"RED MEAT" MYTH

Jane Brody, a long time skeptic on taking vitamins,
eagerly latches on to whatever propaganda is being
pedaled by the conventional "health" industry. She
is food and nutrition expert for the N. Y. T., and her
latest article (4/30/09), "Paying a Price for Loving
Red Meat" continues the fiction that eating that stuff
is bad for your health. For support she cites a couple
of large but scientifically questionable studies done
by prestigious organizations. The report is long, and
I'll refer you to her article if you are interested.

These studies purport to show that, sure enough, folks
in this country that eat lots of red meat are more likely
to suffer from both cancer and heart disease than people
who take it easy on the red stuff and eat more fish and
chicken. This is a shiny example of the fallacy post hoc,
ergo proper hoc (after that, therefore on account of that.)
Are these people just more risk tolerant than others?
What else do they eat? Are the chicken and fish eaters
risk averse, and more careful about their health in other
matters as well?

Here are some facts that suggest that Ms. Brody doesn't
have the full story: 1) The Masai, the Inuits, the Lap
Landers, the Moguls, and our own Plains Indians (before
Europeans came) are all people who thrived for centuries
on red meat diets, including lots of fat. Blubber was a ma-
jor part of Inuits' diet. Among all of those populations,
cancer and coronary heart disease were extremely rare
(before the w. m. showed up with Coca Cola and Hershey
bars.) Doesn't that suggest that maybe the latter, and
not the former, may be the problem? Maybe our red
meat eaters are careless about cokes and pastries as well?

2)Robert Adkins, M. D. went to France and discovered
that the French love real butter and eggs and cheese, and
eat lots of these, but have skinny women and half the
coronary heart disease that we do. He came home and
formulated the Adkins diet, which encourages people to
eat all the red meat and fat they want, but to radically cut
the carbs, especially refined ones. The average American
eats 150 lbs. of sugar a year, most of it in processed foods.
The obesity epidemic is actually a sugar-addiction epide-
mic. Obesity is, of course, connected to both cancer and
heart disease occurrences. The Adkins diet, incidentally,
is hard to stick to because of our addiction to carbs, but it
was thoroughly tested at both Duke and Stanford, and came
out with flying colors health wise. No increase in either
heart disease or cancer were tied to it. People lost weight
on it alright, but soon got tired of it. It is now out of fashion.

As for red meat, Ms. Brody forgot about one of the big
pluses from eating it. That would be "conjugated linoleic
acid (CLA)." That stuff is important in preventing cancer
(established in animal testing) as well as protecting from
coronary heart disease. It's an artery cleaner that breaks
down fat and escorts it out of the body. It's an emulsifier,
as is lecithin. Both of them reduce serum cholesterol.
Guess what is the best source of CLA? Red meat and milk
products from grass fed cows! A meaningful red meat
health test would use only grass fed beef, not that fattened
on grain, which has much less CLA.

So we have a lot to learn. But we won't get it evidently
from the conventional food business and their cheerleaders.
There are now thousands of well qualified practitioners of
"alternative medicine," who support the natural foods
movement, and warn against refined carbs and chemically
poisoned foods. One of them is William Campbell Douglass,
M. D., who publishes The Douglas Report. He writes:
"Starting in 1984, the famous Framingham Heart Study
tracked more than 5,000 adults for decades to find out
what causes heart disease. . . They found that men aged
30 to 55 were the ONLY group where it looked like high
cholesterol might be connected to heart disease. This is
incredible if you think about it. Among all the people
OLDER than 55 -- men and women -- there was NO
connection between high cholesterol and heart disease."
Dr. Douglass says a good steak is one of the healthiest
meals you can eat. Especially so if it comes from a grass
fed animal. He says hot dogs are good for you as well!
The sodium nitrite in them promotes blood flow. He
says our own bodies make the stuff, and "even small
doses of the chemical can TRIPLE your blood flow. That
may help prevent or even cure heart attacks, high blood
pressure and strokes." Who knew? (Besides Douglass.)