Benefits of Eating Meat

[escapee]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf

Well, Japan has the highest life expectancy of any nation; so I bet the level of chronic disease has declined with the improvement in diet.

Japanese has always been doing well with traditional diet. The improvement is on medical technology and sanitation.

Singaporean top the chart of longeivity in 2005 .

[Hilary]

As far as I can see, we humans are natural omnivores. As hunter-gatherers with more brain than brawn, we ate whatever there was - and because of this, we settled just about every habitat under the sun. There are very healthy traditional cultures that are vegetarian, and vegan, and almost exclusively carnivorous. (None that live on processed junk, though, afaik...) We can pick our chosen traditional culture and 'prove' that the 'best' diet is any one of these. Or we can just follow our own intuition and conscience.

[escapee]

I strongly believe there is a much better nutritional & lifestyle approach that would push the current boundary of human health and life expectancy further . The belief does not base on personal intuition but sound knowledge on nutrition and lifestyle plan. hmm.. that's just my personal opinion , take no offense from my post please .

[skinnyninja]

...Just wanted to let the world know that I tried some turkey burger tonight on the old George Foreman Grill.

I won't be doing that again.

[Lonewolf]

skinnyninja - you are a turkey

[Brutha]

I strongly believe there is a much better nutritional & lifestyle approach that would push the current boundary of human health and life expectancy further . The belief does not base on personal intuition but sound knowledge on nutrition and lifestyle plan. hmm.. that's just my personal opinion , take no offense from my post please .

But the fact is that their is no sound knowledge on the topic.

If you call it sound knowledge that eating less meat is healthy because Japanese are healty, you miss a lot of other explanations that could also be the reason for the fact that Japanese have a higher life expectency. Maybe they do more Qi Gong or they just have different genetics.

There is also no real reason to belief that you can transfer the knowledge of the perfect diet for person A to person B.
Person B may have some different gens and may need therefore different nutrition.

An other faulty belief is that nutrition is a liniar process, that can solved by simple minimax.
Take this link as example process that seems in the first instance very simple. But it shows that a very unintuitive solution may be better than the solution that someone who knows his math would propose. Their is no way at the present state of research on nutrition to know whether a nonintuitive solution may be better. To quote Henry Louis Mencke:

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The body of person B might know what it needs. It has expirence and when something is very wrong it will tell the brain.
That phenomen of the body telling the brain is called intuition.

Sure there will be a perfect solution that is different from mere intuition for everyone, but you have at the present state of the science no way to no the solution.
In the meanwhile it is may in fact be better for people who live consciously (those people tend to have a good developed intuition) to trust their intuition.

[Ibanez]

I think I remember reading somewhere that the reason the japanese have a better health expectancy than the americans is due to their omega3: omega6 ratio, higher 3:6. Where in american the omega6 is much higher than omega3.

I do know that both the Americans and Japanese are high up in the list for total hours worked. I know Americans are low in vacation time compared to Europe and such. Maybe one day they will eliminate sleep and we can all enjoy the joys of 16hr work days.

[DQueens]

Meat is an excellent source of protein, B vitamins, zinc and iron. Unless you are a very adventurous legume and vegetable-eater with a lot of variety in your diet you probably fall short in those categories (and B vitamins are impossible to get through a vegetarian diet).

Meat gets a bad rap because of the saturated fat that people tend to associate it with. Just because you eat meat does not mean that every serving of meat you have is laden with saturated fat (ie: hamburger). In fact, most cuts of meat are lean and i believe that chicken, turkey, lean beef and fish are staples to any healthy diet. Another mistake people make when eating meat is portion sizes (the size of your palm is one portion).

I have nothing against vegetanarianism and vegan diets. If done properly, they can be very effective and healthy diets (but just because you are vegetarian and vegan doesnt mean your diet is low fat and healthy! There are many high fat, high sugar-eating vegatarians out there who dont eat enough protein or get enough nutrients). But please do not equate eating meat with things like cigarette-smoking or eating a high fat diet, because meat eaters may follow diets that rival those of non meat eaters. Keep in mind that someone's choice to eat meat is their own and that meat has a secure and important place in healthy diets everywhere.

[gberardi]

Originally Posted by Brutha

If you call it sound knowledge that eating less meat is healthy because Japanese are healty, you miss a lot of other explanations that could also be the reason for the fact that Japanese have a higher life expectency. Maybe they do more Qi Gong or they just have different genetics.

As I had read in a few places, including The China Study, genetics can be ruled out when you have Japanese men in Hawaii while eating a Western-style diet as opposed to Japanese men in Japan who eat a more plant-based diet. If genetics played a significant role, then the situation between the two groups wouldn't be very different. Hawaiian Japanese men had higher incidences of heart disease and were obese as compared to their Japanese counterparts.

So, now we are left with Qi Gong or other explanations, but genetics is a pretty flimsy one. B-)

[Lonewolf]

Look, you both missed the point - which is that the Japanese race has been growing taller and stronger ever since they started eating meat and dairy post WWII.