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Even doctors now say that most meat is bad for you.
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What about the rest of the meat (i.e., doctors don't say that
all meat is bad for you). Honestly, I'm not sure I'd bother trusting the doctors on this point, and here's why: a hundred years ago doctors were proscribing morphine for toothaches, and to date they still haven't decided if margerine is better than butter. As handy as doctors are for cutting of limbs, giving you drugs, and telling you to wash your hands, they've got a lot of work to do yet if they're going to make it believable that the human species was being unhealthy for 30-odd thousand years as it busied itself eating meat. You might as well say that it's not healthy for bears to eat fish. Let me end this wee post with a few colloquial quotations (from a reputable source, I believe) regarding the nutritional value of a vegetable-only diet:
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Nutritionally, energy increase is no substitute for protein quality, nor adipose fats for the structural fats necessary for growth and repair, nor calories over immune system needs, or over the proportion of vitamins and essential minerals found in animal tissues.
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On this, I'd say it sounds pretty sensible to eat a bit of meat now and again...
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[Vegitarians] become slaves to protein hunger by striving to get eight of the twenty amino acids that their own bodies cannot make and that meat contains in optimum amounts. The search leads to cereals and legumes, the first are low in lysine, the second in methionine. Humans with little or no meat must get combinations of legumes and grain (lentils and rice, rice and beans, corn and beans), and they must locate a substitute source for vitamin B-12, which comes from meat.
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Sure, you can go "hunting" for all the things your body needs in non-animal sources, but it seems a tad ridiculous to do so when meat is there staring you in the face, saying "pick me, pick me!" Protein hunger is your body's way of telling you that you should eat meat to get what you need. That's why chicken wings smell so good to vegitarians. For some reason, I don't have much hope for a "superior intelligence" that has to continually supress bodily urges because it thinks that neither my body, nor the bodies of my species over the eons, really knows (knew) what's good for it (them). I'm just waiting for some smarty to say "hey, we have superior intelligence, so why do we need to have sex to have babies? Why don't we just grow them in tubes, or clone them? (Maybe some day we won't even need to use organic material at all!) That way we won't have to have sex anymore, even though our bodies really want us to. Sex is messy, after all." Whoopee, hooray for superior intelligence!
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[Vegitarianism] simply ignores human omnivory, signified not only in food preferences but physiologically in the passage time of food in the gut (longer in herbivores because of the slow digestion of cellulose-rich and fibrous foods, shorter in carnivores). In humans it is half-length between gorillas and lions. ...S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak, and M.D. and an anthropologist, comment: "The difference between our diet and that of our hunter-gatherer forebears may hold keys to many of our current health problems.... If there is a diet natural to our human makeup, one to which our genes are still best suited, this is it."
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Keep in mind that these points do not simply support any old sort of "hamburger-and-steak" diet you like. How we get our meat is as important as getting it, period. But there's no excuse for not eating meat because the meat at (insert your local supermarket here) is crap. Support a hormone-free or organic or ethical butcher. Take a drive into the country, see if you can find a farmer or rancher somewhere who still hasn't sold out to an agribusiness. You might actually find a regular guy who treats his animals well, who doesn't necessarily feed them their dead relatives, and who doesn't pump them up on steriods. Or, heaven forbid, you could grab the nearest weapon (or just sharpen your fingernails) and head out of the city and kill yourself some wild food. I do.