Part Two: Diet Culture
I’m sure everyone has heard that meat causes cancer and all of the other scare tactics involving meat, specifically red meat. Truth is people who eat a lot of processed meats also tend to be heavier, smoke, and engage in other activities that increase their chances of cancer. Unless the food is a proven toxin, it’s impossible to say x food causes y disease with 100 percent certainty.
The association between meat consumption and a lower-quality diet may complicate studies on meat and health. Then one day it’s “high carb,” the next it’s “low carb.” This gets pretty damn confusing, especially when we observe a variety of cultures that eat both more and less fat or carbs than Americans yet have generally better health than we do. It seems that neither researchers nor the government are looking at the continued failure of our food recommendations to try to actually make us healthier. A study was done showing how the “everything in moderation” tactic can be shown not to work. This study showed the more someone liked a specific food, say pizza, the more pizza that person felt was a “moderate” amount. Participants tended to define “moderate” as more than what they personally ate to justify their own intake, and defended their current consumption of most foods as “appropriate.”
The context of today’s ultraprocessed food landscape, limitless food options make portion control difficult. What if the very idea of “moderating” hyperpalatable modern foods is actually going against the grain of human physiology and evolution? Whether you care to consider a low-fat vegan diet, a high-protein, low-carb diet, or something in between, the eating strategies that consistently get results have something in common: to some degree, they all limit our food options. Another study done on over nine thousand hospitalized mental patients found they were fed either a diet rich in saturated fat or a diet in which the saturated fat was replaced with polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils. The patients fed vegetable oils showed a decrease in cholesterol levels but, interestingly, no decrease in mortality. In fact, the opposite was seen; the patients fed vegetable oils were more likely to die during the study period than those fed saturated fat, who coincidentally had higher cholesterol levels. The burgeoning vegetarian movement, coupled with questionable nutrition research and guidelines, resulted in a shift in governmental food recommendations toward more carbohydrate and less fat intake. Second, when people reduce their overall caloric intake, they will lose weight. But weight loss is not the same as fat loss. Both low-carb and low-fat diets lead to weight loss because they usually also involve restricting calories, but what is important to note is that high-protein diets that are either lower in carbs or low in fat lead to more fat loss. When taking out an entire food group, such as meat, you are going to need to supplement with the nutrients that you are losing and contrary to what some people assume, plant foods do not contain vitamin B12. There are trace amounts of B12 analogs in foods like algae, but these are not as effective as real B12 in the body, and actually increase your need for real B12. A deficiency in this vitamin can cause nerve damage, mental illness, neurological problems, and infertility. Meat contains heme iron, the most absorbable type of iron. One study showed that when iron was fortified to teens, only the heme-iron fortification raised iron levels.4 Iron deficiency anemia is the most common mineral deficiency in the US, affecting more than 25 percent of the population and almost half of all preschool children. Meat is a great source of highly bioavailable minerals, including zinc, magnesium, copper, cobalt, phosphorus, nickel, selenium, and chromium. Plants actually can block the absorption of minerals, making meat the better way to get these in your diet. Zinc, in particular, is a common deficiency in those avoiding animal products, and zinc in animals is highly absorbable. Remember variety is everything. An ethical clinician would never tell a patient that they should eat only organic vegetables or no vegetables at all. We have the same position on meat. For those who simply don’t have access to grass-fed beef, we still feel red meat in general is an important, nutrient-dense food for humans. Not everyone has the privilege to “know their farmer.” For all the talk about privilege in our modern dialogue, we don’t seem to talk enough about the fact that the cheapest foods are often the unhealthiest, which has a disproportionate effect where people can’t spend as much on food (low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and rural areas). This is where the “less meat, better meat” ideology can be problematic when we consider the public health impacts of this message. We don’t hear people say “organic vegetables or no vegetables” or “less vegetables, better vegetables.” Many people don’t have access to grass-finished beef, or can’t afford it; there are manifold benefits to eating more protein, specifically from animal sources like beef; and there are few human health advantages to eating grass-finished beef compared to typical beef. So our position is that folks should buy the best meat they can afford. Protein is made up of amino acids (AAs). There are twenty AAs that our bodies utilize, nine of which are essential, meaning that our bodies must obtain these from food. Digestibility of plant proteins is also affected by age and the state of the person’s gut. It is widely agreed that animal protein (eggs, milk, meat, fish, and poultry) is the most bioavailable source. Meat-based proteins also have no limiting amino acids, whereas soy is low in the AA methionine and is not considered a “complete” protein. Animal products overall are a much better source of protein per calorie than plants. Plant-based protein is not the same as animal-based protein in terms of amino acids, and enriching a product with synthetic vitamins and minerals doesn’t mean we will absorb them in the same way we do from natural sources. These products are popularly seen as “healthier” and better options than meat, but are actually ultraprocessed foods, and often much worse for our health than the real thing. It’s worth noting that on paper, foods like lettuce can appear to have a high nutrient-density score. This is because on a per-calorie basis they can contain a lot of vitamins and minerals. But once we factor in the volume of food and the number of calories in a typical serving size, the picture changes very quickly. One cup of lettuce has only eight calories, so the volume of lettuce you’d need to eat to match the same nutrient-density in a small serving of, say, oysters is quite dramatic.
