Double
Whammy
for Meat
The world’s most respected health organisation is practically
saying go vegan
to save your health.
Tony Wardle investigates
Cutting down on red meat will reduce your risk of cancer! This simple statement marks a watershed in health education. It was delivered by two health bodies in separate reports on the same day, September 26 1997, in a double blow to the meat industry. The real story is that anyone should have been surprised!
Other reports have given similar messages for years but none has been officially adopted by government, which this one has – and it is that which makes it so important. For once, the health of the nation has been placed above the profitability of a powerful industry.
One of the new reports came from the government’s COMA* committee, who spent two years on research. It concluded that people who eat an average of 90g (3oz) of red meat per day should consider cutting down and those who eat 140g (5.3 oz) should definitely cut back. The original recommendations were for less meat than this – but it’s a start.
The World Cancer Research Fund authored the second report after reviewing 4,000 scientific studies. Their message is that cutting down on meat could prevent 100,000 cases of cancer annually in Britain. Both reports stressed the importance of eating more fruit and vegetables, exercising, stopping smoking and cutting out alcohol (shame!).
Both reports, of course, looked only at the link between meat and cancer. Numerous other studies have established that a whole raft of diseases are attributable to meat eating – all meat, even supposedly ‘healthy’ white meat. One of the most authoritative was the World Health Organisation’s 1991 study – Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Disease. Its recommendations were almost earth shattering, which is probably why it disappeared without trace.
It should have caused governments to stop in their tracks, to reverse agricultural policy and to transform health advice. They did none of these things. “The nutritional objectives in this report”, it said, “can be expected to meet with considerable opposition.” Boy, were they ever right! What was it the WHO’s experts wrote that got up so many noses?
“Diets associated with increases in chronic diseases are those rich in sugar, meat and other animal products, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol… if such trends continue, the end of this century will see cardiovascular disease and cancer established as major health problems in every country in the world.” You can’t be more forthright than that!
And, of course, they’re being proved correct. Their bottom line was crystal clear – go vegetarian or vegan or pretty damn close to it! Six years later, that advice is still treated with outright hostility by many doctors and some nutritionists who continue to insist that we need to eat meat. What kind of crazy world is it where truth is ignored, where reality is turned on its head and where public money is used to promote a diet that kills people?
So what are the diseases associated with a meat-based diet? Heading the list are the two biggest killers in the industrialised world, cancers and heart disease, both at epidemic proportions. Heart disease will kill a quarter of all females and a third of males. Cancer will afflict one third of the population. But there are others – diabetes, strokes, obesity, gall bladder disease, gastrointestinal disorders, osteoporosis and possibly premature ageing of the kidneys are also on the list.
“Public perception of a high-quality diet as being abundant in animal products and rich in fat has been sustained by decades of public education. Policies should be geared to the growing of plant foods including vegetables and fruits and to limiting the promotion of fat containing products.” That’s what the WHO believes. And what have we done? Given the Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC) even more money to spend on promoting meat and have continued to push dairy products.
“The West’s agricultural policies have influenced the rest of the world. Entrenched farming and industrial interests will not welcome a policy encouraging people to consume only modest amounts of meat and milk.” How perceptive! The combined annual advertising spend of the meat and dairy industries has grown to around £250 million. Those concerned with health promotion such as Viva! don’t stand much of a chance against that.
The distortion of some health advice is at its starkest in dealing with loss of body calcium – osteoporosis, a killer disease. The WHO identifies many factors including loss of oestrogen, lack of exercise, alcohol, smoking and salt. One of the biggest, however, is animal protein and yet post menopausal women are still being advised by some doctors to drink milk – protein rich and part of the cause not the cure, despite its calcium content.
Increasingly strident claims are being made for two essential micro nutrients found in meat – iron and vitamin B12. The 1991 report makes it clear that both are readily obtained from a vegetarian diet. On iron, it says that the most common cause of deficiency is low absorption, best corrected by eating more fresh fruit and veg to obtain vitamin C.
With B12, vegetarians obtain all they need through dairy products while vegans, even though they tend to ingest less than the recommended amount, rarely suffer a deficiency. The WHO believes it is because Vitamin B12 is produced by the small-bowel bacteria and is absorbed into the system via that route. Pernicious anaemia, the severe form of B12 deficiency, is unaffected by diet, they say, and is caused by a defect in absorption.
So there you have it, the great dread of many vegans has little to do with their diet and all those supplements are probably a waste of time.
The WHO’s remit is to look at global health problems and again we, the wealthy of the world, have a negative influence. “Farming policies which do not rely on intensive animal production systems would reduce the world demand for cereals. Use of land could be reappraised since cereal consumption by the population is much more efficient and cheaper than dedicating large areas to growing feed for meat production and dairying.”
The report tackles that old chestnut of whether we are naturally meat eaters or not. It is quite clear that for most of our 40,000 years of evolution, we lived on a diet high in fruit and veg and extremely low in animal products. Even the hunter gatherers who, we are lead to believe, scoffed nothing but mammoth steaks and rhino chops, ate a largely vegetable diet. Their fat intake was 15-20 per cent of total energy, most of which was of vegetable origin. It compares with today’s Western fat intake of 40 per cent, most of which is from animals.
The WHO’s dietary recommendations are profound but have been almost completely ignored. Worse than that, meat promotion has insinuated itself into the National School Curriculum and actively encourages children to consume the most damaging types of meat, such as burgers and sausages by promoting project work based on them. When children as young as three years old are showing the first signs of atherosclerosis (fatty deposits in the arteries) it takes a lot of understanding.
It’s been known since the 1950s that smoking is a killer – now the biggest killer in the world. Through confusion and misinformation, the real health picture was obscured for years. A similar battle is being fought over meat. Viva! has had ten complaints against the MLC upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority – all for misleading health claims. As with cigarettes, the least the government should do now is put a health warning on meat.
* COMA – Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy.