Health Concerns from the Banning of Meat By Mrs Vera West
Few of us some years ago would have believed the extent to which the globalist-based environmental fanatics will go, with bans of life-giving meat, now a coming reality, unless strongly politically opposed. Apart from the politics, moving humanity to a purely plant-based diet, despite vegan propaganda, has not been shown to be in the wider interests of human health, and in fact, evidence suggests that abandoning meat will have ill-health effects. As Dr Mercola (below) quotes from a report: “Among a growing body of research linking decreased meat consumption to various health benefits, a new study concludes that removing or reducing meat consumption from diets is risky as meat is a nutrient-dense food that ‘continues to have a key role in human health and development.’
The researchers explain that meat offers a source of high-quality protein and nutrients that are not always easily obtained with meat-free diets and are often suboptimal or deficient in global populations.
‘Animal-sourced foods are superior to plant-sourced foods at simultaneously supplying several bioavailable micronutrients and high-quality macronutrients critical for growth and cognitive development,’ notes co-author Dr. Adegbola Adesogan, director of the University of Florida’s Global Food Systems Institute. Dietary recommendations to eliminate animal-source foods from diets ignore their importance ...”
This is to be expected, since humanity has been eating meat for its entire existence. If you go with evolution, which I do not (Biblical creation is my belief), the human brain evolved to its present size from eating meat. I do not know how this would work, but since the environmentalists are evolutionists to a man, woman and non-binary, it is worth raising in debate with them.
“Meat has been a celebrated food staple since the dawn of mankind.1 Never has anyone needed to justify the eating of animal protein — until now. According to the globalist cabal that is working toward a complete monopoly of the food supply, the eating of meat is at the core of manmade climate change and must stop in order to “save the planet.”
Back in September 2019, a British barrister (trial attorney) went so far as to call for new laws to ban the eating of meat to protect the environment, and as time goes on, this kind of insanity will likely only intensify. As reported by The Guardian at the time:2
“The barrister Michael Mansfield has suggested that we should have new laws against ecocide — practices that destroy the planet — and that under them, meat could be targeted. ‘I think when we look at the damage eating meat is doing to the planet, it is not preposterous to think that one day it will become illegal,’ he said.”
Aside from an outright ban on meat consumption, a number of other coercive strategies have also been proposed, such as changing agricultural subsidies and trade laws, changing diets in hospitals and schools, adding warning labels, education (read, propaganda) and implementing various taxes, including specific taxes on meat and more generalized carbon taxes.3
Human Health to Be Sacrificed for the Environment
The Guardian cited research4,5,6 from Oxford University, published in the summer of 2018, which claimed meat and dairy production are responsible for 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the agricultural sector, and that cattle use 83% of available farmland while delivering only 18% of calories and 37% of dietary protein.
Environmental concerns cannot be the only consideration. Human health must also be taken into account, and researchers warn we know virtually nothing about the long-term health effects of cultured and plant-based meat alternatives.
But are environmental concerns the only valid factor in this equation? What about human health? Is it reasonable to intentionally doom all of humanity to poor health and low cognition just because a small power-hungry cabal claims food production has a detrimental climate impact?
Many of the activities pursued by these globalists have detrimental impacts on the environment, but you don’t see them addressing those. Instead, they’re going after food!
The most infuriating part of this debate is the fact that human and environmental health can be simultaneously optimized. If the global cabal really had good intentions, they’d incentivize farmers to transition to regenerative farming practices and holistic livestock management.
Problem solved. We’d have healthier, more nutrient-dense food and the environment would rapidly regenerate. Climate normalization would soon follow.
But no, regenerative farming is not even part of the discussion. It’s being intentionally ignored, and that’s how you know the globalists have no intention of solving an actual problem. Their intention is to control the food supply by making sure all foods are patentable and owned by them.
Study Warns: Meat Ban Would Harm Human Health
On the other side of this debate, we have research7 showing that removing meat and dairy from the human diet would result in significant harm to health. As reported by Nutrition Insight in mid-April 2023:8
“Among a growing body of research linking decreased meat consumption to various health benefits, a new study concludes that removing or reducing meat consumption from diets is risky as meat is a nutrient-dense food that ‘continues to have a key role in human health and development.’
The researchers explain that meat offers a source of high-quality protein and nutrients that are not always easily obtained with meat-free diets and are often suboptimal or deficient in global populations.
‘Animal-sourced foods are superior to plant-sourced foods at simultaneously supplying several bioavailable micronutrients and high-quality macronutrients critical for growth and cognitive development,’ notes co-author Dr. Adegbola Adesogan, director of the University of Florida’s Global Food Systems Institute. Dietary recommendations to eliminate animal-source foods from diets ignore their importance ...”
Indeed, as noted in this paper,9 human anatomy, digestion and metabolism indicates that the human race is not only compatible with but also reliant upon relatively substantial meat intake, and disconnecting the entire population from our evolutionary dietary patterns raises rather than lowers the risk for nutrient deficiencies and chronic diseases.
Meat Is More Than the Sum of Individual Nutrients
We already know that the preponderance of processed food in the Western diet is responsible for our current disease burden and removing one of the few remaining whole foods — meat — will undoubtedly only worsen the situation.
Specific nutrients found in meat that are not easily obtained in meat-free diets include B vitamins, especially vitamin B12, retinol, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, iron and zinc in bioavailable forms, taurine, creatine and carnosine, all of which have important health functions. As noted by the authors:10
“As a food matrix, meat is more than the sum of its individual nutrients. Moreover, within the diet matrix, it can serve as a keystone food in food-based dietary interventions to improve nutritional status, especially in regions that rely heavily on cereal staples.
Efforts to lower global meat intake for environmental or other reasons beyond a critical threshold may hinder progress towards reducing undernutrition and the effects this has on both physical and cognitive outcomes, and thereby stifle economic development ...
Leaving aside the degree of negative impact that meat may have on a variety of factors that relate to human and planetary health ... the purpose of the present article is to summarize the positive nutritional aspects of meat consumption.
The outlining, understanding, and weighing of such parameters will be required to enable a proper cost-benefit analysis of any food system transformation, and particularly those that wish to strongly reduce or even eliminate meat intake.”
We Have a Manmade Problem Alright
We do have a manmade problem, but it’s not climate change per se. The problem is that food production has been bastardized. In an April 24, 2023, article in The Scotsman,11 columnist Philip Lymbery shares memories of a trip through Italy’s agricultural valley.
While touring “pretty villages,” “endless pastures and crop fields,” he quickly realized that something was missing: Livestock. Not once did he see a farm animal anywhere. The picturesque pastures were all empty.
“Where were the cows producing milk for world-famous Parmesan or Grana Padano? Or the pigs renowned for Parma ham? Or the chickens producing eggs for Carbonara? What I discovered is that farmers in Italy’s richest agricultural region had forgotten how to keep animals outside.
They simply had a blind spot. They couldn’t see why it wasn’t right to keep them cooped up indoors all day, every day. They couldn’t see the irony of grass being grown then mowed and packed into bales to feed incarcerated cows,” he writes.
“They had lost sight of the fact that cows, pigs, and chickens like to feel fresh air and sunshine as much as we do. It put me in mind of something else Locatelli once said: ‘It is better to have fantastic meat once a week than fill ourselves up every day with cheap, carelessly reared meat. We all have to get used to quality, not quantity.’”
Even foods advertised as being made from “grass fed” cows, such as Italy’s famous Parmigiano Reggiano Parmesan cheese, were raised indoors, Lymbery discovered. Instead of letting the cows graze freely on all those pastures, cut grass is shoveled into darkened factories where hundreds of cows are cramped together.
According to Lymbery, less than 1% of Italian farms that supply dairy for the production of Parmesan allowed cows to graze freely outdoors in 2016. (He asked the consortium that governs Parmesan manufacturing for updated 2023 statistics but received no reply.) Instead, “zero grazing” is the norm. This is where cows are permanently kept indoors.
Another fact Lymbery discovered during his travels through Italy was that crop fields are primarily dedicated to growing animal feed, not human food. These kinds of practices are what’s having a detrimental effect on the environment. It’s factory farming that is the problem, not farming or food production in general. As mentioned earlier, the solution is regenerative farming and holistic husbandry, Not more processed fake foods.”
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