“Sheep get bowel cancer too – and how much red meat do sheep eat?” A quote by Frank Frizelle – a Professor of Colorectal Surgery and Editor in Chief of the New Zealand Medical Journal.
Well, here we go again. Each year, like clockwork, the conventional medical establishment mounts an attack against red meat.
For decades, we were told not to eat it because of the cholesterol and saturated fat it contains. It will surely give us heart disease.
When that argument lost validity http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy/ a new one came out; farming animals for meat causes too many greenhouse gases. Yet the man-made disaster that is the illegal burning of plantations and rain forests in Indonesia for the unhealthy palm oil industry are currently producing more carbon dioxide than the entire US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany. This alone overshadows any level of animal wind, gas or farts.
Now we’re being told not to eat red meat because it will give us cancer!
If this was true, it makes us wonder how our meat eating ancestors ever managed to survive long enough to populate this planet – all too successfully, I might add…
The arguments do not differentiate between those who only eat free range, pasture-fed organic meat, (nose to tail), low in chemicals and a diet high in vegetables, against those who have a high intake of processed meats (high in chemicals, refined sugars, stabilisers, preservatives, flavourings, flour and other fillers) and a low intake of vegetables and fibre. This is a sure recipe for cancer! Of course smoking, alcohol consumption, bodyfat levels, size of meals and exercise also must come into the equation.
Yet these two groups of people are always lumped together as “meat eaters” in the studies and media reports.
In order to accurately say a healthy meat eater is more prone to cancer, there has to be double blind studies. Two matching groups of people isolated in a lab with strictly controlled diets, exercise, and lifestyle factors. Researchers would also have to ensure they had identical metabolic factors, blood and hormone profiles, lean mass, body composition, exposure to environmental toxins, stress levels, and so on.
One group given controlled intakes of healthy red meat, and the other group not, for 20 years or more, with otherwise identical diets. Why 20 years? Because cancer takes years to develop! You can see it’s virtually impossible to conduct any meaningful study on this, therefore we must approach such broad announcements with caution.
In the meantime, enjoy your healthily and sustainably-reared red meat as your ancestors did thousands of years ago…
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