa contain no plant material. Relatively recent ones from north America have included just about everything that could remotely be called edible: from eggshells and feathers to seeds and vegetable fibres. But these remains occur only after the Paleoindians had mastered fire, and even then, seeds had passed through undigested and unharmed. Thus there is no doubt that seeds cannot have been a natural part of their diet.
Homo erectus began to appreciate the value of fire around 350,000 years ago (8) . It is true that if our ancestors had started cooking grain then, we could have evolved and adapted to it by now. However, cooking grain is not as easy as cooking meat. You cannot hang it in a chunk over the fire or lie it in the embers. To cook grain and other seeds, you need a container of some sort. The oldest known pot is only 6,800 years old. In evolutionary terms, that was only yesterday.
For any reliance on cooking, you also need a controlled fire. Although hearths have been discovered that are 100,000 years old, these are relatively rare. European Neanderthal coprolites from around 50,000 years ago, before the use of fire, contain no plant material whatsoever. It was not until Cro-Magnon’s colonisation of Europe, some 35,000 years ago, that hearths became universal. However, even then they were used merely for warmth, not for cooking plants. At the time, Europe was in the grip of a succession of ice-ages. For some 70,000 years there were long, cold winters and short, cool summers. Cro-Magnon and his Eurasian ancestors cannot have eaten plants – for most of the year there weren’t any! He ate meat or he died. And he ate that meat raw.
Fats and brain size
The evidence was already overwhelming that we could not be a vegetarian species. However, in 1972 the publication of two independent investigations really nailed the lid on the vegetarian hypothesis’s coffin. The first concerned fats (9) .
About half our brain and nervous system is composed of complicated, long-chain, fatty acid molecules. The walls of our blood vessels also need them. Without them we cannot develop normally. These fatty acids do not occur in plants. Fatty acids in a simpler form do but they must be converted into the long-chain molecules by animals – which is a slow, time-consuming process. This is where the herbivores come in. Over the year, they convert the simple fatty acids found in grasses and seeds into intermediate, more complicated forms that we can convert into the ones that we need.
Our brain is considerably larger than that of any ape. Looking back at the fossil record from early hominids to modern man, we see a quite remarkable increase in brain size. This expansion needed large quantities of the right fatty acids before it could have occurred. It could never have occurred if our ancestors had not eaten meat. Human milk contains the fatty acids needed for large brain development – cow’s milk does not. It is no coincidence that in relative terms, our brain is some fifty times the size of a cow’s.
The vegetarian will be dismayed to learn that while soya bean is rich in complete protein, and grains and nuts also combine to provide complete proteins, none contains the fats that are essential for proper brain development.
Although the eating of fats today is believed by some to be a cause of heart disease (erroneously, see The Cholesterol Myth ), we know that our ancestors ate large amounts of fat. Animal skulls are broken open and the brains scooped out; long bones likewise are broken for their marrow content. Both brain and marrow are very rich in fat.
Toxicity of raw vegetables
The second investigation (10) concerned the inedibility of many of today’s plant foods in the raw state which contain many anti-nutrients that can damage a wide variety of human physiological systems. These antinutrients include alkylrescorcinols, alpha-amylase inhitors, protease inhibitors, etc. These must be broken down by cooking, and cooking for a long time, before they can be eaten safely. Beans and other legumes although rich in both carbohydrate and protein, also contain protease inhibitors. Starchy roots – yams and cassava – are common staples today, but if not well cooked are very toxic indeed. The cassava even contains cyanide which must be oxidised by heat to make it safe to eat. And apart from the anti-nutrients above, the starch in cereals – wheat, rice, barley, oats, and rye – are also inedible in quantity if not cooked first. Cooking causes the starch granules in the flour to swell and be disrupted by a process called gelatinization Without this the starch much less accessible to digestion by pancreatic amylase. (11) (See also soybeans below.) Unlike meat, which can be easily digested in its raw state, vegetables should really never be eaten raw and cereals should be fermented and then cooked for a very long time before being eaten to neutralise the phytic acid and other toxic anti-nutrients. That fact that we don’t do these things is the reason for so much atopic disease – asthma, eczema, and so on – around today.
‘Homo carnivorus’
There is no doubt whatsoever that we cannot be a vegetarian species. From at least the time that Homo erectus appeared in the cold Eurasian continent some 500,000 years ago, we must have lived on and adapted to a diet almost exclusively of meat.
All this evidence points to our being pure carnivores, as are the big cats. However, we are a remarkably successful species. It is unlikely that we would have been quite so successful if we had been forced to rely on only one source of food. It is obvious from archaeological remains that we tended to be more opportunist eaters. We hunted and ate meat primarily but, if meat was in short supply, we would eat almost anything – so long as it did not require cooking. This still precluded some of the roots and most of the legumes and cereals that we eat today. When meat was in short supply, we got our protein from nuts and ate fruits and berries. During our evolution, therefore, when we lived well, our diet was high in protein and fat: during lean times it was richer in carbohydrates.
So, our ideal diet, the one we evolved and adapted to, must also be one which is high in proteins and fats, and low in carbohydrates.
There is one further piece of evidence that really confirms this. That is the design of our digestive organs and digestive enzymes, which are exactly like those of the great carnivores – and nothing at all like those of a herbivore. Click here for that comparison
The diet revolutions (12)
About 9,000 years ago our ancestors started to domesticate wild grasses. From these we get the cereals we know today: wheat, barley, maize, rice. We could not eat them directly as the starch molecule is too large for our digestive process to cope with. It had to be broken down first by cooking. This development began a dramatic change in Man’s lifestyle. Once our ancestors produced controlled quantities of higher-energy starches which could be stored, their numbers could grow. And as numbers grew, it became more difficult to maintain their supplies through hunting. Thus their basic diet changed from a high protein/fat diet to one largely of carbohydrate.
This radical change of diet brought with it radical changes to our ancestors, both in physique and in health.
As vegetable foods made up an increasing proportion of our diet and intakes of meat declined, so our height also declined. European, meat-eating Homo erectus erectus of 30,000 years ago was some 150 mm (6 inches) taller than his agricultural descendants. Indeed, even today we are still shorter than they were. We see the same pattern in North America. The Paleoindian hunters of 10,000 years ago were much taller than their farming descendants at the time of European conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD.
There is no evidence of nutritional diseases before the advent of agriculture. After it, there is. The cereal crops that became the modern staples, together with root crops which began to be cultivated, are all relatively deficient in protein and the B vitamins. Additionally, all the cereals contain a substance called phytic acid which binds with a number of minerals and other nutrients and reduces their availability to the digestion. As a consequence, with the coming of agriculture we see the appearance of a number of nutritional diseases such as rickets, pellagra, dental caries, beriberi, obesity, allergies and cancers. We see the emergence of the ‘diseases of civilisation’.
About two hundred years ago there began a second dietary revolution which was brought about with the introduction of industrialisation. This had two powerful but opposite effects on our health. The industrialised countries with their increased wealth no longer had to rely on home-produced food with its seasonal changes, they could import the food they needed. Thus the populations of those countries could look forward to going through life without ever being hungry. A good thing, you might think, but it brought with it adverse effects.
Many of the imported foods were unnatural to those eating them. The new fruits, in particular, as well as being novel, tasted nice. As a consequence, we changed from eating what we needed to eating what we liked. And with no previous experience of these foods, our bodies had never learned when to stop. Subsequently, science made possible the production of synthetic foods which had the appearance, texture and taste of the real thing, but with none of the proteins, minerals and vitamins. Sugar, which contains no useful nutrients whatsoever, became easy and cheap to produce, leading to a 30-fold increase in its consumption. The industrial revolution, therefore, was something of a two-edged sword. On the one hand it gave people a wider range of nutritious food than had ever before been possible; on the other hand it brought diabetes, peptic ulcers, heart disease and yet more dental caries, cancers and obesity.
In the late twentieth century the speed at which our diet has become increasingly unnatural has quickened. When a music-hall singer at the beginning of the twentieth century sang that ‘a little of what you fancy does you good’, there was still an element of truth in it – at least as far as diet was concerned. When hunger signalled that the body needed more nourishment, appetite determined which elements. At one time, we ate what we had an appetite for, and the body’s needs were met. Nature told us what to eat and by this means, nature ensured that we ate a balanced diet. Over the last two centuries, and increasingly during the last two decades, however, the situation has changed dramatically.
During the millions of years that we have been evolving, we have been eating our natural food. We had a sense of taste that told us what was good for us and what was poisonous. Like all animals on this planet, we ate what we liked without danger either from nutritional deficiency or from overindulgence. But when food is changed from its natural state that no longer holds true.
At first, all our food, whether from animal or vegetable sources, was eaten raw. Now cooking food has become a way of life. Most people in Western society today would not eat uncooked meat. Indeed, as possible pathogens would not be killed, it may be unwise to eat raw meat. But, while boiling parallels the first stages of digestion, and may be helpful in that process, over-cooking in a way that chars food can present the digestive processes with food which it has great difficulty digesting.
In 1838, in Canada, Dr. William Beaumont performed a remarkable series of experiments on a man named Alexis St. Martin. St. Martin had an opening in the front wall of his stomach from a gunshot wound. Even after the wound had healed, there remained a small opening through which the mucous membrane of his stomach could be seen and, through which, substances could be introduced into the stomach or removed from it. Dr. Beaumont was able to introduce foodstuffs through the opening and observe the rate of digestion. By so doing, he found that raw beef digested in two hours, well done boiled beef in three hours but well done roast beef took four hours. Similarly, raw eggs were digested in one-and-a-half hours but hard-boiled eggs took three-and-a-half hours.
In contrast, the cellulose which envelops cereal grains and which is the major constituent of vegetable cell walls, cannot be broken down by the digestive juices at all. They are ruptured only by the process of cooking. Cooking is also the only means of breaking down the large starch molecules so that we can digest them. As a consequence, cereals and many other vegetables need not only to be cooked, but well cooked, before they can be digested.
That is not to say, however, that cooking presents no other problems. Cooked food, for example, can be damaging to the teeth. We know that sugar is a major cause of cavities in teeth, particularly children’s teeth. We also know that the effect is worse if the sugary food is sticky. Dates and toffee are both high in sugars and stick around the teeth. Both, therefore, might be expected to cause cavities. But while toffee does cause dental caries, Arabs who eat sticky, sweet dates have healthy teeth. Why the difference?
All living organisms have immune systems which protect them from invading bacteria. At the time of being eaten, the raw dates are still living organisms and their immune systems are working. The bacteria which would ferment the sugars in the dates and form the acid which attacks teeth, are repelled. That is not the case with cooked and, therefore, dead toffee.
Cooking can also destroy some nutrients: Vitamin C is a good example. Thus nutrients, which might be present when food is ‘natural’, are lost and their correct balance may also be lost.
Cooking food, therefore, may cause changes to which the body’s systems are not entirely adapted and which, as a consequence, may cause us minor problems.
Today, however, food has been changed much more radically and in a shorter time span – a time span much too short for us to have evolved and adapted to it. A large proportion of the food we eat now can no longer be called natural. This is particularly so in the case of carbohydrates – sugars and starches. There is a considerable body of evidence that it this change which is the cause of so many of today’s ills.
There are a number of vegetable-based foods which are processed to such a high degree that nothing but pure carbohydrate is left. The obvious example is white, granulated sugar. Sugar cane and sugar beet contain a significant proportion of protein which is lost during processing. Also lost are other nutrients such as vitamins and fibre. The end product is pure, concentrated carbohydrate. It is this concentration that is so unnatural. This has not happened with protein as it is relatively expensive. Neither has it happened with fats as they are already concentrated naturally. The concentration of carbohydrate allowed a dramatic and rapid increase in its consumption. Annual sugar consumption in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century was less than two kilogrammes (4½ lbs) per person, today it is more than sixty kilogrammes (130 lbs).
The same is true of cereals, albeit to a lesser degree. Many packaged foods today contain what is euphemistically called ‘modified starch’. This again is highly concentrated carbohydrate, in this case cereal starch. This concentration of sugars and starches is done to make foods cheaper, more attractive and, of course, to make a bigger profit for the manufacturers. But it has had serious effects in large sections of the population. The body’s natural nutrient-requirement signal, the appetite, has not evolved to cope with such unnatural foods. It knows when to stop us eating meat, but not when to stop us eating chocolate bars and cakes. It is also much easier to eat modern white bread than the stodgy, pre-Industrial-Revolution bread.
During the past century there have been dramatic rises in a number of previously rare diseases. These include heart disease, cancers, diabetes, peptic ulcers, tooth decay, constipation and obesity. Although dietary fat is blamed for many of them, a half century of research has failed consistently to provide any convincing evidence in support of this hypothesis (13) . The fat-and-heart disease hypothesis relies on comparisons between disease patterns in ‘civilised’ countries and more primitive societies, and the amounts of fat in their respective diets. They purport to show that where a lot of fat is eaten there is a high incidence of heart disease, while others who eat less fat have lower incidences of the disease. However, if one makes similar comparisons, replacing fat with sugar, one finds similar patterns. And with sugar the argument is much more compelling.
The food that we eat is made up of many different nutrients. We need energy which we measure in calories. Fats, carbohydrates and proteins all contain energy and so lack of energy is generally not a problem. But we also need a variety of minerals, trace elements and vitamins. Although we need them only in small amounts, they are vital to our health. The diet of the adult lacto-ovo-vegetarian may be more bulky and lower in energy than a mixed diet, but because he is consuming eggs, milk and cheese, his diet generally is nutritionally similar to the mixed diet and there is little problem. However, while it is possible to meet the body’s nutritional requirements with the vegan diet if great care is taken, without that care there is a real risk of deficiencies leading to serious ill-health. This risk increases as diets become more restricted. Historical evidence shows that Man can live healthily on diets which vary enormously in their content. However, it also tells us that, generally, the further one gets from a diet which includes animal products, the greater is the risk of ill health.
The meat vitamin: B-12
The most important deficiency for the vegan is of vitamin B-12. By definition vitamin B-12 is essential to human life. It is essential for the synthesis of nucleic acids, the maintenance of the myelin sheath (the insulation around nerves which when damaged causes Multiple Sclerosis); indeed its presence or deficiency affects nearly all body tissues, particularly those with rapidly dividing cells. Without it we suffer from pernicious anaemia which, as its name suggests, is deadly, and a degeneration of the nervous system.
Vitamin B-12 is unique among vitamins in that while it is found universally in foods of animal origin, where it is derived ultimately from bacteria, there is no active vitamin B-12 in anything which grows out of the ground. Where vitamin B-12 is found on plants it is there only fortuitously in bacterial contamination.
Bacteria in the human colon make prodigious amounts of vitamin B-12. Unfortunately, this is useless as it is not absorbed through the colon wall. Dr. Sheila Callender (14) tells of treating vegans who had severe vitamin B-12 deficiency by making water extracts of their stools which she fed to them, thus affecting a cure. An Iranian vegan sect unwittingly also makes use of the fact that human stools contain vitamin B-12. Investigators could not understand how members of this sect remained healthy until their investigations showed that they grew their vegetables in human manure – and then ate the vegetables without being too fussy about washing them first (15) .
To enable vegans to survive, vitamin B-12 is added artificially to breakfast cereals in Britain and may be bought in pill form. This is hardly a natural way to get food and in many cases it is self-defeating. Vitamin B-12 is also unlike all other vitamins in that it occurs as a number of analogues, only one of which, cyanocobalamin , is active for humans. In collecting human stools for analysis Dr. Victor Herbert found that of each one hundred micrograms of vitamin B-12 extracted, only five micrograms was of the cyanocobalamin analogue (16) . Thus even in this most prodigious source of the vitamin ninety-five percent was composed of analogues which were useless.
Several fermented products such as tempeh, a soya bean product, and spirulinas, used by strict vegans as a source of vitamin B-12, either do not contain appreciable amounts of the vitamin or contain analogues of the vitamin which are not active for humans (17) . Vitamin B-12 status was assessed in a group of 110 adults and 42 children from a macrobiotic community in New England. Over half of the adults had low concentrations of vitamin B-12. Children were short in stature and low in weight. The community relied on sea vegetables for the vitamin. However, the researchers say: ” We could not show that individuals who reported more of these sea vegetables had increased vitamin B-12 status…” “Similar null results were obtained with the other sea vegetables, tempeh, and miso, foods considered to contain significant amounts of vitamin B-12 by many individuals in the macrobiotic community. . .On the other hand, it is possible that the vitamin B-12 measured in these sea vegetables has no biological activity for humans….only a small fraction of total corrinoids in Spirulina, a genus of blue-green algae contains cobalamin and that the remainder is in the form of analogues that are not biologically active for humans. In these cases the analogues can block metabolism by the body of the ones that are of use .”
Dr Herbert suspects that vegans taking the spirulinas as a source of vitamin B-12 actually bring on the symptoms of deficiency quicker. Yeast is also believed by vegetarians to contain vitamin B-12 – and it does. But even if the yeast is grown on a medium rich in vitamin B-12, unless some of the growing medium is mixed with the yeast, it is unlikely to contain the cyanocobalamin analogue that is the active form for humans.
The amount of vitamin B-12 we need is very small: about five micrograms per day. Eating more than is needed results in a reserve being built up in the body. When a person becomes a vegan, those stores are depleted – but only gradually. Thus it is possible to live for several years on such a diet before the onset of symptoms of deficiency. In England a carefully conducted study (18) carried out on vegans showed that they all got vitamin B-12 deficiency eventually.
The first manifestation of vitamin B-12 deficiency is usually mental disturbances. These range from abnormal mood swings, mental slowness and memory problems, through hallucinations and depression to severe psychosis. Physical symptoms include: rapid heartbeat, cardiac pain, facial swellings, jaundice, weakness and fatigue and loss of weight. While a dose of active vitamin B-12 given by injection can cure symptoms very quickly, there is a hidden danger. A largely vegetable-based diet provides large quantities of folic acid, which works in conjunction with vitamin B-12. In a diet which contains folic acid but is devoid of vitamin B-12 the folic acid can disguise the vitamin’s deficiency. In such a case, irreparable damage to nerves and the spinal cord can take place such that by the time symptoms become apparent, death is inevitable.
Vegetarianism and militancy
These days, it seems that there are more and more reasons to protest against the way our society is being run. There are voices of disseat everywhere. (It is the reason for this website!) but there is a much more worrying trend – violent protest.
Have you noticed the increasing numbers of occasions when small groups of very militant people demonstrate against all sorts of things: animal experiments, butchers’ shops, new roads, footpaths, nuclear power stations, civil rights, homosexuals’ rights or anybody else’s rights. The odds are that the majority are vegetarians.
As we know, when it needs food, our body indicates this to us with the feeling of hunger. But there are also other signals if specific nutrients are deficient. Meat is the best source of several nutrients. When our bodies are deficient in these, we become irritable and aggressive. This is a perfectly natural signal built into our genetic make-up over our evolution: our bodies are telling us to go out and kill something to eat. This is why strict vegetarians tend to be so vociferous. It is a trait that was recognised long ago; it was, after all, the vegetarian Cain who killed the carnivorous Abel, not the other way round. The vegan Kikuyu tribe in Kenya were the perpetrators of the murderous Mau Mau in the 1950s, not their wholly carnivorous, but peaceful, neighbours, the Maasai.
The butcher’s shop in my village has had its windows smashed so often that it is now boarded up when it is closed. Have you ever heard of a meat eater bombing a greengrocer’s shop?
Vegetarianism – a form of child abuse
All the nutrients that the body needs other than vitamin B-12 can be obtained from vegetable sources if extreme care is taken . However, the availability of some of them to the body is often adversely affected by the special characteristics of a strictly vegetarian diet (19) . Nutrients so affected include: energy, iron, calcium, zinc, copper, manganese, selenium, riboflavin and the fat soluble vitamins, particularly vitamin D. The best sources of these are meats, poultry and seafood, which are not eaten. But not only does the vegan diet consist of foods which are poorer sources of these nutrients, it necessarily contains high levels of fibre, phytic acid and oxalate, all of which are known both to bind with the nutrients in such a way as to inhibit their absorption in the gut and also to deplete the body of the minerals it has. The vegetarian ends up with what is called a negative balance. It is a situation where the more he eats, the worse it gets.
This applies both to adults and to children. In the case of children, however, the situation can be far more serious. Children brought up by vegetarian parents are usually breast fed, often for long periods. Where the mother has a good nutrient-rich diet, this is normally a good thing. But the nutritional condition of the mother affects the nutrients passed in breast milk to the infant. If the mother is deficient in vitamin B-12, for example, this deficiency is passed onto the breast-fed child (20) with unfortunate consequences.
With the more extreme macrobiotic diets the situation is even worse. Serious brain damage is seen in children on macrobiotic diets where it was found that ” Vitamin B-12 is sufficiently low as to have psychological consequences that also raise legitimate concerns about neurological development ” (21) . Other research confirms the depth of the problem. Mental development of four- to five-year-old children on macrobiotic diets (almost devoid of animal foods and fat) with long-term growth deficits, was studied. In addition food consumption and behavioural style of the children, and family and parent characteristics were assessed. Children had only seventy percent of the energy and forty percent of the calcium intake of that reported for children on conventional diets. Thirty three percent of the children studied failed to finish IQ tests due to an inability to concentrate (22) .
Long standing mild to moderate malnutrition may not affect mental development if the children grow up in a stimulating social environment.
Infants and growing children have relatively small stomachs but large requirements for energy and the proteins and other materials with which to grow. As they can only eat small meals, they, most of all, need a diet high in energy and rich in nutrients – needs that simply cannot be met from a vegetable-based diet. When weaned, children of vegetarian parents receive a diet where their small stomachs are filled with relatively nutrient-poor foods. This can lead to grave nutritional disorders such as suppressed growth and nutritional dwarfing (23) , as well as diseases such as kwashiorkor, a protein-calorie deficiency disease usually seen only in severely malnourished African children (24) , vitamin D deficiency rickets (25) , severe iron deficiency anaemia (26) and learning difficulties (27) .
The children of strict vegetarian parents tend to have lower birth weights which studies have shown increase ill-health later in life (28) . Smaller babies suffer more heart disease (29) , obstructive lung diseases and asthma (30) . Under-nutrition in infancy has also been shown to inhibit brain growth and to have a dramatically adverse effect on intellectual development (31) . This last is a disaster as, not only is it irreversible in those children, studies have shown that their eventual offspring also suffer lower intelligence quotients.
Dr. I.F. Roberts, senior registrar at the Department of Child Health, St George’s Hospital in London, and colleagues suggest that these vegetarian type fad diets must be regarded as a form of child abuse 23 . Examples of this, when vegetarianism is taken the the extreme, can be seen in recent news articles about the damage vegans do to thier own children.
But isn’t vegetarianism healthier?
Many people become vegetarians because they believe that such a lifestyle is healthier, particularly in terms of heart disease and cancer. They believe that an intake of meat, and particularly animal fat, will shorten their lives. As evidence of this, a study of largely vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists is usually quoted (32) despite the fact that its authors conclude: ‘ We hope that no-one will take data from this report and use it to say “Food A lowers or food B raises mortality risk”. ‘ It is certainly true that this religious sect suffers less from heart disease than the general population. However, the use of this argument to show that vegetarianism is healthier is flawed. A similar study of Mormons in Utah, who eat a considerable amount of meat, found similar low levels of the disease. In fact, the diet of both communities had little or no impact on their incidences of heart disease; the incidences of the disease is low because they are both close-knit and supportive communities, a situation which is known to be protective as far as such diseases are concerned (33) .
Comparisons of the health and longevity of cultures with different dietary habits confirms that meat eaters, such as Eskimos, Nagas and Maasai, can expect to live twice as long as primitive vegetarians. It may be said that such a comparison is flawed because the situations in which these peoples live is very different but there are cases throughout the world where meaningful comparisons can be made.
In Kenya two tribes, the Maasai and the Kikuyu, live in the same country, the same climate, the same political system and the same environment. The Maasai, when wholly carnivorous, drinking only the blood and milk of their cattle, were tall, healthy, long-lived and slim. The Kikuyu, when wholly vegetarian, were stunted, diseased, short-lived and pot-bellied. Over the last few decades, the Kikuyu have started to eat meat – and their health has improved. Since 1960 the Maasai diet has also changed, but in the opposite direction. They are now eating less blood, milk and meat, replacing it with maize and beans. Their health has deteriorated (34) .
A study by Drs. W. S. McClellan and E. F. Du Bois (35) found that the Eskimos in Baffin Island and Greenland living on a diet composed almost entirely of meat and fish, and eating no starchy or sugary foods, suffered few diseases. This was not the case with the Labrador Eskimos. They had been ‘civilised’ and lived on preserved foods, dried potatoes, flour, canned foods and cereals. Among them the diseases of civilisation were rife.
Dr. Sir Robert McCarrison (36) , working in India, similarly compared the northern tribes – Pathans, Sikhs and Hunzas – who ate meat and fresh vegetables, had fine physiques and were healthy and long-lived with the Plains peoples – Madrassis, Bengalis and Kanarese – who ate little meat or milk, living mainly on rice and who were overweight and unhealthy.
Other studies have purported to show that vegetarianism is healthier. In July 1994, the British press carried headlines like ‘Vegetarian diet means longer life’ as they reported a vegetarian study from the British Medical Journal (37) which said that vegetarians suffered forty percent fewer cancers and heart disease than meat eaters.
But the public were being misled – the study was badly flawed.
¨ The study’s vegetarian cohort was selected through the Vegetarian Society and the meat-eaters were then selected by the vegetarians themselves. This is hardly the way to conduct an unbiased trial – if they want to prove a point, and what vegetarian doesn’t, they will pick those who are most likely to be unhealthy. It is human nature.
¨ The vegetarians were mostly women, while the meat-eating group contained more men. Women live longer than men. In the age range of the subjects studied, men have four times the heart disease of women – enough to confound the figures significantly.
¨ The vegetarians were younger than the meat-eaters. As younger people have a lower death rate, one would expect more deaths among the meat-eaters regardless of dietary influences.
In this study, the two groups were not comparable and the study is worthless.
Vegetarianism and coronary disease
Other evidence refutes the ‘vegetarianism is healthier’ dogma. London has a high proportion of Asian immigrants. They live in the same environment as the indigenous population and mix freely with them. But the incidence of coronary artery disease is much higher in the Asian population. A study published in 1985 (38) was pretty conclusive evidence that the Asian’s diet – high in linoleic acid and predominantly vegetarian – was not protective against the disease.