NEW YORK, March 16, 2012 (by Mark Bittman, NY Times): A new study reported finding that too much meat can kill you. The headlines screamed, of course. The Los Angeles Times: “All Red Meat Is Bad for You.” NY Times: “More Red Meat, More Mortality.” The BBC: Red Meat Increases Death, Cancer and Heart Risk.”
Well, duh.
Do we eat too much meat? Undoubtedly. That our level of consumption causes health problems that may lead to death is not news. For a time it was thought that those problems were because of high cholesterol levels, but no: cholesterol is a marker. Then saturated fat was believed to be the culprit but now, well, we’re not so sure.
It could be one or more of many things. It could be, for example, that the sheer quantity of our overindulgence overwhelms something in our immune systems. It could be too much protein, too little exercise, too few vegetables. It could even be the way the animals are raised or killed or the drugs they’re fed. It could be all of the above.
Our animal production and consumption situation is a great steamship of a mess, one that’s going to take us years to begin to turn around and a generation or more to “fix.” The meat industry is deeply involved in abominable cruelty and questionable practices.
We shouldn’t ignore work that found that “Eating meat is associated with increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and certain cancers,” and “Higher intake of red meat was associated with a significantly elevated risk of total, CVD and cancer mortality.” But this is like throwing a twig on an inferno, or what should be an inferno. High meat consumption has already been exhaustively proven to be bad for you, and bad for the environment.
It’s also worth quoting Dean Ornish, who wrote the journal’s commentary on the study: “What is personally sustainable is globally sustainable. What is good for you is good for our planet.” Which about sums it up.