.

IceCream Wrote:*connection to japan: japan consumes less of these types of meat product. It also has lower rates of diseases like cancer.

Correlation (and a pretty dodgy one at that) does not equal causation. I know you're kinda joking but still...

I'v heard before about a link between red meat and cancer.

Wikipedia:

Recent studies show that red meat could pose an increase in cancer risk. Some studies have linked consumption of large amounts of red meat with breast cancer,[9] colorectal cancer,[10][11] stomach cancer,[12] lymphoma,[13] bladder cancer[14] and prostate cancer.[14][15] Furthermore, there is evidence that consumption of beef, pork, lamb, and goat from domesticated animals is a cause of colorectal cancer.[16] Professor Sheila Bingham of the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit attributes this to the haemoglobin and myoglobin molecules which are found in red meat. She suggests these molecules, when ingested trigger a process called nitrosation in the gut which leads to the formation of carcinogens.[17]

Eating cooked red meat may increase the likelihood of cancer because carcinogenic compounds called heterocyclic amines are created during the cooking process. Heterocyclic amines may not explain why red meat is more harmful than other meat; however, as these compounds are also found in poultry and fish, which have not been linked to an increased cancer risk.[18]

A 2009 study by the National Cancer Institute revealed a correlation between the consumption of red meat and increased mortality from cancer and cardiovascular diseases.[19] This study has been criticized for using an improperly validated food frequency questionnaire,[20] which has been shown to have low levels of accuracy [21][22]

It's all about balance. You need to eat right amount of meat, fish, different kinds of vegetables, nuts, sea weeds, etc. to be healthy. There are actually less strokes after Japanese started eating animal meat. Also, less stomach cancers (probably due to less salt intake though). Most people in the UK would benefit from more vegetables and fish, but that doesn't mean meat is causing the deceases. It's the imbalance that is causing them.

Vegan propaganda


I agree with masaman, shit is all about balance. Though it is true red meat isn't the best meat for the body, you'd be stupid to eat it without any greens.

Without meat, we wouldn't have evolved to the creatures we are now, since many scientists presume that it was animal fat inside bones that was the staple that helped feed a new path to the creation of our ever growing brains.

If this is really the case, vegetarians would never die of cancer.

ocircle Wrote:vegetarians would never die of cancer.

*phew*

SammyB Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:*connection to japan: japan consumes less of these types of meat product. It also has lower rates of diseases like cancer.

Correlation (and a pretty dodgy one at that) does not equal causation. I know you're kinda joking but still...

Oh yah, much lower rate of cancer. Especially near the nuke sites.

IceCream Wrote:*connection to japan: japan consumes less of these types of meat product. It also has lower rates of diseases like cancer.

You're kidding, right?

http://www.truehealth.org/acompar1.html

JimmySeal Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:*connection to japan: japan consumes less of these types of meat product. It also has lower rates of diseases like cancer.

You're kidding, right?

http://www.truehealth.org/acompar1.html

I wonder if the reduced instances of breast cancer in Asian countries has anything to do with the prevalence of small breasts in Asian countries. Furthermore, I wonder if I could convince some government to give me money to study this problem in-depth.

JimmySeal Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:*connection to japan: japan consumes less of these types of meat product. It also has lower rates of diseases like cancer.

You're kidding, right?

http://www.truehealth.org/acompar1.html

I find it amazing that the US has a higher lung cancer rate than Japan considering all the smoking going around.



The worst part about meat here in the US is that it's raised quite poorly. All the animals are stressed out, overfed stuff that they can't even properly digest (hello corn industry) and stuffed into feedlots and treated like trash. The quality of our meat is starting to show its effects in our health.

I feel like the next evolutionary trait will be a developed tolerance and response to this.

Grass-fed / pasture-raised beef is expensive, it's almost double or triple the price. Not to mention, it tastes different too... if you're not used to a gamey lean taste it could take a while to switch to it.

Good single article on nutrition:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazi...wanted=all

(not related to cancer but does talk about red meat and how US policy has caused it to minimize the risks associated with red meat)

http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/...cancer/en/

About diet and cancer.

I'll post more links when I have some time but the Japanese have in general lower cancer rate than Americans except for very specific cancers such as stomach cancer. When comparing cancer rates you also have to keep in mind the age distribution of the population as cancer is much more prevalent in older people, and Japan has much more old people than the US.

ocircle Wrote:If this is really the case, vegetarians would never die of cancer.

Red meat is ONE cause of cancer. Obviously not the only one. Look here for more info:

https://apps.who.int/infobase/report.aspx?rid=126

Kainzero raises a good point. In the US, due in part to corn and grain subsidies, animals are fed and treated very poorly. If someone regularly consumes grain-fed, antibiotic-riddled, saline-injected meat, then comes down with health problems, can you really place all the blame on the meat?

Also, if meat caused cancer, wouldn't it stand to reason that Eskimos, who have an all-meat diet for most of the year, would be dropping like flies from cancerous diseases? They aren't. (http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/cancer-2.html)

Vegetarians as a group tend to be more health-conscious than the average person. This means avoiding junk food, high-fructose corn syrup, (quite a tall order in the US, HFCS is in bread and salad dressing as well as candy and soda) and exercising regularly. Comparing a health-conscious vegetarian to someone who eats Big Macs every day isn't quite fair. And acting like meat consumption is the only factor that matters in determining good health is just wrong. You can be a vegan who never gets off the couch and subsists on fries and soda, and you can be an omnivore who eats clean meat and plenty of vegetables, and who stays in good shape.

Here in the US (I can't speak for other parts of the world) we have a lot of crap going in to our bodies. Chlorine and fluoride are put in to tap water. Estrogen from birth control pills isn't effectively filtered out of drinking water. Subsidized, mass-producing farming methods leave vegetables lacking in trace minerals. High-fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Then figure that there may well be interactions between ingredients in personal hygiene products, and/or between those products and the other stuff you're ingesting. There are too many factors to pin the blame on just one thing.

Moral of the story: eat food that hasn't been mucked around with, don't consume anything made in a lab, run around sometimes, and filter your water.

[ファブリス]

If you look at the way meat is mass produced these days, it really doesn't make you want to eat meat... not that kind of meat.

Even before I worry about meat I'd look into all the crap packaged food we buy these days. It's amazing how much food-like stuff there is at the super market, and how little real food there is. If you just look at the ingredients.. it is really sad. I'm not talking about preservatives or other chemicals which have a purpose, I'm talking about the fruit jam without fruit, the "butter" cookies without butter, and so on. And the best part is: it sells because we buy it...

Jack Lalanne didn't seem to worry about red meat. The "godfather of fitness" (born 1914) is still alive. He's been advocating healthy foods since more than 50 years now?

@Vetero

Quick comment: your link doesn't cite anything more recent than 1932! Concerning cancer, the best thing to do is to stick to WHO and other very well respected institutions.

"Moral of the story: eat food that hasn't been mucked around with, don't consume anything made in a lab, run around sometimes, and filter your water."

Actually, those are not very good recommendations. Natural food, such as meat can still be bad for you, lab stuff can be good (avoiding processed food is generally good advice though) and unfiltered water is mostly harmless.

ファブリス Wrote:I'm talking about the fruit jam without fruit, the "butter" cookies without butter, and so on. And the best part is: it sells because we buy it...

I looked at a package of "bacon-flavored" salt.

There was nothing in there that had any semblance of pork. The closest thing I could find to why it might taste like bacon was "hickory-flavored seasoning."

It's getting a bit ridiculous now.

I stopped eating meat 15 years ago, not for health reasons, but because I started to question the morality of eating meat. I grew up in a family of hunters, yet I never had the heart to shoot an animal, despite the pressure to go through that right of passage. It always bothered me that it felt wrong to kill an animal myself, though I was OK with allowing someone else to do the dirty work for me.
As an unintended consequence, my health did improve. All the other men in my family died at an early age of heart disease caused by obesity. When I gave up meat at age 25, I was well on my way down that path at 110Kg. One year later, without any other lifestyle changes, my weight returned to normal and has been stable since.
Though, over the last four months, I have been working more than 60 hours per week leaving no time for exercise, causing my stomach to become soft.
My girlfriend calls me Marshmellow man now >_<

bodhisamaya Wrote:I stopped eating meat 15 years ago, not for health reasons, but because I started to question the morality of eating meat. I grew up in a family of hunters, yet I never had the heart to shoot an animal, despite the pressure to go through that right of passage. It always bothered me that it felt wrong to kill an animal myself, though I was OK with allowing someone else to do the dirty work for me.
As an unintended consequence, my health did improve. All the other men in my family died at an early age of heart disease caused by obesity. When I gave up meat at age 25, I was well on my way down that path at 110Kg. One year later, without any other lifestyle changes, my weight returned to normal and has been stable since.
Though, over the last four months, I have been working more than 60 hours per week leaving no time for exercise, causing my stomach to become soft.
My girlfriend calls me Marshmellow man now >_<

I'm not an expert on nutrition science or anything, but based on what you said, I would say that you've lost weight because you ate less calories a day...by leaving meat out of your diet. That's it. The basic formula goes: calory intake - calory usage a day = obesity (unused calories) or normal body weight, or malnutrition... Meat in fact has a lot of calories in it, along with a lot of fat, ect. I never eat red meat, I prefer white meat, or maybe brown. But leaving meat out of my diet would be impossible... I always say, stick to what our acient ansestors ate (yes, the cavemen): vegetables, fruit, meat, and different kind of nuts...that's it. The cavemen never ate wheat (bread), never drank milk, ect. Creating a diet which resembles mostly an acient caveman's diet (excluding of course starvational periods) would be the best way to eat healthy...why? Because our bodies are adopted to that diet, genetically....Tens of thouands of years of diet, cannot be changed by a few hundred years of the modern society's food abundance, and new products of food, ect. Eating as natural as possible is the best way. And that includes eating meat....

Dramatically oversimplifying analogy time: our bodies are kind of like cars.

We run on food rather than gasoline and just like burning gasoline in an engine causes wear and tear, burning calories causes wear and tear on our body, a.k.a metabolism. However, just as a car that never moves isn't very useful, if we don't eat we become very useless, a.k.a dead.

Cancer is one of the manifestations of the 'wear and tear' and just like you can drive in such a way to reduce the wear and tear on a car, you can eat a diet that reduces wear and tear on your body. This is about where the analogy ends.

Meat is of course composed of connective tissue, fat, protein; these are somewhat hard to digest. Excess protein requires lots of extra processing to extract energy from it and fat also requires extra processing and so ends up being stored if no extra energy is needed. This happens often because modern diets usually provide an excess of calories.

So yeah the moral of the story is balance,
Don't eat too much red meat when you don't need to. White meat is a little better because it tends to have less of the fat and connective tissues. Meat is still a very rich source of nutrition, but we don't need to be eating the massive quantities that we do, the Japanese eat less at around 40kg/year/person while Americans are on the other end at over 100kg/year/person. But even at 40kg/year if everyone ate this much meat, the planet would suffer.

sometimes my bacon gets really dry before it gets done cooking, so it just gets really hard, and it gets really chewy.
other times it's really greasy, which makes it nice and crisp and delicious.

i cook it at the same heat on the same pan. what could be causing the difference?

Asriel Wrote:sometimes my bacon gets really dry before it gets done cooking, so it just gets really hard, and it gets really chewy.

It does that when it starts to get old. And/or you aren't covering it properly when you store it, could be drying out faster than it should be.

If you take into consideration that not only have humans evolved into eating meat, but that for the majority of time humans have been around, and eating meat, they have been doing so RAW. It really wasn't THAT long ago when humans were nothing more than clever scavengers. Nuts, berries, the occasional dead carcass left by a larger mammal.

However it wouldn't surprise me that eating meat could give you cancer, but mark my words, it is NOT the meat itself! It's what they have done to the meat, put into the meat, everything that goes into the act of raising the cattle (or breeding chickens pumped so full of hormones that they literally cannot walk, and then driving cross country with them in small cages) all the way down the line to it being in a nice clean looking package at eye level in your local wal mart.

I happen to have neighbors that raise cattle, the good ole fashioned natural way, and will slaughter one every so often and keep everyone's freezer stocked full of real, NORMAL meat. One cow makes a LOT of steaks!

Other than that I only eat fish when it comes to meat. I would probably eat chicken if I had the same resource of clean/normal/natural chicken.

Hologen Wrote:It does that when it starts to get old. And/or you aren't covering it properly when you store it, could be drying out faster than it should be.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2eb7gyc.jpg
this is how I store it, still in the plastic things it came in when I bought it 2 days ago. It doesn't expire until July 10th.

I'm getting a lot of my info from this book here: http://www.amazon.com/Foods-That-Fight-C...181&sr=8-1 which really explains in detail which foods cause cancer and which foods can be used to prevent it. The book cites the example of the Japanese who have much lower cancer rate, except for stomach cancer. The author finds that the biggest factor that can explain differences in cancer rate between nations is diet, not genetics or climate or whatever. This means that by changing our diet it's possible to reduce our chance of getting cancer significantly. The book also gives some tips as to how to change your diet and there's also a related cookbook. (But if you live in Japan and eat like the Japanese you probably don't really need to change much except to stop the smoking and drinking)

My favorite book on food is called "Food Rules".

http://www.amazon.com/Food-Rules-Eaters-...041&sr=8-1

Michael Pollan, our nation's most trusted resource for food-related issues, offers this indispensible guide for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible, and easy to use, Food Rules is a set of memorable rules for eating wisely, many drawn from a variety of ethnic or cultural traditions. Whether at the supermarket or an all-you-can-eat-buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat.

It really shows everything that is wrong with the modern day diet in America (and likely many other countries). Some are quite humorous.

Some examples from the book:

Rule 2:
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food.

Rule 6:
Avoid foods that contain more than five ingredients

Rule 13:
Eat only foods that eventually will rot.

Rule 15:
Get out of the supermarket whenever you can.

Rule 20:
It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

Rule 21:
It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language (think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles).

Rule 26:
Drink the spinach water.

Rule 27:
Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.

Rule 32:
Don't overlook the oily little fishes.

Rule 36:
Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

Rule 57:
Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.