I know it’s a shipost and this meme is at least 15 years old. But meat, cheese, and white bread (especially the ones in the US with added sugar) were never healthy
Specially processed meat, cheese and bread. In the case of fast food these ingredients are basically “hacked” to make us crave more and consume more. These industries have “food scientists” working on exactly that.
Meat, cheese and bread in their more natural form is definitely healthy when consumed in moderation.
Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
“Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.
I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)
But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit
That’s sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week “probably” (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a “Group 1” carcinogen.
Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say
Meat is hard to digest (when in fact carnivorous animals have the shortest gut; we’re omnivores and have a medium gut, we also have the most acidic stomach acid of the mammals which is an adaptation to eating meat)
Grain is the healthiest food (the only type of animal that does well on seeds is birds, they don’t have teeth for bread to get stuck between and rot. The ancient Egyptians lived on bread and had the worst dental health)
That humans need a balanced diet of many different things - which we do when we’re eating nutritionally poor foods like bread, but many thrive on simple diets of fatty meat (Inuit before they adopted the standard American diet; Buffalo hunting native Americans; modern followers of lion, carnivore, zero carb)
The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death
Long story short on what you wrote - meat is a nutritionally rich food option and kind of nutritionally acceptable if your people have been living in the tundra for a few thousand years & have actually managed to genetically accommodate it, since there isn’t much else food the further you go north (although it’s very much overly simplistic to depict Inuit diets as entirely meat-based). But for modern people, in temperature or tropical regions, it makes no sense at all, plant-based diets give you the best balance of nutrients without extremely high fat and cholesterol content…there’s a real anti-scientific hubris going on with people trying to brush away this basic fact.
In some circumstances you’re absolutely right.
In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve.
In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
Science suggests that meat consumption always comes with risks e.g. of genetic mutations. So if you can meet your demand of nutrients and trace elements without meat you probably should.
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth. B12, like iron and Protein, are digested differently by the gut (with different efficiency) based on how they are consumed.
If absolutely all you care about is nutrition and nothing else, you should be eating a small amount of non-processed red and white meat (and/or seafood) on a regular basis because it is the best and healthiest source of those three things. Key term “small amount”
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.
I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don’t need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don’t even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it’s way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it’s usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.
But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.
None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm
Take care not to make statements so inaccurate they are effectively meaningless.
“US white bread” isn’t a singular brand and most brands don’t “contain[s] a carcinogen”…
You never mentioned what the carcinogen was. Probably because it would compromise your argument that “US white bread” as a whole contains it when it does not. (It’s Potassium Bromate/Bromide (it’s used interchangeably online sometimes), for those wondering.)
It’s not limited to white bread in where it can be used. It was an additive to flour in general.
A lot of the fear mongering blogs, written by ‘influencers’ whose research consists of 10 seconds of Googling but not verifying a single fucking thing they write about, name brands that contain potassium bromate… but actually don’t. Example: Wonder bread (https://wonderbread.ca/our_products/white-bread-675g/) Chex Mix. Looking up their ingredients list shows the item in question is not used at all. https://www.chexmix.com/products/chex-mix-traditional/
TLDR: Think before you repeat vague, meaningless shit next time.
BTW, You should look into the horrors of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
My statement is far from meaningless. Mild carcinogens are still carcinogenic. Sure, a small dose as a one of will not cause problems short term, but long term build up is a thing.
It’s a preservative widely used in US white bread, but banned in Europe and other places.
I don’t know the specific carcinogen off the top of my head, I’ve never bothered to remember it, and didn’t look it up earlier while I was half snoozing being driven home.
So you do know what I’m talking about.
My source was Dr Joel Fuhrman. I’m not sure if you’d call him an influencer. While I do turn my nose up at some of his preaching, I think much of what he says is backed up by solid science. Not that I follow it myself. If it’s since been removed from most products then good for you and other people in the US.
Your link to Wonderbread is from Canada.
Chex Mix doesn’t contain azodicarbonamide (I’m guessing this is the one we’re talking about? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others), but it does use butylated hydroxytoluene, which is also classed as GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) by the FDA based on a study from 1979. Yet both chemicals have since been called into question for their links to cancer. From a cursory glance, azodicarbonamide has a more proven link, while butylated hydroxytoluene has yet to be properly studied and the link is questionable.
Too much dihydrogen monoxide can kill you.
Alcohol is also carcinogenic - more so than bread additives - but I’m definitely having some of that tonight.
Also, Joel Fuhrman had a podcast talk about lemmy’s favourite, BEANS.
Edit: Bloody kbin users, breaking lemmy threads. Supposedly there’s a comment underneath mine, but it won’t load, and there’s nothing on kbin.
I know it’s a shipost and this meme is at least 15 years old. But meat, cheese, and white bread (especially the ones in the US with added sugar) were never healthy
Specially processed meat, cheese and bread. In the case of fast food these ingredients are basically “hacked” to make us crave more and consume more. These industries have “food scientists” working on exactly that.
Meat, cheese and bread in their more natural form is definitely healthy when consumed in moderation.
Since when is meat unhealthy?
Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?
“Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.
It’s harder on the system doing the digestion.
I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)
But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit
There’s nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information
Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?
That’s sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week “probably” (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a “Group 1” carcinogen.
Flip-side, grains and legumes have been tied to cancer as well. I can’t find exactly what category, but they seem fairly convinced they are carcinogenic.
It is, sadly, like the California Cancer joke, where almost everything causes cancer if taken to excess.
Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say
The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death
This is a common explanation but is unfortunately propaganda in itself.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation
Long story short on what you wrote - meat is a nutritionally rich food option and kind of nutritionally acceptable if your people have been living in the tundra for a few thousand years & have actually managed to genetically accommodate it, since there isn’t much else food the further you go north (although it’s very much overly simplistic to depict Inuit diets as entirely meat-based). But for modern people, in temperature or tropical regions, it makes no sense at all, plant-based diets give you the best balance of nutrients without extremely high fat and cholesterol content…there’s a real anti-scientific hubris going on with people trying to brush away this basic fact.
meat, cheese and bread were never healthy, says a man descended from 10 thousand years of meat cheese and bread eaters
So if I come from a lineage of smokers it means smoking is healthy? I take your word for it, science man.
it’s about the scale at which these items are consumed - eating meat every day was pretty much unheard of until the advent of capitalism
In some circumstances you’re absolutely right. In many parts of the word, meat was either scarce or difficult to preserve. In other parts of the word, some peoples survived almost exclusively on animal products. The natives on Alaska are the first that come to mind.
Of course “meat” was a very important part of their diet, they relied heavily on organ meats for their essential vitamins and nutrients. They were significantly more humane and less wasteful than we are today.
Was it capitalism or was it refrigeration?
There are hundreds of ways to preserve meat without a fridge
Fresh or preserved (salted or dried) meat has existed as long as people have paid for them. Even ice was used for a while prior to refrigeration.
deleted by creator
If I were to be fair then my answer would be neither as I don’t believe capitalism is forcing us to consume meat and there was methods to conserve meat for long periods of time before refrigeration was a thing.
I guess meat can be healthy. What certainly isn’t healthy is highly processed meat like burgers, hot dogs and deep fried turkey
Science suggests that meat consumption always comes with risks e.g. of genetic mutations. So if you can meet your demand of nutrients and trace elements without meat you probably should.
deleted by creator
Interesting. I guess you could still supplement b12
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth. B12, like iron and Protein, are digested differently by the gut (with different efficiency) based on how they are consumed.
If absolutely all you care about is nutrition and nothing else, you should be eating a small amount of non-processed red and white meat (and/or seafood) on a regular basis because it is the best and healthiest source of those three things. Key term “small amount”
Both. Refrigeration is what allows us to store and (I would argue more importantly) transport large amounts of meat, and is as such essential to the industry. However, Capitalism is also key to the meat industry because its lobbyists constantly push for meat subsidies, which is the main reason meat is cheap enough to be something we have every meal instead of once every couple of days.
Proof you only have to live 15 years to reproduce doesn’t mean much for someone wanting to live 80 years.
Nobody ate meat before very recently. And cheese was not your typical daily treat. Remembers it takes a long time to produce
Humans have been eating meat for at least two and a half million years.
But not in that quantity as we do today. In the past it was very special, because you allways had to kill one of your animals to eat some. And if you were a farmer who can decide to eat one big meal or ceep the animal and have milk for a long time its a preety easy decision.
And if you go back even more when humans were still “wild” meat was even harder to get. You had to hunt down an animal that was way stronger that you. So a hunt took days. If you got meat once every few weeks you were lucky.
Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.
I am vegetarian for over 5 years. You realy don’t need any meat. That just some public believe the meat companies planted in our heads. For a vegetarian lifestyle your don’t even have to pay attention to a lot of stuff. In general it’s way more healthy if you do it right. The only thing is that it’s usually harder to cook something tasty, because you can just throw meat in anything and it tastes like something.
But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.
None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm
Especially the US white bread which contains a carcinogen.
Take care not to make statements so inaccurate they are effectively meaningless.
“US white bread” isn’t a singular brand and most brands don’t “contain[s] a carcinogen”…
You never mentioned what the carcinogen was. Probably because it would compromise your argument that “US white bread” as a whole contains it when it does not. (It’s Potassium Bromate/Bromide (it’s used interchangeably online sometimes), for those wondering.)
It’s not limited to white bread in where it can be used. It was an additive to flour in general.
A lot of the fear mongering blogs, written by ‘influencers’ whose research consists of 10 seconds of Googling but not verifying a single fucking thing they write about, name brands that contain potassium bromate… but actually don’t. Example: Wonder bread (https://wonderbread.ca/our_products/white-bread-675g/) Chex Mix. Looking up their ingredients list shows the item in question is not used at all. https://www.chexmix.com/products/chex-mix-traditional/
TLDR: Think before you repeat vague, meaningless shit next time.
BTW, You should look into the horrors of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
My statement is far from meaningless. Mild carcinogens are still carcinogenic. Sure, a small dose as a one of will not cause problems short term, but long term build up is a thing.
Your link to Wonderbread is from Canada.
Chex Mix doesn’t contain azodicarbonamide (I’m guessing this is the one we’re talking about? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others), but it does use butylated hydroxytoluene, which is also classed as GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) by the FDA based on a study from 1979. Yet both chemicals have since been called into question for their links to cancer. From a cursory glance, azodicarbonamide has a more proven link, while butylated hydroxytoluene has yet to be properly studied and the link is questionable.
Too much dihydrogen monoxide can kill you.
Alcohol is also carcinogenic - more so than bread additives - but I’m definitely having some of that tonight.
Also, Joel Fuhrman had a podcast talk about lemmy’s favourite, BEANS.
Edit: Bloody kbin users, breaking lemmy threads. Supposedly there’s a comment underneath mine, but it won’t load, and there’s nothing on kbin.