This report came out a while back and since then people everywhere both black and white have come out of the wood-works proclaiming the evilness of meat despite it being a staple in human diet for. . .  ever.  So I decided to look over that report that can be seen by clicking here and really get down to business with it and to also look at the companion argument that eating meat damages your pancreas causing Type 2 Diabetes.  I’m not even going to get into the argument that if your Black or Latino and you eat meat you are guaranteed to get diabetes.

My Thoughts on this Report
“Although obesity and physical inactivity are major determinants of T2D and account for much of the increase in prevalence (2), dietary factors also play an important role in its development (3).” 

This is right from the intro, so I point my statements here to discussions that I have had with at least a dozen of you over the past few months that the sedimentary lifestyle along with other factors have more to do with T2D than eating red meat alone.  But lets continue…

I’m not going to quote that long section on consumption but suffice to say that a questionnaire, especially one based off memory, is not credible enough for serious consideration in a subject such as this.  Asking people to remember their eating habits and lifestyle patterns from 20 years ago is one thing, but trusting them to be honest about it is quite another, and then taking those answers and making assumption about what is happening in the human body is still quite another.  Matter of fact, the fact that this “study” is a giant questionnaire is in and of itself a huge problem because of the nature of the report.

Something else to point out here is that the Meat eaters are generally not as healthy as the non-meat eaters with a high percentage of them smoking.  And in other studies the is broken down even further to show that meat eaters used in these studies often consume large amounts of both processed and unprocessed meat, smoke, drink, Don’t work out, and work at a desk.  The impact of Extra sugar and sweetener in coffee and soft drinks taken every day for 20 years also can’t be thrown out, and I love a giant glass of red or purple cool aid to this day.

And then there is the point of the numbers, when you are talking percentages it is easy to get people riled up if you don’t put the numbers in perspective.  If eating processed meat causes an increase of 51% in your chance to get T2D that seems pretty alarming until they tell you that your chance of actually getting T2D is 7%.  So that 51% boost bumps your risk factor up to a whopping 10.5 percent (of course not withstanding genetics).  But that isn’t the only argument so lets move to the next one

To the Point that Meat Damages the Pancreas
While the pancreas is involved in the digestion process, I assume what they are getting at is the theory that Trypsin which is a enzyme produced by the pancreas can be overproduced by eating to much meat thus causing this enzyme that is designed to break down protein to begin to break down the pancreas which is a protein based organ.  But Trypsin doesn’t become active until it reaches the duodenum to prevent such a thing from occurring.  While eating large quantities of meat can be destructive, I have seen no reports that show that eating meat breaks down the pancreas, neither the Exocrine nor the endocrine.  Of course I could be wrong.  If this wore the case though, the soy products would be very destructive because they contain protease inhibitors which block the enzymes from doing their work.  Yet studies have shown that the body finds a way around these inhibitors. 

So What Makes Me Credible, Why should I be listened to?

It’s not to me to prove that meat isn’t bad, we have been eating it and surviving for hundreds of thousands of years. Time and tradition, history are all on my side, when I say meat in moderation isn’t bad for you. It is to you to prove that meat is evil and harmful because it just is, moderation or not. My argument isn’t to prove that meat is beneficial, it’s to disprove that it isn’t.

My Final Thoughts

To put it simply, your body is an amazing biochemical machine that is capable of adapting to damn near anything in moderation. The problem becomes excess and extreme, people eat in excess and do extremely little amounts of working out. Again not everyone can handle meat just like not everyone can handle milk, and of course there are genetic considerations to be made, but to assume meat is bad because it just is without looking into the sources of those assumptions is flawed and dangerous.  So consider a lot of those sources, which seem to be people selling herbal products that want you to buy there product in order to cleanse your system from the evil impurity that is meat.  They also want you to buy their supplements because you need them now that you don’t eat meat.  

To point to one last fact, most of the meat that people eat is processed, not healthy at all, just because you eat a cut of beef instead of a slice of bacon doesn’t mean that that beef isn’t processed and/or tampered with in other ways, especially genetically.  To be clear I actually agree with cutting meat out of the diet for most because they aren’t going to be responsible with it, but telling people that meat is evil is not only not true, but also something that they aren’t going to listen to you on.  You want to help our people, tell them to get active first, then maybe they will listen when you start talking about diets, and that is assume that diets is still a concern after they do get active.  If you quit meat and feel great that is great, I have tried it, I didn’t like it, for 4 months I tried it.  I feel extremely strong and excited after eating a nice organic non-modified, cut of steak, and the taste is vastly different from that McDonald’s burger that most of us are used to.

But what do you think, am I a wrong?  How do you feel about eating meat?