This morning I found myself responding to a client who was wondering why she needed to include meat in her diet. After I spent a decent amount of time putting together some information regarding and arguments for including meat in your daily diet, I realized I should turn that response into a blog post. I’ve had a significant number of clients of late who are partly, mostly, or completely vegetarian, so it makes sense for me to crystallize my arguments on this topic and get this information out there. What follows is a collection of my thoughts on why you too should be eating meat.
Isn’t meat bad for me?
We can't talk about the topic of meat versus no meat without discussing The China Study, so let me start there. Some people a whole lot smarter than me have done some great work on this topic, and what I think they've proved is that Dr. Campbell's study was dramatically effected by his vegan bias (see links below). Now, one can easily argue that the people taking apart Dr. Campbell's work also have their bias, but when I read Denise Minger's work The China Study: Fact or Fallacy, I don't see much bias. In fact she's a former vegan, who should have had bias towards confirming Dr. Campbell's work instead of the opposite. Read it for yourself and see what you think.
The China Study may have been biased, but everyone knows eating a diet high in cholesterol leads to heart disease!
The first thing to understand about this topic is that intake of dietary cholesterol has very little effect on cholesterol levels in the blood. It turns out that our body needs cholesterol and simply makes more of it when our dietary intake of cholesterol decreases. Studies actually show that for approximately 75% of people, dietary intake of cholesterol actually has almost no effect on cholesterol in the blood. See Dr. Kresser's article on this topic for more info. Additionally, many foods high in cholesterol (egg yolk, red meat, etc.) also contain a number of nutrients critical for health like choline, CLA, B-vitamins, and more! So, there is good reason to consume some of those foods which are highest in cholesterol.
It also turns out that elevated levels of blood cholesterol isn't really a problem without inflammation in the body. Dr. Mercola has a great article about this. For heart health, eating a diet low in pro-inflammatory foods is actually what we should be striving for, instead of a diet low in cholesterol. The biggest offender foods when it comes to inflammation include:
- Grains
- Sugar
- Soy
- Vegetable Oils (safflower, soybean, corn, canola, etc)
- Processed meats
- Alcohol
We shouldn't be avoiding cholesterol, but we should be avoiding inflammation. Eliminating pro-inflammatory foods is the most important thing we can do for our health!
But won’t eating meat raise my uric acid levels and overwhelm my kidneys?
In regards to the uric acid question, here is a great article on that topic from Dr. Kresser. The cliff notes version of this article is that while eating a diet rich in purines has been associated with gout attacks, the intake of purine alone isn't enough to create problems related to elevated uric acid levels. In fact what creates problems is elevated uric acid levels, in conjunction with significant inflammation in the body. (This concept may sound familiar if you read the paragraph about cholesterol.) One of the pillars of the Paleo approach to eating, is minimizing inflammation in the body. The increase in purine intake isn't a problem if we are eating a diet low in pro-inflammatory foods, which we will naturally do by following a Paleo approach.
But is the human digestive tract really designed to handle meat?
Well, here's an article from Scientific American magazine about our evolutionary history eating meat, as well as some ethical arguments for eating meat. As Vaclav Smil says in the article:
"Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth."
Humans have evolved as omnivores!
Aren’t vegetables always more nutritious than meat?
It turns out that meat is quite nutritious! In fact meat is almost always more nutrient-dense that vegetables! Here's a great article on that topic, and included is a video of Matt Lalonde's talk that is chalk-full of information. Functionally this makes sense as the animal is essentially distilling the nutrients out of the organic matter it eats. In essence the animal is pooping out the parts of the plant that aren’t needed, and absorbing the nutrients the plant has to offer. That said, it is certainly worth considering what the animal we’re going to eat, ate in their lifetime. Obviously, organic grass-fed, cage-free, or wild-caught animal products are always more nutritious than their mainstream counterparts. We should always strive to eat animal products which organic and grass-fed, cage-free, or wild-caught.
It’s impossible to get enough protein without including animal products in our diet!
Finally, we have to consider the concept that getting enough protein without incorporating animal sources is impossible. Here's a great article from Dr. Mercola's website on this topic. High protein diets are associated with fat loss and muscle gain, both things we should be striving for if we want to live long-healthy lives!
In summation
Animal products are part of the optimal human diet! If you are hesitant about including animal products in your diet, my advice to you would be to only include the highest quality animal products in your diet. Incorporating grass-fed red meat and dairy, cage-free chicken and eggs, and wild-caught fish in your daily diet will allow you to get enough protein, saturated fat, as well as many other nutrients we can't get from plant-based sources. This doesn't mean you should decrease your intake of plants, but you should strive to eliminate the pro-inflammatory foods listed above. The optimal human diet is one that is omnivorous in nature, eliminates processed foods, and reduces inflammation. If you can take your diet in that direction, you just might find a healthier version of yourself than you’ve ever seen before!
