• Aldrond@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • abraxas@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • psud@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?

        • Aldrond@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          “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.

          • psud@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            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?

    • psud@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say

      1. 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)
      2. 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)
      3. 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

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.